Wednesday, 06 May 2020
[Speakers via Webex] :Shaykh Arif Abdulhussain (religious scholar)
Soraya Boyd (Humanist activist) Dr Aly El Kabbany (coronavirus survivor, writer and political analyst)
This is surely the most unique experience in our lifetime. The holy month of Ramadan is being observed by Muslims within the walls of their homes. Mosques, Islamic centres and most public places are closed. This makes this year’s event different while fasting, worshipping and living in seclusion. How does it feel? How can it be done? What does it entail? However, self-realisation, contemplation, speaking to God in the deafening peace of home away from society are among the positive outcomes of seclusion. How do we make use of this new reality that could remain with us for a long time to come? How do we see faith in a world riddled with a pandemic that threatens human existence?
Dr Saeed Shehabi: We are now in the holy month of Ramadan. Despite the social distancing and the quarantine we still feel the spirit of Ramadan. We still feel that we have a lot of realisation. I would like to pay homage to one of the brothers who was lecturing to us some time ago but he passed away recently. He was Fuad Nahdi who I am sure many of you remember. He appeared in our forums during the past two to three years. Unfortunately and sadly he responded to the call of God and he is not with us anymore. About a month ago he passed on. May Allah bless him. We will recite a Surah of the Quran for him.
Shaykh Arif Abdulhussain: First of all I would like to thank the organisation for inviting me and giving me this opportunity to share a few thoughts on how to get the most out of this seclusion in terms of our relationship with our creator and the light of our existence.
Dr Saeed mentioned that it is all about self realisation. Seclusion offers us a much-needed opportunity pioneered by reference to our spiritual literature. We will see the stress it places on helwa the notion of being alone with Allah.
Fundamentally he alone means we along with ourselves, to the point of acknowledging what we are and who we are, reflecting inwards to see what the journey is all about and then to remedy whatever is there as a blockage within us that prevents us from this process of achieving self realisation.
So fundamentally we need to learn that we need to conquer and they require us to look inwardly and to be cut off from everyone beyond ourselves or everything beyond ourselves. This brings to mind the hadith of blessed Imam Ali in which he stated that if you could hear the taste of hunger you would never opt to eat and if you could understand the word of silence you would chose to speak but you have not been exposed to hunger nor to quiet internal being.
We need to fundamentally conquer to realms of our existence: our thinking mind and our feeling heart. What happens to us is that we are very impressionable people, there are constant thoughts and chatter which is going on in our heads and constant emotions being encountered by our hearts. We are not truly realising ourselves in a substantive manner because we are caught in the limited world. We are not available to the real world the majority of the time. Our lives are led very robotically.
Even if we were to go to Mars we would not be going anywhere. We are carrying our mental cages with us and our emotions are governing us no matter where we are. So we might be in lofty paradises but in reality we are in the very small world that we created in our life.
Seclusion therefore offers us the ability to bring the thinking mind to a state of rest so that we can open up to the real thing that is out there. It gives us the opportunity for our souls to be calm so we are not hung about by these momentous emotions from one extreme to the other.
It is the way we feel that governs us in our attitudes. Religious literature tells us practise seclusion and in seclusion we engage in the remembrance of Allah, the dikr of Allah. Allah emphasises this in the Quran in several places. There are times when the soul feels existentially there is something about the cosmos.
So here if we could religiously make a small discipline for ourselves that for an hour at sunrise and sunset we will take all the taslim and engage in the remembrance of Allah by his name Allah, Allah, Allah or the silent whisper that the Prophet recommended. Soon this remembrance of God, which Imam Khomeini says is a formal remembrance of God, will penetrate within our beings and the mind and the heart will become engaged.
Indirectly this brings the thinking mind to a halt. We become free of all thoughts. We stop feeding all those emotions that govern us, the impressions begin to leave us and the emotions become silent. As that begins to happen we begin to open up to ourselves. In spiritual literature this is described as the birth of the real person.
We can also couple this with other traditions from their teachings. Let us say Buddhism. It is here that they say that all these thoughts are not actually you. Don’t make the mistake of identifying with them. When you get these thoughts they might not be useful or they may be embarrassing. They do not make you what you are. You are other than these thoughts.
There are some practical tips which they give us. Give that thought a silly name. So when that thought comes back you see the absurd name that is attached to that thought and you see that it is not worthy of thinking.
