Seeing the Mark of a Friend on a Shared Path of Consciousness

At that decisive stage of my thinking, my friend Maher Hasan, may God have mercy on him, was far more than a passing acquaintance. He was a deep companion in knowledge, and his presence stirred up an ocean of questions in every corner of my consciousness. In our long conversations we would examine how a single word, or a brief flash of thought, could expand to fill days of reflection, contemplation and intellection. The bond between us rose above any differences in our social lives or in how we handled everyday matters. It became a harmony of frequencies that dissolved every distance of disagreement and moved me to overlook any lapse with a willing heart, in gratitude for a debt that words cannot measure. In his influence I recognised a guide that lit the paths of the Seven Interactive Dimensions, which his consciousness produced and on which a great part of the philosophy in your hands is founded. My late friend’s way of conversing went far beyond instruction. It was a free provocation of possibilities, drawing on Socrates’ art of midwifery — the dialectical method of drawing knowledge out — which moves the intellection of the heart to make hidden knowledge speak and to strip it of its husks. We would spend whole days on a single question, giving it the research and scrutiny it deserved, until horizons opened in our consciousness so vast, and levels of abstraction so far beyond the frontiers of imagination, that they sometimes moved us to tears. As the horizons of this refined intellectual difference widened, our paths drew apart for many long years, until providence brought us together again, at the start of 2026, while I was revising this book. I hoped to present him with a copy worthy of his standing and of his share in its thought, but death came first. My friend Maher has gone, may God have mercy on him, but the mark of his thought and his deep questions has found a living home in this work. He left us after our last meetings had been, like our first, an abstract dialogue of the kind that makes this life look small in the eyes of anyone who understands its reality. How eloquent is the wisdom of Imam al-Shāfiʿī, which goes beyond the grief of parting to see the permanence of knowledge and virtue: Some have died, yet their virtues have not died; and some live on, yet among the living they are dead. Hashem Nassar All rights reserved