Dr. Maroof Shah | Self, Salvation & Seeking God | MindTrap#42 | Mufti Abu Layth

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another episode of mine trap right now just before we begin i'm just gonna do a quick sound check don't want the audio to be interrupted all right so let me just check with facebook what's going on people clear you're doing it as always all right so i'll just do a quick henna alright it's been a while it has been a while people this is why is here all right with an awesome awesome episode for you tonight

right so let me just check uh let me check with mrente on youtube is the sound coming through fine loud and crystal clear people crystal clear somebody said mufti no shave exactly you know you gotta you gotta keep people guessing you gotta keep the game guessing people unpredictable of rise so yeah you got to go off with the rough look sometimes you know what i'm saying sound is great shukran shukran hina as always much appreciated right shara da put says

you as well right let me just bring up a profile picture people um we have right before the screen that you can see i'm just bringing up there today's guest dr marufsa an amazing incredible mind hailing from kashmir in india somebody with a plethora of intricate and we are just amazing research on comparative religious literature on islamic philosophy on things on very difficult topics like things like so

uh salvation salvific kind of uh exclusivity and well we'll take a look at that and a lot more inshallah but uh first and foremost let me bring on the man the myth dr maruf shah assalamu alaikum all right uh for joining us tonight for taking your time out i do know it's been very difficult really uh just due to other issues extending circumstances to really make this happen

so i'm really glad we've connected tonight so it is always a pleasure and a joy to in a way enter into dialogue with anyone because deep down you know the other is god or from god if you want to be more precise so whenever we see the other and enter into any dialogue or any communication it is a part of marifa if we could really go deep into that that's what plato was up to that is what called that we need to listen okay

yes straight in straight in professor and sufism is deeply fundamentally attuned to the divine sound but you you just listen what is there what is the speaking so if if we could just try to be more serious about how to how to listen to the other people i think half of the people's problems will go this world's problems will go very well said dr uh just a few words um about your your your kind of

you your backstory your backdrop to you to your journey for people who ain't familiar with you uh a bit about yourself we know you you know born raised in uh kashmir in india you've got a background an incredible background in all these studies where were some of these studies conducted um just for people you know the kind of penalty yes i did my graduation in vector science okay veterinary science then meanwhile i had been yes but i had already been pursuing

independent academic journey literary journey i have been writing certain things i have been contributing to columns of late for few years to some newspapers and i have been meanwhile pursuing studies in philosophy and then literature i did phd in from hyderabad on the problem of absolutely in literature and meanwhile religion you know it is in our veins one always tries to think about it tries to engage with it try to practice it if one could so somehow my interest was on the

interface of religion mysticism poetry and what we call philosophy if this has been the point has been raised there are four paths to the ultimate full path four parts to the ultimate poetry philosophy religion mysticism wow i'm loving them

so i have been always trying to seek where ultimately this the drama of life meaning hope death and all that they get their origin their foundations and then try to move ahead so you know wonder is central to philosophy and it is central to science and it is central to poetry as well so that connects that connects us to the oh i think all civilizational paradigms somehow i had this interest in understanding the other so i think richard

meanwhile philosophy meanwhile i had been doing science what we call this vectory science and that's why my first book was on muslim modernism and the problem of modern science in which i tried in which i tried to question certain reading assumptions regarding reading of science and their appropriation in what we call islam islamic compatibility yeah and just just to just to for the viewers uh that ain't familiar that doc dr somebody asked what what is sub sub is just a a term of respect i suppose perhaps equivalent to sir

but uh used a lot more comfortably in urdu uh you know dr marouf has several books uh dating back from 2008 post-modernism post-modernism language and literature uh these are the book chapters these are book chapters are these the chapters right because these were some of them that i was taking a look at you had islam and science historic and contemporary issues islam and science again iqbal's appropriation of modern science vis-a-vis religion a critical appraisal um there's

the unrepresentable that shows forth is this wow okay and society representation textuality and um yeah islam and the and theodicy this has also been another key area of interest for you uh we can maybe take a look at that a little later on approach to evil what you know this whole thing theodicy the problem of evil with a compassionate god how that works so these are just some of the things but you've also written on allama iqbal and you've mentioned how he's been a key inspiration

out of curiosity why uh allama iqbal i think allama iqbal was all i the way i introduced this the human quest and these four departments these four aspects of reality which in a way in which we are interested or we should be industrial people have been interested to approach the ultimate iqbal was also interested in all the four and secondly i think the most profound philosophical explication of islam in the 20th century that simultaneously engaged with the modernity

that is in iqbal and more importantly iqbal's poetry that impressed that entrusts me more and i and i think that needs to be better study that has been subject to several studies but i don't think it has been so well known because later iqbal is in a way appropriation though one of my friends had lastly remarked if people had been introduced

to islam through igbo there would not have been such catastrophic such other problematic things that we find in 20th century islam for example where the political has been at the center stage and there have been what have been called the fundamentalisms and there have been atomistic reactions towards in in response to modernity so i think iqbal is alicia yeti had said about him he is aligned unfragmented man ali like okay i think i think that that has been the greatest epithet

that could be devoted to any great mind so iqbal we have taken him as a both as a poet as a philosopher and as what we call mystical thinker in fact that is what our tradition is in which all these paths simultaneously find place so iqbal when you read iqbal you read almost everything under the sun okay do you feel that yes poetry this is a a pathway to to to the divine and if so

is it uh aptly represented than within religion because within islam specifically yeah it is represented in fact major companions have been great poets sahabi divan poets if you can count till dioband and barely in indian subcontinent job major olama major ulama have been points so my point is from the age of companions till date in our seminaries the poetry tradition has survived that it has been in a way robustly cultivated and you know

the complex question of poetry and prophecy that binary but people if you just penetrate a bit in a bit deeper into the discourse we find generally all the scriptures have been coached in have been put in poetic language yeah and you know great great mystic poets have in islamic tradition they have poets and another kumara swami who has been such a great influence on the 20th century traditionalist thought he has another kumara swami

that sri lankan okay metaphysician he has argued hispanics has been elsewhere argued as well that our primary speech is poetry modern this originally primordial man spoke poetry only pro this is a later decadence so that is why poetry yeah poetry if and if you penetrate to the in into the musical universe of the quran yeah so it looks it's it sings like poetry yeah exactly but though we cannot classify it as poetry because poetry has other associations in the history especially in the arab context but the point is the prophet has

categorically prophesied is categorically told in the ministry and the connection between sagehood or hikmah and poetry has been emphasized throughout an islamic tradition so our rgb sermon will not in a way move people unless it is in a way it appropriates poetry so i mean yeah poetry is everywhere in the islamic world you know i i've argued as well i'm in line with the theory that and i feel it's a compelling theory

that the arabic language it began with uh with poetry with this kind of uh what was like a trance-like state that almost these shaman-like figures who were these mystic kind of wanderers would get into and hence it was to and what they would do they would speak almost in tongues and say these words that would rhyme and this would enchant people and this was um this is why it comes from like and you see it was these shamans

uh in the quran when because some of what they were saying was um a bit weird and they were the ones that allah was referring to that you know that the sun not the poets not just poetry what like today yes you rightly pointed out shady share is share is this show share consciousness knowledge yeah they have similar they have the same voice poetry could in no way be in a way exiled from any traditional civilization any secret any this so poetry has been

hailed throughout islamic tradition prophet didn't quote much poetry he used to sometimes quote a half as something like that but the point is what is poetry yeah first we need to slightly and what the ontology of poetry and the metaphysics are poetry in fact we call meditative thinking is poetry when when when you when there is a conceptual thinking and there is a meditator to think non-conceptual thinking but non-conceptual thinking is poetry so my point is whenever you are being attuned to the higher world

attorneys to your own deaths once that's that silently meditatively poetry is born so poetry is that that life of imagination that imagination you know this is what is what connects the sensual and the intellectual world i mean what we call the the realities of the are captured in the in through imagination and poetry in a way is this uses this imagination to access the higher world so poets that's why they have been called

the students of god so so from major thinkers have been poets you cannot name a major i don't think you can name any major muslim thinker who was not deeply into poetry though himself he may not have been a poet but you can great medieval figures you just note so poetry has been in a way one of the central facets of their work so i have found um dr maruf that you see often especially in

um and i think this is uh it's not just restricted to urdu but it's in many poetry but especially we do see in ottawa's world that in poetry there's a lot of um that people have a lot of courage to question things to be very critical like they will for example almost satirize the wife the preacher they will say you know you know like they ask questions

