13. Shades of Mercy

The imam recited Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim, words that soared melodically throughout the mosque, projected by his hypnotically beautiful voice. I remembered how these words, In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful had once freed me from captivity at Wardak. I remembered Qari’s beautiful voice reciting this verse two years earlier and his calligraphy of the verse on that small piece of paper in my pocket; this verse had acted almost like a key, opening the door to mercy, when read by my captor.

It was 1991 and I was in Konya, Turkey, at the mosque next to Rumi’s tomb. I said those same words as I began the brief ceremony that my dervish friends had come to witness: my formal conversion to Islam. Sitting peacefully in the mosque that day, I thought of how I had finally come to realize it was time for me to take this step. Some months earlier, when meeting with Jamaluddin Rahmatullah for the last time in northern Afghanistan, he said to me, “Sikandar, you have a powerful wine, but in what cup will you hold it, so as not to spill it on the ground?”

By wine he meant a capacity for mystical experience, the receptivity to God’s grace. This capacity is inherent in all human beings but only manifests in those who make this quest their primary goal in life and whose efforts are accepted by God. The Sufis use earthly wine as an apt symbol for the mystical experience in which the mind is freed from the intellect’s domination and from emotional and physical attachments. This wine of spirit is imbibed to such a degree that there results an abiding awareness of God. The Sufis quote God when making use of this metaphor, since in the Qur’an it is written that, “Their Lord pours for them [in the paradisal state] a pure wine.”

Jamaluddin was asking me to finish the job I had started, the work of sorting through my ambivalence about religion. He knew that I had, in my heart, accepted Islam as my faith but that I just hadn’t committed myself formally to its practice. He knew from all I had told him that I could not find my way back into Christian practice, even though I still felt the deepest respect for the Christian faith.  Nor did I think that Jesus had abandoned me, for he occasionally appeared in visions while I was deep in meditation, bestowing light and mercy upon my heart that suffused my entire being.

The last few years of my studies in mysticism had led me to more seriously consider the purpose of religious practice. What I found from my studies was that mysticism does not negate the value of ritual and worship. On the contrary, I discovered that mystical awareness affirms the meaning of all symbolism, including that of ritualistic worship.

I was surprised by the fundamental change in my thinking, after several years of immersing myself in meditation. Sufi meditative practice opened memories going back into childhood. Meditation also allowed me to explore the more ambiguous shades of meaning that welled up from my unconscious, meanings that I had either ignored or put aside as too trivial to consider. Because of meditative practice, I had a far richer mental life. When I would think about things, new associations would arise in my mind, making it easier for me to understand an idea in a broader context. I finally understood why I had not been able to deny the significance of religious ritual, even though my intellect had been dismissive of it as an outer display of worship. My rational mind had insisted for years that outer forms of worship were not important, that only the inner contemplation of the Divine mattered. Something else within me, some visionary capacity, could not quite accept my intellect’s determination, but I had not been able to resolve this problem up to this point because I had not possessed the tools to do so.

After my training in Sufi practice, when I thought about worship, seemingly unrelated images would come to mind. These were often images and memories from my childhood in Tahiti. One of the memories I retrieved was an image of my mother, one of the finest dancers of the slow Hawaiian dance style, teaching this form of hula to her Tahitian students at our home in Punaauia. The hula that my mother had mastered was not at all like the degraded, touristic version of this traditional dance. She moved slowly and harmoniously, swaying gracefully while her hands told a story in the most charming manner imaginable. I saw Beauty’s energy moving through her in pulses emanating from her heart, flowing through her swaying arms into her expressive hands and leaving her gently in the gestures of her fingers. It was clear to me as I watched her dance that she was a different person while dancing, she somehow represented something else, something much greater than herself. As I retrieved these childhood images, what I had unconsciously absorbed started to become clear to me. I had identified my mother, when she danced this way, with the astonishing beauty of Tahiti’s natural environment. When she danced, she was a part of, even at the center of, this revelation of nature’s beauty, at least from my childhood perspective.

This type of slow traditional Hawaiian dance was in fact intended to be a form of storytelling. I had gained this insight—that this expressive dance was storytelling at a most profound level. From this insight, I understood that, in fact, all of Nature was telling the divine story. I realized that human beings also participated in this storytelling at different levels and degrees, according to their natures, through their actions, and through their physical expressions in this world.

This insight naturally led me to consider the body and its role for self-expression in the world. The range of this expression can vary hugely even in the same person, like a book that can be used for anything, from a doorstop to a textual source of mental liberation. I thought of how inescapably we are subject to sensory perceptions. We do, after all, arrive as beings within our bodies into a world that is another body, a greater body made up of many things. But since we are beings with minds and imaginations, we can infer meanings from the bodies of the world as we interact with them. For the mystics, whether Neoplatonists or Sufis, this is not an accident. All bodies are deemed symbols within form, representations of realities originating in a more abstract realm and clothing themselves in the forms of this world. This is why it is thought that these very forms can guide us back spiritually to our origins in the abstract, the eternal realm.

