The worship of the wayfarer
Contents
“I created jinn and men only that they might worship Me” (Qur’an, surah 51, verse 56).
With this Qur’anic verse, enough of the litany of cerebral cogitations about the meaning of existence! Jinn and men, that is, the invisible and visible worlds, have, according to the Qur’an, no other finality than to worship God. A single finality, but what a finality! Royal, absolute, infinite: the meaning of existence would aim at nothing other than a plunge into the Ocean of divine Love.
Admittedly, for a Muslim, worship passes through the performance of a set of prescribed rites (prayer, fasting, and so on), called ’ibadat in Arabic, a term that can be rendered as “acts of worship”. But in Islam, an act is only as good as its intention. Intensity, sincerity, the orientation of the heart make up the very spirit of every utterance, of every human undertaking. The importance granted to intention is so great that it prevails over the carrying out of the acts, which belongs to God. One can imagine, then, the innumerable degrees of worship that an act, and no longer only a ritual one, can take on, as so many states of being, excellence residing in “worshipping God as if one saw Him”.
The primordial covenant
The Qur’an relates how Allah made all souls bear witness, while they were still in an immaterial state, in an extra-temporal sequence going back to the origins of Creation. Revealing Himself to them, He asked: “Am I not your Lord?” To which they all answered without exception: “Yes indeed, we bear witness to it!” And so was sealed what Muslims call “the primordial covenant” (mithaq), a covenant of love in which the heart of every man fell in love with the ineffable divine Beauty. Despite man’s forgetful nature, each of us keeps within an indelible and secret trace of that vision.
It is indeed a question of Knowledge here. Not of acquired knowledge, but of true Knowledge, that of the divine. The Knowledge that every being harbours in his heart, the one that is the ultimate aim of every spiritual quest, the one that requires inner paths to be taken.
For the wayfarer engaged on this path of return to the Essence, the veils of forgetfulness dissipate, so that the nostalgia for the contemplated Beauty can grow very intense. Islamic culture abounds in spiritual poems (Rabi’a al-’Adawiyya and Rumi offer us some of the best known) singing the pain of separation, the desperate quest and, sometimes, the beatitudes of union. The whole of Creation then becomes a vibrant appeal, a song of God’s love towards man. The Arabic term ayat (signs) can indeed designate revealed verses as well as the elements of nature on which man is called to meditate. And if Beauty or Majesty manifest themselves to the wayfarer through Creation, it is in echo to the primordial imprint of beauty and majesty that God deposited upon his heart.
The imprint of beauty
For the Sufis, Allah created the world out of Love: Love engenders Beauty which, in turn, engenders Love. The whole of creation is the manifestation of this perpetual movement whose origin is the divine Essence.
Though man is forgetful, the primordial imprint of Beauty cannot be erased. When, by an effect of divine grace, its memory resurfaces, the eternal amorous exchange is played out once more. The path then consists in immunising oneself against deceptive appearances and purifying the spiritual heart of the illnesses that limit its capacity to grasp the “hidden treasures” buried in Creation. And when he is annihilated in the contemplation of the Beloved’s infinite Beauty, man is then nothing more than a pure reflection of divine Love.
I cast my gaze about And I saw only You, O You whom I love! Without You love would be without flavour For the one who loves I lost my argument In Your love, And he who is thus relieved of it Enjoys intimate proximity. I tore the veils of reverential awe In an overflowing, And the suffering experienced in Your love Proved delicious There must be no complaint in love, not even in heartbreak, And shame on lovers Who take to whimpering When Your love puts them to the test! I was once overwhelmed By separation and distance. In the torpor of the solitary night, My sorrow knew no respite Then dawn appeared to my eyes In all its splendour, And here I am now plunged in the most universal unicity, O You, the Master of the worlds!
Nathalie Izza