you know like this they're trying to show that look like like what is this reasoning and what is this uh but that's just i mean a petty example but they question on many things uh i feel it's a voice of expression for where people feel that that nobody can tell me off like if they just wrote a newspaper saying something like you know like the person says you know um what is it things like uh uh something like this like give me hell and they they give all these expressions like if a person wrote that everybody would

just be like kafir kaffir kaffir but when they say it in poetry there's like a license to get away with it yes yes yes in fact it has been very remarkable that the best intellectual contributions of islamic civilization i mean the mainstream philosophy that has been appropriated by poetry so muslim philosophers especially those who had what we can call more critical understanding of certain reading ideological famines and other things they took recourse of poetry but and

poetry helps you directly reach to the divine so white didn't feel the need of other structures as such so he was confident that of his calling see i have told you that one heidegger one is considered one of the greatest 20th century philosophers he said the job of a philosopher is to explain a point and why it shows the path of the two gods or the path to the holy especially in the post-modern setting where traditional picture of god has been

discredited for so many people and we are in a secular age that the poetry is said to be the portal to transcendence the portal to sacramento and this is this is saying this is this is hard and then we see poetry as salvific see poetry has been in a way can do to what has been helped achieving salvation so in fact what is salvation salvation what is islam it is attitude of surrender when we surrender the film and one and that is attuned to the higher world that is that is becoming a poet who is a poet

poet is one who is not himself who is not caught in that image of ego and identifying with it for eliot is a famous critic he's famously defined poetry as alien escape from personality eliot escape from personality that has been the islamic understanding as well to be a true to be truly a poet you have to escape the trappings of the self and in fact that is precisely what islam wants islam want to surrender on the self and when it when it reaches perfection we get essa and asan has been defined as cultivating beauty

or doing everything in a style what is poetry it is doing language mentions it's in everything even when one of you folds his garments his clothing there is an asan to it as in there's an order exactly exactly my my point is what is sufism the way we try to define it it is irrefutable because it is fundamentally self-awarely oriented towards cultivating issa now asan is cultivation of beauty now beauty is everywhere and we are all in a way summoned to beauty

unconsciously and consciously were all attracted to beauty and beauty is the name of the divine beauty is allah yes so my point so my point is attraction to beauty is one of the ways god saves people devoting ourselves to his worship yeah so god bless people so so so plato used to say that god captures most people through the net of beauty so my point is

they are the priests of beauty so if we are able to cultivate beauty in our houses in our domestic surroundings in our cities in every sphere of or in the very trivial things we do that is that is being a sufi that is that is being truly a muslim who is filthy i mean so this is the deepest rule the deepest ground of sufism if we could properly put an understanding this kind of just being vulnerable to the beauty the the divine beauty that manifests itself

yes yes yes and the poets are able to see beauty everywhere wow that that is something so well said in fact you know ibn arabi was asked about this how do you say this everything is divine and this oneness of god and all that oneness what is what is your opinion about this [Music] um what we call this

this what is what is the scorpion the scorpion is

is as an angel it is by being is as holy as an angel by virtue of parts participating in the divine being because as a being it is beautiful as a being everything is holy as a being everything is sacred so poets are ultimately they they try to capture this being in the in words in to express it's it's it's a it's a miracle yeah people have not given much attention to the problem what we call

the language as the house of being how does god express himself primarily through language then it means being is in a way both veiled and unlimited language so if you try so java prophet islam it has a deeply metaphysical meaning so

so my point is and it's interesting that kalam shares its roots with to wound in arabic as well isn't it that there's this the that it's interesting because in a way the words are so powerful that they can almost slice away i mean that's that's what you're kind of doing you're kind of like slicing reality for the person in a way but or they can equally be wounding the person yes yes it is yeah exactly to wound yeah yeah yeah and

but the top but the points task is ultimately to reach the silence that was added by this one speech the primordial silence that was before the word such a bible in the beginning was the word but but understood silence preceded the word i never thought of that i never ever thought in the beginning there was the word but what precedes it is silence but but you see the beauty of silence can it be expressed except in words what one has to for example it has been said that the highest form of poetry is music

and the greatest music is which is without words so the point and since the language of being is silent the language of being is without words so our our approach would be to use words deconstructively and to reach the being and we do not need words ultimately that's why rumi would say god transport me to a state where speech comes without words

so my point is if the sufi the mystics the poets they have been trying to access a realm where speech comes without words where we just feel the being yeah feel the beauty of it it's interesting because now science is in fact that constitutes salvation or a preview of salvation is here in this world for example in indian tradition we call drama is this literature this poet is called fifth veda or the veda for the lady i've been signature for the commoners because through fifth verse

because this is a universal medium of what we call universalizing consciousness so if if you want a trip into heaven for a commoner it cannot be done in a sermon or a ritual like that but if you give him or if you give him a performance of a very good drama he is transported to the higher one watching a greek tragedy or watching a classic work of art one is transporting the higher world and animate transported to heaven in fact where do poets get their images from from the heaven will their black was of great romantic point imagination imagination is bored and the inside plateau is also

yes from plato to black we see a fundamental point that spites need to immediately travel to the heaven then they visit back to the earth and that is what explains their perennial value and fascination for everyone contact

one could argue uh doctor that is not beauty in the eye of the beholder is it not subjective i think that has been much debated but deep deep down job subject in traditional eastern understanding and islam islamic understanding it is only possible that beauty will be born or you do or you access the divine when subject and object duality seizures so beauty is in that seizing and when the object subject cease to be separate beings

actually exactly oneness that is poetic experience there is no longer a separate subject towards an object they are one they are one and this is true about the mystical experience as well that's why it has been said that the aesthetic and the mystical they are fundamentally united uh yet in method of severe unless they had very difficult tension in modernity that is why moderating has been so ugly as well so beauty was the beauty was primary in a category in traditional cultures but the modernity has been dubbed as the most ugly in that sense that beauty is not at

the center utility is understood okay because i was just gonna ask you to just slightly unpack that when you say modernity is ugly uh or what do you mean you mean that beauty ugly yes i'm not maruti as such is ugly my point is it was only possible in the modern culture that people could tolerate so much ugliness in the name of utility utility all of a sudden the shift has gone from appreciation of uh almost an aesthetic appreciation to utility yeah yeah um benefit how do i benefit basically

that has been a second fall of mine that beauty was no longer at the center of the traditional kashmiri culture beautiful so beautiful crafts so design was on not only on the carpets it was also on the johan chakey papyrus glasses on every little or trivial thing it was and it was with the the very soul of the craftsman was in his work and craftsman was fundamentally patronized by a certain monster but ultimately his inspiration was to work for beauty and beauty's sake alone

and crafts have been a way of worshiping god in traditional cultures this people have forgotten these people have forgotten so beauty has been that i was gonna say you said uh this was the second fall from grace it got me curious what's the first fall first first fall of man we all we are low adam's fall oh right modernity okay then modernity has been okay i see so this is the first so you feel it's the first time

uh that you know mankind has kind of moved away from beauty hmm yeah is it because was it a necessary developmental stage to ah capitalism required it sacrificed everything for profit and this so-called functionality and utility and all these are not compatible with beauty because beauty can be extremely expensive at times so why are islamic why is such a beauty in fact other traditional architectures modern man cannot imagine to build another taj mahal or another mosque

because the very sensibility has gone that focus has gone today we are paid for these works and it is not god they would only sing when they were they pleased to sing the divine so usm the one is most productive or one of the best ones most creative and one is fundamental doing the thing not for the seller but for the other or for god so but the modernity itself is at the center individualism is that is at the center it is and this part has helps explain that beauty is not at the

center because beauty is only born when the self or the ego is dropped see just to be clear when we say beauty obviously and and realigning the center uh to be beauty many people will understand obviously one of i suppose for men one of the the greatest manifestations of beauty is women is this what you're referring to you're referring to something much greater than just the beauty of i am referring to that as well obviously the divine manifestation the ultimate is and he also remarked about the women's

face that since we know all we can if i can summarize it in simple terms the god is formless but we also that all forms are imbued with the divine women's face this epiphany is at its most it is best developed that is why all the epitome of divine uh reflection the intimations of divine beauty are manifest especially in women

he only seeks god he never sees an object but awful people do not and they consciously know this they somehow they think in objects there can be a god our objects can be perceived meaningful but from ibn based metaphysical metaphysical point of view we all all people seek only god as well that's why all are fundamentally worshippers of one god only no consciously they may not be knowing this sin is beaut since people are all attracted to beauty but just to be clear here they they are drawing a distinction between uh this kind of

