AAR Khidr Ruzbihan June 15 2008
“…so how can I be a prophet when I eat and drink and answer the call of nature, and have private parts.” (Ruzbihan, Unveiling 1997:10)
“The human face is really an awesome primary miracle.” (Ernest Becker)
Recapituations
Ruzbihan preached in the main mosque of Shiraz for fifty years. The fact that he built a ribat which he opened in 1165 means that he was able to get government approval.
These notes about describe Chishti masters who taught Ruzbihan’s tafsir and the opening of Ruzbihan’s refurbushed tomb in 1972.
Khwaja Ghulam Farid the Great Chishti master of the Punjab lectured to his students on the commentary on the Qur'an. The contemporary popular scholar and shakh Dr.. Javad Nurbaksh frequently quotes Ruzbihan.
European scholars petitioned the Iranian government for the rebuilding of Ruzbihan’s tomb in 1958 and it was reopened in 1972.
Die Before You Die
Reading Ruzbihan on the story of Khidr, we reading a text that simulates the actions of die before you die. Hearing the story of Khidr opens up questions about life and death. The Prophet Muhammad said “Die before you die.” (Mutu qabla an tamutu. ) Hearing the story of Khidr makes us reflect on death. Cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker writes,
“Neurosis is another word for describing a complicated technique for avoiding misery. That is why from the earliest times sages have insisted that to see reality one must die and be reborn. The idea of death and rebirth was present in shamanistic times, in Zen thought, in Stoic thought, Shakespeare’s King Lear, as well as in Judeo-Christian and modern existential thought.” (Becker 1973: 57)
Transference
What does it mean that Ruzbihan is ecstatic? It means he’s charismatic. He is vividly charged with personal presence and is more likely than most people to receive transference and projection of special kinds or depths.
Ernest Becker, in The Denial of Death says that transference, projecting unrealized positive and protective qualities on another human being, is fundamentally a problem of courage, a solution to the terror of death, a strategy for terror-management, even an urge to heroism. (Becker 1973: 142-158). Becker summarizes:
“This is how we can understand the essence of transference: as a taming of terror. Realistically, the universe contains overwhelming power. Beyond ourselves we sense chaos. We can’t really do much about this unbelievable power, except we can do one thing: we can endow certain persons with it. The child takes natural awe and terror and focuses them on individual beings, which allows him to find the power and horror all in one place instead of defused throughout a chaotic universe. Mirabile! The transference object, being endowed with the transcendent powers of the universe, now has in himself the power to order, control and combat them.” (Becker 1973: 145)
The Qur’anic narrative of Khidr raises points about mortality. It then reinforces those points by setting them in a context where the character of the guide is constructed around his immortality. Then Sufi Shaykhs such as Ruzbihan use the story as an analogy of the master-disciple relationship. This analogy invokes the implicit understanding that the spiritual master is a way to immortality, or at least that one might effect transference onto the transference object of a spiritual master to tame terror over death. Khidr provides a perfect transference symbol of spiritual guidance especially because he represents immortality and reiterates the nature of the training M0ses is receiving. Moses’ training includes, especially, making peace with dangers, death and demise, trusting God’s decisions and justice especially regarding the dying and finally Moses also has to contemplate the real meaning of continuation and efforts to overcome mortality and take small stabs at immortality. Khidr damages a boat and lives are3 put at risk. Khizr kills a child and Moses challenges this. Khidr rebuilds the wall that circumscribes a village. Moses protests that Khidr deserves wages.
The primary explanations (ta’wil) are framed in a unique immortality context. In each case, Moses loses his patience and makes the dual errors of protesting (adab) and misunderstanding. Moses can only hope to rightly understand the situations he witnessed when he adopts a perspective broader and beyond that of a single mortal life. This understanding is not possible for an ordinary mortal. Moses had claimed to be the wisest man on earth. He might have been the wisest mortal on earth, but he wasn’t the wisest man. An immortal would at least potentially be wiser than Moses, even if only because he would have gathered so much experience. That experience could be the medium of God’s transmission of Khidr’s charismatic compassion and intimate inner wisdom.
In the experience of the disciple (murid ) especially under the gaze (nazar) of the shaykh, he has the “experience of the other as one’s whole world” (Becker 1973: 146). “And so he sees, too, the human transference object in all its awe and splendor…The human face is really an awesome primary miracle; it naturally paralyzes you by its splendor if you give into it as the fantastic thing it is….being overwhelmed by the truth of the universe as it exists, as that truth is focused in one human face.” (Becker 1973: 147-148)
Hearing the story of Khidr on the first round brings us face to face with the hero’s quest, how fragile it is to keep food, how precious it is to substitute spiritual training for daily fish, danger and destruction, killing the innocent, random acts of kindness and the village.
Hearing the story of Khidr on the second round we confront theft and war, childhood and procreative immortality, and the wall that defines a village and hides beneath it a treasure which as a result of God’s mercy is part of an inheritance for orphaned boys. Hearing the Khidr story we face death at many takes. In the first take, the fish was a sign that signified by its absence; in the second round, the treasure is a sign that signifies by being unseen.
As a cultural artifact, as an act of story telling and as a dimension of and connection with piety and practice the story addresses the pivotal human concern: existence and non-existence, life and death.
It’s our crisis of our confrontation with finitude. “All culture, all man’s creative life-ways, are in some basic part of them a fabricated protest against natural reality, a denial of the truth of the human condition.” (Becker 1973: 33) It was Ruzbihan who when hearing a voice informing him that he is a Prophet, thinks that one reason this can’t be so is that Prophets do not defecate and he defecates.
“…so how can I be a prophet when I eat and drink and answer the call of nature, and have private parts.” (Ruzbihan, Unveiling 1997:10)
Brides of Elucidation
Ruzbihan takes the storuy on with joyous relish throughout, beut especially when he cites Moses as an example of adab toward the shaykh. Ruzbihan also addresses the question of essential union. He uses the episodes of the story to clearly enunciate his ontology of visions of the presence ir., unveilings. Instatantaeous openings of realities from the unseen world. The unseen worl d iw the most salient example of an immortality symbol. It is the set ofd all immortality symbols. Ruzbikhan is working lexically with this framework. He is an advocate of Hallaj’s vision of human possibility. So Ruzbihan will wear this ojne as an emblem of the immortality domain called the workd for the unseen from whihch come the visitatioins, apparatitions and other forms of presencing of the signs. These signs appear before Ruzbihan as he establishes the ultimate immortality project of creating a set and system of practide centered on an immortality ideology called islam, The ideology and practice of islam stand as an immortslity project. Ruzbihan receives these gifts because he has taken all his attentionj on death and transformed it into figures and faces.
Ruzbihan adroitly presses into service the story of Khidr and Moses to underscore that persons can be given the gift of the presence and embodiment of the immortality ideology. This is actually a major ontological assertion of the realm of the invisible which is in turn the realm of the inrinite eternal and immortal. The existence and manifestation of persons such as Khidr raises the question of how to partake of a dimension of immortality. Khidr is a living example of the answer to the question, if god were to embody himself here now what form would he take. Ruzbihan says, “I saw my Lord in the most beautiful form.” Ruzbihan repeats the hadith that The Prophet, Peace upon Him, intimately received tangible food and drink from his hand. These are very physical descriptions of an immortal being. This is decidedly bi la kayf theology.
Ruzbihan is arguing for the ontological authority of the domain in which Khidr appears because it supports his own teaching that he himself sees God in a beautiful human form. He was even accused of seeing God in specific individuals who lived amongst him. He was accused of eye gazing with boys. He was accused of practicing sub rosa sohbet.
So Ruzbihan is attractive and attracting. He’s charismatic. Now he also wants to validate his world. And when R$uzbihan says we3lcome to my world, we find out there are many beings from the angelic and archetypal realms. Are these realms real? If the4se realms are real, on what basis are they real. Ruzbihan takes the resource of Khidr’s example as a proof text for the ontological existence and veraci8ty and validity and authenticity of angelic and archetypal realms. The symbolic realm of immortality project construction exists. One can make oneself a hero if one is graced by God to be so made. Ruzbihan seems to have lived in that kind of crisis of being authoritative and enigmatic.
Beginning at 18.66, Ruzbihan picks up the theme that God desires (irada) that Moses receive this “secret knowledge, the hidden light.” This motif identifies a concept or category about the nature of rthe realm in which al-Khidr exists and also the nature of the process. These esoterically-intoned phrases, secret knowledge, the hidden light suggests a major initiation or world view or change of world view. To even form the phrase in this boastful way begs the question. N
Ruzbihan suggests that one might even lend into the one with an essential union of merging into God. So this oceanic impulse involves human beings as symbolically, honorifically or ritually considered immortal. Some people think of Elvis as if he lives. These practices occur on the symbolic level of human communication and interaction.
Certiain symbols projected on God’s light will appear tangibly real and vividly iconic. Ruzbihan publicallyu and repeatedly assertsd thast he saw his Lord in the most beautiful form. “ In Ruzbihan’s Sufi lodge tghey would throw a flopwer down and Ruzbihan would eye-gaze with the young boys and grow rapturously ecstatic while looking at their faces. He was a lover of God and especially by starting inductively with an experience of beauty in the here and now, best is a beautiful face and dwell in that reality so that the symbols of immortality appear in clear, vivid and vital ideas, images, visions, and unveilings. Unveilings is Ruzbihan’s way of describing it. Kashf. Unveiling. When a face catches a person’s attention it becomes their world.
Faris says Where Moses was systematic (“constant with God”), Khidr was annihilated in God. This helps describe the very authentic nature of Khidr’s knowledge. It does not conform to the world of a book. This is a tangible teaching transmission.
A tangible teaching transmission can convey extra learning outcomes. The confrontation with death and the validation of the realm of the unseen, the realm of symbols, is more strongly evoked. Khidr is as close to an icon as we can find. He’s a narrative figure, a symbol, a hero. And he represents the tradition that has intensely symbolized God into books. So now God does something totally different. He gives two of his attributes or functions rahma and ’ilm al-ladduni compassion and inner knowledge and makes them available to those who can faced the challenges of the teaching method and the journey.
Ruzbihan proceeds on to underscore that although Moses limited himself to the written version of religion, he also partook of a continuous beautiful inner discourse with God. And one place where Khidr and Moses ranked differently was located around patience. A part of Khidr’s knowledge includes patience.
So next Ruzbihan echoes the supporters of a domain of unveiling and witnessing. This is a symbolic realm, luminously vivid and tangible. Again we find Ruzbihan advocating and defending the realm of the unseen and that region of spiritual symbols having archetypal existence and authority. Obviously God is in tangible form as the most beautiful form. Ruzbihan finds the beauty first in the human being and then ascends dfrom that actual beautiful person to the realm of the archetypes or symbols, but that realm is very real for him. Ruzbihan is using the story to underscore this reality. Ruzbihan repeats these two hadith about seeing God in human form. He places them at the top center of his writings.
Unveilings and Witnessings
The Sufi saints are martyrs honorarily. This makes the Prophets and saints people who live in paradise. In a few cases, the ascension and skipping of death occurs: Khidr, Enoch, Elijah, and Jesus. These four are the Islamic immortals. Ruzbihan sees his Lord in the mjost beautiful form. He starts with a beautiful face of a beautiful person. He begins by throwing down a rose: sub rosa. Under the aegis of the rose, Ruzbihan would eye-gaze and gaze at the faces of beautiful young boys. Annemarie Schimmel describes this in Mystical Dimensions of Islam pp. 296-299). There Ruzbihan begins with a beautiful young boy and contemplate the beauty of his face. The description matches Plato’s account in the Symposium of how to ascend to the pure form of the Beautiful. Love and Beauty are two major motifs in Ruzbihan’s writing.
The Royal We, The Essential Union: ‘Ayn al-Jam
Ruzbihan deals with the theme of the essential union by reflecting on the pronoun shifts.. Sensitive to the story’s syntax and use of pronouns, he comments on the agency of each event. To describe boat-gouging Khidr said “I desired.” To describe the murder, he said, “Your Lord and I” desired. To describe the rebuilding of the wall, Khidr said, “We desired.” This use of “We,” Ruzbihan writes signals essential union. Of course for Ruzbihan this is the Royal “We” of Hallaj. This is the Royal “We” of union.
Ruzbihan’s book of Ecstatic Utterances begins in a framework of investigating experiences of selfhood (“I-ness.” / ana’iyat) (Ernst, Words p. 26)
More evidence now comes that Moses is seeking training (ta’dib) and not instruction from Khidr. This differentiation in types or categories of pedagogy is stressed. And that training is done in an “exceptional state.” Ruzbihan underscores the exceptionality of this transmission. It is unique. What training is so unique. It would likely raise existential issues of death and immortality. It would be so powerful that it would resolve the question that 15-year old Ruzbihan posed about how he could be a prophet. “…I eat, drink, answer the call of nature, and have private parts.
Ruzbihan tells his interlocutor for his Unveilings that s/he must “believe in univeilings” (Unveilings p. 7) In beginning his self-presentation about sainthood, Ruzbihan admits the difficulty of presenting this material. Further he says the phenomena called “unveilings” and “witnessings,” through grace and striving (mujahada) are real in the same way the miracles of the prophets are real. .
Monday, June 16, 2008
Hermeneutics of Immortality II
Hermeneutics of Immortality
Ruzbihan Baqli of Shiraz in Iran in Persia (1128-1209) writes:
"Love and Beauty made a pact in pre-eternity never to be separate from one another."
Mughal Prince Dara Shikuh commissioned a translation of Ruzbihan's commentary on the Qur'an, The Brides ofr Elucidation.
Chishti Shykh ‘Aziz Allah (d. 975/1567-8) taught his students the Brides of Elucidation.
Khwaja Ghulam Farid the Great Chishti master of the Punjab lectured to his students on the commentary on the Qur'an. The contemporary popular scholar and shaykh Dr. Javad Nurbaksh frequently quotes Ruzbihan.
European scholars petitioned the Iranian government for the rebuilding of Ruzbihan’s tomb in 1958 and it was reopened in 1972.
RUZBIHAN WROTE THE BRIDES OF ELUCIDATION OF THE EXEGESIS OF THE QUR'AN ('ARA'IS AL-BAYAN)
Ruzbihan was awe-inspiring and charismatic. He preached for fifty years in the main mosque in Shiraz. He lived the "ihsan" or "doing the beautiful" that come up in the hadith of Gabriel. The Prophet Muhammad says that how to practice virtue or how to do the beautiful is to act as if you see God and that is you don’t see him know that he sees you. This has two parts. First act as if you see God. Can you imagine acting as if you see God? Second it asks you that if you don’t see God then to know that he sees you. How often do we find out or know or experience or believe that God is watching us? Ruzbihan celebrated God as passionate love (‘ishq) and beauty (jamal).
Every day Ruzbihan would experience an unveiling from the spiritual world. These unvelings were vividly real – even if different – ways of seeing the world. We must assess these against Ruzbihan’s own model of the stations and their relationship to each other.
Ruzbihan’s grandson Shamsuddin writes about his great grandfather Ruzbihan Baqli, the Shining Faced Grocer.
