The Letters of Shaikh Al-‘Arabī
Ad-Darqāwī
translated by Titus
Burckhardt
Source: Studies in Comparative Religion,
Vol. 16, No. 1 & 2 (Winter-Spring, 1984). © World Wisdom, Inc. www.studiesincomparativereligion.com
The sickness afflicting your heart, faqīr,
comes from the passions which pass through you; if you were to abandon them and
concern yourself with what God ordains for you, your heart would not suffer as
it suffers now. So listen to what I say to you and may God take you by the
hand. Each time your soul attacks you, if you were to be quick to do what God
orders and were to abandon your will entirely to Him, you would most certainly
be saved from psychic and satanic suggestions and from all trials. But if you
begin to reflect in these moments when your soul attacks you, to weigh the
factors for and against, and sink into inner chatter, then psychic and satanic
suggestions will flow back towards you in waves until you are overwhelmed and
drowned, and no good will be left in you, but only evil. May God guide us and
you on the path of His Saints, Amen.
The Venerable Master, Saint Ibn ‘Atā-Illāh
says in his Hikam: “Since you know that the Devil will never forget you,
it is your business not to forget Him who ‘leads you by the forelock’” (Glorious
Quran 11:56).[1] And our Master
used to say: “The true way to hurt the enemy is to be occupied with the love of
the Friend; on the other hand, if you engage in war with the enemy, he will
have obtained what he wanted from you and at the same time you will have lost
the opportunity of loving the Friend.” And we say: All good is in the
remembrance (dhikr) of God, and the only way that leads towards Him is
through renunciation of the world, keeping apart from people, inner and outer
discipline. “Nothing is more useful to the heart than solitude, thanks to which
it enters the arena of meditation,” as the Venerable Master Ibn ‘Atā-Illāh
says in his Hikam. And we say: Nothing is of more profit to the heart
than renunciation of the world and the fact of being seated between the hands
of God’s Saints.
Dethronement of the ego is a necessary condition, according to us and according to all
the Masters of the Way, and in this respect one of them said: “The very thing
you fear from me is what my heart desires.” But you, faqīr,
should not say this before having said it to your own soul and having forced it
to follow this road and no other.
As to this professor you told me about who is
unable to find the state of presence,[2] tell him not
to look towards the past nor towards the future, to become the son of the
moment, and to take death as the target before his eyes. Then he will find this
state, God willing.
We said to one of our brothers: Let him who
wishes to be in a perpetual state of presence restrain his tongue. And we
advise you: if you are in a state of perplexity (hayrah),[3] do not hasten
to cling to anything, either by writing or by anything else, lest you close the
door of necessity with your own hand, because for you this state takes the
place of the supreme Name, but God is wiser. Ibn ‘Atā-Illāh
says in his Hikam: “Sudden distress heralds feast days for one who
aspires”; and again: “Distress is the key to spiritual gifts”; and again: “You
will perhaps find a benefit in distress which you have not been able to find in
fasting nor in prayer; therefore when it descends upon you, defend yourself no
longer and do not be concerned with searching for some remedy, lest you drive
away the good which comes toward you freely, and give up your will entirely to
your Lord; then you will see marvels.” Our Master used to say when someone was
overcome with dismay: “Relax your mind and learn to swim.”
Do not give nourishment to all that arises in
your heart, but throw it far away from you and do not be concerned with
fostering it, forgetting your Lord the while, as most people do, thus going
astray, wandering, losing their way in a mirage; if they understood, they would
say: what an astonishing thing, the heart; in one instant it gives birth to
countless sons, some legitimate, others illegitimate and yet others whose
nature one cannot discern… How then could anyone who spends his time feeding
all this offspring be available for his Lord? What a sorry creature, this son of
Adam, who effaces the Cosmos until not a trace of it remains and whom the
Cosmos in its turn will obliterate until not a trace of him remains, save a
faint odor which in a little while fades away altogether.
If you love your Lord, faqīr,
leave yourself and your world, and people, except the man whose state uplifts
you and who shows you God by his words. But beware, beware lest you allow
yourself to be deceived by someone, for how many are they who appear to be
preaching for God when in reality they are only preaching for their desires.
The celebrated Saint, Sayyidī Abū
’sh-Shitā
(may God let us obtain profit through him) says in respect to this: “By God, we
call ‘My Lord,’ or
‘Son of My Lord,’ only him who cuts off our fetters.” The fact is not hidden
from you, faqīr,
that what imprisons a man in this world, which is the world of corruption, and
holds him fast, is nothing but illusion (al-wahm); but if a man gets rid
of this illusion, he passes into the world of purity from which he came; and
God brings every stranger back to his homeland.
Certainly all things are hidden in their
opposites—gain in loss and gift in refusal, honor in humiliation, wealth in
poverty, strength in weakness, abundance in restriction, rising up in falling
down, life in death, victory in defeat, power in powerlessness and so on.
Therefore, if a man wishes to find, let him be content to lose; if he wishes a
gift, let him be content with refusal; he who desires honor must accept
humiliation and he who desires wealth must be satisfied with poverty; let him
who wishes to be strong be content to be weak; let him who wishes abundance be
resigned to restriction; he who wishes to be raised up must allow himself to be
cast down; he who desires life must accept death; he who wishes to conquer must
be content to be conquered and he who desires power must be content with
impotence. Which is to say, let him who wishes to be free rejoice in servitude,
as his Prophet, friend and Lord (God bless him and give him peace) rejoiced in
it; let him choose it as the Prophet chose it and not be proud nor rebel
against his condition, for the servant is the servant and the Lord is the Lord…
A strong man is one who rejoices to see that the
world is slipping from his hands, leaving him and fleeing from him; who
rejoices that people despise him, and speak ill of him and is satisfied with
his knowledge of God. The Venerable Master, Saint Ibn ‘Atā-Illāh
(may God be pleased with him) says of this, in his Hikam: “If the fact that
people turn away from you or speak ill of you causes you suffering, return
towards the knowledge of God in you;
if this knowledge is not sufficient, then lack of satisfaction in the knowledge
of God is a far greater trial than that people speak ill of you. The purpose of
this slander is that you should not rely on people; God wishes to bring you
back from all things so that nothing may
distract you from Him.”
NOTES
[1]
Grasp of the forelock: an Arabic idiom, referring to a horse’s forelock. The
man who grasps it has complete power over the horse and for the horse the
forelock is as it were the crown of his beauty, the sum of his power of
self-assertion.
[3]
Hayrah: Dismay or perplexity in the face of a situation apparently
without issue; or again, in face of truths which cannot rationally be
reconciled; a mental crisis, when the mind comes up against its own limit. If
we understand hayrah on the mental plane the advice given here by the
Shaikh ad-Darqāwī
is reminiscent of the Zen method of the koan, that is, of persistent meditation
on certain paradoxes in order to provoke a mental crisis, an utter perplexity,
which may open out into supra-rational intuition.
Comments