How to Take Bayah with Shaykh Nuh Keller..?

Yes there is a Prerequisites before one can take bayah with Shaykh Nuh which that you need to listen to the Virgina Suhba link below. So dont jump into and it , it more Impotant then getting married because if these dotn work you can divorce not so the case with Tariqah and Bayah you maybe getting into something way over your head and may not be able to fufill its duties.

The Suhba Virgina is a Prerequisite you are asked to listen to and is what is expected of a Mureed that wants to take Bayah with Shaykh Nuh.
seee link below

Only registered users can see links on this forum! Register or Login on forum!

===============================================
I was asked a questioned about bayah and who to take it with and why.Personally i would bayah with Shaykh Sidi Hamza al-Qadiri Boutchich Tariqah.

Why?
If you are looking for the Tariqah of this Time! Then look no futher then this, which has combined the spiritual heritage(Sirr) of the Darqawiyya, Tijaniyya and Qadiri Tariqahs and has opened the Mercy Doors of Jamal to enter unlike many others that still go through the Doors of Jalal.

Overview of Shaykh Sidi Hamza al-Qadiri Boutchich Tariqah
In the Name of Allah The Beneficent, The Merciful Praise Be to Allah, The Lord of the Worlds And Blessings and Greetings to the Messenger of Allah peace be upon him.

The Tariqah Al Qadiri al Boutchichi is considered as a (Baraka) blessing from the Arif Bi’llah, (The knower of Allah), the teacher by the Idhn (permission) of the Messenger of Allah (S), our great grandfather, Maulana Shaykh Abdul Qadir Al Jilani, may Allah bless him and let us benefit from his Baraka.

Tariqah Al Qadiri al Boutchichi- of Shaykh Sidi Hamza The Renewal of Sufism Introducing a new era based on flexibility, love and beauty.

The Shaykh teachers through:
Remembrance of Allah (Dhikr)
Love (MAHABBA)
Companionship (Suhba)

Introducing the new era of Sufism based on flexibility, love and beauty which has begun. It is easier to follow now than before but this does not mean that it has lost its value. The addition of flexibility to spiritual education has attracted the hearts of disciples from all over the world. Today, Sufis are more integrated into their social lives. They can enjoy the Sufi experience without it affecting their social rhythm or losing their social identities.

Tariqa Qadiriyya Boutchichiyya is a school where the master educates and elevates the seekers (Murids) to high stages of gnosis and appropriate stations of mysticism, promotes them in the Divine Love, and helps them to rise above their ego (Nafs) by means of Invocation (Dhikr), Love (Mahabba) and Companionship (Suhba).

Key Characteristic of Tariqa Qadiriyya Boutchichiyya:
1.The khalwat -Retreat of the Sufi is inside the heart (alkhalwat fi al-qalb).
2.The path is based on ‘beautification then detachment’ (at-takhliya ba’da at-tahliya).
3. The New direction or orientation (TAWWAJJUH) TO sufism has changed from majestic Jalal to beautiful Jamal.
4. Companionship (subha)
5. Sidi Hamza addresses himself to every one on his own level
6. Today the spiritual master is looking without condition for new disciples

full article see link below about Tariqah Qadiri al-Boutchichiyyah -- Arif billah Sayyid Shaykh Sidi Hamza al-Qadiri al-Boutchich

Only registered users can see links on this forum! Register or Login on forum!

Many Shaykhs today give Bayah of Barakah NOT bayah of Sirr. because thats all they have to give and gave themselves. Barakah Bayah is a bayah of Blessings but Sirr means Spiritual Secrets.

This means that the Murids can for example See the Prophet peace be upon him in a waking state. (while awake) many of Shaykh Sidi Hamza al-Qadiri al-Boutchich's murids are in this state. They connect to the Shaykh and are in Hal -spiritual ecstasy or intoxiacant in the shaykh.

As for books and texts Shaykh Hamza al-Qadiri al-Boutchich Writes in the hearts of his Murids and not on paper or internet. And this is done with just one glance of the eye of Shaykh Hamza al-Qadiri al-Boutchich who is the Grandson of Shaykh Abdal-Qadir Jilani-(theMaster of Masters of all Sufsm Shaykhs)
========================================
i've been given some Phone numbers on how to contact Shaykh Nuh Keller, and ONLY people interested in taking Bayah please email on:

Only registered users can see links on this forum! Register or Login on forum!

and please put in the Subject heading Bayah with Shaykh Nuh and i will forward you these details.
Also as far as i'm aware you are asked to Listen to the Suhba Virgina Talks. these can be found link

Only registered users can see links on this forum! Register or Login on forum!

Suhba Virgina Talks

click this link and go the last Audio files called Suhba Virgina

Only registered users can see links on this forum! Register or Login on forum!

The Suhba Virgina is a Prerequisite you are asked to listen to and is what is expected of a Mureed that wants to take Bayah

Tariqa Notes, a small handbook for those following the Shadhili Sufi order, is given to the Mureeds known as The Forty Grand its 40 Sufi lessons of Muraqbah, which you under the supervise of the Shaykh. It covers things like controlling the Tongue, Anger and so forth and how this is done.!

From The 40 Grand Grand Darse

Only registered users can see links on this forum! Register or Login on forum!

Again this is as far as i know ....!

Shaykh Nuh Ha Mim Keller Q&A

Only registered users can see links on this forum! Register or Login on forum!

=============================================
Nuh Ha Mim Keller From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sheik Nuh Ha Mim Keller, is an American Muslim translator of Islamic books and specialist in Islamic Law as well as an authorised sheikh in tasawwuf in the Shadhili Sufi order. Born in 1954 in the Northwestern United States of America, he was educated in philosophy and Arabic at the University of Chicago and University of California at Los Angeles. He converted to Islam in 1977 at al-Azhar in Cairo, and later studied the Islamic sciences of hadith (Prophetic traditions), Shafi'i and Hanafi schools of Islamic jurisprudence, legal methodology (usul al-fiqh), and tenets of faith (`aqidah) in Syria and Jordan, where he has lived since 1980.

Translations
His English translation of Umdat al-Salik, Reliance of the Traveller, (Sunna Books, 1991) is the first Islamic legal work in a European language to receive the certification of Al-Azhar University, the Muslim world's oldest institution of higher learning. The book, which has become a modern classic, is a bestseller and has had numerous print runs. It is an example the English language of a complete orthodox Sunni work on the Shariah. He also possesses ijazas, or "certificates of authorisation", in Islamic jurisprudence from sheikhs in Syria and Jordan.

His other translations and works include:

Al-Maqasid : Imam Nawawi's Manual of Islam, a shorter manual of Shafi'i fiqh
A Port in the Storm: A Fiqh Solution to the Qibla of North America, a detailed and complex study of the most sound position on which direction North American Muslims should face to pray.

The Sunni Path: A Handbook of Islamic Belief
Evolution Theory in Islam

Tariqa Notes, a small handbook for those following the Shadhili Sufi order.

He has also written numerous articles on traditional Islam is presently a regular contributor to Islamica Magazine. He is currently translating Imam Nawawi's Kitab al-Adhkar (The Book of Remembrance of Allah), a compendium of some 1227 hadiths on prayers and dhikrs of the prophetic sunnah.

He was authorised as a sheik in the Shadhili Tariqa by the late Sheik Abd al-Rahman al-Shaghouri in Damascus. He has students throughout the world and has annual retreats (suhbas) with his students where he teaches the traditional science of tasawwuf in Canada, USA, UK, Turkey, Australia, Egypt, and Pakistan.

============
Umdat al-Salik wa Uddat al-Nasik - from Reliance of the Traveller
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

'Umdat al-Salik wa 'Uddat al-Nasik (Reliance of the Traveller and Tools of the Worshipper) is a manual of Fiqh for Sunni Muslims, consisting mostly of the teachings of Imam al-Nawawi, a Shafi'i scholar, translated into English by Sheikh Nuh Ha Mim Keller.

The author of the original work is Ahmad ibn Naqib al-Misri. The book is not just a translation of the original text but several sections have been added to it from other classical texts to create a handbook of traditional Shafii Fiqh. It also contains appendices on various topics and a mini biography of every person mentioned in the book. The book is the first translation of a standard Islamic legal reference in a European language to be certified by Al-Azhar.

