The Poverty of Power and the Wealth of Insight

During the period I call my “enforced retreat”, I watched closely as the Administration tried in desperation to recalibrate my consciousness and bend my will. Then came the great paradox that confirmed for me the power and the high standing of Abstraction. The authority that held every instrument of repression did not only interrogate me in the usual way. In rare moments of sincerity, I found it listening — listening deeply. I saw the jailer, on some occasions, become a silent pupil, the pillars of his material certainty trembling before the majesty of a meaning that flowed from words drawn from the light of innate nature. Those moments showed me that material systems, for all their arsenals and machinery, are at heart informationally poor. They are hungry entities, searching for a spark of light among the very minds that have dared to break through the veils of matter and reach the kernel. When the Administration acknowledged that my thought was dangerous, it was acknowledging its own poverty. It could shackle the body, which is Concretion, but it had no power at all over a consciousness filled with light, which is Abstraction. It was then I became certain that true freedom belongs to whoever holds the key to the truth, not to whoever holds the key to the cell. The real prison is the prison of ignorance and dependence, not the prison of walls and bars. And the power of the truth was confirmed to me when the Administration came round to it, recognising that my thought posed no threat to the security of society but in fact secured it. For this thought had broken free from the hateful sectarian extremism that the authorities themselves may once have fostered to serve their ends, and that had since turned against them and come to threaten their very existence. Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, may God have mercy on him, spoke of the Spirit as a stranger in the prison of the body and of matter, bearing with patience the pain of separation from its luminous origin: If the body knew the pain it holds within, it would not long for the Spirit’s ancient life. The Spirit is in exile, the body is at home; so let the heart be patient until the pain is gone. That harsh experience was the finest school I have known for learning humility before the Creator’s greatness. I learned that a person is strong not through his faction or his numbers, but through the depth of his connection with the First Source, and through his purity and his sincerity. My enforced retreat did not confine my thought; it widened my horizons. The light that radiates from an independent Self can turn even blind walls into windows that open onto the Dominion. During that visit the computer on which I kept all my writings was confiscated. All I was left with was a floppy disk holding the titles of my studies and some general, compressed notes, stripped of their detail. My request to have the computer returned was refused, and a whole year of research and writing was lost. The loss affected me deeply. The pressure of society and of the authorities fell on me together with the loss of the fruit of my thought, and the only thing that eased it, after God, was my wife, who was my best help and support. Years later, as I pressed on with my research and reflection, that regret became a source of something positive. The further I advanced in thought, the more of my earlier ideas I left behind. I revised my views and discovered dimensions and details deeper and better than anything I had lost, until I found myself thanking God for that loss because of all it had given me. I will not deny that this dynamic way of thinking is what delayed my writing for so long. Even as I write these lines, I find myself developing, revising and criticising some of the conclusions I had reached. Had my wife and my friends not insisted that I set down these conclusions, I would never have done so. That is why I have always been careful, and still am, to warn you not to place complete confidence in what you are about to read, nor to stop at it. This work is only a brief beginning in knowledge. I hope that thought will find someone to complete it and develop it better than I have. Hashem Nassar All rights reserved