being drawn in with this beauty and lust they're not necessarily you know when they're speaking about uh the beauty the intimations of divine beauty manifesting itself everywhere and especially let's say in women for for these poets or for these scholars or for men um and and in nature but they're not necessarily coming at it from an angle of lust this is not this is not what this is because i know some people were saying oh to be truly disciplined for observing beauty or being drawn into beauty one has to overcome lust but there is a deeper point as well

the desire as such is not to be constipated what is what are fundamental people driven by they are doing by god because god is so people are known to god only but god in a way has limited himself he has expressed himself in the form of certain objects

and it's interesting is that comforting love isn't it that kind of uh yeah and it's actually in the hadith used god is irresistible there is another expression you know these divine names if you can you can recall them god one of the names is resistance irresistible for example who can resist beauty none of us can so god is able to capture people through through these nets this that has to be appreciated and one point is we should not fundamentally approach the questionability from a moralistic point of view it has to be approached from on from an

ontological point of view the point is fundamentally beauty it is at its ontological plan attracts everyone it has no tag it is it is as such holy as such sacred but then in the social equilibrium in the complex society of where psychology is emotions and the other is involved we have to observe certain whenever the quran that is what sharia does that's what sharia does sharia generalizes over this instinct for beauty and it wants it to be doctor you said that we should not

uh yes you know when you said whilst differentiating between this uh this love and lust and you said that you know but simultaneously one must not feel the need to castigate their desires to punish their desires i i totally agree and i think that's very well said but why is it then especially in what seems to be the islamic tradition there is and in other traditions there is this uh emphasis by people to look down on desires they see as very um you know evil

and they see as from the shaitaan and um i don't agree that it is from the shaitaan but um the desire has been given such a central place it is never in a way it is never trivialized it is never in any way consticated or exact desire is the desire is holy or divine and in islamic tradition if you know what gaza wrote about for example sexual pleasure that is the fortist of heaven and in fact none of the desires in

including the gaza but all those godzilla talks in such detail and other works that they are all to be used for god to use it to transcend the lower self my point is desire can be a conduit it can be a stepping stone it can be a medium for elevating to the divine and as such desire is deeply deeply why does it come what are the ontological roots of desire what is it for if you reflect on those things desire in islam has been not castigated it has not been looked down upon but there has been

always that passion or centrifugal desire should not block our ascension to higher centrifugal example centrifugal buttons away from the center since god is the center and god is absolute beauty so point of tradition is to move towards this absolute beauty where no ugliness no limitation is another point about these what we call those classical duties the lower forms of pleasure is that they distract us away from that absolute beauty

absolutely that is why anyone pursuing women so hardly anyone pursuing any fame or any worldly objects so at at the cost of so many things he loses god because he therefore fundamental what is idolatry fundamentally from a philosophical point ideology it becomes an idol so god is nowhere in the world he translates the world but everywhere is imbued with the divine light that is there

but my point yes my point is it's not trying to ensure we move to higher beauty to the danger of centrifugal passion is that ultimately serve the ego or the self they're they're not they don't serve the divine so that ambiguity is there and that has that is why sharia is all about discipline not the self but not killing the self say this is the discipline of yourself but dr the thing is that the ultimate beauty that you're saying in allah

in essence beauty but that beauty is formless it is seamless it is um unfathomable to a great extent so to to to to to kind of focus or to to try and draw towards that beauty how does one do it except through uh you know like allah in fact in fact that has been the central problem for a sufi thing that is why ibn arabi usually should have both the eyes of divine of imminence and transcendence god is not only formless every form is really divine that's what

was all this was about in every form only god is the real since god alone is the real so in every form whatever which is which imbues with beauty it is really god there so basically the the the kind of the tajelli of god uh in almost at that string vibration level in quantum physics almost making up matter is that what yeah yeah i mean every form is god dwelling up through that form say we we say god alone is the haqq the real the truth is whatever is i mean that very

since we define god in terms of being whatever is really that is divine so the every form of dunya may have whatever form we encounter god is imminent there see the problem of theology was it lost sight of the imminent god it saw god only as transcendent but then better than mysticism sufism brought this balance back it saw some god should be simultaneously imminent and transcendent we should be able to see god in every form and then transcending all forms that is why we easily use it to say that i have not seen any object without first seeing god in that so my but the point is we have normally

forgotten it that's why there is so nihilism and absolutely and all that chaos we feel god in everyday objects but people will ask dr saab yeah they will say that look what about in all the evil what about in all the uh the horrible people the the murderers in fact that has been my essential interest that's why i wrote a book problem of evil in islamic philosophy a case study afiqbal and then i have i've been working on another book on problem of evil in muslim thought so my point is if we is god in them as well yeah have justifying ways of god to man

that has been one of the central questions where atheism has such a strong hold in modern consciousness atheism of evil yeah what does god doing in heaven there is so much evil in the world now i think everywhere in muslim and muslim philosophers they have when they define god as perfection as being so for them evil is what that has been called private show bona it private you there is no evil as such even in absence of good it does not mean that evil is in a way negated at the relative plan my point is further like okay

category they they all define god as being as fullness of being as perfection so what we call even is absent just a darkness darkness is not an entity it is just absence of light so what whatever we see why is now why is evil in the world simple it is very simple this argument i think everyone should be able to follow that the then you're saying that the default is that without the light of god let's say we are all just very evil people that is the default setting is that what we're saying is that what you're saying here

no no no defaults uh slightly to get your face into the into the into the screen oh yeah excellent excellent that's yeah that's a lot better yeah yeah yes you had asked the question i just forgot no i was saying that you see because the problem of evil is that we're saying well if you say like saint augustine said well really evil is just the uh it's just the absence of goodness it's not actually

something but then killing people and doing all these things is evil so these people are these if we say it's just the absence of the absence of god's light on them then that means the default setting in the absence of god is that we are all evil unless god shines light on us i i feel that now now i could understand your point better in fact we say god alone is good or else is disequilibrium we will not call it a straight forward evil all alice is disequilibrium whatever is separated from the first principle i mean god is contaminated by evil in

fact we see evil even in the paradise serpent serpent so paradise the absolute divine attributes my divine name is all things in the world and if there will be a scheme of things or expressions of the divine names now nothing in the world fully actualizes them that is why it means it has certain limitation

that limitation we call evil point is when we for example see evil actions as as an action nothing is evil mercy it even what about causing harm context that's why we used to say even it's relative it is only our context on anthropocentrism which gives it such a huge meaning my point is from the divine if we see from the divine eyes as being rooted in the being all things are expressions of what we call free separate the play of the divine in that sense nothing is evil but when the other comes in whether relations comes in the humans the society and the other things imagine

there is no person on the world there's only one man [Music] all on my own so my point is when the other is born two human consciousness are born and they are interaction certain things that lead to the lessons you're saying evil is a social entity it is born in society it's not something it can't just happen if there's just one man without the other i mean that needs the otherness yeah i i mean though there have been distinguished metaphysical evil from the social evil

there's a separate discussion with a very abstruse discussion but the sum somebody somebody's dying and they say if god's you know yes yes

why why is it so important he introduces these notions from a metaphysical point of view the joy of being as such god outpours the joy of being which he was in his perfection to the other creatures or is he university that's why it has been called the breath of the merciful the universe is the breath of the merciful is that the breath as being everything is holy but even when it comes to certain contacts with other relations but we sharia then has to intervene and call certain things

even which god does not approve of though ontologically he does approve them that's why there are what why is sharia taklif the notion of why is there [Music] get you back in the frame we're just losing your yeah excellent excellent yeah yeah that's

zabardas plus yeah i don't want to lose you in the frame that's all yeah but doctors but some people look at their pets some people then say that look how do you know that god isn't evil what if he's an evil god like yeah by definition by definition we know it by definition see for sufis god is not some super cosmic being outside the world you see kissing over make some cosmic policemen god is the totality of being god is what is god is what is what is it yes god is what is a famous scholastic

medieval formulation god is what is when for example which in 20th century reformulated this argument god as ultimate concern and god as being then one of the famous professors intervened in his lecture he said mr tillich you have denied me god given right to be an atheist because when you define god as the totality of being so one cannot step outside that the divine in in any case

so when god will define as the perfection of being whatever that is that is irrefutable under its own terms and i feel this is doctors up this is where tillak and these people took that god is ground the ground of being god is grounded yeah exactly the sufi notion god has ground up if if god is as is

then what is is also very horrific it's very evil it's very there's a lot of suffering there's a lot of so how do you not know that god is an evil because if we're saying he is as is within you know putting whatever we see is a manifestation ultimately of the will of the divine then what we see isn't pleasant you know we see a lot of brutality we see a lot of harshness struggle survival uh in the world in nature in people we see cruelty we see kindness we see loving we see

caring but we also see a lot of tyranny so how does one reconcile in fact that's why we need to master the understanding of the theory of divine names in ibn arabi point is world is not considered by god as such god is not as such in the world in that includes world is constituted by the dialectical play of divine names

