Why the Administration Feared Abstraction

The forces gathered outside my house in that decisive moment stood, in my inner consciousness, for the density of matter in all its weight and inertia, trying to besiege the fluidity of meaning as it broke loose and shed its forms. I realised then that the Administration did not see me as someone who merely held a different opinion. What it saw was a mind that had burned its boats of dependence, and it took that mind as a real threat to the sectarian façades it guarded and on which its own survival depended. By its nature the Administration is at home with conventional disputes and theological wrangling, because these stay locked inside the box of Concretion and never threaten the deep structure of universal truth. But when an independent mind declares openly that God is the Abstract Absolute, beyond every image and every limit; that all existence is an outpouring from His majesty; and that the human being is a Vicegerent through knowledge and wisdom rather than through lifeless ritual — then the system senses the presence of a free, abstracting consciousness that threatens to topple the mental idols of religion it has set up over the centuries. The danger of searching for the essence is that it strips away the false legitimacy of every intermediary who tries to stand between the servant and his Lord. Whoever succeeds in connecting directly with the First Source no longer needs sectarian guardianship or outside direction to find his true bearings in existence. The wise philosopher Ibn Rushd grounded the unity of truth and the harmony of reason and revelation in a single principle: truth does not contradict truth; it agrees with it and bears witness to it. That is what they truly feared. They sensed that the pure truth I was seeking would expose the false scales they had set up in order to rule. Perhaps nothing captures the contrast between the narrowness of the siege and the breadth of the inner light better than the lines of a poet who knew that truth cannot be imprisoned by walls: Though they hem us in with a thousand dams and walls, the light of truth within us will go on shining. The spirit lies far beyond the reach of petty schemes; the heart stays clear, and its purposes rise. That siege was the true birth certificate of my thought. It was the moment my thinking resolved to bow to nothing but the truth and to draw its certainty from no source but the original Source from the Lord. The search for truth and essence is a journey towards a freedom that is never granted. It is discovered, in the depths of the Self, once the Self is purified of everything other than God and joins the unbroken outpouring of mercy. Hashem Nassar All rights reserved