Spiritual Journey that Opened my Heart - Life with Awliya Allah

The Prophet Muhammad sallallahu alaihi wasallam he said learning is from the cradle to the grave and that learning process has to continue on through the

life of the man or the woman until they die.

>> There is purity in the world. There is

purity. There's purity in children and there's purity in adults who have not allowed the world to taint their souls.

who've not allowed the world to to pollute their souls and if it was polluted who have worked with diligence at polishing the soul and this is really

what the educational process is and this is a lifelong journey.

>> Traditionally in the Muslim world there's an idea of traveling for the for the sake of God. The pilgrimage to Mecca is like that. But there's also a tradition of of traveling for knowledge,

seeking knowledge. And this comes from a

seeking knowledge. And this comes from a prophetic tradition that's mentioned by Ibra Abd that the prophet Muhammad peace be upon him said, "Seek knowledge even

unto China." And the idea is that if

unto China." And the idea is that if there's if there's knowledge somewhere that you should go seek it.

I grew up in uh Northern California during the 1960s and that was a time obviously there was a lot of change taking place in the United States.

I was actually 17 when I became Muslim and I just lost interest in school. I

was um starting my first year uh se semester of college and I I lost interest and that led to a journey which would be an educational journey. I

eventually did come back and went back to the university and and and did a degree in comparative religion.

I began to study uh Arabic and my studies increased and I I was given an opportunity to go to the United Arab Emirates.

During that time I met West Africans from Moritania.

And I think what what really struck me about these West Africans is their presence.

They actually walked upright. They were

walking with with dignity, with human dignity. They were proud that they were

dignity. They were proud that they were Muslims. Then I'm finding out these people grow up in tents in the middle of the Saharan

desert with goats and sheep and camels and and and I'm listening to them talking about fine points of grammar and about the subtleties of the Quran and

the subtleties of the prophetic traditions and points of of jurist prudence in Islam and history.

And then one day a man comes from from Moritania who's named Sheh Abdraman. And I saw this man and he had

Abdraman. And I saw this man and he had something that was different from even what these other people had. And and

looking at this man for me was like looking at somebody coming out of the seventh or eighth century.

And and I want who is this man? and they

tell me this is the son of one of the greatest scholars of the Sahara whose name is Abu Haj. I said if this is the

son I I want to meet the father.

So my heart suddenly becomes uh just ignited with this desire to go and see this man

and I set out on that journey.

Here's this American kid from Marin County in Northern California in the middle of the Saharan Desert.

And here's this sheh.

And this is the divested man. This is

the man who has he has he's given up the world. He is in a state of complete

world. He is in a state of complete submission.

One of the first things that he said to me after I met him, he said, "Tell me about your dream." And I had had this really extraordinary dream. And the

dream was this meeting The desert people of Moritania are

they're they're almost halfway in the unseen world. Their their dreams are so

unseen world. Their their dreams are so extraordinary. I mean, we know this

extraordinary. I mean, we know this about Aboriginal peoples that they're very connected to the dream world, to the it's called in Arabic, the imaginal

world. And I'm seeing this in these

world. And I'm seeing this in these people. You you think of water and

people. You you think of water and suddenly somebody's handing you a bowl of water.

I ended up spending seven years with the Muritanians and that the experience of living with these people was was very very transformative for me.

Seeing them living Islam for me this was one of the extraordinary things of being out there is that here's a people that are living Islam. Islam is not an idea

in their heads. It's not a political ideology. It's not an agenda. It's not

ideology. It's not an agenda. It's not

It's what they're living.

It's their eating, their drinking.

It's honoring the guest. It's greeting

their brother with a smile on their face. Something that is often rare to

face. Something that is often rare to find in the Muslim world today, right?

People have forgotten these really basic things which are rooted in the Islamic tradition. And one of the things many

tradition. And one of the things many Muslims forget is that our own prophet Muhammad sallallahu alaihi wasallam was in a sense this bridge between the

ancient and the young culture because he was raised amongst the Bedawin and yet he was a city dweller.

He was a merchant and yet his roots were rooted in this ancient culture and he honored these people in that his

religion does not eliminate them.

My educational perspective now it's rooted in my experience both in in my educational experience in the west as well as my

educational experience in the east. I I

was fortunate in the secondary level that I went to some of the best high schools in the United States. Um so at the secondary level I really did see

education at its best in the US. when I

went to the Muslim world, uh the school that I went to in the Emirates, which was actually considered a reasonably good school, uh I think the the

experience was so shattering for me to see how poor and and what a pale imitation the educational model that the Arabs have

now is basically a pale imitation of the West. And what struck me about the

West. And what struck me about the Moritanians is that they have maintained traditional educational structures. And so studying with them,

structures. And so studying with them, seeing the texts that they studied, the ways that they studied, and actually studying it myself and doing this, what

really struck me was the need to preserve this tradition.

the education of the Muslim is the education of the heart. It's purifying

the heart. And so education becomes a vehicle or a means. The word in Arabic darasa means to study. It also means to become ephaced. It means to lose all

become ephaced. It means to lose all traces and and obviously one of the means of traces of ignorance. but also

just losing this personality, this ego, this desire for me, that the world is for me. And we've got

a planet filled with people that are saying me, me, me.