Additions and omissions
Certain sections of the book have been left untranslated (although the original Arabic text is retained) as Sheikh Nuh considers them not relevant to modern societies. These parts include section the section on slavery and the rights and duties of slaves and their masters as well as some smaller sections like those about fixing utensils using gold. Critics argue that Sheikh Nuh did not translate the section on slavery in order not to offend modern sensitivities. However, the question of slavery in Islam in modern times is one which most traditional scholars consider of only theoretical interest since the practice is no longer prevalent. They also highlight verses from the Quran and references to Hadith which encourage muslims to treat slaves well and to free them ([1], [2]). Some critics argue that Shaykh Nuh left the sections untranslated since the topic of sexual rights of male masters over female slaves in Islam hurts modern sensitivities ([3], [4]). For more details, please consult the slavery in Islam article.

Many additions have been made to the book as well. Sections from other famous classical Islamic texts (like Imam Al-Ghazzali's Ihya' 'ulum al-din and Imam Nawawi's Riyadh as-Saaliheen) have been incorporated into the book. A complete section on traditional Islamic Sufism is added too.

Only registered users can see links on this forum! Register or Login on forum!

==============================
Products for Sale by Shaykh Nuh Ha Mim Keller -

Only registered users can see links on this forum! Register or Login on forum!

This link also have Cds available

Only registered users can see links on this forum! Register or Login on forum!

Only registered users can see links on this forum! Register or Login on forum!

Purchase Many Shaykh Nuh Talks
you'll find:-
Awrad Books
CD Awrad of the Tariq
CD Fiqh and Adab
CD Hadra and Qasida
CD Introductory Lessons
CD Latafiyya Lessons
CD Marriage Lessons
CD Mawad al Ghaythiya
CD Questions Asked
CD Suhba's
CD Traditional Scholars
and more ..! see links below

Only registered users can see links on this forum! Register or Login on forum!

Only registered users can see links on this forum! Register or Login on forum!

please also seee: links

these are were you can obtain the Talks by Shaykh Nuh
Shadhili-Darqawi-Hashimi links

Only registered users can see links on this forum! Register or Login on forum!

Only registered users can see links on this forum! Register or Login on forum!

Only registered users can see links on this forum! Register or Login on forum!

Damascus Breeze

Dedicated to our beloved master Sheikh 'Abd ar Rahman ash Shagouri, rahimahu Allah ta'ala.

Shaykh 'Abd ar Rahman ash Shagouri is the Grand of Shaykh of Shaykh Muhammad al Yaqoubi and Shaykh Nuh Keller.

This was written in Oct.2003, after a summer of swimming amongst the scholars of Damascus, it is one of a collection of essays to be published insha Allah.

by Asra Bukhari

In the name of Allah, Most Merciful, Most Benificent. From Him alone we come and to Him alone we return. Peace and Blessings on His beloved, our Prophet, the Elect, ere and anon.


Five years and a split second brought me into Damascus, Syria. Five years of waiting and within a second I was transported there. After one realizes how little one knows about his Lord, and spends some time next to those who know more, something gnaws inside to seek and be around those who have spent most of their lives in that sole pursuit. As Edward Hall, the anthropologist said, “The drive to learn is more basic than the drive to reproduce.” One hopes to either receive some of the knowledge the erudite attained or at least to be in their company for the boon felt beyond the bone in their midst.

This is what led me on the road to Damascus. It was a fortuitous bounty from heaven that the scholar and sage hailing from Syria, Sheikh Muhammad al Yaqoubi, frequented my country, my town, my heart. I sought the Sunnah and found it in his country, his town, his heart. As one studies the Sunnah, one prays to implement everything learned and pines to see its traces on the bodies of brethren. After years of such studies, I was aglow to find that the Damascene scholar is drowned in the Sunnah, his walk, his talk, and the way he doles and delivers, with every instance and interaction. One sees a strain of the way of our beloved prophet, peace be upon him, on many a scholar in Syria who has spent years of study, inhaling his hadith and exhaling his aura afterwards. I realized the wonder of sheikh Muhammad’s exhortation for students in the West to plan the best vacation and “visit the ‘ulema of the Muslim world.”

The late sheikh Mekki al Kattani [d. 1974] May Allah have mercy on him, was one of the recent scholars who brought his brimming love of the Prophet, peace be upon him, [from his native Morocco] and filled the oasis of Damascus with its fragrance. The great wali, Sheikh Ahmad al Habbal one of the foremost elderly scholars of today, glorifies Allah and doles several odes and salutations on the Prophet, peace be upon him, almost every morning after fajr, enrapturing the worshippers, many who come from oceans away to satisfy the necessary desire of loving the prophet, more than one loves his or herself or anything else except his Lord. As the Algerian sage, Sheikh Ahmad al Alawi, May Allah have mercy on him, had remarked, “Chanting is not crippled with the dry bones of words, liquid and flowing like a stream, it carries us into the presence of God.”[1]

One of the Grand Sheikhs of this city, Abdur Rahman al Shagouri, though a bit weak from his old age, may Allah preserve him, whose Dimishq musk lingers on many students throughout the world, still heads his regular sessions glorifying Allah, Most High and singing salutations on the prophet and his family. Truth be told, he is one of the main reasons I landed in Damascus. I had heard about him for years and wanted to quench the two ponds, my pupils, with his presence. My fondest scenes of Syria are of watching the Hadra Sunday nights after ‘Isha from the balcony of Masjid al Warid al Kabir(which stands at the end of a maze consisting of some of the narrowest alleys in the world) and watching all the great men of Allah of this fair city, led by Sheikh Abdur Rahman, taking those present, to the presence of their Lord.

My first attendance at this session, I went alone, and could not rely on a soul to point him out to me, yet I needed no introduction, as five years of waiting intensified my introduction and when he was brought in the musalla, [in a wheelchair] I knew it was he. Allah. II was privy to meet him thrice in his private chambers, Wal Hamdulilah and saw him many times overlooking the balconies of both Masjid al Warid and Masjid Nuriyah. Even if I had done nothing else, no studies nor classes, for the course of my stay in Syria, yet saw him only, it would have been a sufficient success for my trip. He delighted me and my friends with his charm and humor and most tearfully, with his concern for seekers of Truth throughout the world. He asked us, “Who is ahead in their efforts for their Lord, the students in America or those in England?” I, the American, said resolutely, “The English,” much to the dismay of a dear friend, also an American (Californian) and the glee of my English friends whom were present. Hopefully, I provoked more of his pity to be directed westward, thus securing more du’as for us!

Of course, I did mention to him that our beloved Master the great 'Alamah, Shaykh Muhammad al Yaqoubi al Hassani, who strode into our lands with the wheel of knowledge and the weal of wisdom, has been spreading the sanctified Syrian soil and making great leaps in America and throughout the world, taking us on the chariot that leads to our Lord. May Allah preserve and protect him and all of our shuyukh.

To this he smiled proudly from ear to ear and nodded, acknowledging he knew this. We asked him to pray for all of our teachers including, Shaykh Nuh Keller, Shaykh Hamza Yusuf Sheikh Imam Zaid, Shaykh Jamal al Zahabi, and all those we know and those we don't.

Also in that attempt, I asked him to bless a few bags of sweets so that I can return with them to spread some of his barakah to these lands. As it happened, one of those bags was sent to India via my aunt and the others distributed to students in the East Coast and a few blessed friends still have to this day, some of those choicest candies. This city, as all Muslim lands, is known for her hospitality and the homes of the scholars are the actual “open universities” as they all have revolving doors making way for the seekers of knowledge and wisdom. Damascus is a denizen of voices making music elocuting their love for the prophet, peace be upon him, at every interval between prayer and party.

My trip started off with two weddings to attend, one of a friend and the other, of the daughter of noble, notable parents, Umm Sa’eed and Sheikh Adnan Al Majd, teachers of sacred knowledge, paisleys that adorn this city of silk. Upon entering their home one is caught in a waft of surreal love for the prophet, peace be upon him. Both gatherings beheld the majesty of our Maker, both were cascading with love for our Master Muhammad, peace be upon him. It occurred to me that these are the real princes and princesses, the true repositories of regality that most of the world lives, unawares. The bride, the sheikh’s daughter, was aglow in her wedding dress as she dressed her spirit with the remembrance of her Lord. She was indeed a precious princess, filled with decorum and Divine Grace that glided her every move. Her every exhalation filled the chambers with pristine love for the prophet, peace be upon him. Even the dancing was divine, as the women [celebrating separately from the men] moved only their torsos, arms above making an angular ‘U’ all the while sending salutations on the prophet, peace be upon him. Guests were served with luxurious vanilla ice cream, embedded with emeralds, no less. Syria is known for both its heavenly ice cream, which even the “Culture Shock” guidebook, calls the best in the world, and its jewel of a nut, the pistachio. And while we are on its epicurean attractions, one must not forget that chapter 95, Surah “Al Tin” in the holy Qur’an, according to most scholars, refers to Syria, as this fair city is resplendent with this divine delight, the fig, as well. [2] My heart was captured, my soul enraptured, my body and mind fractured, in fana, [annihilation]. These were the most marvelous wedding parties I ever walked into, insha Allah, they were a portent of paradise for all in attendance.

