5 MORE Sundays

About the Series

The major theme passing through all of these essays is the intimate relationship between peace, justice, mercy, love & freedom. We all agree that peace is the nature of ʾIslām. Yet where is the peace? Throughout the world, we find wars. Why is this so? There is no peace without justice; with such inequalities in the world where is the justice? There is not justice without mercy; the nafs has overcome the mercy and people have forgotten that the Prophet ﷺ was sent as a mercy to all the worlds, and they harp on minor details of the sunnah, forgetting its basic character. There is not mercy without love, and to find love the hearts must be broken, the nafs submitted, the Prophet ﷺ within revealed. And there is not love without freedom, as the Sḫaykḫ says, you can’t put a gun beside someone’s head and say, “Love me!”

The exploration leads to the way in which the original ʾIslām, a spiritual transmission, was transferred to a secular tradition, which did not deal directly with the transformation of humanity back to the “aḥsani taquim” (best of forms) of our original nature. When the reins of leadership were not passed to Sayidinā ʿAli (ʿalayhi-s-salām), whom the Prophet ﷺ designated as his mawlā, the outer dimension of ʾIslām began to take precedence over the inner, and the process has continued ever since. Whereas in the beginning we had the presence of the Prophet ﷺ, and after he passed his scent and profound influence remained for some, after a while the dīn came to be understood in a more and more rigid and external way, leading to what the sḫaykḫ calls “counterfeit ʾIslām”. Hence we have no peace because we have lost the ability to be peaceful people. The only solution is to return to our true spiritual origins, which have been preserved inside taṣawwuf by the transmission from the Rasūl ﷺ through Sayidinā ʿAli (ʿalayhi-s-salām) on down to the sḫuyukḫ of today.