Similarly they speak about the ocean. It is like you are in a room and that room is clustered. There are so many things in that room that you can’t walk around, you can’t breathe. You can’t leave that room and go to another. These are emotions. Gather these emotions, put them in little boxes and store them away and tell yourself I will revisit them at some point. This will then give you respite and free you from within.
The spiritual master suggests that when you are deeply engaged with Allah certain thoughts will cross your mind and certain emotions will arrive emphatically. What you need to do is to then take hold of that thought of that emotion and say to yourself this is what is preoccupying me from receiving the benefit of meeting my Lord. Analyse that thought. See what is in there that is causing you to revisit it again and again. Take hold of that emotion, analyse it, deal with it and free yourself from it. Seclusion is supposed to offer opportunities for us to introspect and reflect a little bit more.
Sometimes in seclusion we are faced with our demons. We begin to realise that these are the things I have said and done. The idea here is that God wants us to succeed. Allah looks forward to receiving us. Just like a parent. They do not want the child to curse themselves. They want the child to do something. An instructor will say to a student you failed once, you do not need to fail again. See what you did wrong and do better next time. We cannot hate ourselves. We need to say to ourselves that I have this opportunity. Let me take the aid of my friend, my God and with Allah let me analyse what is it that feels wantsome within me and then see the opportunity to work in the positive.
So the person is greedy. Let them see that greed as an opportunity to work to acquire an inner generous disposition. If a person is closed to ideas and dislikes the opinions of others and what they say then let him analyse this and say let me come to terms with this. This is an opportunity for me to see what they have to say. This is the opportunity that seclusion offers us. It offers us a unique insight as to how to remedy ourselves and use those things as real opportunities for going in the opposite direction. The blessed Prophet said: “I have enslaved my Shatan and now my Shatan serves me.” It is not the other way around.
Seclusion also gives us the opportunity to do what the Quran suggests. Allah asks us to reflect upon nature and to reflect upon the faith or previous nations, generations and races that have gone before.
This is an opportunity for us to educate ourselves. Look at the National Geographic channel, seeing nature, how beautifully and precisely it is organised. We will see a glimpse of the divine, we will see God at work. Suddenly there is a cry from within, a realisation that God did not create any of this in vain. And suddenly there is this epiphany, the people realise and they wake up with the beauty of God.
So look at the cosmos. Look at the galaxies that God has created. They are so majestic, they are so grand, immediately the soul will not be preoccupied in the mundane aspects of our lives. The majesty of God is so overwhelming we will tremble in awe of the most majestic and tremble at our own being, the way that Allah has constructed us, the way that he is nurturing us. We will see the love and the beauty of God unfold.
Seclusion offers a unique opportunity for us to find our friend Allah, bring the mind to a state of control. Use all those things that we see as defects in the positive. Learn about nature, learn about the cosmos and embrace the beauty of God.
The recommendation that the imams gave on the plain of Arafat was to remember our sins and seek forgiveness for them. Seclusion actually, uniquely brings that to us. In seclusion we will remember the wrongs that we have committed against others. We have to make amends for this. If I have wronged somebody allow me to put it right. We need to drop these burdens that we are carrying but we cannot drop them by ourselves.
The best thing that can come out of the blessed month of Ramadan is for us to have the ability to let go of all resentments and all amity.
Soraya Boyd: Thank you very much to Open Discussions for organising this event. I am delighted to be able to be part of this journey. I would like to begin my reading out, if I may, a couple of passages from one of my favourite books. It is from Kahlil Gibran from In the Eye of the Prophet. It is a book that I refer to time and time again and I would like to share some of its wisdom with you.
We have been so conditioned to live in a certain manner that we have been to a certain extent prevented from living and, as our brother said earlier on, we are very much encumbered by the weight of our feelings which conflict with our thoughts which ultimately do not align with what we are going to say and what we are going to do. So there is an ongoing, perpetual internal conflict that arises in each and every one of us and the fact that we are at a certain point in our lives looking just to live and possibly meet the needs of our family. This takes us away from the other path that is far more nourishing and far more sustaining: that is to be more active in the pursuit of the ultimate self realisation. This is a work in progress.
If we look at Jesus or Prophet Mohammed or even the Buddha who lived in the lap of luxury he actually renounced his riches on account of wanting to seek something far more nourishing or closer to the heart of God. As for Jesus and Prophet Mohammed they were also extremists. They were quite radical. They did not countenance any kind of falsehood. They lived simply, they propounded a message with the idea of compassion, charity and service, mercy, forgiveness and support for those in need.
