THE WAY OF MUHAMMAD

THE WAY OF MUHAMMAD

Shaykh Abdalqadir As-Sufi

Madinah Press
© Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi
First published: 1975 Diwan Press
This (revised) edition: Rabi al-Awwal 1423/June 2002

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This Book is dedicated to the Masters of the
Habibiyya-Shadhiliyya Tariqa.
Acknowledgements

My thanks are due to:

Aisha Abdarrahman at-Tarjumana Bewley whose

translations of ‘Ibn ‘Arabi and Moulay al‘Arabi
ad-Darqawi are used throughout.
Dr. Fritjof Capra for permission to quote him.
Hajj Abdalaziz Redpath, Hajj Abdalhaqq Bewley
and Aisha Bewley for their assistance in drawing
up the charts and structuring the material relevant
to them.
My wife, Hajja Zulaikha, and Hajja Rabea Redpath
for their assistance in preparing the manuscript.
 Contents

Preface …………………………………… xi
Affirmation ……………………………… 15
The Science of the Self …………………… 35
The Science of the Sunna ………………… 79
The Science of States …………………… 111
The Science of Qur’an ………………… 143
The Science of Bewilderment …………… 177
The Science of the Moment ……………… 203
The Charts: Introduction ………………… 227
The Charts ……………………………… 231
 ISNAD

In the Name of Allah the Merciful the Compassionate

Sayyiduna
Muhammad
blessings and peace of Allah be upon him
Sayyiduna ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib

Sayyidi al-Hasan ibn ‘Ali Sayyidi al-Hasan al-Basri

Sayyidi Abu Muhammad Jabir In the Name of Allah, Sayyidi Habib al-‘Ajami
Sayyidi Sa‘id al-Ghazwani the Merciful, Sayyidi Da‘ud at-Ta‘i
Sayyidi Fathu’s-Su‘ud Sayyidi Ma‘ruf al-Karkhi
Sayyidi Sa‘d
the Compassionate. Sayyidi as-Sari as-Saqati
Sayyidi Sa‘id Al-Imam al-Junayd
Sayyidi Ahmad al-Marwani Say: Sayyidi ash-Shibli
Sayyidi Ibrahim al-Basri ‘He is Allah, One. Sayyidi at-Tartusi
Sayyidi Zaynu’d-Din al-Qazwini Allah, as-Samad. Sayyidi Abu’l-Hasan al-Hukkari
Sayyidi Muhammad Shamsu’d-Din He has not begotten, Sayyidi Abu Sa‘id al-Mubarak
Sayyidi Muhammad Taju’d-Din Mawlana ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani
nor was he begotten,
Sayyidi Nuru’d-Din Abu’l-Hasan ‘Ali Sayyidi Abu Madyan al-Ghawth
Sayyidi Fakhru’d-Din and no-one is like Him.’ Sayyidi Muhammad Salih
Sayyidi Tuqayyu’d-Din Sayyidi Muhammad ibn Harazim
Sayyidi ‘Abd ar-Rahman al-‘Attar

Sayyidi ‘Abdu’s-Salam ibn Mashish

Sayyidi Abu’l-Hasan ash-Shadhili
Sayyidi Abu’l-Abbas al-Mursi
Sayyidi Ahmad ibn ‘Ata’Illah
The Chain of Teachers Sayyidi Da‘ud al-Bakhili
of the Shadhiliyya Sayyidi Muhammad Wafa
– Darqawiyya – Sayyidi ‘Ali Wafa
Sayyidi Yahya al-Qadiri
Habibiyya – ‘Alawiyya Sayyidi Ahmad al-Hadrami
Tariqa Sayyidi Ahmad az-Zarruq
Sayyidi Ibrahim al-Fahham
from their source, Sayyidi ‘Ali ad-Dawwar
may the blessings Sayyidi ‘Abda’r-Rahman al-Majdhub
and peace of Allah Sayyidi Yusuf al-Fasi
Sayyidi ‘Abdu’r-Rahman al-Fasi
be upon him, Sayyidi Muhammad ibn ‘Abdillah
up to the present day. Sayyidi Qasim al-Khassasi
Sayyidi Ahmad ibn ‘Abdillah
Sayyidi al-‘Arabi ibn ‘Abdillah
Sayyidi ‘Ali al-Jamal
Mawlay al-‘Arabi ibn Ahmad ad-Darqawi

Sayyidi Abu Ya‘za al-Muhaji And there came from Sayyidi Ahmad al-Badawi
Sayyidi Muhammad the farthest part of Sayyidi Muhammad al-‘Arabi
ibn ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Basha the city a man running. Sayyidi al-‘Arabi al-Hawwari
Sayyidi Muhammad ibn Qudur He said, ‘O my people, Sayyidi Muhammad ibn ‘Ali
Sayyidi ibn al-Habib al-Buzidi Sayyidi Muhammad ibn al-Habib
follow those who
Mawlana Ahmad ibn Mustafa al-‘Alawi
Sayyidi Muhammad al-Fayturi Hamuda have been sent.’

Sayyidi ‘Abd al-Qadir as-Sufi ad-Darqawi al-Murabit

 “If you engage upon travel you will arrive -
and may Allah, praise be to Him, guide you and us!”

