INQUIRY TWO My Journey to Discover Existence Sown in God

Reflections on “He Sows You Within Him” My long and unhurried pause before the verse “He sows you within Him” (yadhraʾukum fīhi, Q 42:11) was the turning point at which I pronounced the traditional, spatial Concretion of God dead in my consciousness, finally and for good. On my long and exhausting search for the First Source I left no sect or group unvisited: Sufis drowned in allusions, Ashʿarīs lost among their textbooks, and on to the Shīʿa, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Salafī groups, the Qurʾānists and the new symbolists and esotericists who branched off from them. The greatest obstacle these traditional systems had planted in my mind was their picture of God — the supreme Creator, who brings this existence into being — as a concrete entity “separate” from His creation and from existence by vast material distances. It opened a deep existential rift in my Self and left me with a kind of existential orphanhood, an estrangement from my own origin. But when I began to apply the method of Abstraction to this astonishing cosmic verse, I discovered that the preposition fī, “within”, is not merely a grammatical device for linking words. It is a great truth that turns our existential understanding upside down. I saw with complete clarity that this sowing (dharʾ) is not a parallel act of creation taking place in some external space independent of God. It is a continuous, unbroken existential broadcast, a perpetual and absolute self-disclosure that happens inside the compass of God’s Name the Manifest, of which existence itself is the disclosure. From this I became certain that the separation we feel is nothing but an illusion born of a grave deficiency in our instruments of perception. Our material senses are content to see husks, boundaries and distances, and the great abstract truth escapes them: that we never pass outside the circle of God’s sustaining power (qayyūmiyya), which encompasses all things. This understanding made me rethink the whole of existence. If God is “the Encompassing” (al-Muḥīṭ) — a description the Qurʾān gives Him explicitly — then everything we see is no more than ripples and disclosures within this encompassing ocean, and is itself encompassed by God. Indeed everything, however small or great, is encompassed by God and never passes beyond His encompassment. It is the illusion of spatial distance that produced the traditional Concretion from which the devout suffer today: they imagine God “somewhere” far away, while the verse says plainly that the sowing happens “within Him”. This shift — from a Concretion that draws boundaries to an Abstraction that sees encompassment — is what gave me inner peace, and made me feel that the Source is nearer to me than my jugular vein: not a merely figurative nearness, but a necessary existential one, which follows from the impossibility of separating the wave from the ocean. That epistemic shock became my decisive answer to all the debates I had with eminent scholars, among them Dr Zaghloul El-Naggar, may God have mercy on him, in our conversation about “the existence of God”. Where he and those before him tried to prove God’s “existence” as something subject to causality and place, I saw God as the One who sows all things in the outpouring of His majesty. In this verse, sowing redefines the human being. He is not a lump of matter lost in empty space, but a vicegerent consciousness, a code taking shape within the absolute divine encoding. From this point I set out to build my system of knowledge, which refuses to fragment the truth or to lock it into spatial directions. Intellectual sovereignty, I hold, begins when a person realises that he has never for a single day been separated from his Source, and that all it takes is to recalibrate the frequencies of his consciousness in order to see the truth behind the curtain of material illusions. The word dharaʾa, “to sow”, is altogether different from taraka, “to leave”: the first implies connection at the root, the second separation at the root. This is the understanding that my esteemed brother Yaser Al-Ederkawi and I discussed together and agreed upon. Hashem Nassar All rights reserved