My Struggle with Language and the Birth of a Distinction

You who are searching for the truth: from the very beginning of my journey of knowledge, language has been for me — and still is — like a garment cut too narrow, straining to hold a vast ocean of meaning. Whenever I tried to put into words the flashes of insight that would take me by surprise as I reflected on the verses of the Absolute, I found the traditional terms standing like a solid wall against the flow of meaning. I felt deeply humbled as I watched how the words we had inherited had been loaded with historical and sectarian baggage until they lost their primordial purity. Words such as God, worship, nearness, vision and heart now translate, in the mind of the listener, into dense and material mental images that bear no resemblance, in majesty, to the truth whose trace I could feel in my depths. This is where the pressing need was born in me to coin new terms that would serve as keys. It was not a wish for linguistic distinction. I was looking for precise surgical instruments that could separate abstract truth from material Concretion. My struggle with language was the ground on which the distinction between Concretion and Abstraction was born — the two poles that govern the movement of human consciousness in existence. The crisis, I found, lies not only in what we say but in the tools we say it with. The old language was built to serve the senses, whereas the truth I was reaching for demands a language built to serve cosmic consciousness. As al-Niffarī said long ago, in words of lasting wisdom: “The wider the vision, the narrower the expression.” Hashem Nassar All rights reserved