I think this current confinement period in which we find ourselves is a tremendous opportunity for looking within and looking within ourselves. It also means at some point that we are looking at others and we will have seen ourselves in each and everyone whosoever we encounter.
So in this holy month of Ramadan many brothers and sisters who are in the process of fasting and saying their prayers are akin to Christians who do the same thing during Easter and of course it should not just be a process. I am not suggesting that many only do this at those times. It should be a process of ongoing reflection. Every day, by the grace of God, that we wake to a new day we are given a tremendous opportunity to look and reflect with open hearts and open minds.
We are given any number of opportunities throughout the course of the day to do what is right by others, to do unto others as we would wish to have done to ourselves. Very often many do not seek to engage and there is a missed opportunity either because of the economic pressures or whatever other pressures that bear upon people. But every day there is a tremendous opportunity that may lead to a miracle and not recognising, not acknowledging or not being aware of that opportunity it is a bit of a set back.
I would like to continue by reading another extract. Gibran goes on to say that: the moderate suitor cannot drink from the cup of love while delighting from the freshness of its honey. He is content to moisten his lips on an adulterated beverage framed by stupidity from the mouths of cowards. To live in fact to reflect, is the tremendous opportunity to come alive and enliven the ordinariness of our lives that we have become accustomed to – accustomed to an abnormal state of being.
I think that if you reflect it is an expression of self affirmation, it is an expression of will. It is also an expression of courage to want to look at that which encumbers you intellectually, emotionally etc
So it should always be an ongoing process in which we review that which we think we think. By doing so it is enormously simplifying and it is also a very helpful process in adopting what Gandhi formulated: live simply, so others can simply live.
So there is realisation of the inherent duty of care that we have to each other. And that is one the guiding principles that is being advocated across all of the scriptural pronouncements. So maybe this time during which we are confined to our homes, is also a great gift in which we are given the opportunity to process some of the things that we were not able to process as a result of the every day pressures of work etc.
And that opportunity is in my view a blessing, a miracle in both looking within to herald the change that we want to see in the world. And I think that is certainly empowering, simplifying and humbling. It is almost I would say akin to universal love. The love of our fellow brethren in faith or out of faith.
I would like to continue by reading this other excerpt. It begins: the man who enjoys neither hostility to evil nor support for what is good will not know to destroy what is evil in himself nor thank God for that which is good. He limits himself to watching his life go by at the edge of the sea like a shell.
The process of acculturation and socialisation has indeed erected very many restraining structures from which we are obliged to function therefore limiting our capacity to go beyond those constraints. And to attempt to go beyond them is again a demonstration of courage. And I return to the word courage because earlier on I read a passage in which the term cowardice was employed.
I think the more we begin to look within internally the more we begin to realise that everything that is outside of ourselves is very much inside of ourselves and looking at that fragmentation, division and conflict we are really led to just one conclusion that is not difficult to understand: the world is groaning that people from every country are having to bear the weight of the extraordinary pressure that has come to bear over time, particularly since everything has been globalised.
In my view these timeless truths spoken by Gibran can be held as a mirror to reflect the times that we are living in where there is tremendous friction between the world that ought to nourish the heart of our mind and of course our very heart when compared to all of the suffering that we see in the world, the despair and the loneliness. So it seems that moderation has done one thing. It has killed all but life and in consequence we are prevented from drinking from the cup of love. We cannot just continue to moisten our lips because that would be just the same thing as the idea of the compassion of love, of empathy of charity, of service. They cannot just be abstractions. They must be fully embodied every day in our lives.
So looking at the world at this particular time in this holy month and throughout the course of the preceding month and the ones that are yet to come are we enjoying that which is good when we neither substantively address the evil and shortcomings within ourselves in order for us to be aware of and realise the need of the importance of protection of all that we hold dear which we call God.
Are we content to live our lives in the periphery of our lives in a world that continues to violate sense and dignity in which we are all quite complicit? Is this the state that we need to continue and observe a normalisation of the state of division, hate and incitement? Are we to see our refracted existence separated from its very self as we continue to bear witness to the horrors that are taking place in the world.
Love unto others has in one way or the other congregated in whatever manner or form. I would like to go on by reading and this time it’s Luke, Mark and Matthew. I am not going to go into dogma in terms of what we know about Jesus. I am going to speak in simpler terms.
