BismillahirRahmanirRahim

Destur

Medet

InshaAllah in writing this down I won’t be trivializing what it is that I feel and have experienced.  At some level that’s necessary, because what I feel is much deeper than just some words on a internet article.  Its deeper than any artistic expression that I know how to use.  This is a part of me, and if I could be put on paper or canvas or soundwaves then that would make this much easier.  But my feelings can’t, my fears can’t, my hopes and dreams can’t, my ego can’t.   Or I don’t know how, if its possible.

It is draining.  It’s so tiring looking into peoples eyes.  Hearing there “Oh’s” and “Ah’s”.  Not knowing how to react to my strange words and strange appearances.

Do they hear me or do they hear some confused reflection of what it is I am trying to communicate?  They are not understanding, or worse yet, thinking they understand.  How can they understand when, really, I have not fully understood.  But I have a glimmer, and that is what I can try to share.

I’m standing in the middle of a foreign country.  It is about midnight, the streets are so tight that it is hard to fathom any American car getting through its twists and turns.  I’ve knocked and knocked.  The doors are locked, I am stuck.  It is starting to get cold.  I try another door, to the side.  Someone has got to know what to do.  No one answers.  I try for half an hour around various approaches.  The hotel itself is locked, its no use.  Small places like this don’t have 24 hour service.   I stand on something to get a better view, how can I get back inside?

A door opens.  A man comes out, he’s holding a sword.  No, really.  He is holding a sword.  He is screaming in a tongue I have no way to understand, but his heart and face are screaming something I understand clearly.  Kill.  This is a man who wants to kill me.  He screams and approaches me.  The women are standing by the door.  They are in tears, begging for him to stop.  He thinks hes protecting them.  He clearly has no end to his fury.  He runs at me, but I don’t move.  My hands are extended, “I’m just trying to get in the hotel!”  He comes at me screaming louder and louder.  The sword is in the air.  I’m going to die.

I am in the middle of nowhere and I am going to die.  I wonder a few things…

What goes through your mind when facing death or danger?  Everyone faces it differently I suppose.  I faced it in a few different ways.  This wasn’t the first time I was exposed to it.  The first time, I didn’t really care.  I thought I was doing something good, and so I did it.  Did I really face the possibility of sacrificing my life?  Not really, I was young and thought I would live forever.  This is when I pulled a man out of a burning building.  I still remember the firemen screaming “Get back! get out!” as they turned up right when we had already done the hard part.  It was satisfying to kick the door down.  But I was really young and stupid, I had no idea what I went through and I didn’t have the presence of self or mind to take an accounting of it.

The second time, I began to know it as a reality.  I understood the danger much more, I think.  But I didn’t care any further.  If I did care at some level, at the levels that expressed themselves I didn’t.  If I was going to die, I just thought so-be-it.  I’d wake up and I couldn’t move, and when I found out at any point that it could be my heart that didn’t move, that my every night sleep could easily be my last, then what could I do?   I gave in to the numbness that I felt in my legs and arms, that same numbness was in my heart.  Every night I died in some way, or some part of me died when I couldn’t move in the morning.  Hypokalemic periodic paralysis.  I thought this was how I was going to go.  So I lived my life, enjoyed what I could take.  That was it.  It was again, a carefree abandon, there was little or no thought paid to life, after-life, etc.

And here I was again. Sword-man coming at me.

Ostensibly I had found faith, but here was a man ready to kill me and I didn’t view it as a test and I didn’t prepare myself.  I could have talked endlessly about zikr in one’s final breaths when constructing a formal argument for loud zikr to a Wahabi,  but I didn’t do it myself when I needed to.  I wondered, briefly, what my blood would feel like in my hands, will it feel like that goat I recently slaughtered,  would I die so easily, so peacefully, like him?  But most of all, I worried about my families future, the house, the payments.  How it would all come to pass…

I worried about provision.  Of the 54 Fardh in Islam, I lost out on number six, and trust me I didn’t make it through one to five with flying colors either.  And the absolute icing on the cake about all of this was, that I didn’t even realize it.  That’s right, do you think I had any idea at that time what had happened?

The reality was shown to me in weeks later. I’ve survived, and I am telling my story as a casual tale to entertain.  That’s the only way I know how to deal with it.  I make people laugh and enjoy it, at least they will get something good out of it.

But it wasn’t until I was with my Shaykh, Shaykh Abdul Kerim Effendi, that he pointed out my flaw directly to me,  I had failed that test. I had demonstratively lost my faith, and that too, at the worst possible time.    I lost myself between self-preservation and worry for the future.  I lost my faith in those few moments, or I at least demonstrated how weak it was.   I demonstrated that I don’t even know how to die.  I demonstrated that even if I knew the exterior, I didn’t practice it and I didn’t know what that meant on the inside.

I was being shown, incident after incident with danger and death, “wake up to yourself!” and I was so deaf that I had no idea that it was even being said.  Call them signs, call them tests, call them what-you-will, but I now call them failures of heedlessness.

These experiences in life, for me, have been extreme.  I’ve had so many much more subtle ones as well, and so have many people.  But the reality is I wouldn’t have realized my own lesson, even in these extreme cases, without a guide.  I may be a particularly dense person, but most people don’t often see their own mistakes.  We tend to view our actions distorted through our own lenses of happenstance and heedlessness.

We don’t consider our daily lives on the level of faith, and only after instruction did I realize that I was about to die without any real faith.

My faith had never been tested, or rather, it had been constantly tested but I was completely unaware that I was even being examined.

The fundamental aspect of religious teaching is: We are all going to die, so die with faith.  Everything stems from this. My vast realms of fake ‘Islamic knowledge’ had proven to be completely useless, for when the moment came, the little high they brought of ‘Islamic pride’ was forgotten.  The classes and seminars didn’t help (and I had attended countless numbers).  Even talking about high spirituality with poems or achieving Marifat or Haqiqat or Shariat, humility or patience, these were irrelevant discussions sent to occupy my mind from the reality of my own mortality.

I learned that laissez-faire Islam, seminars, or even articles on ‘Sufi Ways’ can never teach you anything about correcting your own self, day in and day out.  Such things can’t put us on the path that is required to fix ourselves, and we are so incredibly flawed.   They may help with the flaws you recognize, perhaps.  But what of the flaws you don’t recognize?  The flaws you only expose to those with whom you are in constant companionship, living day in and day out?  Or those flaws that arise when you let your guard down.  I’m speaking of those hidden areas of your personality that you don’t even know yourself. That is where my need for Sohbet (association) arises, and my need for community, and my intimate need for a guide.

These are my must-have tools on my journey to death.

It’s about time I wake up to myself… the man with the sword let me live. This gives me another opportunity to die before I die.