“His face was always so beautiful that anyone who saw him was freshened and quickened in spirit, and would see the trace of sainthood on his forehead which was the reflection of his blessed interior made external.” (Ernst, 1996, p. 6)
Another great-grandson writes with awe and projects awe. Sharafuddin writes:
“The master had a fine appearance, but awe-inspiring, and most of the time he was cheerful; for him hope was preponderant over fear.” (Ernst, 1996, p. 6). So the awe and cheer of Ruzbihan impressed people. He preached in the principle mosque of Shiraz for much of his life. He obviously commands respect and authority. His Family’s Sufi Order lasted for five to fourteen generations so that possibly Hafiz was one of the dervishes amongst the six generation of teachers.
So these writings are rhetorical acts of hagiographic construction which define some of the context for how these texts can be read. They are biographical portraits built around models of holiness or sainthood (Ernst, Ruzbihan p.7)These are the flowers among a garden that includes garlands of genealogies. These symbolic constructions called “chains” of transmission (silsilah) create an immortality symbol by projecting the idea of a transmission shared among two people, in a setting that some would choose to call initiatic or at least transformative. The lineage tree establishes awe and wonder in that it is practicially a non-visual icon of immortality. It is a theoretical chart, chain, list or tree a garland of genealogical descent the genealogy of one’s spiritual ancestry or training and traditions. All of this is the hagiographical construction of a reality called the cult of the saints.
One of the popular tools of the cult of the saints was the story about an enigmatic figure who was so sagacious that he was beyond even Moses. And he also happened to be immortal, had traveled as Alexander the Great’s personal assistant and he had in the process drunk the water of immortality (part of his job would likely have been taste-tester.
So Khidr the Green Man comes with a rich background of symbols of immortality.
So we will explore levels of authority. Some authority is evoked by invoking immortality. This certainly sets up a context. The story opens with a divine mission: find this teacher and learn from him the wisdom you don’t know. In some versions, the hadith emphasize this point to affirm that Moses had commensurate, but just different, knowledge as Khidr has. Each to their own domain. Hagiographic construction around Ruzbihan will follow some of the swame literary techniques fro hagiographic construction. Ruzbihan seems fearless. And when one says that one knows that it means at some level they have made peace with that pivotal question of death.
It’s interesting that he did not weite much poetry because he could have written the most exquisite poetry beyond what you or I might imagine, except that his diaries are certainly strong poetic statements, reeal acts of poetry. This is poetry at many levels it is poesis, creativity. Ruzbihan was not a romantic; he was a realist. He writes poetically but always precisely.
And his authority is in the lived dimension of haqq where the Khidr story is set. The story of Khidr is a profound engagement with the questions of what it means to be human. Suddenly we see the person Moses begged to study under doing “terrible things.”
And what Khidr does, Khidr’s acts, two of destruction and one of mysterious enigmatic incongruity. Moses lost patience with Khidr’s acts. Hearing about Khidr demonstrating mysterious situations to Moses with Moses rule-bound not to ask about the situation until Khidr the EDvergreen teacher gioves the indication of approval.
Hearing the story of Moses evokes terror because it invokes questions such as what it means to die and how does reward and punishment work in relation to death, and how do people create an eternal self beyond the body. And since the story comes at this central existential question of what lives on of me after I die? Who will I be when I die. When I die I want to be…
I think that Ernest Becker points to our sphere of practices where we plant seeds on a sysmbolic soil of culture. Culture is focused on heroes who overcome death. That’s the big story. That factors in my work. The Islamic Green Man, the story’s protagonist is considered to be an immortal. The legend is that when he served as Alexander’s assistant, he found and drank the water of eternal life on behalf of his master, Alexander the Great, but when Alexander came to the spot, it had eluded himn it had shifted. So now Alexander’s assistant jhad become immortal, but not Alexander.
To say that Khidr is immortal means to Muslims, that he’s like Enoch, Elijah and Jesus.
Christians believe (and that’s a social action) that Christ conquered death. That’s the Good News (Evangelium – triumphant news). So this story of Khidr shares with the story of Jesus that background.
But even without this background, hearing this story told introduces a powerful set of images and questions. Hearing this story told makes the listener confront death first in the form of a dangerous act, then a murder, then a buried treasure, part of a legaqcy of mercy. The hidden treasure of death is the legacy of mercy.
After protesting the dangerous act, dangerous because innocent peopke would drown. Drowning means dying. The motif raises the theme of death and immortality. Hearing the killing of a child raises questions about death and presents killing. This is an intentional death. This is a murder. Then comes the curious events the village.
The village is the seat of culture in this context. The village is created as a place where people can practice adab. Adab means hospitality and good manners and good etiquette and knowing how to act with honor and dignity in social situations. It is a civil and spiritual virtue. It is something everyone agrees on. Ruzbihan stands firmly on the points of adab and that God is passionate love (‘ishq) and beauty (jamal).
There lived in the village to which Moses and Khidr had come a saintly man (he who buried a treasure). He taught that it was a hidden mercy from God. This buried treasure is a hidden mercy from God. That is alos a very bo9ldly enunciated immortality symbol, to narrate the immortality as residing symbolically in this treasure, its transmission and we should be grateful to the generous being who gives these gifts.
The village is defined by a wall that is a crafted work of art. Khidr performs masonry and rebuilds a dilapidated wall. Khidr is restoring cvulture. Now Khidr is also introducing actually in narrative time introduce the ppiece de resistance of the story the motif of burial is linked to treasure and rahma, compassion.
If we believe Islamically that Gid breathed the ruh into the body, the spirit into the body perhaps even specifically on the fortieth day, but if we blelieve that Gid breathed the spirit or the soul also related to the word breathing, then that soul is independent of that body although now wed to it at the meeting place of its twol seas that it shares nbetween them. At the breatrh those two seas can mneet. No the person can construct himself as a language andnd social-ritual action practitioner and become a master of etitquete and manners.
What happens in readings of Sufi texts when the reader knows the irony that "Die before you die" is not something you have to do because you've already been doing it for your whole life and it’s long been one of your central concerns and problems! You had to repress it to go about life. Each human being has been living with a fundamental question: death and immortality? First, we ask what does it mean that I will die? Second, we ask how can we triumph over death. So we create a hero who is immortal and a hero who triumphs over death. The hero has to be the object of transference. So every day the question of death hovers in the background. It is the spindle around which we weave the fabric of our symbolic self. So I read Khidr's story as a strategy of immortality orientation. The story also features resolutions and explanations of various deaths and dangers. It even includes a figure who is immortal and includes a monument, a village wall, the artistic act of creating a boundary and creating protection. Culture is the creation of a strategy to deal with the terror of death.
What shall we make of Sheldon Solomon’s the theory (which I have not been yet able to explore) that humans first settled in villages for the purpose of praying? Praying, not farming? Praying! People settled in villages for the purpose of praying? And our narrative offers the story of Khidr rebuilding the defining feature of the village – its wall.
The idea here at the bedrock is that every cultural expression every symbol of thought and action belongs to a universal ubiquitous human project of working against death by creating symbolic realities that will "live forever." We are organized around the quest of immortality because we are symbol creating and sharing creatures who have invented the pronoun "I" around which to cluster a symbolic complex (and this is still prehistoric data, imagine the increased reality of the symbolic self as an immortality project -- anyone can have a website !!!.
Ernest Becker says human beings can't sustain the intense and continuous joy the angels sustain.
Dying...we've been doing it all along. So the hadith is ironic. We are always "dying before we die." We have thought about this questiion and our projects vocation and art is directed at creating simulations of or the presence of an immortal realm. Wh have our immortal heroes and triumphant victorious heroes, eternal heroes, cosmic heroes. They are clear and specific instances of engaging the hermeneutic of immortality: the icon of a persona or persona, a voice (sona) behind the person. The superhero is the ultimate symbol of immortality. The superhero implies a triumph over death. The greatest super hero of all is Christ. His story asks us to identify him as the Christ the Anointed Son of God. His story sometimes comes with a reverence for Jesus Christ’s mother Mary. Mary is already an immortality symbol by birthing Jesus that it is a miracuolous affirmation of God’s generous grace that she is honored. Muslims accept the Virgin Birth and the Annunciation in the visitation by the Archangel Gabriel.
Other Islamic superheroes include Khidr the Green Man. He carries a rich legacy of storues that register in the Qur’an, the hadith, the tafsir, the folklore, the legends, the sufi poetry the songs, the Alexanderf Romance. He’s huge. And Khidr the Green Man of Islam got grafted onto Saint George and Elihyahu (Elijah). The story ois a unique and rich part of Islamic culture.
The story of Khidr the Islamic Green Man is a treasury to which many commentators from various walks of life have brought their personal encounter. Sometimes the encounter with this story is problematic because of the way that it deals with presenting questions about death The story’s lessons are presented in a dramatic context certainly a very unique and autonomous context. This story belongs to and shares a setting and a sharing in circles of storytelling people. And it is such an important story, since it is the story that presents questions of life and death so intently and with such a precise set of learning tasks. The story sets a curriculum for a mini-course in death, dying and immortality. It includes an immortal human being as a teacher.
The telling of the story is an event that engages a person in an encounter with their own death. It is enigmatic and in that enigma attracts people to reflect on its star figure as a cosmic immortal hero.
The book and narrative is itself holy sacred pure, and immortal, eternal, endless, timeless. The multi-leveled contexts for this storytelling event is a brilliantly crafted theater of a journey of training. This story is a virtual-reality game of taking a wayfarer’s journey by hearing the story of what happened when Moses took that journey. We get to look at it through Moses eyes and through the eyes of God who is narrating this story. And now many humans have narrated this story in their own varied versions and his fame as al-Khidr, the Green Man is local culture and popular folklore.
Thought for Reflection: Individuals construct a symbolic self around the invented tool of the pronoun “I” and the object of a discourse about itself called the self, as if it were of the realms of things which it is not.
Ruzbihan makes it clear that the human being can not actually serve the all-powerful God, but out of His Divine Love for the human being God allows himself to be served by the human being. This mystery of how God allows human beings to serve Him is presented as a grace.
Were it not for that pure characteristic (al-khassiya al-mahda), [i.e., that they are servants in truth] he [the Prophet Muhammad] (upon him be peace) would not have said, “I am indeed the servant -- la ilaha illa Allah. I am the servant in Truth, and no other.” What honor is more honorable for Khidr (upon him be peace) than this distinction that [Allah] called him a “servant.” And who in reality can be His servant? Were it not for His sufficient compassion (law la rahmatahu al-kafiya) which proceeds from pre-eternity (azal) to His servants? Otherwise it would not have been permissible for His servant to say “I am your servant,” for He [Allah] transcends (munazzah) the need to have the temporal (hadathan) truly serve Him.
Ruzbihan defines the rahma as sainthood. This of course supports the authotity of the office of the Shaykh.
Ruzbihan next addresses who has access to direct knowledge (al’’ilm al ladduni) Ruzbihan quotes traditionalists who affirm that these experiences are by grace.
Ruzbihan cites Tustari’s example of the bee from the Qur’an. Commentators adduced who say that God can communicate with his creatures.(up to 18.66)
There follows a very lengthy discussion of Khidr’s status as a teacher The experience of unveiling is treated having ontological authenticity and verifiable veracity.
Ruzbihan describes Moses as receiving the transmission of Khidr’s knowledge. Ruzbihan describes the Khidr opened a door through which Moses walked to new realm of knowledge. Then God seems to occlude that knowledge, but Moses expresses great satisfication.
Hermeneutics of Immortality
Hermeneuitics of Immortality
Epigraphs:
Ruzbihan Baqli of Shiraz in Iran in Persia (1128-1209) writes:
"Love and Beauty made a pact in pre-eternity never to be separate from one another."
Mughal Prince Dara Shikuh commissioned a translation of Ruzbihan's commentary on the Qur'an, The Brides of Elucidation.
Chishti Shykh ‘Aziz Allah (d. 975/1567-8) taught his students the Brides of Elucidation.
Khwaja Ghulam Farid the Great Chishti master of the Punjab lectured to his students on the commentary on the Qur'an. The contemporary popular scholar and shakh Dr.. Javad Nurbaksh frequently quotes Ruzbihan.
RUZBIHAN WROTE THE BRIDES OF ELUCIDATION OF THE EXEGESIS OF THE QUR'AN ('ARA'IS AL-BAYAN)
Ruzbihan was an awe-inspiring and charismatic individual. He lived the "ihsan" or "doing the beautiful" that comes up in the hadith of Gabriel. The Prophet Muhammad says that how to practice virtue or how to do the beautiful is to act as if you see God and that is you don’t see him know that he sees you. This has two parts. First act as if you see God. Can you imagine acting as if you see God? Second it asks you that if you don’t see God then to know that he sees you. How often do we find out or know or experience or believe that God is watching us? Ruzbihan celebrated God as passionate love (‘ishq) and beauty (jamal).
Every day Ruzbihan would experience an unveiling from the spiritual world. These unvelings were vividly real – even if different – ways of seeing the world. We must assess these against Ruzbihan’s own model of the stations and their relationship to each other.
Ruzbihan’s grandson Shamsuddin writes about his great grandfather Ruzbihan Baqli, the Shining Faced Grocer.
“His face was always so beautiful that anyone who saw him was freshened and quickened in spirit, and would see the trace of sainthood on his forehead which was the reflection of his blessed interior made external.” (Ernst, 1996, p. 6)
Another great-grandson writes with awe and projects awe. Sharafuddin writes:
“The master had a fine appearance, but awe-inspiring, and most of the time he was cheerful; for him hope was preponderant over fear.” (Ernst, 1996, p. 6). So the awe and cheer of Ruzbihan impressed people. He preached in the principle mosque of Shiraz for much of his life. He obviously commands respect and authority. His Family’s Sufi Order lasted for five to fourteen generations so that possibly Hafiz was one of the dervishes amongst the six generation of teachers.
So these writings are rhetorical acts of hagiographic construction which define some of the context for how these texts can be read. These are the flowers among a garden that includes garlands of genealogies. These symbolic constructions called “chains” of transmission (silsilah) create an immortality symbol by projecting the idea of a transmission shared among two people, in a setting that some would choose to call initiatic or at least transformative. The lineage tree establishes awe and wonder in that it is practicially a non-visual icon of immortality. It is a theoretical chart, chain, list or tree a garland of genealogical descent the genealogy of one’s spiritual ancestry or training and traditions. All of this is the hagiographical construction of a reality called the cult of the saints.
One of the popular tools of the cult of the saints was the story about an enigmatic figure who was so sagacious that he waqs beyond even Moses. And he also happened to be immortal, had traveled as Alexander the Great’s personal assistant and he had in the process drunk the water of immortality (part of his job would likely have been taste-tester.
So Khidr the Green Man comes with a rich background of symbols of immortality.
So we will explore levels of authority. Some authority is evoked by invoking immortality. This certainly sets up a context. The story opens with a divine mission: find this teacher and learn from him the wisdom you don’t know. In some versions, the hadith emphasize this point to affirm that Moses had commensurate, but just different, knowledge as Khidr has. Each to their own domain. Hagiographic construction around Ruzbihan will follow some of the swame literary techniques fro hagiographic construction. Ruzbihan seems fearless. And when one says that one knows that it means at soime level they have made peace with that pivotal question of death.
