To many women, there is nothing so tempting
to follow
as delusion.
The most attractive thing is always
the desire for beginnings,
the passion for innocence,
purity
and spotlessness.
The Sulaymi Association
Your Sheikh is your Imam, your mirror. He will lead you through the world of the Unseen. He will descend with you into your tomb, and deflect the questioning you will face there. The Lord has protected him from all error; he can do no wrong. The more you enable him to control you, the more you will reap the fruits. Turn to him and you shall be fulfilled; surrender to him and you will be saved, for he will let you drink deep from the abundance of his ocean. Your ground will shake; your fruits will flower; you will be reborn – on condition that you drink only from the fount of his goodness alone. Those who find no Sheikh to discipline them, to sweep away the dross of their Self, are ruined. Know that all who go against their guide will be lost and perish. Do not deny what you do not understand; those who ask their Sheikh “Why?” will never succeed.
Your Sheikh is a shadow, the Ambassador of the Unseen. Should he unbend to you, beware of taking liberties with him; seek refuge in him from his own might. He cares naught for you were it not for your invocations; any imperfection you see in him is but a reflection of your own shortcomings. As for him, the Lord hath placed a barrier between him and you; and those who see flaws cannot perceive the Unseen. If you walk away from him, you are the loser thereby; it is you who are punishing yourself, for when he dies, Heaven and Earth weep for him, whereas when you die, none will mourn for you. You may never consider yourself safe from the machinations of the Lord if you butt heads with His sainted walis: they may cast you into an abyss from which you may never rise more, or the punishment may fall upon you by depriving you of additional favor or of what you desire, and in the hour of your death, you may become tongue-tied and unable to speak the Islamic credo, “I swear that there is no God but Allah and that Mohamed is his Prophet”. Do not test God!
The Self is a wily serpent, and it hates those who would return it into bondage. Like a snake, it must be tamed. Your Sheikh is your guide to the divine craft; be as putty in his hands, and follow none but him; gift your works to him, for to gain the favor of the Sheikh is to gain the favor of God.
Your Sheikh seeks out what you love so as to subdue it in yourself. If you succeed in abandoning these things, and escape from the impurity of your Self, he will grant you the treasury entire, and will use his will to make use of you, putting the whole of Creation at your disposal. Those who have the Fates at their disposal are the great men of God, those whom He has secret set to be stewards over the earth. But for them, the world would fall into ruin, and chaos would prevail. Governments outwardly rule the world; those who rule in secret govern what lies beyond the physical world. Any good that befalls you is but a touch of the moisture of the oceans of your Sheikh.
Everything happens with permission. Every motion in the world, everything great and small, is performed in pursuit of blessings, even if it be a new obedience. Your Sheikh may allow or disallow it. His permission is the condition for the blessings of the light to descend. You, in yourself, are of the darkness; approaching those of high portals is a blessing, a righting of wrongs, and a salvation. As the Qur’an has said, backstabbing is like eating a dead man’s flesh; know, then, that the flesh of Sheikhs is poisoned. Respect their absence.
The Council of Limpid Mirrors
The Egyptian Encampment
Leader: Master Radwan
The Sulaymi Association, Morocco
Sheikh Master Selim al-Ra’i
Wafaa
Would that I had died before this.
In times of confusion, when the threads are tangled, one becomes so drowned in one’s perplexity that it robs one of the very belief in the existence of a way out.
I was laboring under the delusion that I had arrived, but the truth was that I had been cut off; I thought that I was finally going to be relieved after my burdens, to see light after my darkness, that I had just emerged into the world like a newborn eager for life. But no sooner had its life been cut from that of its mother than it became cut off from all in the room. They left the newborn alone, terrified, uncomprehending of what lay around it, finding no-one to calm its panic or show it the way. Had the link been a mistake from the start? –if the newborn had had a choice.
I am living through dark days. Strange meanings find their way secretly into my heart, and remain stuffed in there, among my internal organs, finding no way out, their way barred by heavy bolts. These meanings leap into my head from the pages of that accursed association – the Sulaymi Association of Morocco – and the meetings at their encampment in Egypt. The encampment is to an Association as a branch is to a tree: if I wish to ask what lies in the pages of their books, no-one will understand me but those who have read them, be they of the Sheikhs of the Association or their followers who have trodden the path before me, and be that as it may, no question or interrogation will be any use in answering what has happened to me. They believe that ignoring a question is its best answer, that answers come at the appropriate time, and if they are prematurely given, they will not stick in the heart – that is, unless the questioner is a member of the Association. In that case, they will not ask, for they already know the answer; and if they are not members, then their answer is best given as a non-answer. For non-members, that which is written in the pages may not be shared with outsiders.