I am not going to read the whole extract. I am going to abbreviate it a little. The Lord sent him, Jesus to heal the broken hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives and recover the sight of the blind. We know that Jesus did not live in comfort. He did not live in the lap of luxury and certainly there was no offshore tax haven. In fact he did turn the tables of the money lenders over.
I just wanted to say that we are to share the bread of humanity which is in my view that we need to look upon each other and then we need to make sure that we use the following ingredients which are the bread of humanity: limitless love, abundant compassion, timeless empathy and universal charity. I think perhaps then we might get to a point where we approximate self realisation. Of course it is work in progress.
Dr Aly El Kabbany: (Recently recovered from Covid 19). We certainly live these days in a very hard time because the pandemic really changed the whole world and the way in which we live in the whole world. I think that this pandemic will change the face of the world, socially, economically and politically for the time being and for decades to come.
I myself find a lot of positive things in this bad situation and in this pandemic which is invading the whole world. The positive thing is that it brings us all back to the creator, to the Almighty to know that there is a power above all these materialistic powers which we have been building all the time. It is a defeat for the materialistic world we have been living in for decades if not centuries.
A small virus which cannot be seen by the naked eye brought the whole world to a stand still. So all the defence mechanisms of the super powers, their atomic arsenals and their scientific advancement did not help them at all.
It also exposes the shortfall of the health system in even the richest countries of the world which proves that the priorities of the governments have been wrong. We have got this quantitative philosophy rather than the qualitative philosophy which human beings everywhere need. To destroy the whole world we do not need more that 150 atomic bombs. But we build and produce thousands and thousands. This is what I mean by the quantitative philosophy. We do not need to destroy the whole world three thousand times because once is enough. We are not going to be there.
And when I talk of the priorities rather than spending all this money on what they call a defence system it is actually spending on aggressive military regimes. Instead we could have directed half of this money to the health service and the social services and we would all be living in a better condition nowadays.
I don’t want to go into personal experience but I was a victim of corona virus. I could not find anyone to help me. I phoned 111 and nobody answered for hours. I phoned my GP and he refused to see me and at my insistence he agreed to talk to me on the phone. My private health insurance BUPA told me you are not covered during the pandemic. I feel I have been left on my own. I have been let down by the National Health Service to which I have been contributing for more than 40 years and they were not there for me in my time of need.
I wrote to my MP and the answer was ridiculous. He said we don’t have enough testing kits. I did not ask her about that in my letter. I complained that the health service was not there. 111 did not answer. I phoned the ambulance, they came but they refused to take me to hospital for a qualified doctor to diagnose me. I had to pay for a private doctor to come, give me the test, diagnose my condition and let me know that I have been infected with corona and I had to be treated.
I over came the situation and I feel very well now. But the issue is the failure of governments to provide the necessary help for everyone who needs it. The shocking statistic is that half of the victims of corona virus came from old people’s homes. There is negligence. They are not caring about the most vulnerable people in our society.
The other thing, the most positive thing, I have been in seclusion not only inside my house but also inside my bedroom because I could not communicate with members of my family even though they helped me tremendously and served me perfectly. But that seclusion gave me a perfect relationship with me and my creator. And it is a reflection on my life, on my humanity and on my relationship with other people I know in my life and, most importantly, on my relationship with God almighty.
Normally I used to do seclusion for the holy month of Ramadan for the last ten days but now it will be a seclusion for all Muslims for the whole month of Ramadan and I hope that will bring them nearer to God.
I also would like to remind myself and remind all the viewers and all human beings all over the world that we have been living in this materialistic world in a vicious circle. And we forgot we think that we live to work. We don’t realise that we work to live. We have a life. So that pandemic and that isolation made a lot of people realise their own social life, their own family life: they became nearer to their children and the grandchildren. I heard a business man say this is the first opportunity I had to understand my children and grandchildren. I did not have time before to sit with them and talk to them. So in this break of the vicious circle we were living in was very positive in bringing us back to God, to our important relationship with our loved ones and the ones we care for most.
I would also like to remind you of the definition of Hassan Al Basri of a human being. He said that the human being is nothing but a number of days and when a day passes away a part of that human being passes away to.
So we are actually a time phenomenon. We are here in this universe for a very short time so we really have to realise our aims in this short period we are staying in this universe and to mend our relationship with our creator and the creatures of God everywhere.