It’s interesting that he did not reite much poetry because he could have written the most exquisite poetry beyond what you or I might imagine, except that his diaries are certainly strong poetic statements, reeal acts of poetry. This is poetry at many levels it is poesis, creativity. Ruzbihan was not a romantic; he was a realist. He writes poetically but always precisely.
And his authority is in the lived dimension of haqq where the Khidr story is set. The story of Khidr is a profound engagement with the questions of what it means to be human. Suddenly we see the person Moses begged to study under doing “terrible things.”
And what Khidr does, Khidr’s acts, two of destruction and one of mysterious enigmatic incongruity. Moses lost patience with Khidr’s acts. Hearing about Khidr demonstrating mysterious situations to Moses with Moses rule-bound not to ask about the situation until Khidr the EDvergreen teacher gioves the indication of approval.
Hearing the story of Moses evokes terror because it invokes questions such as what it means to die and how does reward and punishment work in relation to death, and how do people create an eternal self beyond the body. And since the story comes at this central existential question of what lives on of me after I die? Who will I be when I die. When I die I want to be…
I think that Ernest Becker points to our sphere of practices where we plant seeds on a sysmbolic soil of culture. Culture is focused on heroes who overcome death. That’s the big story. That factors in my work. The Islamic Green Man, the story’s protagonist is considered to be an immortal. The legend is that when he served as Alexander’s assistant, he found and drank the water of eternal life on behalf of his master, Alexander the Great, but when Alexander came to the spot, it had eluded himn it had shifted. So now Alexander’s assistant jhad become immortal, but not Alexander.
To say that Khidr is immortal means to Muslims, that he’s like Enoch, Elijah and Jesus.
Christians believe (and that’s a social action) that Christ conquered death. That’s the Good News (Evangelium – triumphant news). So this story of Khidr shares with the story of Jesus that background.
But even without this background, hearing this story told introduces a powerful set of images and questions. Hearing this story told makes the listener confront death first in the form of a dangerous act, then a murder, then a buried treasure, part of a legacy of mercy. The hidden treasure of death is the legacy of mercy.
After protesting the dangerous act, dangerous because innocent people would drown. Drowning means dying. The motif raises the theme of death and immortality. Hearing the killing of a child raises questions about death and presents killing. This is an intentional death. This is a murder. Then comes the curious events the village.
The village is the seat of culture in this context. The village is created as a place where people can practice adab. Adab means hospitality and good manners and good etiquette and knowing how to act with honor and dignity in social situations. It is a civil and spiritual virtue. It is something everyone agrees on. Ruzbihan stands firmly on the points of adab and that God is passionate love (‘ishq) and beauty (jamal).
There lived in the village to which Moses and Khidr had come two orphaned youths (here is another allusion to death). Their father had been a saintly man (he who buried a treasure). He taught that it was a hidden mercy from God. This buried treasure is a hidden mercy from God. That is alos a very bo9ldly enunciated immortality symbol, to narrate the immortality as residing symbolically in this treasure, its transmission and we should be grateful to the generous being who gives these gifts.
The village is defined by a wall that is a crafted work of art. Khidr performs masonry and rebuilds a dilapidated wall. Khidr is restoring cvulture. Now Khidr is also introducing actually in narrative time introduce the ppiece de resistance of the story the motif of burial is linked to treasure and rahma, compassion.
If we believe Islamically that Gid breathed the ruh into the body, the spirit into the body perhaps even specifically on the fortieth day, but if we blelieve that Gid breathed the spirit or the soul also related to the word breathing, then that soul is independent of that body although now wed to it at the meeting place of its twol seas that it shares nbetween them. At the breatrh those two seas can mneet. No the person can construct himself as a language andnd social-ritual action practitioner and become a master of etitquete and manners.
What happens in readings of Sufi texts when the reader knows the irony that "Die before you die" is not something you have to do because you've already been doing it for your whole life and it’s long been one of your central concerns and problems! You had to repress it to go about life. Each human being has been living with a fundamental question: death and immortality? First, we ask what does it mean that I will die? Second, we ask how can we triumph over death. So we create a hero who is immortal and a hero who triumphs over death. The hero has to be the object of transference. So every day the question of death hovers in the background. It is the spindle around which we weave the fabric of our symbolic self. So I read Khidr's story as a strategy of immortality orientation. The story also features resolutions and explanations of various deaths and dangers. It even includes a figure who is immortal and includes a monument, a village wall, the artistic act of creating a boundary and creating protection. Culture is the creation of a strategy to deal with the terror of death.
What shall we make of Sheldon Solomon’s the theory (which I have not been yet able to explore) that humans first settled in villages for the purpose of praying? Praying, not farming? Praying! People settled in villages for the purpose of praying? And our narrative offers the story of Khidr rebuilding the defining feature of the village – its wall.
The idea here at the bedrock is that every cultural expression every symbol of thought and action belongs to a universal ubiquitous human project of working against death by creating symbolic realities that will "live forever." We are organized around the quest of immortality because we are symbol creating and sharing creatures who have invented the pronoun "I" around which to cluster a symbolic complex (and this is still prehistoric data, imagine the increased reality of the symbolic self as an immortality project -- anyone can have a website !!!.
Ernest Becker says human beings can't sustain the intense and continuous joy the angels sustain.
Dying...we've been doing it all along. So the hadith is ironic. We are always "dying before we die." We have thought about this questiion and our projects vocation and art is directed at creating simulations of or the presence of an immortal realm. Wh have our immortal heroes and triumphant victorious heroes, eternal heroes, cosmic heroes. They are clear and specific instances of engaging the hermeneutic of immortality: the icon of a persona or persona, a voice (sona) behind the person. The superhero is the ultimate symbol of immortality. The superhero implies a triumph over death. The greatest super hero of all is Christ. His story asks us to identify him as the Christ the Anointed Son of God. His story sometimes comes with a reverence for Jesus Christ’s mother Mary. Mary is already an immortality symbol by birthing Jesus that it is a miracuolous affirmation of God’s generous grace that she is honored. Muslims accept the Virgin Birth and the Annunciation in the visitation by the Archangel Gabriel.
Other Islamic superheroes include Khidr the Green Man. He carries a rich legacy of storues that register in the Qur’an, the hadith, the tafsir, the folklore, the legends, the sufi poetry the songs, the Alexanderf Romance. He’s huge. And Khidr the Green Man of Islam got grafted onto Saint George and Elihyahu (Elijah). The story ois a unique and rich part of Islamic culture.
The story of Khidr the Islamic Green Man is a treasury to which many commentators from various walks of life have brought their personal encounter. Sometimes the encounter with this story is problematic because of the way that it deals with presenting questions about death The story’s lessons are presented in a dramatic context certainly a very unique and autonomous context. This story belongs to and shares a setting and a sharing in circles of storytelling people. And it is such an important story, since it is the story that presents questions of life and death so intently and with such a precise set of learning tasks. The story sets a curriculum for a mini-course in death, dying and immortality. It includes an immortal human being as a teacher.
The telling of the story is an event that engages a person in an encounter with their own death. It is enigmatic and in that enigma attracts people to reflect on its star figure as a cosmic immortal hero.
The book and narrative is itself holy sacred pure, and immortal, eternal, endless, timeless. The multi-leveled contexts for this storytelling event is a brilliantly crafted theater of a journey of training. This story is a virtual-reality game of taking a wayfarer’s journey by hearing the story of what happened when Moses took that journey. We get to look at it through Moses eyes and through the eyes of God who is narrating this story. And now many humans have narrated this story in their own varied versions and his fame as al-Khidr, the Green Man is local culture and popular folklore.
Thought for Reflection: Individuals construct a symbolic self around the invented tool of the pronoun “I” and the object of a discourse about itself called the self, as if it were of the realms of things which it is not.
Ruzbihan makes it clear that the human being can not actually serve the all-powerful God, but out of His Divine Love for the human being God allows himself to be served by the human being. This mystery of how God allows human beings to serve Him is presented as a grface.
Were it not for that pure characteristic (al-khassiya al-mahda), [i.e., that they are servants in truth] he [the Prophet Muhammad] (upon him be peace) would not have said, “I am indeed the servant -- la ilaha illa Allah. I am the servant in Truth, and no other.” What honor is more honorable for Khidr (upon him be peace) than this distinction that [Allah] called him a “servant.” And who in reality can be His servant? Were it not for His sufficient compassion (law la rahmatahu al-kafiya) which proceeds from pre-eternity (azal) to His servants? Otherwise it would not have been permissible for His servant to say “I am your servant,” for He [Allah] transcends (munazzah) the need to have the temporal (hadathan) truly serve Him.
Epigraphs:
Ruzbihan Baqli of Shiraz in Iran in Persia (1128-1209) writes:
"Love and Beauty made a pact in pre-eternity never to be separate from one another."
Mughal Prince Dara Shikuh commissioned a translation of Ruzbihan's commentary on the Qur'an, The Brides of Elucidation.
Chishti Shykh ‘Aziz Allah (d. 975/1567-8) taught his students the Brides of Elucidation.
Khwaja Ghulam Farid the Great Chishti master of the Punjab lectured to his students on the commentary on the Qur'an. The contemporary popular scholar and shakh Dr.. Javad Nurbaksh frequently quotes Ruzbihan.
RUZBIHAN WROTE THE BRIDES OF ELUCIDATION OF THE EXEGESIS OF THE QUR'AN ('ARA'IS AL-BAYAN)
Ruzbihan was an awe-inspiring and charismatic individual. He lived the "ihsan" or "doing the beautiful" that comes up in the hadith of Gabriel. The Prophet Muhammad says that how to practice virtue or how to do the beautiful is to act as if you see God and that is you don’t see him know that he sees you. This has two parts. First act as if you see God. Can you imagine acting as if you see God? Second it asks you that if you don’t see God then to know that he sees you. How often do we find out or know or experience or believe that God is watching us? Ruzbihan celebrated God as passionate love (‘ishq) and beauty (jamal).
Every day Ruzbihan would experience an unveiling from the spiritual world. These unvelings were vividly real – even if different – ways of seeing the world. We must assess these against Ruzbihan’s own model of the stations and their relationship to each other.
Ruzbihan’s grandson Shamsuddin writes about his great grandfather Ruzbihan Baqli, the Shining Faced Grocer.
“His face was always so beautiful that anyone who saw him was freshened and quickened in spirit, and would see the trace of sainthood on his forehead which was the reflection of his blessed interior made external.” (Ernst, 1996, p. 6)
Another great-grandson writes with awe and projects awe. Sharafuddin writes:
“The master had a fine appearance, but awe-inspiring, and most of the time he was cheerful; for him hope was preponderant over fear.” (Ernst, 1996, p. 6). So the awe and cheer of Ruzbihan impressed people. He preached in the principle mosque of Shiraz for much of his life. He obviously commands respect and authority. His Family’s Sufi Order lasted for five to fourteen generations so that possibly Hafiz was one of the dervishes amongst the six generation of teachers.
So these writings are rhetorical acts of hagiographic construction which define some of the context for how these texts can be read. These are the flowers among a garden that includes garlands of genealogies. These symbolic constructions called “chains” of transmission (silsilah) create an immortality symbol by projecting the idea of a transmission shared among two people, in a setting that some would choose to call initiatic or at least transformative. The lineage tree establishes awe and wonder in that it is practicially a non-visual icon of immortality. It is a theoretical chart, chain, list or tree a garland of genealogical descent the genealogy of one’s spiritual ancestry or training and traditions. All of this is the hagiographical construction of a reality called the cult of the saints.
One of the popular tools of the cult of the saints was the story about an enigmatic figure who was so sagacious that he waqs beyond even Moses. And he also happened to be immortal, had traveled as Alexander the Great’s personal assistant and he had in the process drunk the water of immortality (part of his job would likely have been taste-tester.
So Khidr the Green Man comes with a rich background of symbols of immortality.
So we will explore levels of authority. Some authority is evoked by invoking immortality. This certainly sets up a context. The story opens with a divine mission: find this teacher and learn from him the wisdom you don’t know. In some versions, the hadith emphasize this point to affirm that Moses had commensurate, but just different, knowledge as Khidr has. Each to their own domain. Hagiographic construction around Ruzbihan will follow some of the swame literary techniques fro hagiographic construction. Ruzbihan seems fearless. And when one says that one knows that it means at soime level they have made peace with that pivotal question of death.
It’s interesting that he did not reite much poetry because he could have written the most exquisite poetry beyond what you or I might imagine, except that his diaries are certainly strong poetic statements, reeal acts of poetry. This is poetry at many levels it is poesis, creativity. Ruzbihan was not a romantic; he was a realist. He writes poetically but always precisely.
And his authority is in the lived dimension of haqq where the Khidr story is set. The story of Khidr is a profound engagement with the questions of what it means to be human. Suddenly we see the person Moses begged to study under doing “terrible things.”
And what Khidr does, Khidr’s acts, two of destruction and one of mysterious enigmatic incongruity. Moses lost patience with Khidr’s acts. Hearing about Khidr demonstrating mysterious situations to Moses with Moses rule-bound not to ask about the situation until Khidr the EDvergreen teacher gioves the indication of approval.
Hearing the story of Moses evokes terror because it invokes questions such as what it means to die and how does reward and punishment work in relation to death, and how do people create an eternal self beyond the body. And since the story comes at this central existential question of what lives on of me after I die? Who will I be when I die. When I die I want to be…
I think that Ernest Becker points to our sphere of practices where we plant seeds on a sysmbolic soil of culture. Culture is focused on heroes who overcome death. That’s the big story. That factors in my work. The Islamic Green Man, the story’s protagonist is considered to be an immortal. The legend is that when he served as Alexander’s assistant, he found and drank the water of eternal life on behalf of his master, Alexander the Great, but when Alexander came to the spot, it had eluded himn it had shifted. So now Alexander’s assistant jhad become immortal, but not Alexander.
To say that Khidr is immortal means to Muslims, that he’s like Enoch, Elijah and Jesus.
Christians believe (and that’s a social action) that Christ conquered death. That’s the Good News (Evangelium – triumphant news). So this story of Khidr shares with the story of Jesus that background.
But even without this background, hearing this story told introduces a powerful set of images and questions. Hearing this story told makes the listener confront death first in the form of a dangerous act, then a murder, then a buried treasure, part of a legacy of mercy. The hidden treasure of death is the legacy of mercy.
After protesting the dangerous act, dangerous because innocent people would drown. Drowning means dying. The motif raises the theme of death and immortality. Hearing the killing of a child raises questions about death and presents killing. This is an intentional death. This is a murder. Then comes the curious events the village.
The village is the seat of culture in this context. The village is created as a place where people can practice adab. Adab means hospitality and good manners and good etiquette and knowing how to act with honor and dignity in social situations. It is a civil and spiritual virtue. It is something everyone agrees on. Ruzbihan stands firmly on the points of adab and that God is passionate love (‘ishq) and beauty (jamal).
There lived in the village to which Moses and Khidr had come two orphaned youths (here is another allusion to death). Their father had been a saintly man (he who buried a treasure). He taught that it was a hidden mercy from God. This buried treasure is a hidden mercy from God. That is alos a very bo9ldly enunciated immortality symbol, to narrate the immortality as residing symbolically in this treasure, its transmission and we should be grateful to the generous being who gives these gifts.