This ancient land, ubiquitously known as the oldest inhabited city in the world, glistens for not just those seeking the sublime. It holds a magical mist for the historian, the architect, the scientist and general explorer as well. This mist is not missed by those seeking meaning in a world of mayhem growing more and more minute by the minute. The archaeologist and the adventurer is drawn here by the ancient amphitheaters, ruined castles and citadels, towers, and tablets [some dating back to the third millennium BC]. My traveler’s guidebook to Syria, quotes Kahlil Gibrain, “You are not enclosed within your bodies, nor confined to houses or fields. That which is you dwells above the mountain and roves with the wind.” [3] Indeed, you may find that you dwell in Damascus. The Kahlilian quote befits my name, ‘Asra’, which is taken from the first verse of chapter 17, the Surah “Isra” in the holy Quran, about the ascension the prophet, peace be upon him, took in the night to Jerusalem and then further on into the presence of Providence. Understood from this context my name actually means to be taken to Sham [the Arabic name for the greater Levant region] in the night, indeed I was. Those from the subcontinent will be familiar with the refrain from elders, “We are all a portion of our names, so be careful of the names you choose for your children.” My Arab friends love to jest that my name is a verb, I was happy to finally ‘do’ my name nonetheless.

It is no wonder that this is the oldest capital city in the world, everything is fine and fabulous here, thus it is kept as it is. Even its weather, though seemingly difficult and dry, is rewarding for the patient and grateful. Every evening is visited by an elegant breeze. The rain of Damascus is its breeze. Dimash al Qadeemah, as the old city is called in Arabic, hides unscathed behind the scrim of the seventeenth century, minus a few cars making way here and there, making themselves anachronisms.

The city’s children are affable, respected as springs of knowledge in themselves, endeared by all, and embraced even by the bustling city streets. They run under its protective care, as they proudly head off for errands to the corner shops bringing back forgotten provisions or treats for themselves, commissioned by their tender parents. It is as if the psychologist, Alice Miller was speaking of children in Sham upon writing the following:

We will come to regard our children not as creatures to manipulate or change, but rather as messengers from a world we once deeply knew, which we have long since forgotten, who can reveal to us more about the secrets of life, and also our own lives...[4]

The older inhabitants of this elderly part of the earth, like its children, exude with curiosity of everything under and around the sun.

I was even privy to glance a time times two, out of the window of my taxi ride, a security guard, standing sentinel, building by his side, yet with his own glance tucked in a book. This city is indeed following the axiom, “Knowledge is gained, from cradle to grave.”

The word education is taken from the Latin, ‘educare’ which means to lead out from within. In Damascus, the laity and the lofty is led out of ignorance into gnosis. Almost everyone I met in Damascus, from my exuberant taxi driver, Abu Ayham, who filled enthusiasm en route to my morning Arabic class at the university, my exotic Arabic teacher, Dima, whose authentic Arab yet subtle subcontinent looks could get her in a Bollywood movie without a screening, to my mysterious cleaning lady and cook, and my newfound effusive friend, Nur, was enigmatic if not eccentric, all genetically encoded with a gift of gab. A Hollywood writer could pick anyone at random off the streets of Damascus and run with a dynamic story on him or her. Abu Ayham if “discovered” would have a screenplay and his own program within a fortnight. But then again, precisely because life is lived to the fullest here, the old fashioned way, of knowing everyone in detail in ones round of daily life, cinema is superfluous. Thus, sans cinema, everyone here has character and charisma, which, incidentally, means, a gift from God.

If it wasn’t for the Arabic that abounds here one might think one is in Dublin as opinions are exerted into the air like a shaken carbonated drink, opened.


The art of dialogue is alive in Damascus and speakers of the Classical Arabic, called ‘Fus-ha’ are especially adept, and the teachers of it, meticulous, in enunciating every letter with its rightful sound and respective characteristic such as length of stay on the tongue and most crucially, the point of exit from the mouth.

Many western singers, in fact, study this art called tajweed, which is mainly studied to recite the Qur’an properly. Upon reciting with the precision of tajweed, the Qari (reciter} inevitably pierces himself and the listener into another plane. Whatever it is that one studies in Damascus, the aim is closest to perfection as ones faculties allow. Thus, the sounds, the sights [including the beauty of its people whom inherited the original Arabic look], after one peels the opaque layer of dust observable at the outset, and the senses, are all exquisite, leaving only rarefied onion layers, transparent and transcendent. It seems, as well, as a reward for their righteous endeavors, for such cities, abuzz with His Glory, God has expanded ten minutes into two hours, all the more time to struggle and celebrate, as those on the road to Damascus do, leading them out to Him.

For the religious set, it is enough to know that the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, blessed Syria with his breath and his body. We know he visited the lands at least twice, once as a young lad on a business trip with his uncle whence the monk Bahira recognized him as the last prophet foretold in the Bible, and another time after prophecy was granted to him. In addition there are sound hadith which record his mention to move to this blessed land when things in the world looked bleak, in addition, numerous hadith contain his extolment for the people of Sham. [5]

Even before the arrival of Islam into al Sham, this part of the earth was already ethereal. Damascus was referred to then, as “the mother of the universe.” Indeed she, Eve, was known to have lived here. It was and has been the sacred abode of countless prophets and saints. Gibril Haddad cites scholars who count around 1700 graves of prophets in the Sham region [including the prophets Adam, Abel, Sheth, Nuh, Lut, Job, Hud, Zakariyya] and 500 tombs in Dimishq itself. Prophet Ibrahim passed through here and the cave wherein he meditated is preserved.[6]

Besides the prophets and saints, and a multitude of scholars from the Ummah, such as Shaykh al Akbar, may Allah have mercy on him, scores of Sahaba, companions of the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, are also buried in the belly of this great city, including the venerable Bilal, may Allah be pleased with him, the first muezzin of Medina, who rests in the cemetery, called Bab as Sagheer, not far from the Ummayyad mosque. Having never visited a graveyard prior to this one, I truly felt like the living dead while paying my respects to the Sahabah and other great sages of the Muslim world that sleep in this Syrian soil. As Rumi masterfully provoked, “Go to the graveyard and behold those silent eloquent ones.” Their legends live on in the world, and upon visiting them, one senses that their limbs are more alive than ones own. Each one of their lives is better than a millionfold of my kind. One is swathed in barakah by visiting these foremost from our Ummah. I would return to the cemetery many times during my summer sojourn in Syria, swaddled in its immense serenity. Therein lay the souls as the prophet had said, that knew the secrets of living, but were in no position to do anything about it, while those who visit them were without such wisdom, though they were in a position to do something about it, if only they knew.

One of the bounties I am eternally grateful for on this trip was how I chanced upon the site wherein sheikh Muhammad’s father and teacher, the venerable Imam of the recent past of the Grand Ummayad mosque, Sheikh Ibrahim al Yaqoubi, may Allah have mercy on him, is interred. Any student who has ever sat in a class with sheikh Muhammad is bound to hear mention of his father in his eternal gratitude to him for the immense knowledge he imparted into his young son, our teacher Sheikh Muhammad al Yaqoubi. Thus, it was that one afternoon soon after arriving in Damascus and not wanting to wait any longer to pay my respects to our teacher’s teacher, I set off in a taxi not even knowing the whereabouts of the cemetery at that time, let alone where his blessed body was laid to rest, yet ending the evening standing at his gravesite at the stroke of the call for the maghrib prayer, and the strike of the evening breeze, just as I was about to head back before the cemetery gates closed.


One ostensible shrine is contained within the Grand Ummayyad mosque in the old city. John the Baptist, peace be upon him, rests within this grand, historic mosque, with a roofless [though roofed perpetually by a congregation of birds] rectangular courtyard, clad with white marble slabs all around its 50 m by 120 m of expansive open space. At one time this was a church, in fact, after the spread of Islam into Damascus during the reign of the second Caliph ‘Umar, may Allah be pleased with him, this serene place of worship was divided in half, Muslims and Christians each using their portion to pray to the same God, the One. This tradition of Muslims spreading their wings, welcoming people of other faiths and protecting them as the Qur’an exhorts them to, continues today in Sham and throughout the Muslim world. Only, to verify this great secret, one must not turn to newspapers for information on Islam and Muslims, but hear accounts of those who have been to these lands from ones circle of friends, else, read real literature. As Oscar Wilde said, journalism is unreadable, and literature unread. The prayer hall in the Umayyad is covered with mosaics, the roof held up by long paneled arms, lined with green and gold motif work, and besot with three domes and three minarets. The southeastern minaret, the tallest of the three, is the one wherein the prophet Jesus, peace be upon him, is expected to alight and rain upon the earth with his reign of peace.

