Beyond the Chains of Transmission: Towards the Abstraction of Abstraction

At that early stage I absorbed what is known as the “science of men”, the study of narrators, and understood it as the study of truth’s background data — what we might call the human metadata that comes before the message. I learned to examine the identity of the transmitter with great precision in order to guarantee the integrity of the message across the ages, and to tell trustworthiness from illusion in the chain of historical transmission. Yet my consciousness grew until it detected a deep flaw in the system itself. The criticism of narrators, for all its importance, remained within the circle of Concretion: it was preoccupied with persons and with authenticating them. The criticism of abstract meaning — the moral essence of the message — was absent, or at best timid. All the attention went to the soundness of the channel that carried the water, with too little examination of the water itself: how pure it was, how far it accorded with our primordial nature, and how many impurities had entered it. So I began to go beyond those silent lessons, in search of deeper levels of what I now call the Abstraction of Abstraction. The manuscript had taught me how to doubt what is ready-made and well-worn. The science of narrators had taught me how to examine tools and means. Living beside al-Albānī had taught me the value of mechanical precision in reaching a result. But my deepest insight kept pressing me towards a larger question: what of the essence of the Qurʾān itself? Do we dare to treat it as an integrated perceptual system for life, rather than as a historical text kept for blessing or a set of passages to be recited from memory? The move from treating the text concretely, as sacred words, to treating it abstractly, as an operating platform for consciousness, calibration and comparison, is the essence on which my philosophy rests. The founding vision I am trying to establish requires us not to settle for documenting history, but to decipher the codes of the future by reflecting on the pure Source from the Lord. Confining consciousness to the examination of transmitters, I found, is a way of staying in the corridors of matter, whereas true vicegerency demands release into the universal meaning that binds earth to heaven. We must transform our relation with revelation from passive reception of dead data into the active operation of mercy, justice and beauty in our lives. From this point of view the Qurʾān was no longer, for me, simply a book to be read. It had become a code of communication, giving human beings an extraordinary capacity to understand their own being and achieve their existential balance in this vast cosmos, far from sectarian conflict and the clamour of reports worn out by human Concretion. Hashem Nassar All rights reserved