The Generous Koran
In the Radiant Name of Allah Who Embraces all in Compassion and Love
Dearest Companions in Allah’s Love
May your hearts be flooded with Divine peace and may you become healing vessels of peace in this time which needs so much healing.
Right now the ISIS group is committing atrocities against the human family and justifying their actions with the Koran. How can hearts not break on hearing this…damaging lives, violating what is sacred, and then saying that God approves this. And others who do not know better are led to believe that this is true, that the Koran must be guiding them to do this. The rebel himself can go on vacation because people are doing his job for him.
That the Koran can be invoked for such actions means either that the people have no idea what is in the Koran, that they are lying, or that the teachers of the Koran are no longer people of truth. Wisdom’s light cannot be tarnished and love will never be anything but love, yet people can be deceived. And now, a large number of people in both the East and the West, the majority of people on earth, are ignorant about the deeper levels of Koran. So, the book which was intended as a mercy for the worlds is used by some as an instrument of tyranny and by others is ignored. This is a great loss for humanity.
Shortly before the blessed Prophet of Mercy left this realm, he stated that he was leaving a treasure behind. This was the Koran, which is the totality of revelations he received over the course of 23 years from the Source of Mercy and Wisdom to share with humanity. The Koran is an ocean upon ocean of light, and it will remain as an inexhaustible reservoir of wisdom for humanity until the end of this creation. In the words of the mystic and Koranic interpreter Tustari,
“His Book is part of His knowledge. If a servant were given a thousand ways of understanding each letter of the Koran they would not reach the end of God’s knowledge within it. This is because it is His pre-eternal speech, and His speech is one of His attributes, and there is no end to any of His attributes, just as He has no end. All that can be comprehended of His speech is as much as He opens to the hearts of His friends.”
However, the Koran needs its chosen interpreters, such as Tustari and Qushayri and other great souls, may they all be embraced in Allah’s mercy. Otherwise one might see only one’s own reflection in the cosmic mirror of Koran and try to impose this upon others assuming that it is the absolute truth. Even the scholarly, literal translators of Koran reflect their own image back into their work. It cannot be avoided. So who can interpret Koran in the way that is closest to its own spirit? Who can represent it for others? These are the inheritors of the Prophet’s light, may he be showered in sublime peace, who appear in every generation, forming a stream of light transmitting heart to heart. They radiate the light of Muhammad and illumine other hearts, forming a prismatic community of light who are the friends of God on earth. Their hearts are true to the spirit of the Prophet, the truthful transmitter of Allah’s Words, and it is they who embody and convey the truth of the Koran and the Sunnah of the beloved of Allah for others. Through them the heart of the Koran and the Sunnah are preserved on earth.
Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi, rahmetullah aleyhi, is one of these great souls who interpreted Koran and Sunnah in his six books of the Mathnawi. The beauty and light of his interpretations have inspired and encouraged countless numbers of human beings to realize the truth. Similarly, the entire corpus of the great mystic saint of knowledge, Ibn al Arabi, rahmetullah aleyhi, is essentially interpretation of Koran and Hadith. For him, and others like him, the Koran is a living reality and he found even the smallest details of his life occurring in the Koran. When he once fell from his horse he lay on the ground a moment without moving and when his companions asked him why he didn’t get up he replied that he was searching where this event was mystically encoded in Koran. He said that he found it in the Fatiha.
In our own time, Shaykh Nur, may his soul be blessed, became intensely inspired by the Koran upon meeting Muzaffer Effendi, who himself was a great lover and interpreter of Koran. Effendi had mystically received the Koran from the blessed hands of the Prophet Muhammad though a dream in which the Prophet reached out from his tomb of light to give Effendi the Book. I was sitting next to Nur in New York City when Effendi recounted his dream, and upon hearing it I saw tears springing from Nur’s eyes.
In Nur’s own rendering of Koran years later:
“Certain souls enjoy most intimate acquaintance with the Eternal Koran before they descend into time, and when these persons hear even one line of the present Arabic Koran, they fall to the earth in ecstatic recognition, proclaiming: ‘These very words are the Resonance and Radiance of Allah…’” (Heart of Koran p. 109).
After years of contemplation and refinement, Nur’s work on Koranic verses became the book called Heart of Koran. Nur conveys the verses on the descent of Koran in this way:
“The Supreme Source radiates the Truth-bearing Koran through the seven subtle realms. Gracefully this Book of Light descends, full of Divine Power and Beauty, into your most pure and receptive being, My beloved Muhammad. The Source of Love has chosen you from before eternity to become the final reservoir of My Revelation…”
If the Koran, according to the great visionaries, is the underlying and encompassing cosmic reality and script of life, and the light of guidance and explanation within life, then even the actions of Isis are recorded in the cosmic Koran. They are inside the Book, they do not follow it. And they attribute their actions to something about which they have no comprehension.
Although Isis is an extreme, there are many groups who attribute their narrow views and negative actions to the Books of revelation within their own sacred traditions. During the time of slavery in America there were many southern Christian communities who found their justification for slavery in the Book of God. The Spanish and English colonization of the Americas took place under the religious rationalization of the Church declaring that indigenous peoples did not have full human souls. Examples of these transgressions against humanity while using the Scriptures as texts of justification abound throughout human history. And they have had the effect of turning many intelligent and sensitive beings away from the sacred texts and paths. So, in our time, there are those who say that the time of religion is past, and that the holy Scriptures belong to the early phase of humanity and are no longer applicable to our modern era of evolved consciousness. Why would we want to go back to the dark ages of religion where women were oppressed and people were enslaved and colonized, and tyranny was justified, all under the aegis of the holy books? Why would we want to live feeling oppressed under the heavy-handed teachings of the Books?
What such ones are not realizing is that the heavy-handedness comes from our self. Oppression comes from our self. Limitation comes from our self. Tyranny comes from our self. Misinterpretation comes from our self. The limited religion is simply the limited self. This is why the healing of humanity and the world is to transform the limited, wounded self to the illumined self through forgiveness and asking for forgiveness, and on the highest level to die to the limited self before we physically die, as the truthful Messenger has revealed. And this is realized through companionship in the lineages of those who have inherited the Mother of the Book, whether outwardly or inwardly. The Mother of the Book is a divine reality from which come all the holy books and sacred scriptures, and it is a knowledge that is given to the hearts, not a literal knowledge of letters. Through this knowledge, the intimate knowledge of the Divine Reality, and through the personal struggles of human beings to embody and live this knowledge, the limited self will transform into divine self, limited family will evolve into holy family, limited society will evolve into companionships of love and mutual support, and limited religion will give way to the religion of truth, the shining splendor of the One Who is Living, Knowing and All Merciful.
I encourage you therefore to study the Koran as a book of love and wisdom-light. Study it by reading Heart of Koran of Shaykh Nur, and reading the Mathnawi and the works of Ibn Arabi and Muzaffer Effendi, may Allah embrace them all in peace. Study the Koran in the companions around you and in the beautiful signs of the Creation. Contemplate the Koran of your heart, see your heart as the Book of God. See your life and its moments as the turning of the pages of light of the divine Koran.
We have much to contemplate in the depths of our heart. May we continue in our quest for truth and may we formulate the essential intention of our life and be sincere in embodying it. May we persevere in remaining aware of our limited self and willing to gratefully abandon it in those moments when we are confronted and challenged by others or by life’s events. May we remain humble toward God and kind with all beings. May we continue offering our self to the embrace of Love.
Effendi would say that the Ilahis are pure Koran. So study them and sing them and embody them!
In the inspiring waves of His life, Her life,
Farah Fatima