I always remind myself that Islam came to break this vicious circle: we all live by the five prayers every day. So during the five prayers we forget the materialistic world and we say Allahu Akbar and we put that world behind us. Normally we receive everything we love in our hands like our babies our something like that. But when we give the back of hand Allahu Akbar we put this materialistic life behind us and we live the spiritual relationship with our creator.
The month of Ramadan is another breaker of this vicious circle to bring us back to the spiritual path of our life which is always fulfilled. So the seclusion is a need of the human being. It is a necessity for each and every one of us and again in the holy month of Ramadan we remember the facts of life that we are all brothers and sisters. Imam Ali said if he is not your brother in Islam he is your son in humanity.
This pandemic brought all human beings together. I would like to remind us all that in our Quran the first verse in the first chapter: Alhamdu Lillahi rab al alamin.Praise be to God the deity of all universe, of all the people. The last chapter of the Quran talks about the king of all people. And as the previous speaker said, we should all drink from that cup of love and live the fraternity of all human beings without any fanaticism or racism regardless of religion. Religion is nothing but personal belief and everyone has his own belief and we should respect our diversity and our differences and live together because this virus does not differentiate between Muslim or non Muslim, believer or non believer. We are all equal in front of God.
We live in that harmony after the reflection of the pandemic and the reflection of the spiritual life in the month of Ramada that will bring harmony to the whole world and it will let those governments rather than directing our money to their destructive weapons, to direct it to our health and social welfare and helping the most vulnerable and needy in our society,
Poem
Freedom from Fear
Virus of Capitalism is not but a crud
Stark inequality is emblematic of Capitalism
After years of flogging the poor with austerity
For the rich to benefit from bailouts
It is now in induced coma
No ventilator can rescue
Having lost the power of development
Now unfruitful, confused and muddled
It has become an addles
A rotten egg with no viability
Create fear amongst the masses
To subdue and control
The Corona Virus, and its fall out
Creating a pandemic of fear
Panic infused evil plan-demic
With the World Harlots Organisation*
Being the key architect of fear
And global mass media mafia the cheer leader
Capitalism teaches us to be fearful when others are greedy
And greedy when others are fearful
The vultures of capitalism devour more
When the world is at bay
The capitalist profiteers want to make hay
At the pandemic’s human toll
The real lesson After Corona
It will not be same as Before Corona
Life is so fragile, handle with care
It is easy to live without junk food
Consumption control an added benefit
Now is the moment to contemplate
With plenty of time on hand
An alternative world can take root
Towards strengthening humanity and faith
To defeat the fear mongers
And attain Freedom from Fear
Shabbir Jafer Razvi
Balham, London
Monday 13th April 2020 4.00am
- * W.H.O. World Harlots Organisation
* Shaykh Arif Abdulhussain founded the Al-Mahdi Institute in 1993, and currently serves as its Director and Senior Lecturer in Usul al-Fiqh and Muslim Philosophy. For over twenty years, Shaykh Arif has been at the forefront of developing and delivering advanced Islamic studies, tailored towards training students capable of addressing the needs of contemporary societies. Shaykh Arif was educated at the Madrassah Syed al-Khoei, London from 1985 and graduated with honours in 1988 where he also taught Grammar, Logic, Islamic Law and Usul al-Fiqh. He then furthered his studies in the Islamic Seminary in Qum, carrying out traditional Post-Graduate Islamic studies between 1989-93. On his return to the U.K. after founding the Al-Mahdi Institute he continued his graduate (kharij) training in Usul al-Fiqh and Fiqh from 1994 until 2008 under Ayatullah H. Amini, a student of Ayatullah Khoei.
** Soraya Boyd is an educational consultant, public speaker and human rights campaigner. She is the CEO and Founder of Facilitate Global, a London based NGO promoting and protecting human rights for all, one rule of law for all and serving humanity through dialogue and friendship. She has been engaged with issues related to Christianity, Christian Muslim relations and human rights violations from Palestine to Kashmir.
***Dr Aly El Kabbany is journalist and a religious and political analyst of Middle Eastern affairs. He was working from 1978 to 1981 as a journalist with Al-Hawadess magazine, a weekly socio-political Pan-Arab magazine. From January 1982 to June 1983 he was working with ”2000 Magazine”, a monthly futuristic magazine. From July 1983 to 1990 he was the general manager of the Islamic Press Agency (IPA), publishing five different magazines. He had working relations with Khashoggi at the IPA. From 1991 to date he is a freelance journalist and political analyst of Middle East affairs on TV and radio. He has recently recovered from Covid-19 infection.
