Clearing the Scales, and Freedom from the Illusion of Fullness

In our philosophical view, the radical change that Sheikh Abu Malik underwent is a comprehensive clearing of the scales, of the kind that happens at the decisive moments in the life of a consciousness. For centuries inherited certainty had worked with miscalibrated scales. They gave their owner the illusion of being full of knowledge and of having arrived at the end of the road, when in reality he suffered from a spiritual emptiness and a poverty in grasping the essence of existence and the truths of innate nature. My long reflection on the sheikh’s confession and his honest tears led me to an essential truth: those who have appointed themselves, or been appointed, guardians of meaning are in fact the people who most need to be freed from the meaning they have made with their own hands. Whoever tries to confine the Absolute within the limited, or to bind God’s outpouring in narrow sectarian moulds, has lost all authority in matters of knowledge. The sheikh’s tears were the final expression of a deep perceptual repentance, the moment when a consciousness suddenly realises that it has been chasing a material mirage and mistaking it for the absolute truth. That is when I became certain that the work of building this new structure of knowledge was not an academic contribution or an intellectual luxury. It was a real rescue, for minds that were close to closing the records of their existence without ever connecting with the pure light of the true Source. Here I saw with complete clarity the meaning of what Imam al-Ghazālī describes in Deliverance from Error, his release from imitation into the open space of verification: the veils lifted, the truth became plain, and it was clear that knowledge which yields neither action nor certainty is only a burden on the one who holds it. And as the poet said, who saw with the light of his heart that the truth lies in what goes unspoken behind the narrations: The knowledge of narration, however much it grows, is, without understanding, a body with no spirit. So look with your heart upon the horizons and take heed: you will meet the truth between the light and what it confides. The move from narration, as the mechanical collecting of information, to understanding, in its broad sense as the grasp of God’s laws in creation, is the essence of the independence I seek. With a heart stripped of attachments I found that the human task is not to be a vessel for other people’s opinions, but a mirror in which the lights of the Dominion are reflected. We do not stop at criticising the past. We draw its lessons in order to build a present that breathes with certainty, and a future founded on a direct connection with God, glory be to Him, rather than a life wasted in the mazes of conjecture. Truth is not sought in the crowd, but in the stillness of a Self that has stripped itself of its illusions. Abstraction reinvests a lifetime through direct connection with the Source. It turns every second that used to be lost on formalities and husks into a journey of ascent through the Dominion of absolute truth. I followed with the attention of a vigilant researcher the lectures of the brilliant scholar Adnan Ibrahim, and I found in him a project to transform the Muslim community as a prelude to transforming the human being. He had been a Salafi in the broad sense, and an Ashʿarī deeply devoted to that school’s method, but I was sure that he himself was changing, and his thought with him. I still expect a radical change in his view of the whole tradition. A man of his calibre deserves, in my view, to be the undisputed renewer of this age — if only he would lift from his shoulders the cloak of ancestral tradition and let his thought strip itself further still. With a settled heart I came to see that the task of the method of Abstraction is to turn the human being from a storehouse of narration into a beacon of understanding. We are not looking for personal glory, for ourselves or for anyone else. We are laying the ground for a state of existential clarity, in which no law governs the heart — the intellect — except the law of God and what issues from it, and in which nothing veils the heart except the rust of sins and attachment to persons. Breaking the shackles of dependence is the first step on the road to true vicegerency, where a person returns to reading the Book of God with his own eyes, not through other people’s, and with his own consciousness, not with the memory of those who came before. Hashem Nassar All rights reserved