The village is defined by a wall that is a crafted work of art. Khidr performs masonry and rebuilds a dilapidated wall. Khidr is restoring cvulture. Now Khidr is also introducing actually in narrative time introduce the ppiece de resistance of the story the motif of burial is linked to treasure and rahma, compassion.
If we believe Islamically that Gid breathed the ruh into the body, the spirit into the body perhaps even specifically on the fortieth day, but if we blelieve that Gid breathed the spirit or the soul also related to the word breathing, then that soul is independent of that body although now wed to it at the meeting place of its twol seas that it shares nbetween them. At the breatrh those two seas can mneet. No the person can construct himself as a language andnd social-ritual action practitioner and become a master of etitquete and manners.
What happens in readings of Sufi texts when the reader knows the irony that "Die before you die" is not something you have to do because you've already been doing it for your whole life and it’s long been one of your central concerns and problems! You had to repress it to go about life. Each human being has been living with a fundamental question: death and immortality? First, we ask what does it mean that I will die? Second, we ask how can we triumph over death. So we create a hero who is immortal and a hero who triumphs over death. The hero has to be the object of transference. So every day the question of death hovers in the background. It is the spindle around which we weave the fabric of our symbolic self. So I read Khidr's story as a strategy of immortality orientation. The story also features resolutions and explanations of various deaths and dangers. It even includes a figure who is immortal and includes a monument, a village wall, the artistic act of creating a boundary and creating protection. Culture is the creation of a strategy to deal with the terror of death.
What shall we make of Sheldon Solomon’s the theory (which I have not been yet able to explore) that humans first settled in villages for the purpose of praying? Praying, not farming? Praying! People settled in villages for the purpose of praying? And our narrative offers the story of Khidr rebuilding the defining feature of the village – its wall.
The idea here at the bedrock is that every cultural expression every symbol of thought and action belongs to a universal ubiquitous human project of working against death by creating symbolic realities that will "live forever." We are organized around the quest of immortality because we are symbol creating and sharing creatures who have invented the pronoun "I" around which to cluster a symbolic complex (and this is still prehistoric data, imagine the increased reality of the symbolic self as an immortality project -- anyone can have a website !!!.
Ernest Becker says human beings can't sustain the intense and continuous joy the angels sustain.
Dying...we've been doing it all along. So the hadith is ironic. We are always "dying before we die." We have thought about this questiion and our projects vocation and art is directed at creating simulations of or the presence of an immortal realm. Wh have our immortal heroes and triumphant victorious heroes, eternal heroes, cosmic heroes. They are clear and specific instances of engaging the hermeneutic of immortality: the icon of a persona or persona, a voice (sona) behind the person. The superhero is the ultimate symbol of immortality. The superhero implies a triumph over death. The greatest super hero of all is Christ. His story asks us to identify him as the Christ the Anointed Son of God. His story sometimes comes with a reverence for Jesus Christ’s mother Mary. Mary is already an immortality symbol by birthing Jesus that it is a miracuolous affirmation of God’s generous grace that she is honored. Muslims accept the Virgin Birth and the Annunciation in the visitation by the Archangel Gabriel.
Other Islamic superheroes include Khidr the Green Man. He carries a rich legacy of storues that register in the Qur’an, the hadith, the tafsir, the folklore, the legends, the sufi poetry the songs, the Alexanderf Romance. He’s huge. And Khidr the Green Man of Islam got grafted onto Saint George and Elihyahu (Elijah). The story ois a unique and rich part of Islamic culture.
The story of Khidr the Islamic Green Man is a treasury to which many commentators from various walks of life have brought their personal encounter. Sometimes the encounter with this story is problematic because of the way that it deals with presenting questions about death The story’s lessons are presented in a dramatic context certainly a very unique and autonomous context. This story belongs to and shares a setting and a sharing in circles of storytelling people. And it is such an important story, since it is the story that presents questions of life and death so intently and with such a precise set of learning tasks. The story sets a curriculum for a mini-course in death, dying and immortality. It includes an immortal human being as a teacher.
The telling of the story is an event that engages a person in an encounter with their own death. It is enigmatic and in that enigma attracts people to reflect on its star figure as a cosmic immortal hero.
The book and narrative is itself holy sacred pure, and immortal, eternal, endless, timeless. The multi-leveled contexts for this storytelling event is a brilliantly crafted theater of a journey of training. This story is a virtual-reality game of taking a wayfarer’s journey by hearing the story of what happened when Moses took that journey. We get to look at it through Moses eyes and through the eyes of God who is narrating this story. And now many humans have narrated this story in their own varied versions and his fame as al-Khidr, the Green Man is local culture and popular folklore.
Thought for Reflection: Individuals construct a symbolic self around the invented tool of the pronoun “I” and the object of a discourse about itself called the self, as if it were of the realms of things which it is not.
Ruzbihan makes it clear that the human being can not actually serve the all-powerful God, but out of His Divine Love for the human being God allows himself to be served by the human being. This mystery of how God allows human beings to serve Him is presented as a grface.
Were it not for that pure characteristic (al-khassiya al-mahda), [i.e., that they are servants in truth] he [the Prophet Muhammad] (upon him be peace) would not have said, “I am indeed the servant -- la ilaha illa Allah. I am the servant in Truth, and no other.” What honor is more honorable for Khidr (upon him be peace) than this distinction that [Allah] called him a “servant.” And who in reality can be His servant? Were it not for His sufficient compassion (law la rahmatahu al-kafiya) which proceeds from pre-eternity (azal) to His servants? Otherwise it would not have been permissible for His servant to say “I am your servant,” for He [Allah] transcends (munazzah) the need to have the temporal (hadathan) truly serve Him.
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Unveilings: The Ontology of the Forms of Presence
Unveilings: The Ontology of the Forms of the Presence
The Moment (waqt), the now during meditation,
The moment of mindfulness, during meditation,
the moment now, between the past and the future.
“Its reality is the graces that are hidden in the heart.” (Ernst, p. 33)
Apparition (Badi)
Visitation (Warid)
Onslaught (hujum)
Overwhelmings (ghalabat)
Astonishment (Hayra)
Ecstasy (Wajd)
Witnessing (Mushahahda)
Vision of the Heart (Ru’ya al-Qalb)
Veridical dream (ru’ya saliha)
Manifestation (tajalli)
Interlocution (muhaadatha)
Infinite Conversation (Munajat)
Annihilation (Fana)
Subsistence (Baqa’)
The Moment (waqt), the now during meditation,
The moment of mindfulness, during meditation,
the moment now, between the past and the future.
“Its reality is the graces that are hidden in the heart.” (Ernst, p. 33)
Apparition (Badi)
Visitation (Warid)
Onslaught (hujum)
Overwhelmings (ghalabat)
Astonishment (Hayra)
Ecstasy (Wajd)
Witnessing (Mushahahda)
Vision of the Heart (Ru’ya al-Qalb)
Veridical dream (ru’ya saliha)
Manifestation (tajalli)
Interlocution (muhaadatha)
Infinite Conversation (Munajat)
Annihilation (Fana)
Subsistence (Baqa’)
Friday, June 13, 2008
Immortal
I. IMMORTALITY SYMBOLS
Human beings need to struggle with, repress and maybe even express our death anxiety. When we sublimate and transcend our death anxiety we create cultural expressions that the interdisciplinary cultural anthropologist, Ernest Becker (1924-1927) called "immortality symbols."
II. ARTIST AND HERO
Following Becker's analysis, "terror of death" is the pivotal point and spindle around which we weave a fabric of symbols that will outlast our physical finitude. The artist takes that question of human symbolic immortality challenged by anguish of being connected to a limited decaying animal-body that will die. The artist resolves this literal dilemma by creating an "immortal" work. The artist is a hero who "thinks outside the box" or to use Becker's phrase is "over people's heads."
Many of our mainstream religious and contemporary commercial mythologies feature characters who have triumphed over death. We are dealing with such a story here.
In this hero story, Khidr the Green Man belongs to the elect of the elect servants of God. Like Enoch, Elijah and Jesus he is considered an immortal. And his name which means "The Green" illuminates that motif that he is the immortal rejeuvenating green man.
III. DEATH AND IMMORTALITY
Khidr, the main character is presented to us as an immortal which makes us face our death. Khidr then deepens the encounter with death by making Moses witness people being subjected to danger, killing and the a hidden burial ground. A war, more violence evoking mortality, also lingers in the background of the story. Justice as an abstract theme takes a back seat in the tradition of Islamic commentary because the story primarily projects questions about mortality, death, immortality and what it means to live where the two seas of life and death meet.
The framework of resolution of death and life in the afterlife is set on death.
This is our shared human pattern. We do, make and disseminate symbolic realities in story, cinema, theater or literature. These works of art represent our gesture or "pitch" or an existential act to outlast material mortality and physical finitude. The pattern of denial-of-death and projection of symbolic immortality sometimes fueled with heroic projection (at best) is pervasive.
IV. DEATH MOTIFS IN KHIDR'S STORY
How does knowing that the question and challenge of death and symbolic immortality inform an analysis of the story of an immortal prophet who kills a child puts boat-riding people in physical danger, and finally leads Khidr to a buried hidden treasure treasure, a remnant of a funery rite and a transmission of an inheritance beyond physical contact. The transmission of the treasure not only plunges the reader into the question of mortality but also comments on non-historical non-physical trans-personal ruhaniat transmission. The buried treasure as anbother trace of the burial of the saintly man who ownbed the treasure and buried it so his sons could grow old and strong enought ot extract it from the earth involves powerfully evocative symbols of survival of death and survival after death. The buried treasure is another immortality symbol.
Next the book (Qur'an) in which the story is transmitted is itself an immortality symbol and the religion of Islam as a whole is an immortalIty ideology.
V. RUZBIHAN
Ruzbihan was a charismatic powerful ecstatic Sufi (1128-1209) buried in Shiraz. His grave has been a major pilgrimage site for centuries and was restored in 1958 and 1872. It is possible that Hafiz (d. 1329) may have studied in the ribat that Ruzbihan founded in 1165.
Ruzbihan measures knowledge by personal experience, talks about God as passionate love and makes Beauty (as in a Platonic archetype) the name of God. Ruzbihan uses the term "beauty" to describe the destination of one's personal ascension.
Human beings need to struggle with, repress and maybe even express our death anxiety. When we sublimate and transcend our death anxiety we create cultural expressions that the interdisciplinary cultural anthropologist, Ernest Becker (1924-1927) called "immortality symbols."
II. ARTIST AND HERO
Following Becker's analysis, "terror of death" is the pivotal point and spindle around which we weave a fabric of symbols that will outlast our physical finitude. The artist takes that question of human symbolic immortality challenged by anguish of being connected to a limited decaying animal-body that will die. The artist resolves this literal dilemma by creating an "immortal" work. The artist is a hero who "thinks outside the box" or to use Becker's phrase is "over people's heads."
Many of our mainstream religious and contemporary commercial mythologies feature characters who have triumphed over death. We are dealing with such a story here.
In this hero story, Khidr the Green Man belongs to the elect of the elect servants of God. Like Enoch, Elijah and Jesus he is considered an immortal. And his name which means "The Green" illuminates that motif that he is the immortal rejeuvenating green man.
III. DEATH AND IMMORTALITY
Khidr, the main character is presented to us as an immortal which makes us face our death. Khidr then deepens the encounter with death by making Moses witness people being subjected to danger, killing and the a hidden burial ground. A war, more violence evoking mortality, also lingers in the background of the story. Justice as an abstract theme takes a back seat in the tradition of Islamic commentary because the story primarily projects questions about mortality, death, immortality and what it means to live where the two seas of life and death meet.
The framework of resolution of death and life in the afterlife is set on death.
This is our shared human pattern. We do, make and disseminate symbolic realities in story, cinema, theater or literature. These works of art represent our gesture or "pitch" or an existential act to outlast material mortality and physical finitude. The pattern of denial-of-death and projection of symbolic immortality sometimes fueled with heroic projection (at best) is pervasive.
IV. DEATH MOTIFS IN KHIDR'S STORY
How does knowing that the question and challenge of death and symbolic immortality inform an analysis of the story of an immortal prophet who kills a child puts boat-riding people in physical danger, and finally leads Khidr to a buried hidden treasure treasure, a remnant of a funery rite and a transmission of an inheritance beyond physical contact. The transmission of the treasure not only plunges the reader into the question of mortality but also comments on non-historical non-physical trans-personal ruhaniat transmission. The buried treasure as anbother trace of the burial of the saintly man who ownbed the treasure and buried it so his sons could grow old and strong enought ot extract it from the earth involves powerfully evocative symbols of survival of death and survival after death. The buried treasure is another immortality symbol.
Next the book (Qur'an) in which the story is transmitted is itself an immortality symbol and the religion of Islam as a whole is an immortalIty ideology.
V. RUZBIHAN
Ruzbihan was a charismatic powerful ecstatic Sufi (1128-1209) buried in Shiraz. His grave has been a major pilgrimage site for centuries and was restored in 1958 and 1872. It is possible that Hafiz (d. 1329) may have studied in the ribat that Ruzbihan founded in 1165.
Ruzbihan measures knowledge by personal experience, talks about God as passionate love and makes Beauty (as in a Platonic archetype) the name of God. Ruzbihan uses the term "beauty" to describe the destination of one's personal ascension.
Reading Ruzbihan
Ruzbihan Baqli (1128-1209) lived in Shiraz in Fars in southwestern Iran at a time when the Seljuk Turks had become Muslim and supported the Sunni caliphate and created alliances between the ulama (religious scholars) and Sufis. During his lifetime Iran was ruled by Seljuks, Salghurid and Mongol govenors. Ruzbihan preached in the principal mosque in Shiraz for most of his life.
Within a hundred years after his death, Ruzbihan's tomb was a major pilgrimage center.
Historically, Ruzbihan, born in Fasa, was educated in Sufism at the ribat of the Banu Salbih family (Ernest, p. 2). While there he had a vision that caused him to close up his business as a grocer (thus the name Baqli, Grocer) and wander in the desert for three years. Then in 1144 "he joined the Sufis, serving them, learning their discipline, and studying and memorizing the Qur'an." (Ernst, Ruzbihan 1996, p. 2)
Then Ruzbihan was a student of three Sufi masters:
Jamaluddin Abi al-Wafa’ ibn Khalil al-Fasa’i (named by Ruzbihan in his diaries).
Sirajuddin Mahmaud ibn al-Khalifa (also of the Banu Salbih and the Kazaruni lineage of Persian Sufism) and
Abu as-Safa’ al-Wasita.
The library at the ribat of Banu Salbih offered Ruzbihan access to the writings of Hallaj and through him the ecstatic (sukr tradition of Sufism. Ruzbihan's bearing and appearance was charismatic and magnetic and beaming with love. Ruzbihan prized beauty and saw God as 'Ishq the powerfully passionate love of divine attraction. God is a name derived from the root word for "ravishing" ("walah" ) and not the root of a god ("alaha")
Ruzbihan mentions less than a handful of teachers.
Ruzbihan never mentions Sirajuddin or the Kaszaruni lineage. Ruzbihan also studied hadith, in particular the Masabih.