[Music] so my my point is these are the divine names so whenever the since world is constituted by the relativity by binary is by contrasts so everything in the world by precise definition of not being god by being separated from the divide in itself so it is considered by the play of binaries by the play of good and evil so in fact you will see the play of light and darkness everywhere in the world that's why nothing in the world is absolutely pure that's why it is said to god to purity belongs primarily to god alone that's why when jesus was asked when someone

said jesus is good he said no god alone is good so my point is the perfection only belongs to the divine yeah just to clarify for people when you're saying a dialectical interaction often it's assumed if we're looking at um generally in philosophy if

you're looking at the term that we're looking at a contrast of things which then maybe results in a result which then may contrast with itself and go further um is this what we're is this or you're just speaking about a general contrast of um of opposites dialectical dialectically i mean when we say the world it means it is not god god is separate category and when we have to distinguish worldly separate category from and you just say why why is there five degrees of divine presence from ah from and ultimately when

we enter the world of materiality the divine light and or the absolute itself it is not there as such so it means matter is considered by its own what we call the material principles what gives and it as such it is separated from the divine and as such it is then the divine names come into the picture and divine names are oriented to divergent and what is not what is not jameel or what is not other than

so let's say people say now the name of allah if we're going to take names like al-jabbar you know the the kind of forceful uh or if you're going to take names like al-modil more importantly like the what could this possibly mean because if allah

was especially commented on this the point he has made in fact he has also made it he gives an example of a curvature of a bow of a power to be honest he said he said everything is technically or primordially is

lust they should follow reason and then they will reach the divine but logan they will follow sensual pleasures they centrifugal passions they will go here and there then as a result they will suffer because of slightly suffering different their suffering will teach them that the absolute is not here god is not here our path is not good but then that their movement for straight path will be innovative bring you back into the picture

basically this is people that have kind of just gone off on their paths of lust and desire and kind of lost themselves that that is how it's it's a kind of contrast for them to understand just on on a side note doctor could you slightly just we're losing you in the in the frame well i but you know what dr saab i want to say here a moment ago we said that look one should not castigate their desires one should not kind of demonize desires or lust or uh

it has been understood by the traditional [Music] [Music]

ultimate happiness happiness that's an interesting point those of you that didn't get the doc said that pain is contrasted by pleasure but bliss has no contrast exactly and god is this bliss so my point is if we are really oriented our

if you if we are really attentive see what is sufism sufism is attention towards breath or attraction towards present moment being in the presence [Music] being the child at the moment past or future mental construction they are both from the devil in the sufi understanding from the devil that's interesting because even einstein he says that the past present and future are simply an illusion albeit a persistent one you know the way

time actually is it's not how we perceive it but yeah is

that it's islam does not demonize desire but it sets higher goals it aims it has a higher benchmark in saying not to get caught up and obsessed with desires yeah exactly our own greatest [Music]

straying from the proper path because you know that better to move towards an oasis an oasis to go to for this drink and to go to drinks the shortest part is to go to god yes is god if we want to reach god if we want to reach the divine in the shortest way we should abide by sharia if we do not do that

foreign [Music] morality foreign

[Music] being such nasty and such rude you know so my point that before we just go on to that you know just on this point dr saab that look i totally agree with you i've often said myself that look really the the fundamental base of morality

the the instinct rests on this concept of harm we've an empathy we recognize harm and we don't and we can empathize with it and then we build the rest on it through socialization and i totally agree with you that the whole sharia really comes down to the hadith of the prophet you know do not cause harm now but here an interesting point just to tie into what you're saying then why is one of the names people will say of allah you know [Music] exactly yes yes yes there

foreign that we're saying that god is the essence of good that's what we're saying there is good but it's not morality we don't vocalize it should not be due to the moral good sentiment better [Music]

there are so many microorganisms killing each other every moment of course of course nature is very cruel yes so my my point is what the function of zoro is it is one of the divine names [Music]

foreign names which actualize in the bliss you should not pray for them yeah but in the world of things they both are needed

you see one could say uh dr madhus that look since god is all-powerful and he is because god is a totality our being when we say god is the totality of being eternal he has to share his pleasure being with every other creature whoever seeks being evil

one could say that could he not make a world without suffering he could not he could not or he could but he chose what that i i mean this this debate was carried by gaza yeah in in his famous argument that it's the best yeah the best of all which is also uh uh live i think

who has expressed in one of his books on and islamic philosophy and dimensions of islam and that muslim because muslim scholasticism because they have fundamentally seen god from a will-centric point of view volunteerism with what we can call them by the right use of intelligence

salvation just to be clear you're saying that the center is uh it's not will it is will or it's not center is intelligent islam is the path of intelligence absolutely absolutely yeah that is why islam is

foreign okay

just to just to fill the people in so we're saying well look uh the intellect uh was ultimately intellect is referring to it's it's it's rooted in a very greek culture as well of intellect and coming from this kind of knowing but you've got reason which is you're saying uh the islamic tradition tried to combine the both intellect and reason and refer to it through the heart in the terms of the forad or the kalb and

okay but and ultimately are we trying to say what are we trying to say about intellect or reason here that it's ultimately it is the the great is beneath god it is god it is what what what what yeah yeah i what i try to say is intellectual self knowledge is what is what is ultimately knowing god point ok

intellect accesses reality known conceptually immediately directly intellectual intuition but the problems so just to just just declare so intellectual uh intuition is our perception being able to perceive things her perception the normal perception is also in a way immediate hair which may be

is a sense of because in arabic often they translate reason as another often uh they would say that you know mean hate on another like it involves some reflection and assessment usually you have to assess yes a reason involves dividing reality for our convenience for achieving certain answers so that is why we have to con why are there

just to translate so we're saying well okay in modernity the problem was people wholeheartedly embraced reason but shunned intellect and forgot intellect okay so uh okay so the the camera camera is great by the way we just put it but yes so uh okay so but so you feel in some ways the intellect is more helpful than reason they are they care what we call reason is a mental projection of intellect so they they are in a way they should not be they put into the

such a binary what is law they could speak is that an important role if we want to understand it from an islamic point of view the place of logic in islamic tradition yeah what is logic is that it is from a divine ray of intellect that is why you god cannot also go against that logic in that central sense reality is

[Music] you see there came a clash between the theologians and the mystics and the theologians argued for a rational sense of divine being like of rational arguments or rational recognition of the divine whereas the mystics argued for an intuitive um reasoning for the divine so that's okay that's that's very

uh fascinating i mean i and more importantly what igbo comes in iqbal it was not an islamic tradition and

before we move away from from that point i just wanted to just touch up briefly on the point you said uh dr madhus that so has early and uh had this very famous kind of controversy this this thing that happened and his own student of what could have been a lot of me not the sufi lottery the the spanish maliki so he even writes about it and obviously they there are odds on it but it's his famous statement that lisa phil im khan abdul that that basically we live in the best of all possible worlds and this is something which they the world

god could not have made it any better than it is this was obviously ghazali's claim later on philosophers like leibniz expand on this and take it further you you find yourself you would agree with that fundamental statement laissez because could not god have made a world without cruelty without suffering without where everything a form of paradise ultimately this question has been much debated and i think the the modern philosophization philosophical maybe so much has debate on on it but i will ask in a different question then i think

we will then we will be able to understand it was there available to god a separate will to make another world center when we say god is all possible just to translate for the people that what what you're saying is we have to always with god the central theme must always be his intelligence as opposed to his will because what we're saying is that if this way we're looking at it we're looking at it as though um that there's more will involved than

intelligence is this what we're saying is is this what yours i i am also saying this i am also trying to point out metaphysical perspective is purely intellectual it does not involve what we can call the arbitrariness of will god is all possibility it means all possibilities are necessarily to be actualized [Music]