(The Makkan Revelations)

– Shaykh al-Akbar
 Preface

Preface

IT WAS WITH a certain reluctance that I agreed to a new edition

of this early work of mine, and this only after some minor editing
to remove errors which I can now perceive. The original intention
of the work was to show that it was possible to grasp the meaning
of Islam in terms of the European existential tradition. Indeed,
it is of course the culmination of it. Ironically, the effect of the
book was not in the main to open Europeans to Islam, but to
restore to those who had gone out of the Deen, especially Arabs,
a sense of respect and discovery in relation to Islam. The book
is simply a meditation of the five pillars of Islam as viewed by
someone who has taken them on and is savouring their meanings.
However, now with a lifetime of Islam to contemplate I would
want to express the whole matter differently without denying
the basic personal truths I tried to indicate in this text. Today
the enemies of Islam all explain that the danger of it is that it
is not merely a metaphysical construct but is something that
affects the whole of life. Yet, after a quarter of millennium of
western occupation of Muslim lands, first in colonialism and
then by the ethos of technology it can be shown that, tragically,
we have abandoned Deen in its totality.

— xi —
The Way of Muhammad

The irresistible magnetic power of Islam which is now about

to spread its rays over all the world lies in its Shari’at. Properly
speaking the Messenger, blessings and peace of Allah be upon
him, abolished the state as the model of societal order. This does
not mean he established either anarchy or some kind of mystic
individualism, like Buddhism. Where the state was based on
canon law and the imposition of order by force, empowered by
taxation, the new order established in Madinah was altogether
different. The Islamic community is itself a freely chosen social
contract of believers who agree to live within its parameters. The
proper translation of Shari’at is a road.
The two dimensions of the Shahada confirm worship as
belonging to Allah and obedience being due to His Messenger.
The next two pillars, Salat and Zakat, in this sense could also
be placed beside the double-Shahada. The worship of Allah and
the paying of the only permitted tax, Zakat, go together just as
the first and second Shahada do. It is in between these two pillars
that Islam sheds light on the nature of governance.
Since worship must be according to what we have been
ordered, it is not possible to proceed in ‘Ibada beyond a certain
point without previously having appointed an Amir. It is precisely
at the point of Ramadan that governance becomes inescapable
to order the sighting of the moon, to start the fast and to order
the collecting of Zakat, which is not charity but something, in
effect, taken by power. Thus the collection and distribution of
Zakat imply the existence of the Amir. It is because Allah in his
glory has shown to us the means of transacting socially and
avoiding corruption that Islam is called Deen al-Fitr. It is the
transaction of original nature, that is, before corrupted by cultural
excess. Allah has permitted trade and forbidden usury. Zakat for
this reason cannot be paid in paper money for it in itself is
forbidden, being a promissory note, and in the majority of cases
one against which no material goods can be matched. The

— xii —
 Preface

Messenger, peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, said: ‘The

miser withholds from others the wealth that is due them.’
Therefore banking is revealed as an unthinkable institution both
materially by its usurious nature and morally by its perversion
of people’s evaluation of life.
This touches the nub of the question of the self and what we
now call character. The identity is not formed in a psychological
non-spatial zone, but rather it is the pattern and web created
by the whole series of transactions which form a social nexus.
It is in the exchange of goods, in the holding and the distribution
of wealth, in the giving up and the taking on of possessions that
the self emerges. Therefore, the path to an integrated human
identity can only be established on obedience to the commands
of Allah and His Messenger. When he left Makkah, the city of
his encounter with Allah, glory be to him, to establish the Islamic
community, he renamed the neighbouring city of Yathrib,
Madinah. Its meaning quite simply is ‘the place of the Deen’.
When he settled there he established two institutions - the
mosque and the market. The mosque and market were identical
inasmuch as it was not permitted to establish your corner or part
of it for your use. With the foundation of Madinah was
established the inevitable abolition of capitalist and socialist
society. The inability to create monopoly and the impossibility
of an elite to separate themselves, in worship from the people
had been assured. Not only papal Rome, but later the Holy
Roman Empire and later the European Union of the Treaty of
Rome, and equally the Soviet Presidium, the English Parliament,
and the American Senate, in the light of Islam were revealed to
be tyrannies, the basis of which was not its regal army, but its
fiscal subjugation of the masses.
The imperial phase of bankism, which sweetly gives itself a
political title, ‘constitutional democracy’, while still dominating
the world in a manner more ruthless than any ancient warlord

— xiii —
The Way of Muhammad

now clearly exposes the truth that systems control does not work,
that the abolition of trade and its reduction to mere distribution
does not work, that the denial of genuine autonomy of peoples
at a local level does not work.
It is for these reasons that the modern man must dig deep
into himself to see if, after the almost complete conditioning
to which he has been submitted, he is able to act at all. The result
of a secular liberal education is something akin, socially, to the
general paralysis of the insane. However, there are still those who
will not accept the role allotted them by the oligarchy of banking
– to be helpless and happy members of the faceless consumer
mob. After all the progress, after all the modernity, public arenas
of modern life are inescapably identical to that of the Roman
Coliseum and Aztec Temple.
The response of the free-acting people of this age will be to
obey the order of Allah, glory be to Him, in Qur’an: “Enter Islam
in its totality.” (2.206 ). It can also be translated: “Enter Islam all
together.”