He may have been a murid of the following shaykhs as well:
Jagir Kurdi
Qiwam al-Din Suhrawardi
Ruzbihan’s biographer Shamsuddin jmaintains that Abu al-Safa conferred upon Ruzbihan the cloak of initiation.
In 1165 Ruzbihan established a ribat in Shiraz.
THE BRIDES OF ELUCIDATION: RUZBIHAN'S COMMENTARY
Ruzbihan Baqli wrote that his mystical Qur’an commentary was “the unveiling of the brides of the elucidation.” Ruzbihan writes about divine realms as very direct immediate and unimediated experiences. The moment of experience is an unveiling, and not just any unveiling, but the unveiling of a bride: it is a decisive moment.
Ruzbihan grew up in a non-religious family and had a number of spiritual experiences as a child. But he considered the experience he had at age fifteen to be the first “unveiling” (kashf ).
A text can work as a representation or a text can enshrine a rhetoric of mysticism that mystifies. One aspect of mystification includes the human being's encounter with death. For many people in the world a text stands at the intersection between people's lives and their experience of the comprehensive ultimate unified reality. In some traditions the text has to take the place of the temple and its rituals. The text sometimes replaces the temple as the ultimate immortality symbol. In this text, our hero, Khidr, is an immortal teacher. Maybe he's even an immortal prophet. In addition to being immortal, he teaches Moses by involve him in case-study problem-solving learning situations. Whether the lesson was taught and learned might also be fruitful.
But this text transmits a narrative about a teaching transmission that transcends Moses' system of ethics -- even if that system is divinely derived/ This story provides the ultimate attack on fundamentalism. Moses is right in each case if you "go by the book." But if, like Khidr, you follow the muse of intuition and of listening to the music of God's heart.
The musical metaphor is impprtant because the social scientists who have written about narratives that involve death and evoke the question of one's own death create mortality salience inductions have thought about Art and the Artist. They have presented the Artist as the hero and art as the comic heroic immortality project.
What is immortality? One thing we know about immortality is that everyone has had one time or another thought about the question of what it would be like. Some realize that unless everyone was immortal you would be lonely watching your friends die and aching from all the pains you had acquired in your body. At least immortality manifests in the legacy, heritage, inheritance, contribution, mnonuments and landmarks of life. So one is a courageous hero who is an artist at heart, an artist of life.
And Khidr is an artist. He is like the hero and the artist in an elite station and has an elite status (khass). Ruzbihan is quick to bring this up that this verse shows verifies that there are special saints God has chosen. In the case of Khidr, God has chosaen to give him compassion and inner wisdom. So Khidr has mastered the art of showing compassion and living and teaching wisdom.
This story brings us face-to-face with the harsh realities of the master-disciple relationship where domination and control are coupled with problems of transference and disobedience.
Khid as a being ands as a teacher stands multiplty as an immortality symbol in another immortality symbol (the Qur'an as a synechdoche or metonymy of God.) Tese two immortality symbols are units of communication, narration and inner reflection in an immortality ideology called Islam.
Now the tangible teaching transmission steps forth as a significant immortality symbol in an immortality ideology of Sufism that teaches that the Prophet taught “Die before you die.” And like Plato, Ruzbihan’s ultimate immortality symbol is love, ‘ishq. Passionate love is a metaphor of God. So God is love, Beauty and lived truth, haqq. Like Bestami, ‘Ayn al-Qudat al-Hamadani, and al-Hallaj, Ruzbihan stands out among ecstatics. Ruzbihan is the master of all the ecstatics. Ruzbihan practices the sub rosa face-to-face and eye-to-eye gazing into the windows of the soul. God is love, not just love, but passionate love. Using an alternative etymology, Ruzbihan asserts that the root of the name of God Allah is not as most grammarians maintain, “a-l-h,” but the root for the word “to ravish as beautiful,” “w-l-h.”
Writing onj 18.65a Ruzbihan clearly asserts that the privileged class to which Khidr and Muhammad belong is the rank of "servants." Ruzbihan gives special emphasis to the mastery in servitude. These people of the secret and of the secret of the secret know the secret of servitude, Khidr is the pre-eminently selected servant among all of God's servants: ('Ibad al-'ibadana). He is so special that the folk people and Alexander Romance writers will take to calling him an immortal being. Then the people of Palestine, Lebasnon and Turkey will hybridize him with St. George and Elijah as messianic heroes without decisive political power. Muslims know the uniqueness of this story which is pubically proclaimed from Friday mosque loud speakers that typically include in the morning's readings, the eighteenth chapter, the Sura of the Cave from which this story comes. From the Alexander Romances we get iconographic illustrations and the story that he derved as Alexander's cook, deputy and ambassador. He was to Alexander what Hanuman was to Rama. In support of Alexander's mission to get the water of eternal life, Khidr first found it, drank it and brought Alexander back only to find that the water had moved.
“And he found a servant from among Our servants.” (18.65a)
In this there is a hidden indication that God, Glorified be He, has certain selected [khawassan] servants. They are those whom He selected for gnosis (ma‘rifa) from the sciences of Lordship (‘ulum al-rububiya), the secrets of unicity, the realities of wisdom and subtle graces of His angelic and majestic realms (malakutihi wa jabarutihi) that He reserves for himself. They [these selected ones (khawass)] are the people of the unseen, [the people of] the unseen of the unseen, [the people of] the secret, and [the people of] the secret of the secret. [They are] the ones whom Allah has concealed in His concealment, veiled from His own creation out of compassion (shafaqa) for them due to the secret of God that they display. They are the servants in reality (haqiqa), those who reached the reality of servanthood, in the sense that Allah made their servanthood parallel (muhadhiyan) to His Lordship (rububiyatihi). Otherwise all [of His servants] are His servants from the viewpoint of creation, but they are servants in reality from the perspective of gnosis (ma‘rifa).
Were it not for that pure characteristic (al-khassiya al-mahda), [i.e., that they are servants in truth] he [the Prophet Muhammad] (upon him be peace) would not have said, “I am indeed the servant -- la ilaha illa Allah. I am the servant in Truth, and no other.” What honor is more honorable for Khidr (upon him be peace) than this distinction that [Allah] called him a “servant.” And who in reality can be His servant? Were it not for His sufficient compassion (law la rahmatahu al-kafiya) which proceeds from pre-eternity (azal) to His servants? Otherwise it would not have been permissible for His servant to say “I am your servant,” for He [Allah] transcends (munazzah) the need to have the temporal (hadathan) truly serve Him.
So how does this set of values shape his exegesis of the Qur’an, especially around the master-disciple relationship in the story of the Green Man, Khidr.
Like Plato, Ruzbihan adheres to the call of Beauty in its many forms. Ruzbihan is known for the shaid bazi and nazar practices of Sufism, but one alos sees that his way of writing about it matches the terms of Plato.
Unveiling is a metaphor for Sufi Qur’an exegesis.
In his first sermon, Ruzbihan addressed the congregation of the ‘Atiq mosque in Shiraz on whether a daughter can show herself in public.
“Although you advise her and forbid her, let her show herself! She should not listen these words of yours or accept this advice, for she is beautiful, for beauty has no rest until love becomes joined to it.” (Ernest, p. 4)
He may also have added: “Love and beauty made a pact in pre-eternity never to be separate from each other.
Version circulated that hearing these words, a man fainted and that Ruzbihan was cutting open hearts. Ruzbihan is a figure of radiant presence and endowed with ecstatic charisma and magnetism. He has experienced an essential union with God. In the text we will read, Ruzbihan discusses death and immortality.
Ruzbihan described God as passionate love (‘ishq). Ruzbihan stands among the most prominent proponents of passionate love. Ibn ‘Arabi writes that stories about Ruzbihan were still told in Mecca of the female singer he fell passionately in love with. Ruzbihan realized he had transferred his love of God to the singer. Ruzbihan explicitly identified and admitted transference. He turned in his cloak to the Sufis. In the end, she became ashamed and began to serve him.
The Qur’an narrates a story of a mediator who is an immortal who God directly transmitted compassion and wisdom to. His name is al-Khidr the Green Man. His gift of compassion and inner wisdom sets him apart from Moses’ level of learning. Moses learning is instruction, Khidr’s transmission is ta’dib, training. This living is an art, an adab. Like art, the pedagogy includes an active learning and immersion method. The dynamics of the mentoring relationship share dynamics of training in an art, in this case the art of spiritual living, Sufism. And this teacher al-Khidr is immortal. Al-Khidr symbolizes the triumph over the terror of death.
“The creative person becomes then in art, literature and religion, the mediator of natural terror and the indicator of a ne way of triumph over it. He reveals the darkness and the dread dof the human condition and fabricates a new symbolic transcendence over it.” (Becker, Denial of Death, p. 220)
Khidr represents a possibility of symbolic or spiritual transcendence over death. With the transmission of compassion from God, he overcomes terror, which is fundamentally related to death. Khidr conveys wisdom which is a synechdoche or metonymy of immortality. And the general consensus is that Khidr is an immortal being who acquired his immortality on his journey with Alexander the Great in search of the immortal transforming elixir of eternal life.
In the Qur’an’s story about Khidr, each episode involves danger, death or demise. As we dig deeper in the story we find that the entire story is pervaded by symbols and events of death: danger, war, orphans, legacies. This story and its protagonist provide a powerful confrontation with our own death and mortality. The pedagogy involves the kind of active learning and problem solving that can only be transmitted. Rebbe once said he learned everything he needed to know about the Torah by watching his teacher tie his shoe.
Since Moses already lives in a reality that takes God’s word to be a metonymy or synechdoche of its immortal eternal and infinite author, this new protagonist, al-Khidr also stands in as a synechdoche or metonymy of God. He is immortal.The book, the story, the star, all stand for God, serve as immortality symbols. And the main thread is the theme of training one in what Evelyn Underhill calls “the art of union with reality.”
Within a hundred years after his death, Ruzbihan's tomb was a major pilgrimage center.
Historically, Ruzbihan, born in Fasa, was educated in Sufism at the ribat of the Banu Salbih family (Ernest, p. 2). While there he had a vision that caused him to close up his business as a grocer (thus the name Baqli, Grocer) and wander in the desert for three years. Then in 1144 "he joined the Sufis, serving them, learning their discipline, and studying and memorizing the Qur'an." (Ernst, Ruzbihan 1996, p. 2)
Then Ruzbihan was a student of three Sufi masters:
Jamaluddin Abi al-Wafa’ ibn Khalil al-Fasa’i (named by Ruzbihan in his diaries).
Sirajuddin Mahmaud ibn al-Khalifa (also of the Banu Salbih and the Kazaruni lineage of Persian Sufism) and
Abu as-Safa’ al-Wasita.
The library at the ribat of Banu Salbih offered Ruzbihan access to the writings of Hallaj and through him the ecstatic (sukr tradition of Sufism. Ruzbihan's bearing and appearance was charismatic and magnetic and beaming with love. Ruzbihan prized beauty and saw God as 'Ishq the powerfully passionate love of divine attraction. God is a name derived from the root word for "ravishing" ("walah" ) and not the root of a god ("alaha")
Ruzbihan mentions less than a handful of teachers.
Ruzbihan never mentions Sirajuddin or the Kaszaruni lineage. Ruzbihan also studied hadith, in particular the Masabih.
He may have been a murid of the following shaykhs as well:
Jagir Kurdi
Qiwam al-Din Suhrawardi
Ruzbihan’s biographer Shamsuddin jmaintains that Abu al-Safa conferred upon Ruzbihan the cloak of initiation.
In 1165 Ruzbihan established a ribat in Shiraz.
THE BRIDES OF ELUCIDATION: RUZBIHAN'S COMMENTARY
Ruzbihan Baqli wrote that his mystical Qur’an commentary was “the unveiling of the brides of the elucidation.” Ruzbihan writes about divine realms as very direct immediate and unimediated experiences. The moment of experience is an unveiling, and not just any unveiling, but the unveiling of a bride: it is a decisive moment.
Ruzbihan grew up in a non-religious family and had a number of spiritual experiences as a child. But he considered the experience he had at age fifteen to be the first “unveiling” (kashf ).
A text can work as a representation or a text can enshrine a rhetoric of mysticism that mystifies. One aspect of mystification includes the human being's encounter with death. For many people in the world a text stands at the intersection between people's lives and their experience of the comprehensive ultimate unified reality. In some traditions the text has to take the place of the temple and its rituals. The text sometimes replaces the temple as the ultimate immortality symbol. In this text, our hero, Khidr, is an immortal teacher. Maybe he's even an immortal prophet. In addition to being immortal, he teaches Moses by involve him in case-study problem-solving learning situations. Whether the lesson was taught and learned might also be fruitful.
But this text transmits a narrative about a teaching transmission that transcends Moses' system of ethics -- even if that system is divinely derived/ This story provides the ultimate attack on fundamentalism. Moses is right in each case if you "go by the book." But if, like Khidr, you follow the muse of intuition and of listening to the music of God's heart.
The musical metaphor is impprtant because the social scientists who have written about narratives that involve death and evoke the question of one's own death create mortality salience inductions have thought about Art and the Artist. They have presented the Artist as the hero and art as the comic heroic immortality project.
What is immortality? One thing we know about immortality is that everyone has had one time or another thought about the question of what it would be like. Some realize that unless everyone was immortal you would be lonely watching your friends die and aching from all the pains you had acquired in your body. At least immortality manifests in the legacy, heritage, inheritance, contribution, mnonuments and landmarks of life. So one is a courageous hero who is an artist at heart, an artist of life.
And Khidr is an artist. He is like the hero and the artist in an elite station and has an elite status (khass). Ruzbihan is quick to bring this up that this verse shows verifies that there are special saints God has chosen. In the case of Khidr, God has chosaen to give him compassion and inner wisdom. So Khidr has mastered the art of showing compassion and living and teaching wisdom.
This story brings us face-to-face with the harsh realities of the master-disciple relationship where domination and control are coupled with problems of transference and disobedience.
Khid as a being ands as a teacher stands multiplty as an immortality symbol in another immortality symbol (the Qur'an as a synechdoche or metonymy of God.) Tese two immortality symbols are units of communication, narration and inner reflection in an immortality ideology called Islam.
Now the tangible teaching transmission steps forth as a significant immortality symbol in an immortality ideology of Sufism that teaches that the Prophet taught “Die before you die.” And like Plato, Ruzbihan’s ultimate immortality symbol is love, ‘ishq. Passionate love is a metaphor of God. So God is love, Beauty and lived truth, haqq. Like Bestami, ‘Ayn al-Qudat al-Hamadani, and al-Hallaj, Ruzbihan stands out among ecstatics. Ruzbihan is the master of all the ecstatics. Ruzbihan practices the sub rosa face-to-face and eye-to-eye gazing into the windows of the soul. God is love, not just love, but passionate love. Using an alternative etymology, Ruzbihan asserts that the root of the name of God Allah is not as most grammarians maintain, “a-l-h,” but the root for the word “to ravish as beautiful,” “w-l-h.”