[Applause] [Music] just to translate for the people um you see ultimately you're saying that god is uh the ultimate pure being so when you gave the example of karam or jude or generosity or these things

but if we were to say that god has infinite capacity like he can it does not mean that each one of those capacities is to be actualized it's to actually happen i i take it that's what we're saying but the question then is but could they not be actualized why would they still be problems um i mean yeah yeah yes yes yes from nervy's point of view

i mean [Music] [Music] to give that being he cannot resist not giving because he is youth his being wants generous he is generous ontologically wants to be yes ontologically god god quran

which dog has for example of smell and dog will lose their condition humans have as that of intellect and then that we will call evil any limitation we call evil because we have chosen these this with all its limitations foreign

he used to see with both eyes god was decided that he can live outside god he can choose pleasures outside god they could otherwise keep punishing the islam all pleasures are allowed if they are in god order allowed if they are in god but if they are outside god

we have tried to it's interesting because ghazali we've mentioned his early says that the greatest uh approximation on earth to the pleasures of jannah is the orgasm so he said what happens it's very simple to understand in orgasm one loses the subjectivity one word movements one loses sense of time sense of separate subject sense of separation okay and in fact this is the key of all their

joy in every great joy we enjoy the world maybe in the music in nature in art self has to be that is amazing that is very very well said that in an organization paradox of subjectivity and a timelessness even if it's momentary in the in that moment of the orgasm what's interesting is this same timelessness and this kind of stripping away of subjectivity is also

um found in certain certain experiences like psychedelic experiences it is also something that you know a person that they escape the time space continuum almost um so that's very interesting that you that you said that i thought wow okay this you know this thing we find that islam hasn't actually um or the scholars sorry institutionalized islam hasn't really celebrated uh this notion of things like

psychedelics as much but i feel that the sufi mystics did um appropriate whether they knew it or not but they must have appropriated um certain psychedelic um whether it was plants or things like this whether they were making drinks out of it whether they knew or not just by their literature it seemed so um otherworldly i don't know what if you would agree with that uh dr yeah in fact yeah so the point has been anything that leads you to outside yourself

is in a way demanded there is a transcendence in music unquestionably it strikes the soul you know people say it's the nourishment of the soul it definitely some there are certain octave sounds and notes that strike uh that

hit people i mean even plato you know before christ was speaking about how you could heal people through music how you could destroy people through music i mean it's um it definitely has some transcendent power to it exactly now if now if we come to the question of psychedelics if you see for example when huxley wrote his doors of perception and helen all those and moksha so he never initiated that debate he said the greatest contribution of modern science would be to invent a helluva to a halogenic that does not derange brain that only leads to a blissful heaven and all

and all that and it's what happened in sufi tradition since the path to pursue the divine through some shortcut is so peril in human humans and drugs do achieve a transcendence though it has been sometimes seen if it is since islamic sufism may be a central notion that you have to consider sufism is the science of stations

[Music] [Music] then you better access god if you if you have approached god from the from these from this higher stations the problem can drug

people understand so you're saying that the the people the mystics they the sufis they distinguished between the hal which was the more ecstatic experience the the kind of experiential side and between the mat which were the stations of things like patience taqwa things like this and they were the goals the developmental goals not the the exit the kind of experiential ecstasy was the the byproduct but if you get hooked on even though one doesn't get addicted but let's say if you take these psychedelics and things one it's a shortcut and

two it's it's going for the byproduct not for the real goal which is the macam yeah uh you can put it partly that way but i think one more though ultimately some this is a very interesting fascinating point that these two terms

existence existence we exist outside ourselves with ecstasy authentic living or primary is a whole different

yes so so my point is is it better to be sane and the mystic at the same time or or is it better to lose sanity and enjoy the ecstasy so the mainstream sufism was that we should be both saying and enjoying the higher world simultaneously so if we are able to move that very subtly in on that path then some sufis would not have so much problems with certain use of for example in many sufis we call that shot they have been using certain these some mood altering substances but the point is it was never mainstream it was always in a very suspect

because there is firstly a danger that it will be a short circuit to transcendence one will only enjoy the bliss of the movement and then the larger goal of getting assimilated in the divine or getting transformed one with the oneness they

wanted more a balanced path between the both not just this kind of intoxication ecstatic sorry and i think that's a better way this ecstasy and not just this dryness but something in in in between yeah but you know doctors have that that point that you said about and which then would you mind expanding just slightly on that i found that very fascinating yeah yeah yeah yeah i will i will see when are we by man has been defined as

self-transcending animal point every movement whatever you see you search for something that is outside the self to be outside the self because self is the sorrow self is the devil self is your own greatest enemy when you try to sip a good tea or when you try to enjoy jokes i just got you are this habit of jokes just i'm recalling ruby said that jokes jokes directly reach the essence of the

diva seriously did he say that humor yes okay that justifies all my humor you know prophet saws had employed employed a person who would tell him jokes on a regular basis okay yes prophet saws had employed a person whose only job was to tell him jokes seriously and he also yes yes so so i mean now this humor has been so central to islamic understanding of the divine but very few people have noted it humor hawaii has in any major mystical book you will find

profuse references to the humor point one of the famous arguments that was developed in 20th century one of the philosophers argument from humor because because of possibility of humor were able to argue for transcendence and argue for god but i will not go into those details my point is whenever we want to be enjoying the best of the life we have to for that moment transport ourselves outside the self what happens in poetry you are transported outside yourself what happens in music you are transferred outside yourself is this what happens now what happens in

love you are transformed out of your ego what happens is whatever you cherish where are you placing the wujan is that the outside and the is the the answer no i mean i i i mean god has to be found okay yes so so we have to clean is the mirror of the self to polish our this then god turns on it so but that finding god is always ecstatic whosoever finds god he becomes ecstatic he cannot afford normal behavior

who said that by finding god i then began to dance naked point is it it could be metaphorical as well but the point is whosoever finds god finest bliss finds great joy that is so overwhelming that you cannot afford a normal this decorum and all that for that moment that is why in the great levels of mystics when you have the most intense experiences of of you are not able to be sure in this world that we don't even the livers are the even the life of the prophet when he said i have a special movement with god and at that time i do not

let me ask you here uh dr marouf but you see uh this is absolutely amazing and i i find this so profound but this concept of the other and yes there is from one aspect is what you're saying this that the self that the person always wants to transcend the self to the other but then the other is also by you know one could argue that religion creates the other in a negative light as well and casts the other to an eternal damnation uh you know like and so you are on this

right path and these people are going forever to to hell you know this uh uh self self salvation is exclusive um yeah i mean ultimately because many of the things that you're saying here that this you know for recognizing or that ibrahim is saying recognizing uh in all creation in all things the divine many of these things are said in other faiths i mean hinduism is often misunderstood by people like they think hinduism is like that pagan kind of uh

yeah it's like this pagan cult dumb kind of thing i mean it does have some weird stuff about it which is you know may sound dumb but in essence it has a philosophy that is also just about one god that is just permeates or being and um so i mean one could say well if ultimately all these things are from god let's say hinduism ultimately came from god whether some changes along the way people did or not why why do some people argue for exclusive salvation yes that has that's a very complex that is that

is a complex question but i think if you go to the mainstream muslim thinkers says yeah they have always they have always just they have always questioned this monopoly on salvation they have and they have understood islam as the act of surrender to the divine will not a particular faith that originated with prophet of madina in a particular time from adam to muhammad there is only one one and that is metaphysical what is what really saves is that attitude of surrendering to the divine to be empowered to be empowered and

enriched and encompassed by the divine the truth that saves and in fact from that point of view if you see muslim philosophers and sufis they have not been exclusivists in in general they have questioned this monopoly on salvation they have not other for example sufis have known that they have converted the whole world by by being more open to the other the and they didn't as such preach the peace religion to them but they just rated their higher being higher values that converted people to them to their path my point is if you just note others and then limiting salvation to the other

to oneself this is if you go deeper into the psychology of it this is some there is somewhere centralization of the ego or the nafs in it that is why in islam by by by making it mandatory that you have to affirm all of the previous faiths all other revealed faiths then only you become a muslim you in a way introduce the notion that others too could be saved even in ghazali who's who made a condition formulated in a way try to articulate it

african others he had tried to explain in detail that those communities who are not who do not know historical prophet of muhammad ali they are going to domination but then he said he has to be attractively presented to them he has to to be known by them but then there is a deeper understanding of who is muhammad muhammad is the principle of manifestation muhammad is not just a historical personality when you say in the sufi context of muhammad nuri muhammad muhammadiyah then muhammad is the muhammad is the death of being in all of us the ideal

man in us is muhammad so knowing muhammad is so in bad science we can understand the exclusivity exclusivist claim see exclusive claim has to be understood at rest properly or then it is not a problem but if it is to be understood at is on a deviant path they do not know muhammad formally so they are in for that particular reason they are going to be damned that has not been a popular uh that has not been a proper understanding in with muslim sage if you go for example allah he if you did read him in details and other