— xiv —
 Affirmation

Affirmation

THERE IS ONLY one method by which you can approach the sufic
sciences and that is to start, tabula rasa, by putting away the
whole world-picture and value structure which has formed you
until now and which is completely the result of your social and
historical imprinting which you share with millions of others,
whatever particular individuality you may imagine you have over
and against those millions of others. You have an idea of how
things are, and how you are, how things should be and how you
should be. Interposed between you and reality is a functioning,
fluctuating conceptualisation of existence that, mingled with
your personal emotional responses to event and personality, make
up what you think is both ‘you’ and ‘your world’.
Any idea of ‘god’ as an explanation of existence or an arena
for your life-experience has to be set aside. ‘Religion’ (from the
Latin – to bind together) as explanation or arena is equally false.
Indeed, to mistake the name for the thing named, the category
for the indicated, is to make tasawwuf impossible of access. Non-
realities that have now crystallised in people’s imagination as
having some kind of dynamic actuality like history or class or
individuality have to be set aside.

— 15 —
The Way of Muhammad

The subject of tasawwuf – Sufism – is you.

The subject of tasawwuf is reality.
Let us start from the beginning.
One.
The whole matter begins and ends with an affirmation
of One.
But – it will be said – I am another, there is ‘two’, ‘three’,
‘multiplicity’. John is not Arthur, nor Margaret, Anne. Precisely.
It is because of the experiential multiplicity that the science of
Unity exists. This implies, therefore, that as you are, you are not
grasping the true nature of existence. It is like a perpetual fever,
a constant hallucination. Things are multiple, alien and solid.
There is not even continuity, yet we persist in it. I am the same
one who was here yesterday after a night of dreamless sleep –
at least everyone in today’s ‘dream’ confirms this. Otherwise I
would be mad. Idiotiki, in Greek, means private. My reality is
affirmed socially, so I exist. Unless they are in my dream. Yet
when I dream, the objects seem insubstantial, awake they are
solid and therefore ‘real’. Real means solid. Yet I have physicists
in my ‘reality’ who now tell me that solidity has no reality for
them. The object is slipping away from me yet again, and forms
are being proved out of existence and I am left holding onto a
‘mental reality’ in a vanishing world of forms which they tell
me is merely dynamic space. The information about my ‘real
world’ has become very odd and contradictory – at times even
ironic. The person this world has appointed to assuage my inner
anxiety, I observe, is in a worse state than I am. It is to this subject
that tasawwuf addresses itself.
Thus:
If you desire to know reality you must know yourself.
You are the key, the only key to reality.
You are nothing but a mirror of reality.
It is enough to reflect.

— 16 —
 Affirmation

But, your anxiety – about what is on the horizon, and in

yourself – stops you from calm and clear reflection. You desire
urgent tranquillising information saying ‘it is all proved,
everything is really all right, you exist.’ Information has for the
moment been set aside.
Let us, however, examine a possibility.
The possibility is that there is someone to trust about the
very urgent matter of what life is about. Since we are not to be
trusted, it must be some very remarkable sort of person. What
would be the qualifications of a man to trust in this matter? There
would be only one thing that would make him an ‘expert’ and
that is that he knew how to live his life, utterly fulfilled, in radiant
and expansive serenity that left space around him for his
community and space within him for his own inner peace. Just
as in the legend of Kurosawa’s ‘Rashomon’, we are in a dilemma.
In that story a woman has been raped and killed. Each witness
tells what happened, but each one has given a version of the event
from their own subjectivity. Each story is in the end a
contradiction of the one before it. The lover, the bandit, the wife
– each has been trapped in a private fantasy that insists on
interpreting existence in a way that allows for their ‘self-respect’
to continue. Finally, a simple woodcutter who is ‘outside’ the
event, with nothing to gain or lose, tells what really happened.
But by now the man who sought the truth dares no longer believe
anyone, for he has ample evidence that people want their own
version of events. When the woodcutter sees the man’s dilemma,
and what it has done to him – he no longer believes in existence
as a dynamic functioning reality, it has proved to be a fragmented,
subjective, ever-changing lie – the woodcutter breaks down and
weeps. Humanly it is all he can do. Open himself completely
to the man, surrender any idea of separateness, interest,
dissembling – just give up, unresistant to that moment and its
simple truth: his story. Then the man knows that he too has to
give in, he has to shed his doubt and his distrust and even his

— 17 —
The Way of Muhammad

own experience. Somehow life cannot have any continuity again

unless there is affirmation of this encounter and its reality. And
the two men weep. The moment has been tasted.
This is essentially the starting point of the science of
tasawwuf. It begins with surrendering any vain concept that you
can think or detector-feel your way out of the contradictions
and pains of lived existence – and the surrender, while actually
to the Shaykh, is in truth to the Messenger, the one who is sent
just for that, to tell you what reality is like, Muhammad, the
Messenger of reality.
The necessary qualifications for this acceptance are these same
simple and profound ones of his humanity and his deep sanity
and his disinterestedness.
No, I swear by what you see
and by what you do not see,
it is the speech of a noble Messenger,
it is not the speech of a poet
(little do you believe)
nor the speech of an occultist
(little do you remember). (Qur’an 69.38-42)
By the pen and what they inscribe,
thou art not, by the blessing of thy Lord,
a man possessed.
Certainly you will always be repaid.
Certainly you are on a vast self-form.
So you shall see and they shall see
which of you is the demented. (Qur’an 68.1-6)