>> And the world is not me.

The world is us. This is the world and this is really what Islam is teaching us is that that that we have greater concerns that our concerns should not be selfish concerns and the reason for that

is because this is not the ultimate place.

There is so much confusion in the Muslim world about education and about what we're supposed to be learning and also some really basic things. There's a lot of confusion amongst the Muslims about

what Islam is. There are many Muslims that have really taken Islam as a political ideology. And while Islam

political ideology. And while Islam doesn't exclude politics, it is certainly and never has been at rooted in its center a political

agenda.

People clamor now for an Islamic state and yet an Islamic state of being and

state of mind has to preede the idea of a a a political state and you don't find people in an Islamic state of mind.

The great questions of the Quran are spiritual questions. And the verses out

spiritual questions. And the verses out of the over 6,000 verses in the Quran, those that relate to political uh and

juredical legislation are about 500.

The vast majority of the Quran is is relating to the spiritual concerns of man. And this is not to the exclusion of

man. And this is not to the exclusion of the world. We the Muslims are not we

the world. We the Muslims are not we don't separate our spirituality from the world the but our spirituality

is our politics and that that is how politics is transformed when politicians become spiritual beings that are

concerned not simply with their own agendas but with the the betterment of their societies and with a sense of service.

The Islamic education is to teach these tools to people so that they can move into the world with trained minds and and connecting their minds though

with that heart, never losing the connection. And so the spiritual rooted

connection. And so the spiritual rooted in this training is not simply the abstraction. It's not simply learning

abstraction. It's not simply learning these sciences, but it's sitting with people who are not only transmitters of this knowledge, but also spiritually

transformed individuals. People that

transformed individuals. People that have gone into the depths of their souls and have moved internally have have trained their souls

at the hands of those who train their souls back to the messenger of God.

And these people that have unfortunately become anomalies now in the Muslim world but still exist men like and going and sitting with these people

and learning this knowledge from them.

Another knowledge is being transmitted.

the knowledge of humility, the knowledge of purity, >> of not having ulterior motives. And this

is hard for people to understand who have spent their entire lives in the world of ulterior motives. It's hard to imagine that there's actually people

that might not have an ulterior motive in wanting to be good to you, in wanting to help you.

It's really the purification of the self from cynicism, right?

I mean, and it's it's something that's deeply rooted in our in our world view.

Cynicism, a peculiar Anglo-Saxon characteristic right?

One of the great paradoxes of the liberal democratic culture is that once we make

this assumption that the individual and everybody is entitled to their opinion, we have a world filled now with uh people that really are entrenched

uh in opinions that they think in fact are their own and they're really not.

When people say to me uh things like, "Oh, well that's that's your reality, but that's not my reality."

This is a stand. It's a philosophical position. It wasn't arrived at uh

position. It wasn't arrived at uh through your thought. You are an inheritor of a philosophical position, which is that there's nothing of value

in the world. And if there is, it's relative. There is no truth with a

relative. There is no truth with a capital T. There's smallcase truths.

capital T. There's smallcase truths.

Your truth is your truth. My truth is my truth. And this is not the language of

truth. And this is not the language of the ancients. It's the language of the

the ancients. It's the language of the moderns and the postmoderns. And this is what's destroyed us. And then how do we how can we condemn what's wrong?

Once you reduce the world to this leveled effect of everything being equal in its importance,

then where is there room for real truth?

And this is why we we talk about values.

Now we don't talk about virtues. Values

because values are relative. What's

expensive in one place is cheap in another place. Right? Whereas virtue

another place. Right? Whereas virtue

when we talk about virtue which comes from a Latin root which which means true and this is what religious traditions have taught. They've taught virtue and

have taught. They've taught virtue and this is what's been removed from the modern society and virtue is truth.

And people say, "Well, different cultures have different virtues." No.

Honesty is a virtue in every culture on this planet.

Courage is a virtue in every culture on this planet. Generosity is a virtue in

this planet. Generosity is a virtue in every culture.

and wisdom, understanding the intellectual virtues. You have the moral

intellectual virtues. You have the moral virtues, the intellectual virtues, they have to be tempered by the religious virtues of faith, of

hope, of charity.

This is how the ancients understood the world.

The things of the world have always been here and they will be here as long as the world's here. But each one of us is going to go through the world and and and really spend a short time in this

world in relation to human history.

>> So we are confronted with questions of ultimate concern. Where am I going?

ultimate concern. Where am I going?

This is one of the great Quranic questions.

Where then are you going and and confronting each one of us being confronted with that question is something that the Muslims have always

been concerned with. And that question is not a political question.

That question is a spiritual question.