To flock to Mecca is a must for every Muslim to renew his faith and rehearse for the parting from this world. Here, La ila ha illa Allah is cemented in his soul. To visit Medina, where is encased the one concerned for all of the created, the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, is demanded by the heart. Here, one hears the cry of the other half of the creed, “Muhammad ar Rasul Allah.” While Mecca and Medina are mandates, Damascus is a desire, at least for those that come to know of its significance in the realm of all religions. Damascus beckons to the believer. “All those come here who feel haunted by the thought of God.” [7]



1] Lings, Martin. “A Sufi Saint of the Twentieth Century: Ahmad Al Alawi.” Islamic Texts Society, Cambridge, U.K., 1993.

2] Haddad, Gibril. “The Excellence of Syro-Palestine, Al Sham, and its People.” Maktabat al Ahbab, Damascus, 2002.

3] Mannheim, Ivan. “Syria and Lebanon handbook.” Footprint Handbooks, Ltd., Bath, England, 2001.

4] Markowa, Dawna. “How Your Child is Smart.” Conari Press, Berkeley, Ca, 1992.

5] Haddad, Gibril.

6] ibid.

7] Lings, Martin. p.21, quoted by sheikh Ahmad al Alawi to a Westerner who asked him how his disciples find him.

© Asra Bukhari, 2003 - 2004

Only registered users can see links on this forum! Register or Login on forum!

more links

The Shadili Darqawi Alawi Sufi Path

based on Traditional Sunni Islam
Mawlana Sidi Ahmed Ibn Mustafa Al Alawi Al Mostghanmi - Qaddasa Allahu Ruhahu

Only registered users can see links on this forum! Register or Login on forum!

Becoming Muslim - by Nuh Ha Mim Keller

"I studied philosophy at the university and it taught me to ask two things of whoever claimed to have the truth: What do you mean, and how do you know? When I asked these questions of my own religious tradition, I found no answers, and realized that Christianity had slipped from my hands."

The story of American former Catholic, Nuh Ha Mim Keller, who in the 25 years since his conversion has gone on to become one of the leading contemporary scholars of Islam.

Born in 1954 in the farm country of the northwestern United States, I was raised in a religious family as a Roman Catholic. The Church provided a spiritual world that was unquestionable in my childhood, if anything more real than the physical world around me, but as I grew older, and especially after I entered a Catholic university and read more, my relation to the religion became increasingly called into question, in belief and practice.

One reason was the frequent changes in Catholic liturgy and ritual that occurred in the wake of the Second Vatican Council of 1963, suggesting to laymen that the Church had no firm standards. To one another, the clergy spoke about flexibility and liturgical relevance, but to ordinary Catholics they seemed to be groping in the dark. God does not change, nor the needs of the human soul, and there was no new revelation from heaven. Yet we rang in the changes, week after week, year after year; adding, subtracting, changing the language from Latin to English, finally bringing in guitars and folk music. Priests explained and explained as laymen shook their heads. The search for relevance left large numbers convinced that there had not been much in the first place.

A second reason was a number of doctrinal difficulties, such as the doctrine of the Trinity, which no one in the history of the world, neither priest nor layman, had been able to explain in a convincing way, and which resolved itself, to the common mind at least, in a sort of godhead-by-committee, shared between God the Father, who ruled the world from heaven; His son Jesus Christ, who saved humanity on earth; and the Holy Ghost, who was pictured as a white dove and appeared to have a considerably minor role. I remember wanting to make special friends with just one of them so he could handle my business with the others, and to this end, would sometimes pray earnestly to this one and sometimes to that; but the other two were always stubbornly there. I finally decided that God the Father must be in charge of the other two, and this put the most formidable obstacle in the way of my Catholicism, the divinity of Christ. Moreover, reflection made it plain that the nature of man contradicted the nature of God in every particular, the limitary and finite on the one hand, the absolute and infinite on the other. That Jesus was God was something I cannot remember having ever really believed, in childhood or later.

Another point of incredulity was the trading of the Church in stocks and bonds in the hereafter which it called indulgences. Do such and such and so-and-so many years will be remitted from your sentence in purgatory. That had seemed so false to Martin Luther at the outset of the Reformation.

I also remember a desire for a sacred scripture, something on the order of a book that could furnish guidance. A Bible was given to me one Christmas, a handsome edition, but on attempting to read it, I found it so rambling and devoid of a coherent thread that it was difficult to think of a way to base one's life upon it. Only later did I learn how Christians solve the difficulty in practice, Protestants by creating sectarian theologies, each emphasizing the texts of their sect and downplaying the rest; Catholics by downplaying it all, except the snippets mentioned in their liturgy. Something seemed lacking in a sacred book that could not be read as an integral whole.

Moreover, when I went to the university, I found that the authenticity of the book, especially the New Testament, had come into considerable doubt as a result of modern hermeneutical studies by Christians themselves. In a course on contemporary theology, I read the Norman Perrin translation of The Problem of the Historical Jesus by Joachim Jeremias, one of the principal New Testament scholars of this century. A textual critic who was a master of the original languages and had spent long years with the texts, he had finally agreed with the German theologian Rudolph Bultmann that, without a doubt, it is true to say that the dream of ever writing a biography of Jesus is over, meaning that the life of Christ as he actually lived it could not be reconstructed from the New Testament with any degree of confidence. If this were accepted from a friend of Christianity and one of its foremost textual experts, I reasoned, what was left for its enemies to say? And what then remained of the Bible except to acknowledge that it was a record of truths mixed with fictions, conjectures projected onto Christ by later followers, themselves at odds with each other as to who the master had been and what he had taught. And if theologians like Jeremias could reassure themselves that somewhere under the layers of later accretions to the New Testament there was something called the historical Jesus and his message, how could the ordinary person hope to find it, or know it, should it be found?

I studied philosophy at the university and it taught me to ask two things of whoever claimed to have the truth: What do you mean, and how do you know? When I asked these questions of my own religious tradition, I found no answers, and realized that Christianity had slipped from my hands. I then embarked on a search that is perhaps not unfamiliar to many young people in the West, a quest for meaning in a meaningless world.

I began where I had lost my previous belief, with the philosophers, yet wanting to believe, seeking not philosophy, but rather a philosophy. I read the essays of the great pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer, which taught about the phenomenon of the ages of life, and that money, fame, physical strength, and intelligence all passed from one with the passage of years, but only moral excellence remained. I took this lesson to heart and remembered it in after years. His essays also drew attention to the fact that a person was wont to repudiate in later years what he fervently espouses in the heat of youth.

With a prescient wish to find the Divine, I decided to imbue myself with the most cogent arguments of atheism that I could find, that perhaps I might find a way out of them later. So I read the Walter Kaufmann translations of the works of the immoralist Friedrich Nietzsche. The many-faceted genius dissected the moral judgments and beliefs of mankind with brilliant philological and psychological arguments that ended in accusing human language itself, and the language of nineteenth-century science in particular, of being so inherently determined and mediated by concepts inherited from the language of morality that in their present form they could never hope to uncover reality. Aside from their immunological value against total skepticism, Nietzsche's works explained why the West was post-Christian, and accurately predicted the unprecedented savagery of the twentieth century, debunking the myth that science could function as a moral replacement for the now dead religion.

At a personal level, his tirades against Christianity, particularly in The Genealogy of Morals, gave me the benefit of distilling the beliefs of the monotheistic tradition into a small number of analyzable forms. He separated unessential concepts (such as the bizarre spectacle of an omnipotent deity's suicide on the cross) from essential ones, which I now, though without believing in them, apprehended to be but three alone: that God existed; that He created man in the world and defined the conduct expected of him in it; and that He would judge man accordingly in the hereafter and send him to eternal reward or punishment.

It was during this time that I read an early translation of the Koran which I grudgingly admired, between agnostic reservations, for the purity with which it presented these fundamental concepts. Even if false, I thought, there could not be a more essential expression of religion. As a literary work, the translation, perhaps it was Sales, was uninspired and openly hostile to its subject matter, whereas I knew the Arabic original was widely acknowledged for its beauty and eloquence among the religious books of mankind. I felt a desire to learn Arabic to read the original.