The sun can evoke for the visionary mind a compelling awareness of  ultimate Truth. Trees represent life and are also symbols of shelter and nourishment. Their demeanor suggests worship and a reaching into the sublime realms beyond our own. Mountains embody majesty and serenity. I considered how it was largely culture and our immediate social environment that teach us how to see nature and our own presence within it, as either a sacred or trivial experience or somewhere in between. Native Americans and Polynesians easily make use of nature’s imagery in their cultures’ visionary symbolism.

It was largely because of these insights that arose from visionary experience, which I had integrated into my thinking about religion over these last few years, that I became certain about converting to Islam. I accepted the claim that the Qur’an is a revelation from God through his messenger Muhammad. Visionary experience had cut through the cynicism of my modern, Western, rational approach to life such that I was now able to apprehend the world’s intricate and limitless events as storytelling. I saw the storyteller as Existence Itself, telling the whole cosmos about the infinity of meanings it holds within Itself. Infinity is showing its signs, its indications everywhere. Existence is always describing Itself, in infinite degrees of clarity and ambiguity. I understood that this is what the Qur’an is trying to teach us. Nor was I just twisting the religion of Islam to conform to some strange personal vision. The Qur’an is where I found guidance for this view of existence. There are many places in the Qur’an that refer to the cosmos as an unfolding symbolism of True Reality; in one of the most famous verses God says, “We will show them Our signs on the horizons [the cosmos at large] and within themselves [or their souls], until it shines forth for them that this is the Truth [or that He is the Real].”

 I no longer expected that a book like the Qur’an should be limited by the rational or the logical. On the contrary, I understood that it had to be comprehensive in its presentation to be able to appeal to the visionary as well as the rational capacities of people. I saw the Qur’an as a record of visionary revelation that I needed to comprehend.

I was also ready to accept the devotional practices of Islam. I remembered how, when first watching Muslims pray, I was struck with a sense of wonder at their devotional movements. The serene movements in the worshippers’ posture—their standing, bowing, and fully prostrating themselves before the prayer niche facing Mecca—immediately evoked in me a vision of spiritual surrender. What I saw in the beauty of their worship was not unlike what I had seen in my mother’s expressive dancing. Their prayer was more austere than my mother’s dance, yet I saw in both a relationship between the human body and its expression of the sacred. I saw that the body can, symbolically and through gesture, express the spiritual beauty that abides within.

I found support for this insight in the extra-Qur’anic scripture of hadith, “Truly Allah is beautiful, and He loves Beauty.” [Inna Allaha jamilu yuhibu-l jamal]. Just as God in the Qur’an describes Himself as Light, as Living, and as possessing many other definable qualities, He also describes Himself as Beautiful. And always, in every chapter of the Qur’an many times over, He describes His nature as fundamentally Merciful.

I had come to the mosque next to Rumi’s tomb to surrender to Islam, the Islam of Mercy. From my study of the Qur’an, this is what I understood Islam requires. This is also what I understood from searching my own conscience and from sorting out the wide range of claims about this faith made by the different Muslims I had met during my years in Asia. The Qur’an is, after all, the ultimate authority on any question about Islam. It unequivocally states that Muslims must accept God as the one and only reality, accept the Qur’an as the ultimate guide in religion, and cultivate the mercy of an open heart toward the world.

It was on this basis that I began to assess the people claiming to represent Islam. My criterion was straightforward enough: Did a particular Islamic message advocate the mercy that God attributes to Himself and demands of human beings?

Most of the Arab and Afghan Islamists that I had encountered in Afghanistan behaved in a manner that I found very saddening. What they had in common was a lack of mercy when dealing with anyone outside their creed. Because of this, they caused great suffering wherever they gained power. They seemed utterly unable to accept any ideas—other than their own view—about what it means to be a Muslim. They ruled through oppressive dictates that were sustained by the threat of imprisonment or death. A tragic example of the result of this practice can be seen in the rejection by the Wahabi sect of other Islamic schools in Saudi Arabia in the early nineteenth century. Muslims who did not accept the Wahabi view were designated heretics who could, legally, be imprisoned and killed. It was Wahabi money that had, in the 1980s, funded the spread of these narrow Islamist views in Afghanistan. Not infrequently, I was exposed to the overwhelming grief of relatives of those killed for refusing to share the view of these fanatics or as punishment for some ordinary human foible.