writings you can see how he opens the path of the salvation for never but that

but but but the point was point was muslim sages muslim sufis have understood the other as the aspect of our own self so they could not exclude salvation to them okay so what you're saying is that you see although this otherness this kind of this this is intrinsic within human beings what many people have done is kind of projected it on let's say the other whether it's the hindu and what some of these mystics have done or what the mystics have done is rather

than on other people and thereby becoming egocentric they've pres they've project introjected that onto another side of the the self the ego yes that is why when ruby was asked about the 71 deviated sects he said they are all within me i i could say the same thing but it would have a totally different meaning if i said it

we have to understand that god is unique in his every manifestation so every religion will assert its uniqueness that has to be granted that's why in fact in concentration you say jesus says i am the truth i am the truth so to to know jesus is to know the truth but in islamic tradition you will find muhammad system at the center that's why nasr has used the solar system analogy that fits i think well he said in every religion it is like a solar system where sun is at the center and that sun is their archetypal figure they are our dear prophet but sitar's that does not mean stars are in a way absent stars are there but they are dim

like jumps when we see in the night stars are there but during the day stars are no longer there but that doesn't mean stars are not really there they are demoned by the light of the sun so in every religious universe their central prophet prophetic figure is the center but the point of islam was ultimately that is why ibm again comes here ibn army says the perfect man is attached to no belief all belief is an attachment wow

so he says for perfect man he cannot be not you cannot tell him to and not and just just for the uh for the viewers that because the word akida comes from which is a not and the word not in arabic carries a kind of negative connotation isn't it like they will say often in things like okay this is an ok and now we've untied this particular knot it's seen as a kind of negative like usually a tension a problem exactly though it had technically a positive function it its function was to bind us to a particular manifestation of a device

that we did not lose our get distracted by hair and that because reason can be it has a function of housing why is the skepticism modern skepticism when the reason is when reason was unleashed could discipline when we couldn't observe discipline so it could flower into ten thousand become absolute that is a pathology that is why sufis then resist that that's when they will target those who

are exotic thousands who just trade this and set up central question and i'll forget the decision between faith and belief whenever you go to the quran you will say central it is not akira and and iman is an existential that you feel that you are in a way that you intuitively know so it is not to be captured in any critical language in any conceptual network so deeply our iman is an existential affair it is like love affair we cannot in a way love everything the absolute evil

the emotion is is that what we're saying the love what sorry it doesn't is consistently islam has advocated this this direction but later our famous orientalist scholar this smith argued in this decision between faith and belief problem is in a modernity especially when this age of decline has happened people have not understood things very metaphysically or intellectually

beneath became central that's why clash of salvage salvations as if we say other traditions are bound by these beliefs so they are actually from the proper beliefs but the problem is the religion is fundamentally demands faith and faith is scientific by its very nature and that's an existential affair it is not to be kept in any critical system that

[Music] foreign that should be safeguarded against those who want to fix it into a certain critical system that was fundamental but just to be uh for some of the people that what uh dr zab had said is that

this um you see the dogmatization of creed uh or sorry and pulling it of faith and turning it into a creed this by especially mystics was deemed a kind of pathology of religion it was uh this was a kind of like this is where the disease is really the infection is coming through and i think that's very well said because really faith was about faith it was about belief it wasn't about creed and creed is what brought much of the problems but you know on this uh following on from that

line of thought uh dr maroof you see you've got these different ancient religions at uh certain similar times you've got ibrahim alaihissalam you've got the indic you know the vedant the vedas and the vedic kind of period you've got the zoroastrian what why different religions then you know one could ask that you know like we gave them all different kind of oasis to drink from and min and a root tone but why very simple reason very simple

reason because individualities and temperaments differ religions have to differ because religion is not catering to the pure truth that is the domain of metaphysics that is the domain of what we call the new kayam that has stayed the same for quran metaphysics has stayed the same from adam to muhammad there is no difference in metaphysics from in in religions so that's why so just just just to unpack that slightly so the metaphysical deen has been static what does that mean just to understand that yeah i mean yeah i mean that's key saving moral and metaphysical truths

that really say you that that for which revelation was sent what was the reason revelations were sent so from that point of view they have been so if you read the quran it has been said in la ilaha it is all metaphysics and in fact we can find equivalent expressions of all major religions you can translate this is this is the dino this is the loop okay so so my point is

when quran says quran uses syria in plural manhattan plural so it means despite changing sharia from profit to profit saving function of religion didn't change so saving function of reason is fundamentally matter of the moral and metaphysical content so that has stayed the same point is we for example why are there different styles of clothes why we want to you are in a different cloth

or we love different styles in our architecture my point is if we really understood metaphysics we would not quarrel over religions wow that is amazing so and religions have to be different because religion is catered to the individual and the emotional leaders say truth pure metaphysical truth when filtered in individual and imaginative expressions becomes religion and that religion has a function of sourcing people as well metaphysics need not be consoling see men ultimately people need consolation they need solace they need certain stories as well they need certain so if that is the

religion as that's the milla and the deen that's not the dino the ultimate metaphysical yeah i exactly in so many forms and in fact every day it changes agarap is in islam you say what does what is the function of what is the function he reinterpret off and on so does not stay the same

the moral and the metaphysical content has also changed so that does not change because their concerns are very you you quite well read with things like uh the vedic tradition as well and the vedanta and things like isn't in hinduism they have a kind of tripartite uh representation of god in that way where they say like brahman and paramatma and ishwar is it is that the version of this information even christianity and other traditions as well for example god as creator hmm right okay what does god has destroyed

for example shiva in one tradition so in so what happened in hinduism the different name is for the god which are which are in islam god is muhi also and he's also mumeet god life and he takes life so what happened for some people it looks as if they have been separately hypothesized that heck not the case all are ultimately subservient to the one you see the conception of the once update it is elsewhere as farm we find it in noise tradition we find in islam we find it in other traditions as well now there has been a very important

point which has been often foreign what is misleading in this characterization is people forget that deva corresponds fundamentally to the angel in islamic

system i mean diva and technically means children of light does it diva if you are able to understand islamic angiology better then find correspondences in other traditions you are always able to find for example when we see franzan's book transcended unity of religion she could find these correspondences but since people they do not really give a

damn to this what does the brahman mean this is the vedas means bliss doesn't it i don't mean it is and there is a conception of consciousness and the truth when you say god is heart that is truth and god is heavier now god's a consciousness so if you are able to find these correspondences

then there would no not be such an authorization as has happened in recent history do they you know do uh in the vedas is god ex described as this as one is that a dominant theme in the vedas or [Laughter]

identify with these multiple gods they have been understood as anthropophysic my point is the one the beard being or pure being see because if you go back to yes i was gonna say if you go back to the uh indus valley civilizations with they weren't really statues at that time which is just what about four thousand years ago this seems to have been hinduism i mean this vedas were there presumably these teachings but it's they were more about forces weren't they like things like varun and agni and fire and you have different

names to them yeah there is a tendency that we all have some religions tend to dignity towards paganism in historical pathological water these terms have this happened in fact elsewhere as well but the point is the central orthodox understanding is god is one and in fact we better use human being not god if we have to understand religion is better because if you come to the conception of god and you will say buddhism there is no conception of god so then there is no dialogue possible with the buddhist then buddhism then a buddhist has no way of getting saved

because he denies god but then if you transpose this if you use that language of metaphysics we say absolute is at the center of every religion they call god absolute that personal god may be not figuring in buddhism or jainism but that is not a huge problem personal god emerges at a second stage in event humans interact with the absolute in a particular personal format but ultimately what universalism is the notion of absolute not personal god but absolute islam or other traditions fundamentally they are maintaining only the absoluteness of the absolute no what other person so just

just to kind of just unpack that for the viewers what you what you're saying is that look when we're communicating with certain religions they some of the notions don't carry across like so obviously in buddhism there isn't you know there isn't this central concept of god uh whereas within uh obviously the other religions there is however what you're saying is there is always a central notion we need to change our rhetoric our language because although they're not using the word god but they're using what do you say the absolute absolute is the proper term being

that being becomes the central term which is really the transcendent ultimate being which we would call god now the personal god where we start interacting or we choose to you know we see god as that personal relationship this is a secondary process and we can put that aside for a moment yeah so okay i mean in that sense oh you know somebody had asked the question here as well that um in fact i believe it would say it ali it do and it say i'm not sure if you know him but he's been on a previous