On a vacation home from school, I was walking upon a dirt road between some fields of wheat, and it happened that the sun went down. By some inspiration, I realized that it was a time of worship, a time to bow and pray to the one God. But it was not something one could rely on oneself to provide the details of, but rather a passing fancy, or perhaps the beginning of an awareness that atheism was an inauthentic way of being.

I carried something of this disquiet with me when I transferred to the University of Chicago, where I studied the epistemology of ethical theory how moral judgments were reached reading and searching among the books of the philosophers for something to shed light on the question of meaninglessness, which was both a personal concern and one of the central philosophical problems of our age.

According to some, scientific observation could only yield description statements of the form X is Y, for example, The object is red, Its weight is two kilos, Its height is ten centimeters, and so on, in each of which the functional was a scientifically verifiable is, whereas in moral judgments the functional element was an ought, a description statement which no amount of scientific observation could measure or verify. It appeared that ought was logically meaningless, and with it all morality whatsoever, a position that reminded me of those described by Lucian in his advice that whoever sees a moral philosopher coming down the road should flee from him as from a mad dog. For such a person, expediency ruled, and nothing checked his behavior but convention.

As Chicago was a more expensive school, and I had to raise tuition money, I found summer work on the West Coast with a seining boat fishing in Alaska. The sea proved a school in its own right, one I was to return to for a space of eight seasons, for the money. I met many people on boats, and saw something of the power and greatness of the wind, water, storms, and rain; and the smallness of man. These things lay before us like an immense book, but my fellow fishermen and I could only discern the letters of it that were within our context: to catch as many fish as possible within the specified time to sell to the tenders. Few knew how to read the book as a whole. Sometimes, in a blow, the waves rose like great hills, and the captain would hold the wheel with white knuckles, our bow one minute plunging gigantically down into a valley of green water, the next moment reaching the bottom of the trough and soaring upwards towards the sky before topping the next crest and starting down again.

Early in my career as a deck hand, I had read the Hazel Barnes translation of Jean Paul Sartres "Being and Nothingness", in which he argued that phenomena only arose for consciousness in the existential context of human projects, a theme that recalled Marx's 1844 manuscripts, where nature was produced by man, meaning, for example, that when the mystic sees a stand of trees, his consciousness hypostatizes an entirely different phenomenal object than a poet does, for example, or a capitalist. To the mystic, it is a manifestation; to the poet, a forest; to the capitalist, lumber. According to such a perspective, a mountain only appears as tall in the context of the project of climbing it, and so on, according to the instrumental relations involved in various human interests. But the great natural events of the sea surrounding us seemed to defy, with their stubborn, irreducible facticity, our uncomprehending attempts to come to terms with them. Suddenly, we were just there, shaken by the forces around us without making sense of them, wondering if we would make it through. Some, it was true, would ask God's help at such moments, but when we returned safely to shore, we behaved like men who knew little of Him, as if those moments had been a lapse into insanity, embarrassing to think of at happier times. It was one of the lessons of the sea that, in fact, such events not only existed but perhaps even preponderated in our life. Man was small and weak, the forces around him were large, and he did not control them.

Sometimes a boat would sink and men would die. I remember a fisherman from another boat who was working near us one opening, doing the same job as I did, piling web. He smiled across the water as he pulled the net from the hydraulic block overhead, stacking it neatly on the stern to ready it for the next set. Some weeks later, his boat overturned while fishing in a storm, and he got caught in the web and drowned. I saw him only once again, in a dream, beckoning to me from the stern of his boat.

The tremendousness of the scenes we lived in, the storms, the towering sheer cliffs rising vertically out of the water for hundreds of feet, the cold and rain and fatigue, the occasional injuries and deaths of workers these made little impression on most of us. Fishermen were, after all, supposed to be tough. On one boat, the family that worked it was said to lose an occasional crew member while running at sea at the end of the season, invariably the sole non-family member who worked with them, his loss saving them the wages they would have otherwise had to pay him.

The captain of another was a twenty-seven-year-old who delivered millions of dollars worth of crab each year in the Bering Sea. When I first heard of him, we were in Kodiak, his boat at the city dock they had tied up to after a lengthy run some days before. The captain was presently indisposed in his bunk in the stateroom, where he had been vomiting up blood from having eaten a glass uptown the previous night to prove how tough he was. He was in somewhat better condition when I later saw him in the Bering Sea at the end of a long winter king crab season. He worked in his wheelhouse up top, surrounded by radios that could pull in a signal from just about anywhere, computers, Loran, sonar, depth-finders, radar. His panels of lights and switches were set below the 180-degree sweep of shatterproof windows that overlooked the sea and the men on deck below, to whom he communicated by loudspeaker. They often worked round the clock, pulling their gear up from the icy water under watchful batteries of enormous electric lights attached to the masts that turned the perpetual night of the winter months into day. The captain had a reputation as a screamer, and had once locked his crew out on deck in the rain for eleven hours because one of them had gone inside to have a cup of coffee without permission. Few crewmen lasted longer than a season with him, though they made nearly twice the yearly income of, say, a lawyer or an advertising executive, and in only six months. Fortunes were made in the Bering Sea in those years, before overfishing wiped out the crab.

At present, he was at anchor, and was amiable enough when we tied up to him and he came aboard to sit and talk with our own captain. They spoke at length, at times gazing thoughtfully out at the sea through the door or windows, at times looking at each other sharply when something animated them, as the topic of what his competitors thought of him. "They wonder why I have a few bucks", he said. "Well I slept in my own home one night last year."

He later had his crew throw off the lines and pick the anchor, his eyes flickering warily over the water from the windows of the house as he pulled away with a blast of smoke from the stack. His watchfulness, his walrus-like physique, his endless voyages after game and markets, reminded me of other predatory hunter-animals of the sea. Such people, good at making money but heedless of any ultimate end or purpose, made an impression on me, and I increasingly began to wonder if men didn't need principles to guide them and tell them why they were there. Without such principles, nothing seemed to distinguish us above our prey except being more thorough, and technologically capable of preying longer, on a vaster scale, and with greater devastation than the animals we hunted.

These considerations were in my mind the second year I studied at Chicago, where I became aware through studies of philosophical moral systems that philosophy had not been successful in the past at significantly influencing peoples morals and preventing injustice, and I came to realize that there was little hope for it to do so in the future. I found that comparing human cultural systems and societies in their historical succession and multiplicity had led many intellectuals to moral relativism, since no moral value could be discovered which on its own merits was transculturally valid, a reflection leading to nihilism, the perspective that sees human civilizations as plants that grow out of the earth, springing from their various seeds and soils, thriving for a time, and then dying away.

Some heralded this as intellectual liberation, among them Emile Durkheim in his "Elementary Forms of the Religious Life", or Sigmund Freud in his "Totem and Taboo", which discussed mankind as if it were a patient and diagnosed its religious traditions as a form of a collective neurosis that we could now hope to cure, by applying to them a thoroughgoing scientific atheism, a sort of salvation through pure science. On this subject, I bought the Jeremy Shapiro translation of "Knowledge and Human Interests" by Jurgen Habermas, who argued that there was no such thing as pure science that could be depended upon to forge boldly ahead in a steady improvement of itself and the world. He called such a misunderstanding scientism, not science. Science in the real world, he said, was not free of values, still less of interests. The kinds of research that obtain funding, for example, were a function of what their society deemed meaningful, expedient, profitable, or important.

Habermas had been of a generation of German academics who, during the thirties and forties, knew what was happening in their country, but insisted they were simply engaged in intellectual production, that they were living in the realm of scholarship, and need not concern themselves with whatever the state might choose to do with their research. The horrible question mark that was attached to German intellectuals when the Nazi atrocities became public after the war made Habermas think deeply about the ideology of pure science. If anything was obvious, it was that the nineteenth-century optimism of thinkers like Freud and Durkheim was no longer tenable.

I began to re-assess the intellectual life around me. Like Schopenhauer, I felt that higher education must produce higher human beings. But at the university, I found lab people talking to each other about forging research data to secure funding for the coming year; luminaries who wouldn't permit tape recorders at their lectures for fear that competitors in the same field would go one step further with their research and beat them to publication; professors vying with each other in the length of their courses syllabuses. The moral qualities I was accustomed to associate with ordinary, unregenerate humanity seemed as frequently met with in sophisticated academics as they had been in fishermen. If one could laugh at fishermen who, after getting a boatload of fish in a big catch, would cruise back and forth in front of the others to let them see how laden down in the water they were, ostensibly looking for more fish; what could one say about the Ph.D.'s who behaved the same way about their books and articles? I felt that their knowledge had not developed their persons, that the secret of higher man did not lie in their sophistication.

