The Shock of an Edifice with No Spirit Inside It

My great shock began when, with a critical eye, I recognised the vast gap that today, in philosophical terms, I call the gap between structure and outcome. I watched students of religious learning race to memorise thousands of hadiths, scrutinise the chains of narration and immerse themselves in the minutiae of the science of narrators. At the same time I saw an alarming swelling of sectarian ego that blinded them to the truth. Concretion was the chronic disease governing it all. Religion had been reduced to outward appearance, to the literal wording, to the person of the sheikh, as though absolute truth had been locked inside material fragments with no power to live. This immersion in the veneration of the concrete left us blind to Abstraction. The universal meaning of mercy vanished from our hearts, and the essence of existential tawḥīd — which sees all existence as one whole joined to the One who brought it into being — faded away, replaced by a narrow fanaticism that sees truth in one sect and error in all the rest. I would ask myself bitterly: how can this heart — the intellect — filled with the luminous texts of revelation produce conduct overflowing with exclusion and hostility? Is not ethics the final fruit, and the only proof, of a genuine connection with the All-Creating? The absence of this ethical manifestation told me that something was deeply wrong with the engine of understanding we were using, and that we needed to repair a consciousness lost in the crush of formalities. We had drowned ourselves in the Concretion of means until we forgot the abstract ends. We guarded the doors but never entered the houses; we worshipped mental idols made with our own hands, in the name of preserving our inheritance. That gap was the cry that shook the foundations of my old Salafi certainty and drove me to seek a philosophy that would reshape the relation between text and reality — so that the text might be an energy of liberation rather than an instrument of repression, and truth a space that unites us rather than a trench that divides us. Hashem Nassar All rights reserved