mind trap as well now uh he'd ask the question that of krishna then being a prophet or i think that's what he said the question has gone further up now um or being a manifestation or do you say manifestation of the divine i'm not sure but i thought i thought he said profit but um so okay i mean what what i don't know so what what are your thoughts uh on that yeah in fact uh where you use better term is avatara avatara is a manifestation of the absolute see what is the fundamental for what is the fundamental function of the prophet prophet communicates the will of the

absolute to the human kind he then he is the envoy of the absolute is almost similar it he he manifested the absolute in in the self in in the very flesh and the very being of their definition to seeing him you are in a way put in touch with god you just are transported to god so in that sense in indian tradition

avatara that rama that krishna so functionally equivalent to prophetic figures but proper term they would not use the prophet term they would use these but they have rishis as well the rishis are enlightened how rishis yes that i want to talk about rishi is one who has heard the that has been

eternal that has been heard then when it transcends the particular historical medium it gives the revelation of the quran by the primary what is revelation it is the eternal speech of god so precisely that is the theory of revelation in indian tradition as because they have they call it if i recall it correctly they call it like you have the shruti and the samhiti or something that they the oral kind of transmission which is the vedas yes in fact in fact islam is uh in in islam also we know fundamentally god's speech is is heard it is not written all the faith

there is a huge tradition of preserving the exact exact what we call that semantics and the musicality and how we have to pronunciation there are great pronunciation schools that they have these are often a debate so indian tradition has made it a point to preserve the original understanding the way it was originally heard originally it was recorded pronounce it because it's an oral tradition as well in fact adaptations have been also primarily oral and scripture is a speech of god just not in the writing of god so i'll teach you the who were they heard by and

written by yes yeah those who heard them they are called the issues in fact yes and if if you want in an islamic relation the equivalent of rishis normally now it historically the way sage is when we say hoki if you go allah's grandson ismail shaheed his great book that introduces sufi metaphysics for the world in a very brilliant way though that aspect is often forgotten by those who now try to own him despite trying to which which grants him

which is and he summarizes metaphysical teachings and there is a pin ultimate chapter on hakim haki means sage this is the equivalent of muslim philosopher now there is a very interesting there is a very interesting hierarchy in islamic tradition the hierarchy goes like this first is the prophet then there is the muhaddas that was applied to umar from from his

mouth just to just to clarify with people this is not muhaddith somebody a scholar of hadith yes so there is a hadith uh that there were people before you who were um had the thorn that they were kind of spoken to uh as in inspirationally intuitively although they were not prophets yeah then in the abacada there's the arthur writers then then after this there comes sage hakim and he says he is divinely protected against error okay

is he wow not only that he says the prophet's best advocates are sages prophet so he feels they are in he feels the sages are infallible his point is now if you go in in the islamic history from ghazali to allah or ibn arabi or previous people they have been fundamentally with what we can call sages they are not merely intelligence they are not merely they are fundamentally in sages so point is and they have helped they have been called proofs of islam

so if not and not any who are merely a fake are merely a theologian they have not been called fruits of islam so those who have best interpreted the prophet in different traditions they are called sages this is true about in christian tradition if you go to christian tradition there is a thomas aquinas for example he has helped he has he is the central figure in expounding christian understanding of the world for example in this in that catholic structure or if you go to buddhism there is nagarjuna okay if you go to mahayana tradition especially and if you go to for example christian metaphysics better more esoteric part it is mr eckhart or if you go to indian

tradition shankaracharya shankara these are all sages the function of the sage is to explain the revelation in such a way that most people understand it and they are able to relate to it the deeper truths of revelation are communicated more rational in more rational terms to them and see the note a very important point one of the functions of the prophet is to teach hikmah okay

[Applause] argument in detail but the point is you you we have imam shafi try to restrict or reduce hikmah to the sunnah okay so that limits its scope kashmiri is a famous scholar who hailed from kashmir he has criticized imam shafi on that point and there have been others what is uh stance on hikmah yeah

their their point is it moral metaphysical teaching jo of the deen when explained in rational terms or not only need not be it it's to be fundamentally intuitively known that constitutes hikmah moral metaphysical teachings of the eternal revelation of the dheenal kaim that is hikmah so it is not in a way to be identified with what we can call hadees or that is restricting it now hikmah is what what is wisdom why why is philosophy for example defined as a pursuit of wisdom

of wisdom so if philosophy is a separate endeavor of that we pursue wisdom and that they need also moral qualifications for that if you if you read plato closely though they can hear your arabic philosopher is not a proper philosopher there are in greek tradition also sages we have a conception of sage not just a rationalist philosopher let's see everyone has become a fair philosophy so islamophobia also we have at the concept of not a racist senior to think that but a sage and hakeem's qualifications

qualifications are moral and intellectual so hikmah is what ultimately unites religions i see so you would say that these as well and when we try to use philosophy to that is why there have been in indian tradition as well as as well in islamic tradition who have

tried to give hello i'm just slightly i'm sorry no problem no problem you're back it's just the one of the central tragedies of modern muslim modern muslims is that they have not given philosophy it is proper place in islamic intellectual philosophy used to figure heavily in the curriculum especially that's in his army if you go

and at one point after nine books that dealt with philosophy by part of the syllabus but gradually they have been curtailed and we know in islamic seminary and these muslim philosophers are nurtured so what is it why is it now restricted to the fikka mostly and even logic is being in a way taught very summarily it's kind of dismissed really religion unfortunately for the most part institutionalized islam um has kind of uh become a bit bankrupt of the voice of reason and uh it's just fallen into this kind of like

dogmatism and almost like just glorified cults um which is a shame really but yeah i was really i found that really interesting that you said about uh maulana ismael de la being very uh inclined this way about kind of consciousness and these all hickman stuff like this even though his book is really hailed by the hadith hadith really as racism pioneer yeah yeah so that's really amazing irony is he is not being read on the point of you know i wanted to ask you but i know we're taking up so much uh

we've taken up so much of your time professor but i wanted to say you know in contrast to all of this and this kind of thinking and religion and you've mentioned modernity you do have what was uh the rise obviously people challenging institutionalized religion but it led to atheism and the rise of atheism but with it brought the fear of nihilism and this was something that you did look into personally and especially albert camus who's an existentialist i wanted what were your kind of summarizing thoughts on that because i found that very fascinating um

yeah yeah my point was for example when nitshi said god is dead or when can't long back fought arguments of god which are normally popularly even today argued but he showed there are problems in them the way they are usually argued and then the secular age we know the west and all that so after evolutionary and other paradigms in scientific knowledge we know it has been a very long drawn battle with religion yeah and it religion has been often on the losing side you know modern academia is more agnostic than theistic

of course of course yes so now that my my point was if we could that is why if we could turn to metaphysics no to religion though ultimate religion is in a way it is in that integral conception of civilization we we have religion we have metaphysics we have poetry we have all things but in a proper perspective in proper relationship my point is if we could for example take a departure and look at ibn arabi as the central figure with which to engage in the modern in modernity in the wake of atheism and all that our debate with so-called atheists gets a very very different turn

so fundamentally islam is transtheistic it is not theistic or it is not atheistic obviously metaphysics metaphysics is trans-theistic that is why we are able to then engage with the buddha or even modern high-tech areas and darida and all that for example i would say i would ordinarily pass for an atheist [Laughter] so and he didn't embrace what we can call crude atheism and this has been said about other major post-modern thinkers if you have to engage with them then we have in our traditions people like ibn arabi and there we know their studies such as it has been published

sufism and this deconstruction beyond this okay who has published this book and there are many other studies where we are able to put in dialogue major modern atheistic thinkers or known atheistic thinkers with muslim mistakes my point is fundamentally mysticism in sufism has given as a transtheistic part of spirituality what i've read recently as well which is just on this point uh doctor was quite interesting it was in that recent book the um what is it the immortal mysteries or the keys to immortality um but the uh was mentioning

about mystics from all religions and it actually said the interesting thing about mystics is that they don't often refer to god as god like they refer to him using either um certain symbols or terms like like they might say for example and he and he's referring to uh in his study including sufi's muslims mystics as well like they may refer to him as the pronoun or or maybe light or something but they often won't use the word god and he said that's just

he was making an interesting observation of of this point and i just thought well that's an interesting since you were saying that of the transition yes if you you if you if you read ibn arabi he mostly used god yeah the truth and and and if you can closely follow the modern philosopher's so-called atheistic thinkers they will not have any problems with this word is truth see god is reality it is a famous article there is a famous one lecture and in this is one of the books different lectures most probably god is reality that is the central chapter if