I wondered if I hadn't gone down the road of philosophy as far as one could go. While it had debunked my Christianity and provided some genuine insights, it had not yet answered the big questions. Moreover, I felt that this was somehow connected I didn't know whether as cause or effect to the fact that our intellectual tradition no longer seemed to seriously comprehend itself. What were any of us, whether philosophers, fishermen, garbagemen, or kings, except bit players in a drama we did not understand, diligently playing out our roles until our replacements were sent, and we gave our last performance? But could one legitimately hope for more than this?

I read "Kojves Introduction to the Reading of Hegel", in which he explained that for Hegel, philosophy did not culminate in the system, but rather in the Wise Man, someone able to answer any possible question on the ethical implications of human actions. This made me consider our own plight in the twentieth century, which could no longer answer a single ethical question. It was thus as if this century's unparalleled mastery of concrete things had somehow ended by making us things. I contrasted this with Hegel's concept of the concrete in his "Phenomenology of Mind". An example of the abstract, in his terms, was the limitary physical reality of the book now held in your hands, while the concrete was its interconnection with the larger realities it presupposed, the modes of production that determined the kind of ink and paper in it, the aesthetic standards that dictated its color and design, the systems of marketing and distribution that had carried it to the reader, the historical circumstances that had brought about the readers literacy and taste; the cultural events that had mediated its style and usage; in short, the bigger picture in which it was articulated and had its being.

For Hegel, the movement of philosophical investigation always led from the abstract to the concrete, to the more real. He was therefore able to say that philosophy necessarily led to theology, whose object was the ultimately real, the Deity. This seemed to me to point up an irreducible lack in our century. I began to wonder if, by materializing our culture and our past, we had not somehow abstracted ourselves from our wider humanity, from our true nature in relation to a higher reality.

At this juncture, I read a number of works on Islam, among them the books of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who believed that many of the problems of western man, especially those of the environment, were from his having left the divine wisdom of revealed religion, which taught him his true place as a creature of God in the natural world and to understand and respect it. Without it, he burned up and consumed nature with ever more effective technological styles of commercial exploitation that ruined his world from without while leaving him increasingly empty within, because he did not know why he existed or to what end he should act.

I reflected that this might be true as far as it went, but it begged the question as to the truth of revealed religion. Everything on the face of the earth, all moral and religious systems, were on the same plane, unless one could gain certainty that one of them was from a higher source, the sole guarantee of the objectivity, the whole force, of moral law. Otherwise, one man's opinion was as good as another's, and we remained in an undifferentiated sea of conflicting individual interests, in which no valid objection could be raised to the strong eating the weak.

I read other books on Islam, and came across some passages translated by W. Montgomery Watt from "That Which Delivers from Error" by the theologian and mystic Ghazali, who, after a mid-life crisis of questioning and doubt, realized that beyond the light of prophetic revelation there is no other light on the face of the earth from which illumination may be received, the very point to which my philosophical inquiries had led. Here was, in Hegel's terms, the Wise Man, in the person of a divinely inspired messenger who alone had the authority to answer questions of good and evil.

I also read A.J. Arberrys translation "The Koran Interpreted", and I recalled my early wish for a sacred book. Even in translation, the superiority of the Muslim scripture over the Bible was evident in every line, as if the reality of divine revelation, dimly heard of all my life, had now been placed before my eyes. In its exalted style, its power, its inexorable finality, its uncanny way of anticipating the arguments of the atheistic heart in advance and answering them; it was a clear exposition of God as God and man as man, the revelation of the awe-inspiring Divine Unity being the identical revelation of social and economic justice among men.

I began to learn Arabic at Chicago, and after studying the grammar for a year with a fair degree of success, decided to take a leave of absence to try to advance in the language in a year of private study in Cairo. Too, a desire for new horizons drew me, and after a third season of fishing, I went to the Middle East.

In Egypt, I found something I believe brings many to Islam, namely, the mark of pure monotheism upon its followers, which struck me as more profound than anything I had previously encountered. I met many Muslims in Egypt, good and bad, but all influenced by the teachings of their Book to a greater extent than I had ever seen elsewhere. It has been some fifteen years since then, and I cannot remember them all, or even most of them, but perhaps the ones I can recall will serve to illustrate the impressions made.

One was a man on the side of the Nile near the Miqyas Gardens, where I used to walk. I came upon him praying on a piece of cardboard, facing across the water. I started to pass in front of him, but suddenly checked myself and walked around behind, not wanting to disturb him. As I watched a moment before going my way, I beheld a man absorbed in his relation to God, oblivious to my presence, much less my opinions about him or his religion. To my mind, there was something magnificently detached about this, altogether strange for someone coming from the West, where praying in public was virtually the only thing that remained obscene.

Another was a young boy from secondary school who greeted me near Khan al-Khalili, and because I spoke some Arabic and he spoke some English and wanted to tell me about Islam, he walked with me several miles across town to Giza, explaining as much as he could. When we parted, I think he said a prayer that I might become Muslim.

Another was a Yemeni friend living in Cairo who brought me a copy of the Koran at my request to help me learn Arabic. I did not have a table beside the chair where I used to sit and read in my hotel room, and it was my custom to stack the books on the floor. When I set the Koran by the others there, he silently stooped and picked it up, out of respect for it. This impressed me because I knew he was not religious, but here was the effect of Islam upon him.

Another was a woman I met while walking beside a bicycle on an unpaved road on the opposite side of the Nile from Luxor. I was dusty, and somewhat shabbily clothed, and she was an old woman dressed in black from head to toe who walked up, and without a word or glance at me, pressed a coin into my hand so suddenly that in my surprise I dropped it. By the time I picked it up, she had hurried away. Because she thought I was poor, even if obviously non-Muslim, she gave me some money without any expectation for it except what was between her and her God. This act made me think a lot about Islam, because nothing seemed to have motivated her but that.

Many other things passed through my mind during the months I stayed in Egypt to learn Arabic. I found myself thinking that a man must have some sort of religion, and I was more impressed by the effect of Islam on the lives of Muslims, a certain nobility of purpose and largesse of soul, than I had ever been by any other religions or even atheisms effect on its followers. The Muslims seemed to have more than we did.

Christianity had its good points to be sure, but they seemed mixed with confusions, and I found myself more and more inclined to look to Islam for their fullest and most perfect expression. The first question we had memorized from our early catechism had been Why were you created? to which the correct answer was "to know, love, and serve God". When I reflected on those around me, I realized that Islam seemed to furnish the most comprehensive and understandable way to practice this on a daily basis.

As for the inglorious political fortunes of the Muslims today, I did not feel these to be a reproach against Islam, or to relegate it to an inferior position in a natural order of world ideologies, but rather saw them as a low phase in a larger cycle of history. Foreign hegemony over Muslim lands had been witnessed before in the thorough going destruction of Islamic civilization in the thirteenth century by the Mongol horde, who razed cities and built pyramids of human heads from the steppes of Central Asia to the Muslim heartlands, after which the fullness of destiny brought forth the Ottoman Empire to raise the Word of Allah and make it a vibrant political reality that endured for centuries. It was now, I reflected, merely the turn of contemporary Muslims to strive for a new historic crystallization of Islam, something one might well aspire to share in.

When a friend in Cairo one day asked me, Why don't you become a Muslim?, I found that God had created within me a desire to belong to this religion, which so enriches its followers, from the simplest hearts to the most magisterial intellects. It is not through an act of the mind or will that anyone becomes a Muslim, but rather through the mercy of God, and this, in the final analysis, was what brought me to Islam in Cairo in 1977.

Is it not time that the hearts of those who believe should be humbled to the Remembrance of God and the Truth which He has sent down, and that they should not be as those to whom the Book was given aforetime, and the term seemed over long to them, so that their hearts have become hard, and many of them are ungodly? Know that God revives the earth after it was dead. We have indeed made clear for you the signs, that haply you will understand. (Koran 57:16-17)

©Nuh Ha Mim Keller

Shaykh Articles on Islam by Nuh Ha Mim Keller

Only registered users can see links on this forum! Register or Login on forum!

Interview with Sheikh Hamza Yusuf by Nuh Ha Mim Keller


As-salaamu Alaikum.
Walaikumu Salaam.

Jazak-Allah Khair for taking time out of your busy schedule to spend some of it with us. You returned from the Hajj recently, and you?ve been previously haven?t you.

Right.

What was different this time around as opposed to other times - or is each time different in itself?