I was swallowed up by the vortex of obsessive thoughts, like a plant cut off from water while seeking harvest and knowledge, unable to reach fruition and yet wrenched out of its original state, that of ignorance. A barren land, devoid of hope. I could not imagine salvation; all I had was the words of my heart or of my Self, as the Sheikh calls it. A venture with the Afterlife at stake; indeed, a gamble. And here I crouched in my shell, trapped by my thoughts, a prisoner of myself, besieged, befuddled in my own world. A world in which none but myself resided, as though it were my fate to live among questions all my life.
We were created to enquire. Some of us protest or even rebel, then come back to their senses, or are taken away by their Lord in the midst of their delusion, and to Him alone falls judgment. He alone sees what is in our hearts; and I am unable to express what roils in mine or put it into words. How painful not to be able to speak of what lies within you in a voice that can be heard, or even to your own self! This is, perhaps, the price one pays for intelligence: the mind is faster than the tongue can express, running ahead of it by leaps and bounds. Meanwhile, the tongue struggles, panting, in its wake, trying to catch up, gathering up the words left by those that came before to choose from its lexicon words to express itself, and finding none. My tongue stands paralyzed, unable to give voice to the meanings leaping through my mind like an express train that no-one can stop. The more expansive the meaning, the more limited its expression. The meanings in my head are as broad as a line that extends and knows no end. I cannot organize my thoughts even if I had the desire to enter into a discussion; I stand waiting for some observant, understanding person to read into the confusion that lies in my heart and eyes, to decode my truncated, scattered speech; to see the smoke within it that bespeaks the flames of thought that consume the breast of their owner, an invisible fire that burns and spreads, consuming thoughts and beliefs held within for years with none to run and put them out; not many people care to extinguish this kind of fire, being only good at igniting them. Since I had not yet found my fireman, I turned inward to my lost self and my perplexed obsessions, praying, “Lord, show me things as they are; only as they are.”
I have passed long hours and heavy days among the books, reading different views of the same subject, never settling upon the shores of a single opinion. Each one has his own justifications and explanations; they are supposed to be clerics and men of knowledge, but I wonder, if one of those men from olden times lived in our own era and I went to him for advice, would he have gone to the trouble of listening to me? The trouble of reading and understanding what has been set down in books? I mean an understanding inspired by opposing opinions. Would he have begrudged me his time as my Sheikh Radwan does to me? Would he have charged a fee, calling it, perhaps, a charity for the time spent in conversation with me? We might take hours to unravel my question-marks and bring together their scattered, confused, parts, spend hours in discussion. The goal is for a full, clear picture to emerge; or so I wished. However, I cannot find any who wear the turban of a Sheikh who would deign to discuss this with me; they begrudge their time and explanation. Time is money, after all – literally – and they take no issue with pocketing the fees for their time, which they see as their due, even though it be fruitless. They see our questions as useless sophistry, and we laymen have outstayed our welcome, remaining to the end and yet refusing to submit. They turn their backs on us and towards new clients, for we are mere numbers to them.
I am, of course, of a lowlier status than they. I am a layperson, as they describe me: perplexed and lost. I am running from the thesis set forth by one to the argument proposed by another, surrounded by the rudders of books, without the capacity to formulate a question. I, the articulate and eloquent speaker, president of the debate club at university! An entire list of questions would not be enough; I run here and there seeking an answer that will calm my disquiet, to no avail; indeed, I become even more unsettled and find none who will be patient with me.
I wonder, will this labyrinth end with losing religion, or with losing sanity?
