"Wisdom, or the recognition of Love as the ultimate goal to be attained"
The beginning of wisdom starts with an inner questioning: what are our failings? What are our dysfunctions, in relation to what is central, spirituality, and its helpmeet, inextinguishable love?
The first thing is to recognise the unity of the human race, monogenism. “O you people, We have created you from a man and a woman, We have made you into peoples and tribes so that you may know one another. The noblest among you in the sight of God is the most pious” (Qur’an XLIX, 13). “Piety does not consist in turning your face towards the East or towards the West; true piety consists in helping the blind, the destitute, the orphan, the child of the road.”
Yet to speak of the unity of the human race is in no way to speak of uniformity. There is a willed diversity here, like a divine plan for mankind. For in His omnipotence and omniscience, God could have made of us a single community, but He did not do so; and this escapes neither His almighty power nor His wisdom.
We find an allusion to this in verse 48 of sura V: “Had God willed, He would have made of you a single community, but He willed to test you through the gift He has given you. Seek to outdo one another in good works. One day you will return to God, and then He will enlighten you concerning your differences.”
Our diversity, that of tongues, cultures, ethnic features and religions, is a divine plan. Yet it is both a trial and an immeasurable gift.
A harsh trial when one gives free rein to the hypertrophy of one’s ego, to arrogance. And in that case, unfortunately, this diversity is a source of conflicts.
Whereas when one exorcises fears and tames obsessions, when one makes of obstacles the place of mediation and encounter, this diversity becomes a source of immeasurable happiness.
In the manner of the Sufi who said: “Lord, dilate my heart so that it may welcome all Thy creatures, or else pulverise it, so that, atomised, each of them may receive a parcel of it”, there, beyond mere tolerance, which can betray a haughty and condescending attitude towards the tolerated, there is room for a demand of oblative, theocentric, incandescent love.
Two Qur’anic verses speak of this love: “Say to them: if you love God, follow me; He will love you and forgive you your faults”; “Assuredly God will raise up a people whom He will love and who will love Him”.
And Teilhard de Chardin said: “When we have exhausted the resources of the tides, of the wind, of the energy of all that surrounds us, there will still remain for us to draw upon the energy of love, and there we shall rediscover a fire that will set us all ablaze.”
Rabi’a al-’Adawiyya, encountered with a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other, said: “I am going to set Paradise on fire and put out the fire of Hell, so that men may come to worship their Lord for Himself alone.” And she composed her famous poem of the two loves: “I love Thee with two loves: a love truly worthy of Thee, and a love aimed at my own happiness; as for the love of passion, it is that I busy myself with naught but thinking of Thee; and as for the love truly worthy of Thee, it is that Thy veils fall and I see Thee. In neither the one nor the other is there any glory for me, but praise be to Thee, for this one and for that one.”
Ibn ’Arabi, the greatest master of all time for some, had said in echo: “My heart has become capable of all forms: it has become a convent for the monk, a meadow for the gazelle, a Kaaba for the pilgrim, a leaf of the Qur’an, a tablet of the Torah. I profess only the religion of Love; wherever its caravans may head, Love is my religion, my faith.”
This omnipresence of love must be the light that guides us, we who are embarked in this planetary vessel and who would wish in no case for the craft to be damaged. We want precisely that it reach safe harbour, a haven of peace whose substratum is justice. True justice must be followed by forgiveness and reconciliation. For there is nothing better than to cleanse one’s soul of infamous animosity, than to purify one’s heart of all rancour.
A mystic of the thirteenth century said: “I spent my life blackening the whiteness of pages so as to acquire knowledge, and I realised that I should also have purified the blackness of my heart.”
Like the heliotrope that follows the sun, the human soul is itself “theotropic”: it seeks God. It is sometimes overtaken by doubt, it does not want to drop the prey for the shadow, it does not want to flee the anxieties of the hour for a lure. There is first an enormous inner work, a veritable effervescence, and then divine grace, divine concurrence, does the rest, as al-Ghazali observed: “God cast into my breast a light that made me realise that…”
If there were to be a wisdom, a spirituality, an orientation for humanity at the beginning of this century, it would be, with much humility, much restraint, but also much presence and witness, to say that the human soul is neither debased nor perverted, that it proceeds from God and that there is a road to travel. What counts is to take the step. The greatest voyage begins with a single step.
Ghaleb Bencheikh
Extracts from a dialogue, during the Mediterranean Encounters on Sufism, between Ghaleb Bencheikh (physicist, specialist in islam, writer) and Faouzi Skali (anthropologist, writer, specialist in Sufism, director of the Fes Festival).
Ghaleb Bencheikh
Faouzi Skali
Further reading
- Rabi’a al-’Adawiyya, voice of divine love
- Love in Sufism
- Spirituality as a reminder of the essential
Further reading
- L'autorisation divine (idhn)The divine authorisation (idhn): transmission and degrees (1/2)
- L'autorisation divine (idhn)The divine authorisation (idhn): transmission and Qur'anic sources (2/2)
- The allusive science (ishara), by Kalabadhi
- The heart of the path: the spiritual guide and the transmission of the secret