I was dismayed by the many narrow and mean-spirited interpretations of scripture that I encountered, even in the sermons given at some American mosques. My own study of the Qur’an had led me to reject the literalist interpretations of these zealots. Their frequent reference to scenarios of hellfire punishment were already familiar to me from my Christian upbringing. It struck me that religious zealots, whether Muslim or Christian, are actually engaged in an emotionally-driven commerce of self-importance. They establish in their own minds a dichotomy of “us” versus “them” in which the “others” will burn in hell for not following the zealots’ religious viewpoint. They profit emotionally from this feeling that they are better than other people. The zealots of any religion will point to scriptural references to justify their claims, all the while trading in self-satisfaction. Although it is true that there are many verses in the Qur’an that threaten severe punishments for various sins, those verses are presented alongside the Qur’an’s fundamental message of love and mercy. In the Qur’an, it is clear that it is God and not man who decides whom to point out as a sinner and whom to punish.

I was finally ready to make the biggest commitment of my life, that of identifying myself as a Muslim. What I found daunting about this decision was a sense of responsibility about fully embracing this new faith. I was ready, I came forward to speak.

I recited the testimony of the faith: La illaha illa Allah, Muhammad ar-Rasul Allah “There is no god but Allah. Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.”

My friends and I said prayers together and went from the mosque to Rumi’s tomb. I made a supplication to God at the tomb, asking Him to always guide me away from error and narrow-mindedness. I walked up to a poem hanging on the wall nearby, one that I read at each visit to the tomb. It is a poem by the Sufi, Abu Sa’id Abu Khair, which reveals the open-heartedness of the Sufis.

Come, come! whatever it is that you are, come!
Whether infidel, Magian, or idol worshipper, come!
Our court is not a place of despair, so even if
you’ve broken your vows a hundred times, come!

I still had to sort out how, specifically, I was going to apply the teachings of Islam in my modern, Western life. Not only were the verses of the Qur’an written in another time and culture, but interpretations of the Qur’an, just like interpretations of Jewish and Christian scripture, varied considerably from one community to another.

What is absolute and beyond temporal considerations is the Qur’an’s teaching on God’s nature, and the primordial intimacy that exists between God and human beings. The Qur’an warns the believer about the joy or suffering brought upon oneself through fidelity, or the lack of it, to this primordial nature within us. Moreover, many stories in the Qur’an provide guidance to enliven the intimacy with God, an intimacy that can be found in our own natures. Rekindling this intimacy is the central purpose of worship.

I accepted the Islamic doctrine that human beings are easily drawn away from their primordial nature as a consequence of life’s many diverting experiences. It is life’s appetites and sorrows, the Qur’an claims, which cloud this nature with overlays of attachment, resentment, fear, and boredom. I personally found the Qur’an’s call to a passionate worship of God more appealing and useful than the paths of detachment advocated by some of the other Eastern religions I had studied. The Islamic prayer really did seem to suit me. By performing the prayers regularly every day I learned the liturgy of many Qur’anic verses in Arabic. I had already kept the month-long fast of Ramadan as a test on a couple of occasions and was aware of the benefits of that practice. I was now also obligated, as a Muslim, to the duty of giving charity, a practice that had always made sense to me as a means of enriching the community at large. Thus I had accepted the first four pillars of Islam—the testimony of the Islamic faith, prayer, fasting, and charity. I had yet to fulfill the fifth pillar, the pilgrimage to Mecca.

I came to understand that the Qur’an is a multi-leveled revelation that extends in subject matter from the most mundane to the most sacred. The Qur’an is intended both for all times and all cultures, yet in certain respects it seems to be restricted to the culture of the time and place of the Prophet Muhammad. I began to distinguish between the eternal message of the Qur’an, in which the voice of Divinity defines absolute relationships and essential meanings that never change, and ephemeral social and temporal relationships that do change and vary.

As one example of the latter, there are a number of verses about slaves. These verses advocate, on the one hand, the freeing of slaves for the expiation of sins, and on the other hand, the permissibility of men having sexual relations with their slaves, including the mention of recently captured women. There are also metaphorical lessons in these verses. Nevertheless, one must leave metaphorical interpretation aside to consider the outward application of these verses to a pressing social question in Muhammad’s lifetime. This was the regulation of the preexisting practice of slavery in Arabia. These particular verses have no real bearing on a modern life. One should not, just because these verses exist in the Qur’an, assume that slavery is somehow justified, I thought. Rather, one should consider that the Prophet found Arabia the way it was in the sixth century, and some of the revelations that came to him were about very specific social issues that needed some modification. There are clear indications, in the case of slavery, that the revelations were intended to improve the lot of slaves and to encourage Muslims to treat them well and to free them. I could easily see in this example that I should not be trying to imitate the life or culture of that time, but to think about the principles of ethics and morality being addressed by temporal equations in the Qur’an such as this one.