Mu’adh ibn Jabal said, ‘The Messenger of Allah commanded

me saying, “Oh, Mu’adh, I command you to fear Allah, to report
truthfully, to fulfil the oath, to act loyally, to avoid wrong actions,
to care for the neighbour, to have mercy on the orphan, to be
soft spoken, to be generous in extending greetings, to do good
acts, to limit expectation, to cleave to the Way, to study the
Qur’an, to love the life beyond this world, to be anxious in regard

— 18 —
 Affirmation

to the Reckoning, to act humbly: I forbid you to abuse the

learned, to accuse an honest man of lying, to obey the man of
wrong actions, to disobey a just man, to put a land in disorder:
and I command you to fear Allah at every stone, tree, or village,
and that you show regret for every wrong action, secret or
public.”’
At this point there are clearly things that do not make sense:
fear Allah, to love the life beyond this world, to be anxious in
regard to the Reckoning, and to show regret for wrong action.
Surely we desire to be rid of fear – and not simply project
it into a god-concept and call it a name?
What lies beyond this world? So far we do not know.
What Reckoning? Surely this regret sounds like guilt?
It is at this point that we must beware of bringing with us the
whole value structure that we were prepared to jettison, and
applying it just at the point of pretended clarity and lack of pre-
conception. If the matter of tasawwuf is sin and repentance and
the whole guilt-mechanism that modern man has so sensibly been
determined to throw off then we are back to square one. We are
quite clear at this stage of our enquiry that the guilt/redemption
language of Christianity is a hopeless dialectic superimposed on
a neurosis and not dismantling it. Let it be, and let us therefore
lay aside these disturbing phrases to see what we make of the
rest of the injunctions. Apart from these subjective and seemingly
‘religious’ ones, all the others are social and benign. A man of these
qualities is certainly someone to be open to, someone to copy.
Let us look more closely at the picture of the man, Muhammad.
His name means the Praiseworthy.
Muhammad was forbearing, honest, just and chaste. His hand
never touched the hand of a woman over whom he did not have
rights, with whom he did not have sexual relations, or who was
not lawful for him to marry. He was the most generous of men.

— 19 —
The Way of Muhammad

Neither a dinar nor a dirham was left him in the evening. If

anything remained and there was no one to give it to, night
having fallen suddenly, he would not retire to his apartment until
he was able to give this excess to whoever needed it. He was never
asked for anything but that he gave it to the asker. He would
prefer the seeker to himself and his family, and so often his store
of grain for the year was used up before the end of the year. He
patched his sandals and clothing, did household chores, and ate
with his women-folk. He was shy and would not stare into
people’s faces. He answered the invitation of the slave and the
free-born, and he accepted presents even if they consisted merely
of a draught of milk or a rabbit’s leg, while because of hunger
he would at times tie two stones around his stomach.
He ate what was at hand, and did not refrain from any
permitted food. He did not eat reclining. He attended feasts,
visited the sick, attended funerals, and walked among his enemies
without a guard. He was the humblest of men, the most silent
without being insolent, and the most eloquent without being
lengthy. He was always joyful and never awed by the affairs of
this world. He rode a horse, a male camel, a mule, an ass, he
walked barefoot and bareheaded at different times.
He loved perfumes and disliked foul smells.
He sat and ate with the poor.
He tyrannised nobody and accepted the excuse of the one who
begged his pardon.
He joked but he only spoke the truth. He laughed but did
not burst out laughing. He did not eat better food or wear better
clothes than his servants.
The conduct of this perfect ruler was untaught. He could
neither read nor write, he grew up with shepherds in an ignorant
desert land, and was an orphan without father or mother. He
refused to curse his enemy saying, ‘I was sent to forgive not to
curse.’ When asked to wish evil on anyone he blessed them
instead.

— 20 —
 Affirmation

Anas ibn Malik, his servant, said: ‘He never said to me about
anything of which he disapproved, “Why did you do it?” Moreover
his wives would not rebuke me without his saying, “Let it be.
It was meant to happen.”’
If there was a bed he slept on it, if not he reclined on the earth.
He was always the first to extend a greeting. In a handshake he
was never the first to release his hand. He preferred his guest
over himself and would offer the cushion on which he reclined
until it was accepted. He called his companions by their kunya
(surnames) so as to show honour to them, and the children so
as to soften their hearts. One did not argue in his presence. He
only spoke the truth. He was the most smiling and laughing of
men in the presence of his companions, admiring what they said
and mingling with them. He never found fault with his food.
If he was pleased with it he ate it and if he disliked it he left it.
If he disliked it he did not make it hateful to someone else. He
did not eat very hot food, and he ate what was in front of him
on the plate, within his reach, eating with three fingers. He wiped
the dish clean with his fingers saying, ‘The last morsel is very
blessed'. He did not wash his hands until he had licked them
clean of food. He quaffed milk but sipped water.
Sayyedina ‘Ali, his closest Companion, said: ‘Of all men he
was the most generous, the most open hearted, the most truthful,
the most fulfilling of promise, the gentlest of temper, and the
noblest towards his family. Whoever saw him unexpectedly was
awed by him, and whoever was his intimate loved him.’
He himself said: ‘I am al-Qautham,’ meaning, ‘I am the
complete, perfect man.’
It is to this man that we address ourselves in the acquiring
of the knowledge of tasawwuf, the science of the self. In
submitting to the Shaykh we submit to the man who has himself
mastered these aspects of his behaviour that were not in accord

