Voices of Islam (77 page)

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V
IGIL

•

Barry C. McDonald

Men dream the shadow play of history; We live and die, together and alone.

The here below is not our final home; All men are born to face eternity.

Why am I on the earth? And should I fear? Sit quietly, invoke the Name of God.

Stay vigilant, although the night draws near, Repeat again the liberating Word.

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D
HIKR
,
A
D
OOR
T
HAT
W
HEN
K
NOCKED
, O
PENS
: A
N
E
SSAY ON THE
R
EMEMBRANCE OF
G
OD

•

Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore

In the Name of Allah, the Merciful, the Most Merciful

I begin with praise of the One Who has given us His Name to call Him by: Allah, Creator of every creation conceivable and inconceivable, our breaths and heartbeats, our origins and destinies, He Who has no origin other than Himself nor destiny other than Himself, in Whose formless form we have been fashioned in order to be refl ons back to Him of His Grace in His creation, He Who is both Origin and Destination of our praise and gratitude, upon Whom we rely when all supports have been removed and we are left facing life and death with none but Him, and upon Whose Mercy we throw ourselves when the world is dark, relying on His endless Light alone.

And praise be to His prophets, from His first reflected light, Adam, to the last of the prophets, His beloved Seal of Prophethood, Muhammad, son of Abdullah, peace of Allah’s praises be upon him eternally, he both Praiser and Praiseworthy in one, door from Eternity into time and the Next World into this world, living example of God’s qualities and translator of His will and continuous blessing upon us, dispenser of the macrocosm into the microcosm, straightener of prayer rows and releaser of sorrows, the Prophet and Messenger Muhammad, from whose heart line come the saints, scholars, and teachers of purity and deepest devotion living among every people on earth and in every age on earth until the end of time, those who teach remembrance of God and who have it on their tongues and in their beings both asleep and awake, in good times and bad, and whose generosity is God’s generosity, and whose wisdom in all moments is His wisdom from whose milk we may freely ladle divine knowledge and illumination suited to every circumstance in our lives perfect for this life and the hereafter.

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Voices of the Spirit

And to my own shaykh, Sidi Muhammad ibn al-Habib ibn al-Siddiq al-Amghari al-Idrisi al-Hasani, may God be pleased with him and grant him light in the grave, whose
zawiya
in Mekne`s, Morocco (al-Maghrib,
The West
), contains his light that radiates out into this world of forgetfulness to awaken it to its original remembrance of God with every person’s breath and heartbeat, knowingly or unknowingly. As he says in his
Diwan:

If the breath of His
dhikr
were to fill the west and there were

A sick man in the east, that man would be cured of his affliction.

This echoes in mirror image the words of the Sultan of the Lovers, the Egyptian mystic poet Ibn al-Farid (d. 1235
CE
), from
al-Khamriyya,
The Wine Ode, that being the wine of God intoxication:

Could the breaths of its bouquet spread out in the East, One stuffed-up in the west would smell again.

And may Allah bless and expand all present shaykhs and guides, and my present
shaykha
(female spiritual master) Baji Tayyiba Khanum, in her deepest light and loving compassion, spreading the way of the
dhikr
of Allah to the West to open the passages of our hearts again to love of Allah and His Prophet Muhammad in at least some small measure of the vast dimension in which they should be loved.

Though I grew up in Oakland, California, in a nonreligious family, I was always drawn to music and words and a particular sacred aspect of the joining of the two, but perhaps not any more than any other child with a newly minted mind open to new experiences. Sacred music, Bach, Stravinsky, and generally classical and modern serious music attracted me more than the then-current pop music, but so did jazz, which in its spontaneity has always seemed to have a touch of the sacred and philosophical in it. California in the 1950s was also infl nced by everything Japanese, in spite of being on the coast most vulnerable to possible attacks from Japan during the war, so that we had high-class framed Japanese prints on the wall and generous decorative elements of bamboo and
ikbana
flower motifs.

It seemed natural, then, in my twenties, already writing poetry and avidly reading spiritual texts from all the traditions, especially Zen Buddhism and the early Hindu sutras, to sit in the
zendo
of Sensei Shrunyu Suzuki in San Francisco, in the Japanese Buddhist Temple on Bush Street, and to recite the short Prajn˜a Paramita Sutra in phonetic Japanese, that ends,
Ji ho san shi i shi hu shi son bu sa mo ko sa mo ko ho ja ho ro mi
(‘‘Ten directions, past, present, and future, all Buddhas, the world-honored one, Bodhisattva. Great Bodhisattva, Great Prajn˜a Paramita!’’). After an hour or more of silent medi- tation in Zen, cross-legged, attempting (but only rarely succeeding) to let thoughts drift by without attachment, such chanting in the large, empty hall

Dhikr,
a Door That When Knocked, Opens
55

with its polished wooden floors and simple Buddhist altar with bowl-shaped bells and gladiolas spraying out of tall vases went deeply into the heart and cleared one’s consciousness of its daily cobwebs.

But we were nothing if not eclectic in those heady days of 1960s in California, and we chanted Hindu chants during Hatha Yoga practice, the Sanskrit version of the Prajn˜a Paramita Sutra ending,
Gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate, bodhi, swaha!
(‘‘Gone, Gone, Gone Beyond Goneness, Gone to the Other Side, into Bodhi consciousness,
Swaha!
’’), Tibetan chants of
Om mani padme Hum!
(‘‘O Jewel in the Heart of the Lotus,
Hum!
’’), and any other invocations we thought might be effi cious in transforming our consciousness, wafting on streams of the various smokes traveling through our rooms, brightening a sense of worlds beyond our senses and the mysterious workings of the cosmos shivering its lights through our walls and ceilings, in the leafy woods in our exploratory retreats, or alone in our incense-rich rooms in the dark of night.

Invocation:
the repetition of phrases meant to call up spiritual reality, or halt our normal minds, to descend into our hearts to metamorphose our daily lives into awakened attention and delight.
Transformation
is the key element in all invocation, to change our central focus from individual consciousness to the greater ‘‘cosmic’’ consciousness, or, as in the case of the Sufi practices I later encountered, which have a very pure metaphysic, to be annihilated from our effective ego-self and allow God, Who Alone exists, to be experientially realized in His singular existence.

From the moment we first find we can make audible and effective sounds, we might become focused and energized in our being by repeating certain words or phrases over and over again, such as the ubiquitous
dada
and
mama,
our fi real invocation to those flawed but beloved, mortal gods, to increase our sense of an intimate universe with all its vastness somehow encompassed within our hearts. And when we later discovered the existence of the no-less mortal but far less-flawed saints of the religious paths, who have repeated mantras or chanted sutras or intoned simple phrases up to and past their shattering and transforming point of enlightenment, this for us in those dropout days was enough to increase our thirst and determination to engage in the practice of what I later would be able to call:
Dhikr of Allah.

The era of the 1960s, however, was remarkable for the amount of new material that was suddenly flushing into our culture, music from India listened to with full and devotional attention, Tibetan monastery music, the rumbling chant of monks along with their sad artifacts that were then being sold very inexpensively at various import stores in San Francisco and elsewhere, no doubt from refugees willing to part with them for any amount of money more useful to them for much-needed food and clothing. I had a theater company in Berkeley in the 1960s that based its sacred theatrics imaginatively on Tibetan rituals I was reading at the time and that seemed fi ng for our crazed consciousness experiments within the overall