Writing onj 18.65a Ruzbihan clearly asserts that the privileged class to which Khidr and Muhammad belong is the rank of "servants." Ruzbihan gives special emphasis to the mastery in servitude. These people of the secret and of the secret of the secret know the secret of servitude, Khidr is the pre-eminently selected servant among all of God's servants: ('Ibad al-'ibadana). He is so special that the folk people and Alexander Romance writers will take to calling him an immortal being. Then the people of Palestine, Lebasnon and Turkey will hybridize him with St. George and Elijah as messianic heroes without decisive political power. Muslims know the uniqueness of this story which is pubically proclaimed from Friday mosque loud speakers that typically include in the morning's readings, the eighteenth chapter, the Sura of the Cave from which this story comes. From the Alexander Romances we get iconographic illustrations and the story that he derved as Alexander's cook, deputy and ambassador. He was to Alexander what Hanuman was to Rama. In support of Alexander's mission to get the water of eternal life, Khidr first found it, drank it and brought Alexander back only to find that the water had moved.
“And he found a servant from among Our servants.” (18.65a)
In this there is a hidden indication that God, Glorified be He, has certain selected [khawassan] servants. They are those whom He selected for gnosis (ma‘rifa) from the sciences of Lordship (‘ulum al-rububiya), the secrets of unicity, the realities of wisdom and subtle graces of His angelic and majestic realms (malakutihi wa jabarutihi) that He reserves for himself. They [these selected ones (khawass)] are the people of the unseen, [the people of] the unseen of the unseen, [the people of] the secret, and [the people of] the secret of the secret. [They are] the ones whom Allah has concealed in His concealment, veiled from His own creation out of compassion (shafaqa) for them due to the secret of God that they display. They are the servants in reality (haqiqa), those who reached the reality of servanthood, in the sense that Allah made their servanthood parallel (muhadhiyan) to His Lordship (rububiyatihi). Otherwise all [of His servants] are His servants from the viewpoint of creation, but they are servants in reality from the perspective of gnosis (ma‘rifa).
Were it not for that pure characteristic (al-khassiya al-mahda), [i.e., that they are servants in truth] he [the Prophet Muhammad] (upon him be peace) would not have said, “I am indeed the servant -- la ilaha illa Allah. I am the servant in Truth, and no other.” What honor is more honorable for Khidr (upon him be peace) than this distinction that [Allah] called him a “servant.” And who in reality can be His servant? Were it not for His sufficient compassion (law la rahmatahu al-kafiya) which proceeds from pre-eternity (azal) to His servants? Otherwise it would not have been permissible for His servant to say “I am your servant,” for He [Allah] transcends (munazzah) the need to have the temporal (hadathan) truly serve Him.
So how does this set of values shape his exegesis of the Qur’an, especially around the master-disciple relationship in the story of the Green Man, Khidr.
Like Plato, Ruzbihan adheres to the call of Beauty in its many forms. Ruzbihan is known for the shaid bazi and nazar practices of Sufism, but one alos sees that his way of writing about it matches the terms of Plato.
Unveiling is a metaphor for Sufi Qur’an exegesis.
In his first sermon, Ruzbihan addressed the congregation of the ‘Atiq mosque in Shiraz on whether a daughter can show herself in public.
“Although you advise her and forbid her, let her show herself! She should not listen these words of yours or accept this advice, for she is beautiful, for beauty has no rest until love becomes joined to it.” (Ernest, p. 4)
He may also have added: “Love and beauty made a pact in pre-eternity never to be separate from each other.
Version circulated that hearing these words, a man fainted and that Ruzbihan was cutting open hearts. Ruzbihan is a figure of radiant presence and endowed with ecstatic charisma and magnetism. He has experienced an essential union with God. In the text we will read, Ruzbihan discusses death and immortality.
Ruzbihan described God as passionate love (‘ishq). Ruzbihan stands among the most prominent proponents of passionate love. Ibn ‘Arabi writes that stories about Ruzbihan were still told in Mecca of the female singer he fell passionately in love with. Ruzbihan realized he had transferred his love of God to the singer. Ruzbihan explicitly identified and admitted transference. He turned in his cloak to the Sufis. In the end, she became ashamed and began to serve him.
The Qur’an narrates a story of a mediator who is an immortal who God directly transmitted compassion and wisdom to. His name is al-Khidr the Green Man. His gift of compassion and inner wisdom sets him apart from Moses’ level of learning. Moses learning is instruction, Khidr’s transmission is ta’dib, training. This living is an art, an adab. Like art, the pedagogy includes an active learning and immersion method. The dynamics of the mentoring relationship share dynamics of training in an art, in this case the art of spiritual living, Sufism. And this teacher al-Khidr is immortal. Al-Khidr symbolizes the triumph over the terror of death.
“The creative person becomes then in art, literature and religion, the mediator of natural terror and the indicator of a ne way of triumph over it. He reveals the darkness and the dread dof the human condition and fabricates a new symbolic transcendence over it.” (Becker, Denial of Death, p. 220)
Khidr represents a possibility of symbolic or spiritual transcendence over death. With the transmission of compassion from God, he overcomes terror, which is fundamentally related to death. Khidr conveys wisdom which is a synechdoche or metonymy of immortality. And the general consensus is that Khidr is an immortal being who acquired his immortality on his journey with Alexander the Great in search of the immortal transforming elixir of eternal life.
In the Qur’an’s story about Khidr, each episode involves danger, death or demise. As we dig deeper in the story we find that the entire story is pervaded by symbols and events of death: danger, war, orphans, legacies. This story and its protagonist provide a powerful confrontation with our own death and mortality. The pedagogy involves the kind of active learning and problem solving that can only be transmitted. Rebbe once said he learned everything he needed to know about the Torah by watching his teacher tie his shoe.
Since Moses already lives in a reality that takes God’s word to be a metonymy or synechdoche of its immortal eternal and infinite author, this new protagonist, al-Khidr also stands in as a synechdoche or metonymy of God. He is immortal.The book, the story, the star, all stand for God, serve as immortality symbols. And the main thread is the theme of training one in what Evelyn Underhill calls “the art of union with reality.”
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Muhammad, The Lover: Bright Daylight of Haqq as Ecstatic Presence
Sufi Qur'an commentators present an intertextual conversation about how the contents of sacred scripture relate to mystical experiences, practice and meaning.
But more than a book about immortality, the way the Qur'an is symbolically-constructed evokes and also invokes God's presence. One can imagine how for many the object of the book (mushaf) is itself, an immortality symbol. The Qur'an stands as an immortality symbol. Symbolically the Qur'an works as a synechdoche -- co-eternally a synechdoche -- of God and all that is considered divine or of the "realms of the unseen" ('alam al-ghayb)
We also are welcomed into a conversation about the context of sacred scripture. How does the hermeneutical context that the Qur'an is both co-eternal with God and uncreated shape readings of its contents?
Muslim readers of the Qur'an must read knowing that the historically dominant understanding of the nature of the book is that its author is God, a divine immortal being named Allah in Arabic. His names Allah, Allaha, Eloh, were invoked by Abraham, Moses, David, Jesus, and Muhammad.
So the Muslims began with: la ilaha illa Allah (There is no [other] god but God) and Muhammad Rasul Allah (Muhammad is the Messenger of God.) Muhammad joins the ranks of 25-28 named and a total of 124,000 unnamed prophets. And the Qur'an says these prophets were sent to every people. This gives some room for Hindus, Chinese Muslims, among others to expand and derive meanings creatively.
At the physical center of the Qur'an, in between its 15th and 16th thirtieth-sections, stands the story of an immortal man to whom God conferred compassion (rahma) and inner knowledge ('ilm al-ladduni, 18.65) God sent Moses to him to learn wisdom. Moses asked him to let him follow him to learn of his mature guidance (rushd).
What meaning does it add to the story that the central figure is immortal. The central figure is a rare -- almost unique -- human being who has resolved the crisis of the symbolic self and he has conquered death. What does it mean that the mediating and mentoring figure of the spiritual guide is presented as an immortal being? How does that extra-degree of symbolic immortality deepen the reading and extend its range of applicability?
RUZBIHAN BAQLI ASH-SHIRAZ (1128-1209) LIVED IN THE SOUTHWEST PART OF IRAN called FARS, a few hundred miles southwest of the ancient ruins of the Achaemenaed capitol, the seat of the Shah of the Persian Dynasties of Biblical times -- Persepolis, a monument to the immortality image of King Cyrus.
TEXT AS IMMORTALITY SYMBOL: SCRIPTURE AS CO-ETERNAL WITH GOD
The tradition of Muslim scholars has made believing in "qadim," co-eternity of the Qur'an with God, a major point of investigation. This is more than just fundamentalism. The text itself is an icon of immortality. This is not unusual. The Hindus have done it with the Veda, the Jews with the Torah, some types of Protestants come a little close. When Muslims read they Qur'an, we read a book presented as eternally uncreated and especially co-eternal with God. The Qur'an is immortal and it is a symbol of the immortal and of immortality.
Writers such as the commentator whose work stands at the center of this paper, Ruzbihan Baqli (1128-1209) affirm that the Qur'an provides principles for mystical guidance and is an accurate guide to, and map of, various domains of ethical, religious and mystical experience: symbolic, psycho-spiritual, ritual performance, meditation, trance, etc.
THE TEXT IS IN THE BOOK: SYMBOLIC IMMORTALITY AND PHYSICAL DEATH
An interpretive community presents sacred scripture as an icon of immortality. This analogy of the object and its text as a symbol of immortality varies from lineage to linheage and community to community. Jews and Muslimms conceive of God's "eternal word "inlibriated" (put into a book) and Christians also conceive of God's word as incarnated (placed into a body). The Qur'an stands among Muslims as not only a book that discusses immortality, but also a symbol of immortality. The dominant position is that Muslims revere the Qur'an as co-eternal with God and preserved as his speech. Taking the first created object, the Pen inscribed it on the second-created object, the tablet that holds the words God writes with his pen. Thus the Qur'an, the "recitation" becomes literally as well as symbolically an eternal word or the closest simulation one could have of the eternal word, a presence of eternity, a sign of the4 unseen, a sounding of the unheard.
What are the hermeneutical tasks in reading Ruzbihan's medieval Sufi Qur'an commentary? One faces a conversation about the mystical stages and stations that that book reflects and confirms by the experience of the reader. It is a reading based on personal experience. I call this the hermeneutic of recognition. A scholar who excludes tariqa has to promote ethics while downplaying the motherly caring functions of the mystics who affirm that we can all experience Christ or God directly. Among the mystics a textual reading compares and evaluates the text according to how well it holds up to the mystic reader's own interpretations and experiences.
If one interprets in a "hermeneutic of recognition" one is resonating with, in sympathy with and feeling the same wavelength, the same vibration. This is the realm where people think that they have "good chemistry." The interpretation exists as a nod of recognition. The recognition may be the content. Or it may be the analogy from the content. Or it may be an allegory, teaching a bigger principle from a simple story, or it may just be mystical writing meaning it's filled with speech acts of paradox, catachresis, intuition, heartfulness, poetry, etc.
So we see the text is a meta-symbol of itself. And this hermenetic horizon and the exegetical experience of seeing the book itself as a symbol of something both sufficient-unto-itself while also beyond itself, and beyond-nesses. Muslims think through this question with the categories of the Qur'an and the mushaf, the codex or printed copy of the Qur'an. A Muslim would see the rectangular-cube of a book and call it the "mushaf" of the Qur'an, or even just the "mushaf." One would not call that object the Qur'an, because the Qur'an is an eternal reality, an immoertality symbol, beyond all objects.
THE GREEN MAN: ENTER THE IMMORTAL PROPHET
And standing at the center of this story is an immortal Prophet. This immortal Prophet is named al-Khidr and also called al-Khizr (rhymes with "hithir," and "scissor." And the way the Persians pronounce the name it rhymes with "weather," al-Khehehzer))
And Khidr takes Moses on as a student. This is a very significant story then in a spiritual culture in which the practice of teachers accepting and guiding students stands at its center. The story then stands out as a paradigm for understanding both the general ethics and principles of the teacher-student relationship ethics as well as the ethics and nuances of the teacher-student relationship in spiritual training and spiritual development and formation.
It appears in the eighteenth chapter of the Qur'an at what is literally the center of the text.
First of all he's one of only four immortals in Muslim traditions:
Enoch (Idris),
Elijah (Ilyas),
Jesus ('Isa) and
this unusual being, al-Khidr, "the Green Man."
The Qur'an doesn't name him. But the companions of the Prophet Muhammad asked the name of the righteous man AR-RAJUL AS-SALIH who Moses followed. And the Prophet Muhammad said that the name of the man was the Green Man. The Prophet called him al-Khadir, the Greening One. More casually people called him al-Khizr. So the companions asked the Prophet, why was he called al-Khadir. The Prophet replied that he was called al-Khadir because when he would sit on barren land, after he arose, that land would be verdantly green with vegetation. Aristotle might have thought of him as a symbol of our vegetable soul.
ALEXANDER'S ROMANCE: AL-KHIDR BECOMES IMMORTAL
The story of how he became a green immortal takes one to the Alexander Romance where Khidr is Alexander's deputy and cook and in helping Alexander win his goal in the quest for the elixir of immortality, it was Khidr who found the fountain where he drank some of the aqua vitae and became immortal. He then brought Alexander to the spot, but it had moved and Alexander never drank from the water from which Khidr drank.
So this is the background on the immortal prophet al-Khizr the Green Man. One day Moses told one of the children of Israel that he, Moses, wisest man on earth. God then spoke inside of Moses' heart (wahy) and instructed Moses to seek out al-Khidr (literally named "The Green")who is wiser than Moses. Their story stands out in the Qur'an as a unique type of story in many ways.
And among Sufis, whatever many and myriad things this story can be, this story is a story of the perspective that knowledge of immortality brings and how should a student connect with and follow a teacher. How does a student travel up close with the teacher. The student who signs on to travel close up and next to the teacher will have many romantic and idealistic fantasies challenged and shaken. In our story Moses struggles to reconcile the ethical code God has handed him in stone, and this very different multi-dimensional lived-reality flexibility.
Introducing RUZBIHAN BAQLI of SHIRAZ (1128-1209)
What can one say about Ruzbihan Baqli? He lived in a station of being that the Sufis call, Haqq. Haqq is the "reality" of God. Haqq means "right" and "rights.". Muslims idealize, "The Straight Path," Surat al-Mustaqim. All of this is Haqq. The word for "realization," haqiqa expands the basic word haqq into haqiqa. One of Ruzbihan's heroes Mansur ibn Husayn al-Hallaj was executed, as legend says for saying "I am Haqq!" He claimed to be the living truth. Ruzbihan radiated that same authoritative, direct and commanding presence, especially an ecstatic presence.
Ruzbihan and Hallaj are what Weber calls "charismatic." In the Sufi literature, they have baraka
Mansur al-Husayn's followers created an immortality symbol of such striking narrative and tropic power that they succeeded in making these narratives a part of mainstream Iranian culture. The followers of Mansur ibn Husayn al-Hallaj created a hagiographic projection out of the event that Louis Massignon pointed out paralleled Jesus Crucifiction savior narrative. In fact the parallel between Christian and Muslim readings of such a person in this instance offers room for reflection.
Otherwise, in addition to projecting a heroic transference onto Hallaj, people were always confronted by this question related to immortality: If Hallaj says he is God and each of us is God, then, am I God? Ruzbihan believed in 'ayn-i jam a cosmic union and integration of one's self with God.