— 21 —
The Way of Muhammad

with his ‘vastness of self-form’ which is the Messenger’s. We are

making no mistakes and we are remaining within the zone of
existential recognition. The Messenger is not being worshipped,
deified, or made into a symbol. He is being accepted as a witness
of how-things-are, as being a completely open person in flowing
harmonic accord with existence so that he knows it inwardly and
outwardly. A man came to him who was over-awed by his
presence and became reverential towards him. He said to him,
‘Be at rest. I am not a king. I am only the son of a woman of
the Quraysh, who eats dried meat.’ His answer to his name was
‘At your service.’ The Shaykh is simply the man who has fully
surrendered his self-form and filled himself up with the clear
radiance of this perfect behaviour. The Messenger has said, ‘I
was sent to complete the noble qualities of character.’
It is essential that this starting point is established. We cannot
see clearly, we don’t know what is happening, we are looking for
a witness of the event of existence we may trust. Madmen, poets,
occultists we have by our reason rejected: the witness must be
disinterested, and he must manifest the highest social and human
qualities. It is not enough that he be some kind of a superior
being with superior powers, yogic control over the body and the
mind, what is essential is that he is completely at peace and that
with that peace he can function in the social setting that is man’s
ordinary quotidian reality. In the Messenger of Reality,
Muhammad, peace be upon him, we find a man with all these
qualities. He has left behind a book called the Qur’an, and as
yet we have not examined or satisfied ourselves as to the meaning
and validity of the book – for the moment we are persisting in
a more direct existential search for what we seek. We are staying
with the man. He has confirmed our own recognition that we
are in no way well enough to recognise reality but somehow we
must trust the validity of this affirmation of his serenity and
human-ness. He has said, ‘Man is asleep, and when he dies he
wakes up.’ This confirms our initial experience of being

— 22 —
 Affirmation

somnambulistic, unawake to the true taste of life, but it has in

it no consolation, and could be a mere Roman cynicism. However
there is another Tradition of his which tells us, ‘Die before you
die!’
This infers that there is a science of waking up, therefore, while
still in the world of bodies.
But the Messenger died fourteen hundred years ago, and the
book he left looks at first glance suspiciously like the others, and
we had got to a point where only a direct experience was going
to convince us. It is here that the essential teaching element of
tasawwuf declares itself.
Transmission:
Our concern is the alteration of the self, the conquest of the
self, the peace treaty with our rebel forces – and we have understood
that our self-form is oddly unresponsive to reason, and worse
than that, has a particularly dangerous quality of self-destruction.
Life can, in extremis, be an organised suicide or an endless
sleep-in.
Structured information then can only become the foil of this
self-destroying, self-deceiving entity – the self. The very knowledge
of what is wrong seems to betray our hopes for it, and instead
of releasing us it traps us and paralyses us more, and the very
awfulness of our self-hood which we think we see at last, brings
us grinding to a disastrous self-aware frozen halt. What then is
the method of the Messenger of Peace, or as he prefers to call
himself, the Messenger of Submission?
He simply is there and he asks people to follow him, keep
him company, and to do as he does. That is all, or seems all – but
in fact this is everything.
He has said that, ‘If a man lives with a people he becomes one
of them,’ and also, ‘A man follows the life-pattern of his friend,
so let each of you look to who he takes as a companion.’ We
already know in our barbaric state that if a man is locked up with
the insane he most probably will himself fragment in his self-

— 23 —
The Way of Muhammad

experience, and if he keeps the company of junkies he will sooner

or later succumb to their habit; more recognisably, a man becomes
a soldier on entering the army. He gets ‘beaten into shape’, the
self-form is restructured and solidified into something considered
manly, heroic and brutal. A man who keeps the company of
women, and avoids men’s company, even if he is sexually expressed
as a man, will take on a subtle feminising of self-form and
behaviour. Or to narrow the field of this phenomenon even more,
if you sit in a room with someone in a rage you will pick up from
that person the subtle form of their condition. You will either
become ‘defensive’ or you in turn will attack their anger. If you
sit with a depressive you will in turn be depressed or you will feel
obliged in some subtle manner to put up a resistance to their
swamping all-enveloping low-energy, you will have to become
either depressed or by contrast resistantly high. In other words,
there is a constant traffic in the energy-forms of the self, and they
do battle as much socially as they do inwardly. If the behaviour
is controlled from outside, at a certain point there will still come
an eruption from within when the outward situation allows it.
Now from the embattled position of the self as it is, we cannot
but be well aware that it is of its nature to continue the struggle,
to sabotage the end of hostilities, for it thrives on struggle and
seems to gain life by its own continued self-destruction. This
means that the self is going to be constantly seeking the very
company that will keep it constantly trapped in a cycle of pain.
If you desire to be punished you will not rest till you find the
executioner. You may work your way through a whole series in
the desperate desire to prove that you ‘want out of it’, but see
what a cruel fate has always provided you with a destructive
partner. In other words for the embattled self, the other is fairly
certain to turn out to be the enemy, and hell will, after all, seem
to be other people.
Returning now to our point of departure, we have agreed that,
knowing as we do that the self is in an endless loop of repeated