I think the Hajj tends to reflect the state of the Ummah. That?s one of the things about the Hajj is that you get to see the Ummah. It?s a microcosm of the Ummahs condition. And I think what you see on Hajj is that the Ummah is not in good condition. What you see is that there is good in the Ummah, but the state, the overall state is not a got state and I think that?s very reflective in the Hajj. One of the things that is very obvious is that there is, in a sense, a loss of what?s called "Ithar", which is deference to others. One of the essential characteristics of the Muslims is this idea of deference and adab and if you lose adab in the Haram, you certainly won?t have adab in the place where you?re coming from. And so what happens is that you have people who forget partly where they are. Some of the outwardly manifestations of that are a lot of people smoking, publicly, in the Haram, a lot of intermingling between men and women in ways that are inappropriate.

Also a total lack of concern for the cleanliness of the place - garbage is everywhere. I mean, already garbage as a phenomenon, it?s a modern phenomenon. Humans have always produced waste products, but consumer waste products are very different from classical waste products that were by and large, biodegradable - things that would go back to the earth. And here you?re dealing with a lot of plastics and thing that are not...they?re ugly. And there?s just a lot of garbage, and what I?ve think that is indicative of, the fact that the Muslims throw things around, is that there is an assumption that somebody else is going to pick it up. And so really what that?s telling us is that nobody is taking personal responsibility, and I think that is by and large a real crisis in the Muslim Ummah as a whole, that people, individual Muslims are not taking personal responsibility for the condition of the Ummah, they?re expecting that somebody else is going to take care of the problems, somebody else is going to take care of our troubles, and this has led to a type of apathy, and so I think that?s all reflective in the behaviour. At the throwing at the stones, I mean that?s.... I mean, the people that I went with, we all threw our stones without harming anybody, without any pushing and shoving, and we went in and out. But we did it because we were consciously doing that, where as there?s a lot of people there that, there just don?t care about other people, they?re pushing people to get their...to get in and do what they have to do, and they harm other people doing it. You can see this also around the Black Stone, you see it around the Tawwaf, and the trouble is is that by honouring other Muslims, Allah honours you, and by disparaging other Muslims, you only in the end, Allah says "Ya Ayohan nas, Inna Baghiakum a la Anfusikum" - O mankind, your harm of other people is only against ourselves. And so by harming other people, what we?re really doing is harming ourselves, and I think that?s what?s happening in the Muslim Ummah, and that?s why we have this type of oppression in the Muslim Ummah towards one another, which manifests in the corruption within government organisations, the corruption within the private sector.



So are you saying that during the time you?ve been going back to the Hajj, things have gotten worse - you?ve perceived deterioration or improvement?

No, I don?t think so - I don?t think that... I don?t want to paint a completely bleak... but one has to be realistic as well. For me personally, despite all of that, there are extraordinary things that take place, and it is still.... I mean the real task of every pilgrim is to, inspite of all these overwhelming circumstances, to experience the Hajj as a spiritual journey. I mean, that is a task. Something that probably earlier, in earlier time, it was easier. Now there?s a struggle.



Why do you think Muslims have lost their tradition of mutual love and courtesy amongst each other, why do you think there has been that decline?

Because there is a breakdown in the whole concept of what an ?Ummah? is, I mean this is the idea of Divide and Conquer. It?s taken some time to achieve, but there has been a breakdown in nationalities, there?s now artificially created nationalities and borders that divide us, and those nationalities and borders have taken a life of their own, and so what happens is that people begin to view themselves as Egyptians, as Algerians etc. and not as Muslims, not as one Ummah and Allah says that "you are one Ummah and I am your Lord". You have one Lord, one Ummah and one Prophet. We have in our Ummah all of the ingredients that no other communities have, not even the homogeneity of countries, don?t have the ingredients of unity outside of there countries. In other words, the Japanese, they do have a type of solidarity based on their Japaneseness, but outside of that, outside of a bloodlink, as a people and a language link, they don?t have anything to unite them. Whereas with the Muslims, we have within our tradition all of the ingredients to unite the most diverse people and it?s extraordinary, there?s nothing else similar to it at all in history or in the world right now.

What America would like to do is they would like to unite the world based on shared, quote - unquote, values, because I don?t like that word, based on these shared values of consumerism, gratuitous consumption, of pleasure and the world is created basically for play and entertainment and as a pastime, and music and dancing and basically bestial lower self behaviour and this is what they?re spreading all over the world. So everybody will look the same, in their jeans and their Nikes shoes, and everybody will listen to the same sugared pop music, and everybody will eat the same hamburger, French fries and milkshakes and everybody will have the same banal perspectives on the world. So this type of unity which is based on reducing the human being to an automaton, who has no volition of its own and who simply sleepwalks through life without any sense of identity, awareness or tradition. This is the unity they?re hoping to achieve with this idea of some kind of one world. Maybe with some new-age spirituality thrown in there because people do tend to have some spiritual needs, so we can throw in some new-age... it?s all one in any case, right? So take a little dabble from this religion and that religion, and we can all be Buddhists, and then you can just meditate, or something like that, or they?ll, I?m sure, be providing soon enough, Spiritual Television.



Have you read the book by James Redfield, it?s very appropriate to what you?re talking about, The Celestine Prophecy?

I actually have read that. I think that?s exactly what I?m talking about. It?s this kind of new-age religion that?s being promoted - which is Dajjalic in its nature because it?s looking at certain spiritual truths and it?s distorting them. Iblis is the mimicker, right, I mean Allah says that his throne is on water, so Iblis made his throne on water. Iblis is the great mimicker; he?s the mocker. And so the pseudo religion always will mimic true religion, and unfortunately when you don?t have people that have the ability to discern and distinguish between truth and falsehood, then they spend their life being misled and groping in darkness.



Do you think the intellectual decline in our Ummah can in any way be related to the decline in the Arabic language and its importance?

That?s a very strong element in the whole overall decline. Out of the several hundred languages in the world, there are only a handful of languages that are considered ?civilisational? and Arabic is certainly one of them.

Right now, the language of power and dominance, and of discourse at whatever level - whether commercial, philosophical or scientific - is English. And the power elite in the west are certainly capable of articulating in the English language. Whereas in the Arab world, you would be hard pressed to find people capable of articulating verbally - using the Arabic language as a vehicle for discussion and serious though - unless they had been well trained. More can actually write and part of that is because the Arabic language is so deeply rooted in classical Islamic Knowledge.

English has a worldview, and now you find in the Arab world, people who have English as their second language - usually their higher education will now be in English. Every language contains within it the roots of the worldview of the people that produced it - so by taking on the English language, one is taking on a western worldview, and you can?t avoid it. By abandoning the Arabic language what people are doing in fact is abandoning the worldview that the Qur?an provides. Also, the Muslims had a deep sense of the linguistic power and the actual underlying expression of reality embedded in the language. The language of the Qur?an is the language of truth, and therefore the one who learns it and is deeply into it will ultimately be confronted with reality through the expression of the Arabic language.



Why do you think so many pieces of good Islamic literature are being written by non-Muslims - e.g. George Makdisi?s ?Rise of Humanism in Classical Islam and the Christian World??

Partly because the west is the dominant power-elite, and the dominant powers always have intellectual apparati to maintain their power - part of the apparatus, what it will do is it will enable and facilitate research and facilitate intellectuals to explore/pursue ideas and thoughts ultimately for the benefit of the power elite. But what will come out of that often is that people who do have inherent brilliance are able to have the time and the freedom to think deeply about matters. This is the whole system of endowments in the west - if you look at most of these people who do these things, they?ll often have a paragraph of gratitude towards some fellowship that was given to them, which gave them 2 or 3 years to do the research they needed to do. What happened in the Muslim world is that because there is no power (the Muslim world has in fact become of secondary importance) most Muslim governments are in no way interested in pursuing intellectuals - in fact, quite the opposite. They want to prevent them from thinking, they don?t want them to think. The fact that the west does allow these intellectuals to pursue things is in no way indicative of some desire for truth.



That is a very important note.

Right. Sometimes, truth is a by-product of it, because in order for the to fulfil what they want to fulfil, they allow an ?expressive? control of their intellectuals - but because of the nature of the mechanism, it will in the end, only serve the power elite.



Someone remarked that "sitting before a teacher who passes you knowledge is like taking a photograph - in that by the light, the image of what is in front of you is implanted in your heart. This is education."

Please comment - why can?t we receive ?education? from reading books?