Baqli: The Grocer
Ruzbihan ibn Abi al-Nasr (d. 1209-10)lived in Shiraz. In 1165, he built a ribat there in the section of the city called "the New Garden."
Some of his most often quoted hadith include:
Don’t you see how he [Rasul Allah] said “I pass the night with my Lord; He feeds me and gives me drink.”
Ruzbihan repeats: "I saw my Lord in the most beautiful form." (The Unveiling of Secrets, p. 7, and throughout)
His memory lives in history in his tomb in Shiraz, his own writings and biographical writings about him. His tomb in Shiraz was restored in 1958 and again in 1972. Thus people can, have made and continue to make visits (ziyarat) to his tomb. A legend holds that the pre-eminent Persian poet Hafiz (d. 791/1389)was a Ruzbihaniyya disciple. Ruzbihan and Hafiz share an understanding of the Ascension to the Pure Form of Beauty that parallels that of Plato in the Symposium . Carl Ernest points out that an anonymous commentary on The Jasmine of the Lovers that quotes Hafiz to explain Ruzbihan's text might have been written by Hafiz
Ruizbihan's name means the bright day light. In 1165, Ruzbihan established a ribat a Sufi teaching, fellowship training and service center. Ruzbihan received and embodied the ecstatic states of the great sukr, tradition of Bayzid Bestami, Mansur ibn Husayn al-Hallaj, so much so that it was Ruzbihan Baqli who became the paradigmatic Shaykh ash-Sha.t.h or in Latin, Dr. Ecstaticus, Dr Ecstasy. Ruzbihan combined scholarship with mysticism of the boldest and almost boasting sort. And that bold, blunt matter of factness only contributes to making it vividly real and tangible. Ruzbihan often presents descriptions of events and phenomena definitely "out of the box" or "off our radar screens."
Ruzbihan repeats: "I saw my Lord in the most beautiful form." (The Unveiling of Secrets, p. 7, and throughout)
He must have lived intensely. An observer writes: "I met him, and he was a master of mystical experience and absorption, continually in ecstasy, so that one's fear of him never left..." Writing rhapsodically in a hagiographical setting meant to register a symbol of divine immortality, Ruzbihan's great-grandson Shamsuddin reported that Ruzbihan's presence was transforming.
"His face was always so beautiful that anyone who saw him was freshened and quickened in spirit, and would see the trace of sainthood on his forehead which was the reflection of his blessed interior made external."
He calls Muhammad, The Lover (Habib) who manifests his beauty from the lotus tree in the garden of the farthest Abode.
Ruzbihan warns: "It is very hard to present these mystical stages, when the people of ordinary knowledge do not comprehend them."
The question is first to acknowledge the reading strategies for approaching Ruzbihan Baqli's text. In this case Ruzbihan's Qur'an commentary, Brides Elucidation, reflects an intertextual engagement with the Qur'an. Since the commentary is a mystical text, we may ask if it evokes an experience of, or association with the questions of immortality and the afterlife. Next we must ask in what ways the text is to be read literally, analogically, allegorically and mystically. Since the entire set of acts of readings, writing, interpreting and rewriting happens in relation to a sacred text we have to ask how the fact that the text stands for immortality at many levels must be addressed.
Ruzbihan knows that the transmission of the knowledge of Qur'an comes through "unveiling" -- the pervasively popular word in titles and texts -- and then in particular the style of the unveiling has the power of a moment as poignant and pregnant as the moment when a bride is unveiled at a wedding.
The Brides of Elucidation on the Verses of the Qur'an
Ruzbihan Baqli, (522/1128-606/1209)‘Ara’is al-bayan al-haqa’iq al-qur’an (The Brides of Elucidation of the Realities of the Qur’an, pp. 590-595)
Ruzbihan has chosen the symbol of the bride and has described their role. What do thje "brides" of the Qur'an do in their "bridal" intimacy?: The Brides elucidate the realities of the qur'an. In this "marriage of meaning" reading, the immortality symbols in Ruzbihan's commentary will elucidate a reality of the Qur'an. The root word bayyan means to make something clear, to clarify, with a slight sense of light up. So when we take on such a text, we have to account for how we face reading and interpreting a text that is addressed to existential life crises while transcribing those existential crises to eternal symbols of immortlaity so that we know or can tell ourselves we're immortal.
Muslims have even developed a general sense that there are four immortal Prophets: Enoch, Elijah, Jesus, The Green Man. Each of these four figures is a prominent immortality figure among Muslims and many Christians and Jews. So Muslims will inevitable read the story of Moses and the Green Man as a story thast has a backdrop of the question of immortality and mortality.
So the wedding is a sacred symbol of a lasting trust. And Ruzbihan has chosen to put this metaphor in the title of the text he has written. Now in addition to the ways that weddings evoke lasting values and institutions, Muslims see the Qur'an as a symbol of immortality. The text is Umm al-Kitab, the "Mother of the Book." The Qur'an was written on the "Eternal Tablet (lawhun al-mahfuz. The first sign of the Qur'an is the pen. In the first revealed portion of the Qur'an the Qur'an speaks of the meaning of the pen. The Prophet Muhammad points out that the inventor of the pen is an immortal Prophet named Idris (also the first tailor).
Ruzbihan (brightly shining day) was born in Shiraz in 1128 and died there in 1209. In 1181 he began writing his spiritual diaries. They require a very rigorous hermeneutic and exegesis. Are these realistic descriptions, written in analogy, allegory, etc? Ruzbihan holds the reputation of being the pre-eminent among all ecstatics, the "second coming" of Beyazid Bestami, a kin to the soul and heart of al-Hallaj. Ruzbihan excelled because he combined scholarly skill with mystical experience.
Because tangible teaching transmission so frequently stands at the center of Sufi training and culture, we can learn much about the master-disciple mentoring relationship by watching and studying how Ruzbihan intertextually reads and writes about the story of Moses and Khidr.
(1) We would like to understand how Ruzbihan practiced his master-disciple mentoring relationships and
(2) We would like to research how his writing about the relationship between Khidr and Moses reflects his own life experiences with that question or in those relationships.
and
(3) We would like to clarify what Ruzbihan wants us to understand about the master-disciple relationship that we can particularly learn from the story of the journey of Moses and Khidr.
As a subset of these questions, especially the last, we will find ourselves searching for answers to these questions as well. How does Ruzbihan expand on the motifs in the story to construct a symbolic code in the interpretive framework of his commentary? Do we find any clues or indications about the role of transference on the teacher as part of the technique of the transmission. Does the initiatic transmission require transference? Is transference a dynamic of the transmission process? why did Moses not suceed?
Ruzbihan understands the difference between Moses' two famous landmark journies: the days of witnessing on Sinai to receive the law and this journey of aspiration (irada, desiring, intention, mentorship, master-disciple relationship.
Ruzbihan locates the problem in the heart and ascribes to a lack of balance between the mind and heart.
"When they lost their way (tariq), they did not undertake the journey (yasra’ ) according to the heart, and fatigue (nasab) weighed them down. And that was through Allah’s instruction to them (ta‘lim Allah) to go beyond the limit. The inner sense (sirr) in the heart may apprehend wisdoms of the unseen (hikam al-ghayb), but the heart and the intellect did not know these [wisdoms]. The soul (nafs) was brought to suffering in injury (adha’) through its ignorance of this [i.e., the wisdoms of the unseen (hikam al-ghayb)]. Had the heart and the soul known [this] as much as the inner sense (sirr) did, they [heart and soul] would not have been overcome by the dictates of exhaustion (ahkam al-ta‘ab) or been enveloped by fatigue (nasab), no matter how much they were in the station of struggle (mujahada) and testing" [p. 590]
Then Ruzbihan explictly identifies that Moses is supported by the Haqq, the Truth, Reality, and Right:
"When he [Moses] was seeking mediation (wasita), he was veiled from the station of the witnessing (mushahada) and suffered in his striving (mujahada). And it was Truth that trained him (addabahu al-haqq) in this [matter] so it did not occur to him that he had something of the knowledge of divine realities (‘ulum al-haqa’iq ), because the Exalted is jealous of whoever pretends to attain the secret of secrets. For that reason God sent him to learn (ta‘allum) the knowledge of the unseen (‘ilm al-ghayb). The Teacher [al-Qushayri] said Moses was burdened (mahtamal) in this journey."
Of Ruzbihan's tafsir on 18.60 he says that a journey of training differs from the station of witnessing. This difference accounts for why his time on Sinai was easy and here he must, because of the type of training bear hardship. Hardship is a part of the training. It is also a journey of training. This motif evokes the wayfaring "salik" and syas the wayfarer is also in training.
As Annemarie Schimmel points out,m the transformation is envisioned either as a journey, an alchemical transmutation or an erotic love romance. In that framework, this story is a story of a journey and the word "journey" as a choice of term acknowledges that Sufism is a discipline which may be understood using the model of a journey.
Wasting no time, Ruzbihan jumps to the verse that first presents Khidr. Ruzbihan uses Khidr as an example that shows the existence of special saints. Ruzbihan sets up a framework for understanding their particular nature. Ruzbihan uses particular Sufi motifs of the "people of the unseen," and the "people of the secret." But Ruzbihan is also working rhetorical invocations by weaving in paradoxical utterances:
“And he found a servant from among Our servants.” (18.65a)
In this there is a hidden indication that God, Glorified be He, has certain selected [khawassan] servants. They are those whom He selected for gnosis (ma‘rifa) from the sciences of Lordship (‘ulum al-rububiya), the secrets of unicity, the realities of wisdom and subtle graces of His angelic and majestic realms (malakutihi wa jabarutihi) that He reserves for himself. They [these selected ones (khawass)] are the people of the unseen, [the people of] the unseen of the unseen, [the people of] the secret, and [the people of] the secret of the secret. [Ruzbihan, A'rais al-bayyan]
Ruzbiihan reaches the parapdoxical point of pronouncing his relationship to "the people of the secret of the secret." This type of mystical utterance works performatively to evoke the presence of God by invoking the question of finitude and mortality: facing your own death. Whatever is obscure, transcendent, symbolic, or mystical evokes the everyday situation that we know that we and other things die and we participate in a symbolic dimension. In the eyes, ears and hands of the artist, the transmission may float over their heads. Certainly Ruzbihan runs us into running into the risk of Ruzbihan's writings riding straight over our heads. But that very confusion evokes an experience of the ineffable sacred. It actually suggests and intimates the existence of a realm of immortality. The Green Man al-Khidr, the protagonist of the story from the Qur'an around which Ruzbihan's commentary revolves is an immortal and represents and reminds us of our dual life of mortal animal and infinite etyernal inner symbolic being.
But more than a book about immortality, the way the Qur'an is symbolically-constructed evokes and also invokes God's presence. One can imagine how for many the object of the book (mushaf) is itself, an immortality symbol. The Qur'an stands as an immortality symbol. Symbolically the Qur'an works as a synechdoche -- co-eternally a synechdoche -- of God and all that is considered divine or of the "realms of the unseen" ('alam al-ghayb)
We also are welcomed into a conversation about the context of sacred scripture. How does the hermeneutical context that the Qur'an is both co-eternal with God and uncreated shape readings of its contents?
Muslim readers of the Qur'an must read knowing that the historically dominant understanding of the nature of the book is that its author is God, a divine immortal being named Allah in Arabic. His names Allah, Allaha, Eloh, were invoked by Abraham, Moses, David, Jesus, and Muhammad.
So the Muslims began with: la ilaha illa Allah (There is no [other] god but God) and Muhammad Rasul Allah (Muhammad is the Messenger of God.) Muhammad joins the ranks of 25-28 named and a total of 124,000 unnamed prophets. And the Qur'an says these prophets were sent to every people. This gives some room for Hindus, Chinese Muslims, among others to expand and derive meanings creatively.
At the physical center of the Qur'an, in between its 15th and 16th thirtieth-sections, stands the story of an immortal man to whom God conferred compassion (rahma) and inner knowledge ('ilm al-ladduni, 18.65) God sent Moses to him to learn wisdom. Moses asked him to let him follow him to learn of his mature guidance (rushd).
What meaning does it add to the story that the central figure is immortal. The central figure is a rare -- almost unique -- human being who has resolved the crisis of the symbolic self and he has conquered death. What does it mean that the mediating and mentoring figure of the spiritual guide is presented as an immortal being? How does that extra-degree of symbolic immortality deepen the reading and extend its range of applicability?
RUZBIHAN BAQLI ASH-SHIRAZ (1128-1209) LIVED IN THE SOUTHWEST PART OF IRAN called FARS, a few hundred miles southwest of the ancient ruins of the Achaemenaed capitol, the seat of the Shah of the Persian Dynasties of Biblical times -- Persepolis, a monument to the immortality image of King Cyrus.
TEXT AS IMMORTALITY SYMBOL: SCRIPTURE AS CO-ETERNAL WITH GOD
The tradition of Muslim scholars has made believing in "qadim," co-eternity of the Qur'an with God, a major point of investigation. This is more than just fundamentalism. The text itself is an icon of immortality. This is not unusual. The Hindus have done it with the Veda, the Jews with the Torah, some types of Protestants come a little close. When Muslims read they Qur'an, we read a book presented as eternally uncreated and especially co-eternal with God. The Qur'an is immortal and it is a symbol of the immortal and of immortality.
Writers such as the commentator whose work stands at the center of this paper, Ruzbihan Baqli (1128-1209) affirm that the Qur'an provides principles for mystical guidance and is an accurate guide to, and map of, various domains of ethical, religious and mystical experience: symbolic, psycho-spiritual, ritual performance, meditation, trance, etc.
THE TEXT IS IN THE BOOK: SYMBOLIC IMMORTALITY AND PHYSICAL DEATH
An interpretive community presents sacred scripture as an icon of immortality. This analogy of the object and its text as a symbol of immortality varies from lineage to linheage and community to community. Jews and Muslimms conceive of God's "eternal word "inlibriated" (put into a book) and Christians also conceive of God's word as incarnated (placed into a body). The Qur'an stands among Muslims as not only a book that discusses immortality, but also a symbol of immortality. The dominant position is that Muslims revere the Qur'an as co-eternal with God and preserved as his speech. Taking the first created object, the Pen inscribed it on the second-created object, the tablet that holds the words God writes with his pen. Thus the Qur'an, the "recitation" becomes literally as well as symbolically an eternal word or the closest simulation one could have of the eternal word, a presence of eternity, a sign of the4 unseen, a sounding of the unheard.
What are the hermeneutical tasks in reading Ruzbihan's medieval Sufi Qur'an commentary? One faces a conversation about the mystical stages and stations that that book reflects and confirms by the experience of the reader. It is a reading based on personal experience. I call this the hermeneutic of recognition. A scholar who excludes tariqa has to promote ethics while downplaying the motherly caring functions of the mystics who affirm that we can all experience Christ or God directly. Among the mystics a textual reading compares and evaluates the text according to how well it holds up to the mystic reader's own interpretations and experiences.
If one interprets in a "hermeneutic of recognition" one is resonating with, in sympathy with and feeling the same wavelength, the same vibration. This is the realm where people think that they have "good chemistry." The interpretation exists as a nod of recognition. The recognition may be the content. Or it may be the analogy from the content. Or it may be an allegory, teaching a bigger principle from a simple story, or it may just be mystical writing meaning it's filled with speech acts of paradox, catachresis, intuition, heartfulness, poetry, etc.