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 Affirmation

battles, we must be done with the game of suffering and rediscover

that deep basic sanity which we desire and which we cannot but
recognise in this perfectly balanced and radiant figure of
Muhammad, peace be upon him.
We wish to recover, if you like, our Muhammad-nature. And
the means is transmission.
It is enough to sit with someone for transmission to take
place. Instead of seeking again the partner of battle and further
pain, we now turn to the Shaykh, who is completely at peace,
utterly turned away from all the tremors within us and utterly
withholding of either approval or disapproval, the two drugs on
which our continued self-survival depends. ‘The shaykh is
contagious,’ said a follower of Shaykh al-Kamil. If you sit in the
sun you get sunburned, that is enough. For the moment we do
not know why, we have no science yet to indicate why and how
this should be so, for it certainly does not accord with the solid
mechanistic psychology we are with such difficulty trying to leave
behind, because it is a psychology based on the very dialectic that
traps us.
The Shaykh is simply the living exemplar – he is not a
Messenger, for the Message has been delivered – but you could
say that he is the Message. He is a Qur’an and a furq’an. He is
a gathering-together of forms, a unifier, and he is a separator, a
discriminator, one who makes choices and selects and rejects
without struggle.
The mind must be cleared of the whole superstitious, authority-
projection idea of the guru that is so prevalent in our society.
He is not, and this must be established, a super-guide, a powerful
figure, an authority. He is not going to tell you how to live your
life, what house to buy and what job to take, although he may
well know these things. He in no way takes on the burden of
your problems, precisely because from the point of view of his
deep sanity these problems do not exist. He is merely a mirror
in which you may, if you are patient enough, see yourself at last.

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The Way of Muhammad

He is an openness, and an emptiness. He is fully surrendered

to his creature-state, to advancing age, and to changing seasons,
and to the sameness of days. And for this reason he is utterly
turned away from us; he greets us and feeds us and counsels us,
but he is not caught up, there is no yes to our no, and no refusal
of our yes. In some exasperating or frightening way he does not
see us. We could kill him. He really does not care! So what then
is happening inside this man? From our sick point of view it
certainly seems to be a super-defence system that we can envy.
He is unassailable, we are vulnerable. He wins, we lose.
We still see things this way. So we decide to imitate him. We
go to the master swordsman to learn how to kill, and do not
realise that he is teaching us not to need it.
What does he do? What is the means to this omnipotent end?
It is, unsurprisingly, disconcerting. Firstly the Shaykh either does
not sleep at all or minimally, perhaps two or three hours at most.
Putting that aside as the fruit of years of hard work, we cannot
avoid recognising that this awakeness of which the Messenger of
Submission spoke was not some inner consciousness alone, but
consciousness itself.
The whole of his existence is spent in one thing – he is in
a constant state of awareness, of collectedness, or, if you like
recollectedness, for he is there, he does exist before our eyes and
he is recollecting back into himself the plenum. His reality is
that he is in constant and unceasing communication with reality
itself. He has subjugated the self, its struggle is over, and yet there
is still a someone there – a man who eats and sleeps a little, talks,
sits. Yet if his self-form exists it somehow takes in everything,
it excludes nothing, it is all-embracing. We treat him as a Master
and show the utmost respect to him, everyone bows before him
and he sees all this and he does not care. People denounce him
and criticise him and accuse him of fraudulence and he does not
care. He is a Master – yet at the same time he is that by the most
extreme token of opposites – he is a slave.

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 Affirmation

He is not our slave, or anyone’s slave, or any thing’s slave. He

is the slave of It, of this very reality we want to know and experience.
He has subjugated his ‘I’ and he has enthroned the ‘He’, what
the Arabs call the pronoun of absence. Constantly he addresses
reality, his reality, as ‘He’. He is a presence addressing an absence,
and yet we experience him inwardly as an absence expressing a
Presence. He is the perfection of slavery. He is bound, utterly
constrained, without choice, helpless, obedient. He does what
he has been commanded to do.
He bows and he prostrates before this Reality, he calls on its
name morning and night, he asks and he asks – but never for this
or that, never for forms. He asks for this no-thing, this effulgent
nothingness that has produced the myriad forms, he asks It for
It and gets whatever ‘It’ he supplicates for, so we always see him
satisfied and content. He may be ill and in pain, he may be
penniless, but he is content, he is well-pleased, for it seems that
this flow of ‘It’ never ceases through all these apparently negative
events. Stranger still we notice that despite poverty and illness
there is in fact a disconcerting and inexplicable flow of goods
and money in to this centre of submission, the Shaykh.
We observe also that everything that comes in to him, goes
out from him. He is merely a vortex of energy, and the money
is distributed and the people are fed and clothed, and he goes
on bowing and prostrating and praising this Reality with its
endless generosity and compassion and provision, so that we
cannot look at him without being reminded of It!
Again it is dangerous to interpose those old preconceptions
of an ethic that says we must struggle and work and compete
to be a healthy society, and we recall that the working, competing,
struggling society has spent itself in a quite terrible frenzy of
competition and struggle that has all but destroyed the bio-sphere
in which we work to live. For the moment let us enquire openly
into what this system of address is that the Shaykh employs and
what are its effects.