Part of it is the idea of transmission. Anybody who has studied with a teacher will know the answers to that question and anybody who hasn?t won?t. It?s the difference between hearing about something and experiencing it. Our tradition is a tradition of transmission. Our Prophet (saw) was taught by an Angel - that Angel was taught by Rabb -ul-Izza - the Lord of Power. And the Qur?an says, "over everyone who possesses knowledge is someone who has more knowledge". When Musa (as) was asked if there was anyone more knowledgeable on the earth than he was, he replied "No". But Allah then sent him to study with Al-Khizr, who the majority of scholars say wasn?t even a prophet, so here?s a prophet being sent to a non-prophet and it was a reminder to Musa (as) that one can never assume that there is not someone that they can learn from. Part of the modern crisis in the Muslim Ummah is we have auto-didactic scholars - the damage that they have caused is, I think, extraordinary, and one of the signs of the end of time is a Hadith in which the Prophet (saw) said knowledge would be taken from a "Saghir" which means "a little one". Ibn Abd-ul Barr, the great Andalusian commentator on Hadith, wrote that what this Hadith means is that the chain would be broken towards the end of time - people who had not taken their knowledge from the previous generation will begin to transmit knowledge, and that knowledge will be their own opinion and not transmitted knowledge and from the Muslim perspective, truth is not something that needs to be discovered - it?s something that needs to be learned. In the western understanding, truth is something that needs to be discovered, truth has not been given to man - it?s something that man needs to discover for himself. In the 20th Century, although that meta-narrative is disappearing, i.e. - the post-modern phenomenon is in a sense a capitulation to the idea that there is no truth - and if there is truth, it is not with a "T" but with a "t" - meaning, "your truth may not be my truth". What the post-modernist thesis is to say that, really what we have not is some grand narrative of the search of truth, but rather a meta-narratives or small narratives of the truth, that each one is as equally true as the other which is ultimately saying that nothing is true. Because one you say everything is true, what you?re really saying is nothing is true. If I say it?s wrong to kill and somebody says, well that statement has no meaning because what is "wrong"? - what?s your definition of wrong? And because wrong cannot be technically defined within the dominant discourse of the 20th century, therefore it has no meaning. Whereas, if I say it is wrong and wrong is that which Allah has made prohibited, I am laughed out of the auditorium because what I?m saying is that "truth has been revealed by God" - that is no longer an accepted premise for the modern social discourse. So we can?t talk of morality - all we can talk of is legislation, and legislation is what the latest vogue is - should we have the death penalty or shouldn?t we.... it becomes a debate, and there?s nothing in stone so to speak. Like "Thou shalt not kill". It becomes "should we kill or shouldn?t we? Well, let?s take a vote". Truth becomes a democratic process, and that is very alien to the Islamic tradition. So the idea that truth is something which is transmitted from generation to generation is no longer acceptable within the dominant social discourse. And for the Muslims that has been the truth because the Prophet (saw) said that this knowledge - i.e. the truth/revelation will be carried in each generation by upright people and transmitted to the following generation. So Muslims have always seen that knowledge is a transmission, from the breasts of those who know to the hearts of those who don?t know.



Many sisters wish to travel to Muslim countries to learn the Deen from those who know, but they are concerned about the issue of travelling without a Mahram.

First of all, living in the non-Muslim lands - it is accepted in Shariah that if a women makes hijrah from the land of the non-Muslim to the land of the Muslims, she doesn?t need a Mahram - that?s a well known principle in Islamic jurisprudence. The way I view it is I think that a woman is safer without a Mahram in the land of the Muslims than she is with a Mahram in the land of the non-Muslims.



To what extent can a female, married or unmarried, affiliate herself with a sheikh whilst keeping within the boundaries of the Shariah?

Women traditionally studied with teachers, it just has to be done with adab. There?s obviously more limitations on the female, the Qur?an says the male is not like the female. It?s obviously better and more preferred if a women learns from a female sheikh, and there used to be a considerable number of them in the Muslim Ummah. There isn?t anymore and it is even quite unusual now to find a male teacher who is of any high calibre, but to find a female is an anomaly in the Muslin world right now.



With regards to the Shariah, why do you think that the rules regulating trade/industry/ business transactions have almost been abandoned by the Muslims?

Because we?ve become subject completely to the dominant world order, which is a capitalistic, western world order and so international law is now western law, this is history, just read what happened in the 19th century with the abdication of Islamic Law and the usurpation of it place by western legal systems - with some amalgamations like the Anglo-Mohammadan law, where personal matters (e.g.; inheritance & marriage) were left to the scope of the Islamic Tradition, but those matters that related to business and commerce and penal codes became under the jurisdiction of western secular law.



In the Mu?watta of Imam Malik (ra), he places a lot of emphasis on the "Aml of Medina". What is the difference between this and Hadith?

Within Imam Maliks (ra) framework, he sees that Medina has a unique status that other cities do not have during the time of the Tabi?een, because what he says is the Tabi?een were people who lived with the Sahabah, there?s over 10,000 Sahabah buried in Baqia who died in Medina. He?s saying that this city was a city that had a special place in Islam that no other city had - even Mecca - because Medina is the city in which the Islamic legal system and the Islamic social order was fully implemented. For that reason, he in a sense is a inheritor of a social expression of the totality of the Islamic teaching and so his recording that in the Mu?watta is in a sense a recording of what he would consider a city in Submission, and for that reason he would say that if I find an isolated Hadith, not Muttawatir (a Hadith that has several transmissions), with one or two chains from the Sahabah and I find 1000 of the people of knowledge from the Tabi?een in Medina doing something, Imam Malik is saying that their actions override the solitary transmission of that Hadith - i.e., the fact that they?re not following that Hadith and that they were people who lived in the presence of the Sahabah, and that practice would?ve been done in the presence of the Sahabah, among whom were men like Ibn Umar and Umar ibn al-Khattab and women like Aisha, that these people knew better what was the final Islamic decision on the matter. Imam Malik for that reason would consider the action of the people of Medina - when he says that, he rally doesn?t mean everybody, he means the people of knowledge in the city, and the city was filled with people of knowledge. Imam Malik felt that the action was a Hadith, only it had achieved the status of Muttawatir because of its agreement in the city of Medina - even if he did not have an actual verbal transmission of that matter - e.g., there?s a sound Hadith that the Prophet (saw) told people not to fast on Friday, but in the Mu?watta, Imam Malik new that Hadith and said "I found the people of knowledge in this city fasting". - they considered it to be a virtuous day to fast. His point was that they were doing that action in the presence of the Sahabah, and none of the Sahabah said you can?t fast on Friday. Therefore, Imam Malik is saying that the fact that they transmitted this as a virtuous day to fast, and it was not rejected because of that Hadith, he considered isolated transmissions of the Hadith to be weaker than the transmission of Aml, of action.

It?s a difference of opinion, but it is an accepted principle in Usul. Imam Shaffie and Imam Abu Hanifah don?t agree with it, nor does Ahmad, but they do agree the Aml of Medina is higher with regards to certain things e.g.. Measurements.



Have you written/published any works?

I?m in the process of doing so - I?m working on a few things. I?ve published a few articles and things.



There are Muslims who say that we should not attach the word "Syedinna" to the Prophet (saw). Is there such a thing as loving our Prophet (saw) too much?

The Prophet (saw) said in a sound Hadith "I?m the Syed of the children of Adam", so he is our Syed whether people like it or not. Allah (swt) praises Yahya in the Qur?an by calling him "Syedinna Wa Hasoora", that he was a Syed in the Qur?an and our Prophet (saw) is certainly greater than Yahya. Syed means master in the Arabic language, and he is our master.

You should not say Syedinna in the Fard prayer when you do the Tahiyya - there is an opinion that you should, but it is a weak opinion. But when we speak of the Prophet (saw), we should call him the Messenger of Allah, the Prophet of Allah or we should call him Syedinna. We should not say Muhammad without putting some honorific title before his name. One of the things that Qadi Iyad points out in the Shifah is that Allah (swt) always in the Qur?an calls his prophets by honorific titles, e.g.. Ya Ayohal Muzamill, Yasin and so on. It?s part of the adab of the Muslims.

With regards to loving the Prophet (saw) too much, it really has no meaning. He is the means through which we have come to know Allah. The Hadith says whoever has not thanked people has not thanked Allah, this is why massive respect is owned to the parents, because they were the means through which you were given life. Even though it?s Allah (swt) who gave you life, Allah has command that you honour your parents in a way that no one else has been given that high status in the Qur?an - after Allah and his Messenger (saw), high status is given to parents in terms of obedience, so after obeying Allah and his Messenger (which is obeying Allah), the next highest thing the parents.

The Prophet (saw) said none of you truly believe until I am more beloved to you than your own self, and so if you love the Messenger of Allah (saw) less than you lov