So we see the text is a meta-symbol of itself. And this hermenetic horizon and the exegetical experience of seeing the book itself as a symbol of something both sufficient-unto-itself while also beyond itself, and beyond-nesses. Muslims think through this question with the categories of the Qur'an and the mushaf, the codex or printed copy of the Qur'an. A Muslim would see the rectangular-cube of a book and call it the "mushaf" of the Qur'an, or even just the "mushaf." One would not call that object the Qur'an, because the Qur'an is an eternal reality, an immoertality symbol, beyond all objects.
THE GREEN MAN: ENTER THE IMMORTAL PROPHET
And standing at the center of this story is an immortal Prophet. This immortal Prophet is named al-Khidr and also called al-Khizr (rhymes with "hithir," and "scissor." And the way the Persians pronounce the name it rhymes with "weather," al-Khehehzer))
And Khidr takes Moses on as a student. This is a very significant story then in a spiritual culture in which the practice of teachers accepting and guiding students stands at its center. The story then stands out as a paradigm for understanding both the general ethics and principles of the teacher-student relationship ethics as well as the ethics and nuances of the teacher-student relationship in spiritual training and spiritual development and formation.
It appears in the eighteenth chapter of the Qur'an at what is literally the center of the text.
First of all he's one of only four immortals in Muslim traditions:
Enoch (Idris),
Elijah (Ilyas),
Jesus ('Isa) and
this unusual being, al-Khidr, "the Green Man."
The Qur'an doesn't name him. But the companions of the Prophet Muhammad asked the name of the righteous man AR-RAJUL AS-SALIH who Moses followed. And the Prophet Muhammad said that the name of the man was the Green Man. The Prophet called him al-Khadir, the Greening One. More casually people called him al-Khizr. So the companions asked the Prophet, why was he called al-Khadir. The Prophet replied that he was called al-Khadir because when he would sit on barren land, after he arose, that land would be verdantly green with vegetation. Aristotle might have thought of him as a symbol of our vegetable soul.
ALEXANDER'S ROMANCE: AL-KHIDR BECOMES IMMORTAL
The story of how he became a green immortal takes one to the Alexander Romance where Khidr is Alexander's deputy and cook and in helping Alexander win his goal in the quest for the elixir of immortality, it was Khidr who found the fountain where he drank some of the aqua vitae and became immortal. He then brought Alexander to the spot, but it had moved and Alexander never drank from the water from which Khidr drank.
So this is the background on the immortal prophet al-Khizr the Green Man. One day Moses told one of the children of Israel that he, Moses, wisest man on earth. God then spoke inside of Moses' heart (wahy) and instructed Moses to seek out al-Khidr (literally named "The Green")who is wiser than Moses. Their story stands out in the Qur'an as a unique type of story in many ways.
And among Sufis, whatever many and myriad things this story can be, this story is a story of the perspective that knowledge of immortality brings and how should a student connect with and follow a teacher. How does a student travel up close with the teacher. The student who signs on to travel close up and next to the teacher will have many romantic and idealistic fantasies challenged and shaken. In our story Moses struggles to reconcile the ethical code God has handed him in stone, and this very different multi-dimensional lived-reality flexibility.
Introducing RUZBIHAN BAQLI of SHIRAZ (1128-1209)
What can one say about Ruzbihan Baqli? He lived in a station of being that the Sufis call, Haqq. Haqq is the "reality" of God. Haqq means "right" and "rights.". Muslims idealize, "The Straight Path," Surat al-Mustaqim. All of this is Haqq. The word for "realization," haqiqa expands the basic word haqq into haqiqa. One of Ruzbihan's heroes Mansur ibn Husayn al-Hallaj was executed, as legend says for saying "I am Haqq!" He claimed to be the living truth. Ruzbihan radiated that same authoritative, direct and commanding presence, especially an ecstatic presence.
Ruzbihan and Hallaj are what Weber calls "charismatic." In the Sufi literature, they have baraka
Mansur al-Husayn's followers created an immortality symbol of such striking narrative and tropic power that they succeeded in making these narratives a part of mainstream Iranian culture. The followers of Mansur ibn Husayn al-Hallaj created a hagiographic projection out of the event that Louis Massignon pointed out paralleled Jesus Crucifiction savior narrative. In fact the parallel between Christian and Muslim readings of such a person in this instance offers room for reflection.
Otherwise, in addition to projecting a heroic transference onto Hallaj, people were always confronted by this question related to immortality: If Hallaj says he is God and each of us is God, then, am I God? Ruzbihan believed in 'ayn-i jam a cosmic union and integration of one's self with God.
Baqli: The Grocer
Ruzbihan ibn Abi al-Nasr (d. 1209-10)lived in Shiraz. In 1165, he built a ribat there in the section of the city called "the New Garden."
Some of his most often quoted hadith include:
Don’t you see how he [Rasul Allah] said “I pass the night with my Lord; He feeds me and gives me drink.”
Ruzbihan repeats: "I saw my Lord in the most beautiful form." (The Unveiling of Secrets, p. 7, and throughout)
His memory lives in history in his tomb in Shiraz, his own writings and biographical writings about him. His tomb in Shiraz was restored in 1958 and again in 1972. Thus people can, have made and continue to make visits (ziyarat) to his tomb. A legend holds that the pre-eminent Persian poet Hafiz (d. 791/1389)was a Ruzbihaniyya disciple. Ruzbihan and Hafiz share an understanding of the Ascension to the Pure Form of Beauty that parallels that of Plato in the Symposium . Carl Ernest points out that an anonymous commentary on The Jasmine of the Lovers that quotes Hafiz to explain Ruzbihan's text might have been written by Hafiz
Ruizbihan's name means the bright day light. In 1165, Ruzbihan established a ribat a Sufi teaching, fellowship training and service center. Ruzbihan received and embodied the ecstatic states of the great sukr, tradition of Bayzid Bestami, Mansur ibn Husayn al-Hallaj, so much so that it was Ruzbihan Baqli who became the paradigmatic Shaykh ash-Sha.t.h or in Latin, Dr. Ecstaticus, Dr Ecstasy. Ruzbihan combined scholarship with mysticism of the boldest and almost boasting sort. And that bold, blunt matter of factness only contributes to making it vividly real and tangible. Ruzbihan often presents descriptions of events and phenomena definitely "out of the box" or "off our radar screens."
Ruzbihan repeats: "I saw my Lord in the most beautiful form." (The Unveiling of Secrets, p. 7, and throughout)
He must have lived intensely. An observer writes: "I met him, and he was a master of mystical experience and absorption, continually in ecstasy, so that one's fear of him never left..." Writing rhapsodically in a hagiographical setting meant to register a symbol of divine immortality, Ruzbihan's great-grandson Shamsuddin reported that Ruzbihan's presence was transforming.
"His face was always so beautiful that anyone who saw him was freshened and quickened in spirit, and would see the trace of sainthood on his forehead which was the reflection of his blessed interior made external."
He calls Muhammad, The Lover (Habib) who manifests his beauty from the lotus tree in the garden of the farthest Abode.
Ruzbihan warns: "It is very hard to present these mystical stages, when the people of ordinary knowledge do not comprehend them."
The question is first to acknowledge the reading strategies for approaching Ruzbihan Baqli's text. In this case Ruzbihan's Qur'an commentary, Brides Elucidation, reflects an intertextual engagement with the Qur'an. Since the commentary is a mystical text, we may ask if it evokes an experience of, or association with the questions of immortality and the afterlife. Next we must ask in what ways the text is to be read literally, analogically, allegorically and mystically. Since the entire set of acts of readings, writing, interpreting and rewriting happens in relation to a sacred text we have to ask how the fact that the text stands for immortality at many levels must be addressed.
Ruzbihan knows that the transmission of the knowledge of Qur'an comes through "unveiling" -- the pervasively popular word in titles and texts -- and then in particular the style of the unveiling has the power of a moment as poignant and pregnant as the moment when a bride is unveiled at a wedding.
The Brides of Elucidation on the Verses of the Qur'an
Ruzbihan Baqli, (522/1128-606/1209)‘Ara’is al-bayan al-haqa’iq al-qur’an (The Brides of Elucidation of the Realities of the Qur’an, pp. 590-595)
Ruzbihan has chosen the symbol of the bride and has described their role. What do thje "brides" of the Qur'an do in their "bridal" intimacy?: The Brides elucidate the realities of the qur'an. In this "marriage of meaning" reading, the immortality symbols in Ruzbihan's commentary will elucidate a reality of the Qur'an. The root word bayyan means to make something clear, to clarify, with a slight sense of light up. So when we take on such a text, we have to account for how we face reading and interpreting a text that is addressed to existential life crises while transcribing those existential crises to eternal symbols of immortlaity so that we know or can tell ourselves we're immortal.
Muslims have even developed a general sense that there are four immortal Prophets: Enoch, Elijah, Jesus, The Green Man. Each of these four figures is a prominent immortality figure among Muslims and many Christians and Jews. So Muslims will inevitable read the story of Moses and the Green Man as a story thast has a backdrop of the question of immortality and mortality.
So the wedding is a sacred symbol of a lasting trust. And Ruzbihan has chosen to put this metaphor in the title of the text he has written. Now in addition to the ways that weddings evoke lasting values and institutions, Muslims see the Qur'an as a symbol of immortality. The text is Umm al-Kitab, the "Mother of the Book." The Qur'an was written on the "Eternal Tablet (lawhun al-mahfuz. The first sign of the Qur'an is the pen. In the first revealed portion of the Qur'an the Qur'an speaks of the meaning of the pen. The Prophet Muhammad points out that the inventor of the pen is an immortal Prophet named Idris (also the first tailor).
Ruzbihan (brightly shining day) was born in Shiraz in 1128 and died there in 1209. In 1181 he began writing his spiritual diaries. They require a very rigorous hermeneutic and exegesis. Are these realistic descriptions, written in analogy, allegory, etc? Ruzbihan holds the reputation of being the pre-eminent among all ecstatics, the "second coming" of Beyazid Bestami, a kin to the soul and heart of al-Hallaj. Ruzbihan excelled because he combined scholarly skill with mystical experience.
Because tangible teaching transmission so frequently stands at the center of Sufi training and culture, we can learn much about the master-disciple mentoring relationship by watching and studying how Ruzbihan intertextually reads and writes about the story of Moses and Khidr.
(1) We would like to understand how Ruzbihan practiced his master-disciple mentoring relationships and
(2) We would like to research how his writing about the relationship between Khidr and Moses reflects his own life experiences with that question or in those relationships.
and
(3) We would like to clarify what Ruzbihan wants us to understand about the master-disciple relationship that we can particularly learn from the story of the journey of Moses and Khidr.
As a subset of these questions, especially the last, we will find ourselves searching for answers to these questions as well. How does Ruzbihan expand on the motifs in the story to construct a symbolic code in the interpretive framework of his commentary? Do we find any clues or indications about the role of transference on the teacher as part of the technique of the transmission. Does the initiatic transmission require transference? Is transference a dynamic of the transmission process? why did Moses not suceed?
Ruzbihan understands the difference between Moses' two famous landmark journies: the days of witnessing on Sinai to receive the law and this journey of aspiration (irada, desiring, intention, mentorship, master-disciple relationship.
Ruzbihan locates the problem in the heart and ascribes to a lack of balance between the mind and heart.
"When they lost their way (tariq), they did not undertake the journey (yasra’ ) according to the heart, and fatigue (nasab) weighed them down. And that was through Allah’s instruction to them (ta‘lim Allah) to go beyond the limit. The inner sense (sirr) in the heart may apprehend wisdoms of the unseen (hikam al-ghayb), but the heart and the intellect did not know these [wisdoms]. The soul (nafs) was brought to suffering in injury (adha’) through its ignorance of this [i.e., the wisdoms of the unseen (hikam al-ghayb)]. Had the heart and the soul known [this] as much as the inner sense (sirr) did, they [heart and soul] would not have been overcome by the dictates of exhaustion (ahkam al-ta‘ab) or been enveloped by fatigue (nasab), no matter how much they were in the station of struggle (mujahada) and testing" [p. 590]
Then Ruzbihan explictly identifies that Moses is supported by the Haqq, the Truth, Reality, and Right:
"When he [Moses] was seeking mediation (wasita), he was veiled from the station of the witnessing (mushahada) and suffered in his striving (mujahada). And it was Truth that trained him (addabahu al-haqq) in this [matter] so it did not occur to him that he had something of the knowledge of divine realities (‘ulum al-haqa’iq ), because the Exalted is jealous of whoever pretends to attain the secret of secrets. For that reason God sent him to learn (ta‘allum) the knowledge of the unseen (‘ilm al-ghayb). The Teacher [al-Qushayri] said Moses was burdened (mahtamal) in this journey."
Of Ruzbihan's tafsir on 18.60 he says that a journey of training differs from the station of witnessing. This difference accounts for why his time on Sinai was easy and here he must, because of the type of training bear hardship. Hardship is a part of the training. It is also a journey of training. This motif evokes the wayfaring "salik" and syas the wayfarer is also in training.
As Annemarie Schimmel points out,m the transformation is envisioned either as a journey, an alchemical transmutation or an erotic love romance. In that framework, this story is a story of a journey and the word "journey" as a choice of term acknowledges that Sufism is a discipline which may be understood using the model of a journey.
Wasting no time, Ruzbihan jumps to the verse that first presents Khidr. Ruzbihan uses Khidr as an example that shows the existence of special saints. Ruzbihan sets up a framework for understanding their particular nature. Ruzbihan uses particular Sufi motifs of the "people of the unseen," and the "people of the secret." But Ruzbihan is also working rhetorical invocations by weaving in paradoxical utterances:
“And he found a servant from among Our servants.” (18.65a)
In this there is a hidden indication that God, Glorified be He, has certain selected [khawassan] servants. They are those whom He selected for gnosis (ma‘rifa) from the sciences of Lordship (‘ulum al-rububiya), the secrets of unicity, the realities of wisdom and subtle graces of His angelic and majestic realms (malakutihi wa jabarutihi) that He reserves for himself. They [these selected ones (khawass)] are the people of the unseen, [the people of] the unseen of the unseen, [the people of] the secret, and [the people of] the secret of the secret. [Ruzbihan, A'rais al-bayyan]
Ruzbiihan reaches the parapdoxical point of pronouncing his relationship to "the people of the secret of the secret." This type of mystical utterance works performatively to evoke the presence of God by invoking the question of finitude and mortality: facing your own death. Whatever is obscure, transcendent, symbolic, or mystical evokes the everyday situation that we know that we and other things die and we participate in a symbolic dimension. In the eyes, ears and hands of the artist, the transmission may float over their heads. Certainly Ruzbihan runs us into running into the risk of Ruzbihan's writings riding straight over our heads. But that very confusion evokes an experience of the ineffable sacred. It actually suggests and intimates the existence of a realm of immortality. The Green Man al-Khidr, the protagonist of the story from the Qur'an around which Ruzbihan's commentary revolves is an immortal and represents and reminds us of our dual life of mortal animal and infinite etyernal inner symbolic being.
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