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The Way of Muhammad

The Shaykh calls himself Nur-i-Muhammad, the Light of

Muhammad, that is, he is a luminous form of that perfection
of man, he is the summit of what the human creature is in its
potentiality when fully realised.
The thing to be grasped is that the Shaykh is in dialogue with
Reality, he speaks to It and It speaks to him. This is again to be
accepted either as a fantasy or sanity. We recognise that he
functions socially in the world and that he does embody those
noble virtues or good qualities that so appealed to us and so
intrigued us when we discovered that a man could possess them
and live in the world. We also observe that his dialogue rarely
involves direct asking for a specific but is mainly about praising
the endless energy of the Reality and the generosity and
compassion and fullness of its nature – he is busy exalting Reality
and honouring it and even glorifying it. Along with this we note
that he seems constantly to be involved in a kind of fine tuning,
a honing away on this smooth surface of his inner reality of any
roughness or blemish. He is with each new day refining and
asking to be refined, he is polishing and asking to be polished.
So by this token he is utterly open to his own activity, he himself
is constantly under review, constantly being renewed, in this
dynamic communication he has with his own reality – the static
that seems to gather around the wave impulse that is his existence
is being cleared and stilled by this rhythmic act of renewal and
prostration. This is just like the Messenger of Submission,
Muhammad, peace be upon him, who when he undertook any
matter, entrusted it to the Reality, and renounced his own
strength and power and asked for guidance in these words: ‘Oh
Allah, show me the truth as truth, and I will follow it. Show me
what is denied as the denied and make me shun it. Protect me
in case the truth should become doubtful to me, and I then follow
my inclination without guidance from You. Make it be that my
inclination is in obedience to You, and may You be pleased with
my harmonising with You. Guide me correctly in regard to

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 Affirmation

whatever I am in doubt about as to its truth, although that doubt

is by your permission. Truly You guide whoever You want onto
the true Way.’
If this is read carefully, a quite astonishingly fine balance may
be observed in the way in which he addresses It as both other-
than-he, and at the same time recognises that his whole self-form
in its separateness is Its property. His doubt and the adjusting
of his doubt are from one source that is not the ‘I’ that asks.
The ‘I’ that asks is helpless.
The ‘You’ that is addressed is total.
With the man of Muhammad, peace be upon him, nothing
is outside the process. There is no observer, there is no spectator,
there is no alien creature in an alien world in an alien universe.
That would be fantasy – to imagine one was outside the process.
We are in the process, we are the process – if I was not here, I
would have nothing to worry about. It is this persistent lie of
self-hood that is the very matter of conflict and suffering. I look
out at the forms and get frightened and confused, I become
alienated. I try to make the setting of my exile benign. I choose
this mountain or the edge of that ocean because I like it and hope
that it will harmonise with my inner troubled self. I choose this
person and not that person because I feel between us there is
some commonality. But soon I become irritated with that person,
their sameness seems an empty mockery of my individuality and
I long for someone different, the mountain storm echoes my own
turbulence and I long for a landscape that is the opposite of my
inner imagined self. All this stems from my seeing myself as
outside the process and either hopelessly trying to fit myself in
and harmonise or trying not to be overwhelmed by the utterly
irreconcilable otherness of the creation and the creatures.
The man, Muhammad, affirms unity. He says One not two.
So he does not say it, but It says it through him and by him, so
that he says, ‘I am only a slave of the Reality, yet I am the Messenger

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The Way of Muhammad

of the Reality.’ In other words I merely tell you what the reality
is like. But it is not from me, for there is no me, there is only
a locus of communication. There is a radio-station on the
waveband but the air itself is nothing but oscillating signals, the
waveband and the signal are one reality. So his gathering together
of what is, his Qur’an, is not by him but by It and from It – and
we are forced to continue – the message is from It to It, for other
than It – outside It, in It, there is not anything. This is not
complicated.
Two things are being said at once.
If you say One you cannot say the other.
If you say both you approach a new way of understanding
existence.
The Message from It is this:
In the Name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate.
Say: He, Allah, is One,
Allah is endless time,
He did not bring anything into being
and nothing brought Him into being,
and no one form is like Him. (Qur'an: 112)

This is reality. This is what existence is like.

And it is named. It is named so that we may indicate what
cannot be given a name, it is the name of what is not this and
not that. Allah.
Allah – it is named with a personal name for a personal name
does not define, it merely indicates. John does not define John,
it merely indicates that he is there. Allah does not define Allah,
it is our indication that He is present although he is no-place.
There is no god. By the same token, there is no me to reject
god, for that would make me godlike – that is a power, positing
this and that.
Earth is a power but water sweeps over it and destroys it.
Water is a power but air turns it into vapour.