I tossed the book that had been in my hand into the air, not caring where it landed, or whether its pages might be damaged by so doing. I pushed aside the other books around me violently. I was sick of it. I had had enough of fruitless searches. I went to the balcony of the house, face pale and lips dry. I clenched both my hands on the railing in fists, as if readying for a fight. I looked upward: stars sparkling and a nearly-full moon, surrounded by deep darkness – an attractive sight. In a past life, my boyfriend would be next to me watching this beauty: we would stay up late and be close, and sip a glass or two of something in our favorite open-air café. Our fingers would interlace as we were surrounded by stars. Then we would walk the length of the pier into the center of the Nile, where the lone swing sat; where there was no-one. He would swing me gently; I would fly up to the horizon and back into his arms. He would captivate me with some kisses that I returned. But today, ah, what burdens I bear! My gaze up to the sky was filled with rage and defiance, a gaze I had never before directed there, even in my past life. I had never felt any resentment toward you. I had never been so angry with you. I had never wanted to quarrel with you, to confront you, and there had never been a night when everyone in the universe disappeared and no-one was left but the two of us.
I looked at you and spoke to you for a long time. The eyes have their own language, and they said all that my tongue wished to speak. They were reproachful, stern, blaming you for what you had done to me. My pensive eyes filled with tears, betraying a tender emotion. But I was too proud to confess it. Sorrow mingled with anger. A tremor went through me and my extremities shook; even my teeth chattered in frustration and helplessness. Tears spilled down my cheeks. We had been taught that silence is the language of love; it is also, though, the language of resentment. In any case, I have decided to speak to you in a different language now, for there is resentment in my breast. I called for you aloud, peering into the sky, hoping for a glimpse of you. Finally, my tongue let loose a cry. “Why, God, why? Why do this to me? I came to you! I came to you. Where should I go? What should I do? Why do this to me? Why?”
I kept up my cries for a long time. I cried and groaned; I cried as I had never cried in my life. The sound of pain was painful in itself; I could not know how to get rid of it, or of my obsessions. Why are You playing with me? Why do You push me away? Why leave me lost in the darkness of the abyss? What did I do wrong? Was it not You who called me to Yourself? Did you draw me in to punish me? Why did you begrudge me the blessings of this world that please You? Here I am, I have abandoned prayer, when I thought I would never give it up; and all this after You betrayed me. I can think only evil of You. All the invocations and supplications I have given up; even the necklace I wore from birth, bearing Your name, I took off. I want nothing to remind me of You; I only want an explanation. A justification. A reason for what I have come to, and how I may escape it. Why do you not answer me? Why do you make no defense?
Perhaps I was possessed by something or other that night. I spoke words without thinking about them first. I had not known I could speak to you so sharply. Words, once said, cannot be unsaid; they are recorded, and we shall be judged for our words someday. It was a possession by Satan. Perhaps it was a trial of my mind; obsessive thoughts are a trial for the mind just as physical illness as a trial for the body. The temptation of obsessive thoughts can be fatal to one’s inborn values. I came to myself from my fit only to fall unconscious. It was exhaustion of the mind that overtook my frail body. I can see my body fading day by day, becoming overtaken by illness, the same exhaustion tearing away at my weary soul. I have no idea how to hold it back. I was alone in the house when I fainted; I came to myself all alone, with no-one at my side in my extremity. No-one had ever come to my aid.
One is always attacked from the quarter one least expects. Yes; that is how it always is. My downfall came when I was inside the circle, not outside it; it came when I thought I was safe within the circle of religious folk, with the pure, unsullied men who wore the turbans of an Imam, in the company of the devout, those who pray to the Lord morning, noon and night, wanting only His grace. I knew only these for a refuge from all that ailed me; but they abandoned me in my most pressing trouble. Indeed, it was they who were the cause of it! They let me down; I knew of no-one who had the same trouble as I, or who had surrendered to the same temptation, that I might make moan to him. I would be embarrassed to complain to others of my mental state. No-one would have understood me. Usually, the downfall of religion comes through doubting the existence of God; that is the accepted progression. In my case, I do not doubt the existence of God, but I suspect that they worship another in addition to Him.
In leaving their company lay my protest against, and rejection of, what they worshipped in addition to God. However, the decision was never easy, at least without any alternative. Perhaps, in the end, it was the Devil playing with my thoughts. Perhaps it was my Self trying to wriggle out of bondage, as the religious men sought to delude me. Was it not they who knew more than I? They were the best, the most truthful, the most obedient, and the purest of men. I could never understand better than they did. I had spent years in their company, and my heart had lit up; and now, I was consumed by doubt; it spread throughout me. Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps I had miscalculated. Certainty is not dispelled by doubt, it is dispelled by an alternative certainty. Perhaps I had not understood them as I should, or realized what they meant.