Another example of temporality in the Qur’an is found in verses which seek to protect the privacy of Muhammad by asking the believers not to disturb him. Although these verses can be applied metaphorically, they were specific to the time and place of the Prophet Muhammad. Many Muslims that I knew held that every word in the Qur’an was to be taken literally and applied unquestioningly to one’s life. It was clear to me from the passages quoted and others that I could not treat every Qur’anic verse in the same manner. I really had to think about the purpose and application of the particular scripture in question. It took several readings of the Qur’an and a good deal of thinking about this for me to be able to discern what was truly relevant to my situation.

The Qur’an was to become an intimate friend. Somehow, when I would open it at random, I would find the precise guidance that I needed in the moment. It became a guide for assessing my visionary experiences as well as my many failings. The Qur’an is God’s voice speaking directly to me about His love as well as His sorrow over how far I had wandered from my primordial awareness. With the deepening of study and meditation, my visionary experiences became more intense. Their impact was deep, lasting, and helpful to my spiritual development.

I am lying on my back on a hard surface as I come to. I try to move but I feel that my hands and feet are bound. In the dim light I look around as much as I can move my head. There are people standing and talking near me. The men are dressed in some kind of ancient clothing, resembling Afghan attire but more Arabian looking. I see, looking down, that I am lying on a black stone slab, about as high as an altar. I ask the man closest to me where I am but he does not answer, he only looks at me. Then he looks up. I too look up and see a massive obelisk suspended in space above me. It is also of black stone. It is bigger than an automobile and somewhat round and amorphous but with a wedge shape at the end facing me. The sharp end of the wedge is only about three feet above me. I see that it is razor sharp. Now I understand. I am tied here and what is about to occur is “a sacrifice,” my sacrifice. I am not terrified. I am resigned, calm. The obelisk starts to lower directly above my heart. As it touches my chest, I feel immense pressure. It is unbearable as the blade cracks my ribs then cuts through my ribcage. The obelisk continues to lower into my heart. There is a sharp pain at first, but it vanishes as I surrender. Suddenly my mind is traveling outward very fast, expanding beyond the scene of the sacrifice, beyond the mountains. I am ecstatic beyond measure. I am, but I am no longer, myself. I am now permeating the whole cosmos.

The word Islam has often been translated as “submission.” The root meaning of the word Islam actually refers to the ideas of peace and surrender. It had certainly taken me years to surrender to my attraction to this religion and to the idea and practice of surrendering. In some ways, it was just as well that I had delayed becoming a Muslim for so long because I had matured in the meantime. Mystical experience, the direct awareness of God, enhanced my understanding of Islam, while the Qur’an became a primary source for my studies in mysticism. At the most profound level, I found this conversion to be an internal surrender, a mental letting go of trying to do anything but turn toward the Divine. It is here that I found the peace of Islam.

In the months that followed my formal conversion to Islam, I remained in California. I tried organizing a return to the north of Afghanistan to help with food distribution, but was unable to wrench myself from the fundraising I was expected to do to keep our small foundation floating. Things never did get resolved with the UNHCR over the rug project, though at least they dropped their claims about how we would spend the revolving fund. I had no interest, in any event, in returning to Pakistan. I had seen how truly ineffective those cross-border operations had been.

In the United States, hundreds of rugs remained in inventory, many of them unmarketable, flawed in some small way or another. I met with leaders of the various Afghan mosques in the Bay Area to discuss donating these rugs to them. This proved to be the right solution for this problem. Many mosques are used for other activities, such as teaching. Everyone I contacted wanted to take advantage of the offer to make their mosques more comfortable. Over a period of months, we gave away a huge share of these difficult rugs.

I decided, after learning of the deaths of a number of my Afghan friends and associates in northern Afghanistan, that I would not go back to set up an office there until things settled down. I stayed in correspondence with some, but made a new plan to work locally in California with refugees. Our foundation would focus now on the traditional arts of Afghanistan.

I had devoted years of my life to working in Afghanistan but it was time to move on. I was deeply affected by what I experienced there; I am, now, a different person. I felt a positive change in myself thanks to my companionship with many great Afghan individuals, shining lights in a troubled world. What I gained from those associations is beyond telling. I perceive this difference clearly in my person. Within me there is calm and acceptance of what is so. Externally, I have learned to express myself with directness. I will perhaps always carry some sadness because of the suffering I witnessed. My exposure to the pain of war has not worn away my faults. Yet it has expanded my joy and appreciation of life.

My search has enriched me. And of all the wealth that I have been granted, none is more dear than the hidden garden of Sufism, a fragrant garden of great beauty.

Afterword >>