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 Affirmation

Air is a power but fire consumes it –

and Fire is a power but earth obliterates it.
And so on.
In the world of forms there is no god.
This is not absolutely over that. Allah is not, in this declaration
of the Messenger, presented as the ground of being or as the infra-
structure, nor is It presented as being identical with the totality
of forms.
What we are presented with is an uncompromising affirmation
of Unity. One reality, of which the forms are but appearances.
The forms are certainly taken seriously and there is a whole
science of how to be among forms, how to view them and treat
them, including your own. But in affirming the One reality the
forms are negated.
No god. Only Allah.
This is how the greatest Master Shaykh ‘Ibn ‘Arabi puts it:
We draw conclusions about Him through ourselves. We
do not describe Him with any quality but that we possess
that quality, with the exception of a special essential
autonomy. Since we know Him by ourselves and from
ourselves, we attribute to Him all that we attribute to
ourselves. For that reason, Divine communications came
down on the tongues of our interpreters, and so He
described Himself to us through ourselves. When we
witness, He witnesses Himself. We are doubtless numerous
as individuals and types, yet we are based on one reality
which unites us. So we certainly know that there are
distinctions between individuals. If there were not, there
would be no multiplicity in the One.
Likewise we are described in all aspects by what He
describes Himself. There must be a distinction and it is
none other than our need (iftiqar) of Him in existence.
Our existence depends on Him by our possibility. He

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The Way of Muhammad

is independent of that which makes us dependent on

Him. Because of this one can apply pre-endless-time and
no-time to Him which negates the firstness which suggests
the opening of existence from non-existence. Although
He is the First, firstness is not ascribed to Him, and for
this reason He is called the Last. Had His firstness been
the firstness of the existence of determination, it would
not be valid for Him to be the Last to the determined,
because there is no Last to the possible for possibilities
are endless. Rather, He is the Last because the whole affair
returns to Him after its attribution to us. So He is the
Last in the source-form of His firstness and the First in
the source-form of His lastness.
He goes on to say:
So the Universe is its own veil over itself and it cannot
perceive the Reality since it perceives itself. It is
continuously under a veil which is not removed since it
knows that it is distinct from its Creator by its need of
Him. It has no portion in the essential necessity which
belongs to the existence of Allah, so it can never perceive
Him. In this respect, Allah is always unknown by the
knowledge of direct tasting and witnessing because the
time-forms have no hold on that.
Already we seem flung up against an impossibly forbidding
barrier. It seems then that the Existent is an unknowable nothing,
yet bafflingly a fecund nothing out of which endlessly pour
myriad forms. And here is the Shaykh saying that we cannot know
Him by direct tasting, by direct seeing. What then is the point
of it – we were not seeking a closed system of perfect metaphysical
design, we started on the quest because we sought to let our hearts
experience the radiant peace of perfection.
The Shaykh al-Akbar also has said:

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 Affirmation

Some of us implied ignorance of the matter in their

knowledge and said – ‘The incapacity to achieve
perception is perception.’ Among us are those who know,
and who do not utter the like of this: and it is the highest
of words. Knowledge does not give him incapacity to
know as the first said, but rather, knowledge gives him
the silence which incapacity gives. This is the highest mark
of the one who has knowledge of Allah.
And so back we have come to our first perception of the
Shaykh who in his transmission of the Nur-i-Muhammad,
presents us with someone who is utterly helpless.
Sayyedina ‘Umar, the second Khalif of the Messenger, said:
‘Would that I were the dust upon the road.'
The Perfect Woman, the Messenger’s wife, A’isha, said:
‘Would that I were a leaf upon that tree.’
The Messenger called himself the Slave of Allah.
Shaykh ibn al-Habib, who used to sign himself the slave of
the slaves, says in his Diwan:
By slavery I mean being stripped of every power and
strength and capacity and even the act of getting things
for yourself.
Now this is such a completely alien idea that it fulfils our worst
suspicions about asceticism and fatalism and all the other labels
of our education, it all ends up with disease-ridden squalor and
beggars swarming idle in city gutters. The work ethic looms up
and struggle takes on its heroic aspect and the militant flags of
work and progress and social contract again surge through us
with the old adrenaline kick of dialectical rage. We have to be
patient and leave this utterly extraordinary point of view aside
for the moment, remembering that its confrontation is the whole
matter of what has been called the Hikmat, the Wisdom, the Way
from the beginning of man’s story.

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The Way of Muhammad

We have seen that the basis that sustains the whole Wisdom
method of the Perfected is the affirmation, the uncompromising
affirmation of Oneness. The Unity of existence is the key to the
whole set of sufic sciences. Unity of existence is therefore the
foundation of the Wisdom of the Wise, and their wisdom is in
turn the reality of their slave-hood before the splendour of the
Universal Reality.
The Messenger said, indicating the Way –
‘The life-transaction is behaviour.’
And it is this science of the self that we must first discover
on our journey. We will by the very nature of this unitive
approach, come right back to our starting point, Unity, or as
it is called in the technical language of Sufism, Tawhid.
In the meantime, as the Shaykh al-Akbar put it:
The Universe continues to be in the present tense.

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