Escape from the Prisons of Sectarianism into the Open Space of the Absolute

To flee sectarianism meant, at its core, to break the thick mental casings that jurists and theologians had built over the centuries, and to enter directly into the pure heart of existence. In the narrow prisons of sectarianism, God, mighty and majestic is He, is treated as a concretised entity, confined in mental frames that apply human measures to Him: anger and pleasure, direction and place. This, to my mind, is Concretion at its height, and it has caused whole nations to waste their lives in corridors of illusion. In the open space of the Absolute to which I travelled, I discovered that God is the All-Encompassing, whom no description limits and no setting contains: the light that transcends every inadequate sketch or mental image. My migration in knowledge was not an escape. It was a tireless search for the One who cannot be divided among sects, whereas sectarianism is, in truth, the art of dividing the One into rival sectarian shares. I decided, in full awareness, to leave the herd formed by dependence and to recover my own independent connection with the First Source. The human being, as a rabbānī Vicegerent, does not migrate with his group, nor does he draw his certainty from crowds. He migrates with his abstracting consciousness, to become “a nation in himself” in the presence of the Absolute, far from the din of followers and the illusions of guardians. Ibn ʿArabī described in his verses the Spirit’s union with the great self-disclosures of the Real: Once I would reject a companion whose religion was not close to mine. Now my heart is open to every form: a pasture for gazelles, a cloister for monks. This existential breadth was the goal I was seeking, where the heart is freed from the idol of a single idea and can receive the disclosures of the Name the Real in every corner of the Dominion. Breaking one’s mental idols is the first condition for practising vicegerency; whoever does not dare to break the idol within will never see the light of the Absolute without. I wanted this edifice to be a sanctuary of transcendence, not a place for sanctifying the moulds that have stifled the spirit of the text and stood between human beings and their Lord. Hashem Nassar All rights reserved