From the Narrowness of the Letter to the Breadth of Meaning

In gatherings that buzzed with debates over God’s “rising” upon the Throne, His “descent” and His “attributes”, conducted through a human vision steeped in bodily Concretion, I felt a profound spiritual poverty. All around us the community was groaning under ignorance, dependence and division, yet the learning offered to us did nothing to change the frequency of the Spirit. It merely loaded the memory with dead data, lifeless and without any effect on reality. Those assemblies had forgotten that the essence of our connection with heaven does not lie in confining God within material images or rigid linguistic moulds, but in raising human consciousness until it grasps what God intends beyond the words. There I discovered that the true station of vicegerency for which we were created is the supremacy of meaning over the word, and of spirit over matter. They wanted me to be a mere imitator repeating what had been said, a transmitter of ideas frozen at the limits of a material Concretion of revelation. Yet my Fuʾād told me with certainty that I had been created to be a Vicegerent who is rabbānī (devoted to his Lord), building new edifices of consciousness. In this philosophy the Vicegerent is the human being who embodies the verse “And when your Lord said to the angels, ‘I am placing a vicegerent upon the earth’” (Q 2:30): the rabbānī human being who realises what I call vicegerency of the Lord, standing as the deputy of the Lord who appointed him, to fulfil His station on earth. Such a person is not produced in factories of repetition that turn out identical copies of imprisoned minds. He is born in the fields of Abstraction and of sincere reflection, which free the human being from the fetters of time and place and join him to his Lord Most High. True sovereignty begins when we understand that God has told us of His attributes so that we may see His light in His Dominion, not so that we may imprison His Essence within our illusions and anthropomorphisms. I had to choose between staying in the crowd of storytellers who venerate the concrete and the outward, and setting out into the space of Abstraction, where the Spirit meets its Creator in an endless cosmic dialogue. This cry was never a rebellion against religion. It was a search for religion’s luminous essence, buried under the dust of indoctrination, and a longing to raise a generation that sees in revelation an inexhaustible power to build and a force for change that reaches past the literal wording of the texts to the depths of God’s great purposes. Hashem Nassar All rights reserved