Dismantling Illusion and Building Cities of Light

In this philosophy, the laws for breaking the wall of fear do not rest on pointless confrontation. At their heart lies a deep awareness that these guardians are themselves victims of the same machinery of indoctrination and the same shackles they impose on others. Shahrur’s influence helped me to see the fragile human side of those guardians, and how badly their intellectual structure shakes when it meets the great questions of existence. The courage in knowledge that I drew from Shahrur, may God have mercy on him, was never a desire for quarrel or debate. It was a pure desire for existential survival. I found, with a certainty untouched by doubt, that to stay inside the sectarian wall is a slow death of consciousness, while leaving it requires a great leap of faith in the capacity of the human intellect to connect with the Absolute without intermediaries. I turned this courage from an emotional act of rebellion into a disciplined method of building. We do not break down the wall to live exposed in a wilderness of confusion. We break it down to build cities of light on the rigorous laws of Abstraction. In this new edifice the human being exercises his innate right to rise and ascend — tamaʿruj — without fear of the exegetes’ guillotine or the fetters of their followers. Our goal — to reclaim the Lord’s Trust — grew so great in our eyes that every fear instilled by indoctrination, and every ghost of the past, grew small. As the wise poet Abū al-Ṭayyib al-Mutanabbī expressed it, in lines that sum up the philosophy of resolve and of rising above small things: Resolutions come in the measure of those who resolve, and noble deeds in the measure of the noble. Small things look great in the eyes of the small, and great things look small in the eyes of the great. Independence, in our approach, is the move from protest to vicegerency, where we are concerned not with what others have said but with what the Creator intended in the order of existence. We do not bring down idols today in order to stand upon their ruins. We do it to make room for the sovereignty of meaning and the beauty of transcendence, and so to achieve a harmonious unity between the independent Self and the essential cosmic law. Hashem Nassar All rights reserved