we want to understand the islamic notion of god is identified with reality now where it is what is what we underencompass what can be experienced god is not some supra cosmic policeman some extraterrestrial force some personal beings sitting somewhere that someone can question see when quran says what does it mean one cannot entertain a doubt regarding god so what is that god one does not entertain it out in reality what does that mean what can and can the doubt be entertained regarding god so quran questions this and when quran says

god is the manifest truth so manifest truth it means it is it and leaves out it so much it confronts us in such a blindingly blinding light that no one can question or ignore it [Music] to move further and further into higher realms of consciousness so my point is if we could restore the sagely understanding of tawheed we could give philosophers this sufi

modification the central place our dialogue with modernity which is committed to certain pluralistic ideas and other things it would it would move forward somebody asked on that note that they said um you've so where exactly does god live um i mean is that does that how would you respond to that question so we're exactly just godliness

where does god live so they're saying so we're exactly based on what you're saying um if god is reality so where exactly does god live or exist yes yes identifies him with a very life subhanallah so god in the in life and salvation of life god is very life wow so when hubble worried when we try to understand that what is that god is our very subjectivity [Music] how do you understand god is nearer than the jugular vein

god is the very name of the self then why i turn to igbo igbo defines god as in terms of his philosophy of ego god is the ultimate ego i mean if you go to the bible when moses asks god how would i at those people to whoms who sent me then there was this profound statement god says i am that i am i am there i am sufi is when we

in fact the best proof of god is that we have self or the self is in us not we have something you know myself are we saying here consciousness exactly consciousness and that is that is the name of the god so if we understand that no atheist as such so the dialogue between theism and atheism is often shallow so deep down deep down if you understand god is grounded being if we understand god as the very self or as the manifest truth or as what is the case what then i think there's a very good dialogue between so-called atheistic sectors and muslim

muslim sufis and were able to move forward wow out of curiosity you picked two you know in that uh in your um thesis you focused on two main uh philosophers you picked uh albert camus right okay why why these two yeah in fact they are the most imp significant or influential theorists or writers of the absurd and absolutism and nihilism have been central malaise or we can call it has been the center to modern understanding of the

question of spirituality religion and because i mean just for people i mean albert camus is is so huge on this you know a key figure in existentialism in this understanding of really uh of of of our being but also he's a very key proponent of atheism as as well isn't he so uh yeah yeah he he is he is but my point was if you read for example if you feel the notion of silence in beckett very seriously it almost converges with the notion of mystics

back it was fundamentally denying critical structures for molistic structures when the language tries to capture reality he was denying that claim so what is fundamentally absurdity absolutely is there is no meaning in life which is which has been the overwhelming experience of modern man who find us because god is not at this at his center of attention he finds everything meaningless now now then now interesting thing is how can we restore meaning to life for absolutist philosophers for if we go for this samuel becket it is almost similar to what mystics propose

that you attuned to your being in silence you just do not be attached to your stories your narratives you attune to the being in silence okay that you are tuned to attuned to the being in silence and for kamu it is and here comes art art poetry and all that you see because just on a side point camus says that one of the greatest and i've cited this often that you know pro philosophical problems i find is suicide like like this problem of you know of sisyphus that why don't we just kill ourselves and end it all like what

what is the purpose to you know just to repeatedly like you know you've got him pushing this rock up the hill sisyphus like he gives this scenario so yeah yeah so point is how do we find meaning in life and do not commit suicide my point is in islamic tradition art has also been a very important means of finding life when you say a son a son has to be understood in terms of art as well what is art art is creating things in beauty in his style yeah art is very transcendent it can be

with the mystics on this point and he in fact in other points from for many other you know just on a side on a side note doctor i was going to say that i've i've said recently in times when i've been asked about the quran and i've also referred to what is it karen armstrong's book as well that you see people should read scripture like art i've said that you know we read it like a textbook and and i feel it's more that quran this this kind of recital this artistic recital to it that it is more to be read as art

in a way yeah but sorry carry on uh in fact in modernity it has often been said that religion will be substituted by art and then attempt has been to read scriptures as art though there are some nuggets sorry say that again say that again sorry scripture should be read as art which has often been said by certain modern things arnold said religion has to be substituted by art but i think we should but great minds think alike i think uh i think we should not buy into this duality of art and religion when we define religion and we see it as essential combinations

very well that is itself a pursuit of the beautiful and what is art but the pursuit of the beauty in a way so my point is in islam there is such a rich intellectual poetic aesthetic literary culture if we give more attention to it then we will find other parts of meaning open to us then we will find also dialogue with the secular modernity possible so if we could give other the central place which it had in traditional islamic curriculum now which now it has been in a way in a very relegated to the background that needs to be given central pla

given it is due place what happens ultimately god has been deferred as the meaning of life now what is the meaning of life god now what gives meaning to life a greater understanding of conscious awareness of being when you are rooted in your being you are you you solve all problems it was famously said by pascal that all of human problems arise from our inability to sit at us to sit alone in a room who said that pascal

[Music] what is all that about dialogue with one's own son so if we really try to know ourselves is it is it not in a way it's so true that we for the life of us try forever to run away from that silent inner dialogue with ourselves like we preoccupy ourselves with so much noise just to not have that internal dialogue yes there's a modern muslim modern indian mystical thinker kumara is krsna-murti he has also argued this theme that that

modern man tries to escape from the self and that is his melody we do not want to encounter the nothingness at the heart of the self and that nothingness ultimately converts with the pure being of the divine yeah whosoever knows the self knows god that is that is what has been said by so many sufis in so many ways so so our central problem is not god it is theosis it is becoming divine image okay that with that we are primordially we are dividing that's the problem theosis yeah so by so this that that is the objective okay i mean that that that we have to achieve okay we're

able to achieve theosis to become theosis [Music] recapture our divine image our divine in which we are created by god then that is our salvation so when people try to discuss god and believe in afterlife they are usually missing the fundamental point that theology is autology of god is really the science of the self so if theology has autism

you know the famous saying that he so attributed whosoever in a knows slightly different statement but it converges with this as well this is what this was said by swami so my point is if we understand theology in this sense as it is really our story god manifesting in us unfolding in us that is the end and substance of all religion and then love is born and then consciousness gets attuned to its higher reach and then we find a world with wonder and beauty and joy

for example the central word wonder taqwa ah quran uses taqwa so many times this fear of god which is hugely translated yeah but the best translation is it is in every experience

[Music] [Music] melvin sees a beautiful object when one sees a beautiful what object object [Laughter] moving in fact god has been defined as the sweetness of all sweet things wow let's store it as rasa in the kashmir tradition also god is identified with the rasa rasa means the sweetness rust just goes the sweetness

so when we understand god in these terms say jesus prophet defines god in terms of love and islam defines the terms of truth the reality and then we see love is in a way connecting more that's why sufi is so much emphasized on it i think it is no authorization then we are in a way on a sacred ground we are all one we are not dialogue with the other we are really dialogue with our own selves and uh

that book should be revealed to your own self then alone you can existentially or authentically engage with the quran wow that when you engage with the quran it's you know you're placing yourself as that recipient of this revelation in the moment so i my definition of muslim is building on these sufi metaphysicians it is to be open to experience to submit to the truth or the experience god is not a particular object of experience god is whatever is encountered in every experience in fact we encounter only god god alone alone is encountered that is

the sum and substance of this metaphysics so that is why world is such a beautiful place no one wants to leave it because always we are searching by god we are haunted by god there is a deep in abraham joshua his book is titled god in search of man so if we understand that so god will not going to god it's not going to leave us he is going to find us and that's why we are always restless

without god that's what quran says without god your souls will never find rest so in that yeah and i feel sometimes you know i don't know if you're a fan of people like uh or if you read up much like john ilia he's shiny but i feel that even when he says some people you know they take it the other way or atheistically but i take it this way like when he says like you know us

you know like the way you look at the the sky i mean does somebody actually live up there i feel it's more he's trying to break off that institutionalized god and trying to say well you know he says in one of these other lines that kuch then much maybe which some days that even god lived within me uh that he's creating this more natural um organic uh intuitive kind of understanding of god yeah i i think this is so amazing uh uh

you know dr martha i'm so grateful we've finally managed to have this dialogue and i know we've been trying for a while and it's been difficult with the internet and stuff uh but i'm so absolutely uh in awe of what you've been saying people have asked before we wrap this up people have asked um would you could you recommend a reading list uh for people who are interested in this or certain books maybe that you that people are interested in yes yes yes i think i can share that with you on this email i like that and you can share yeah but absolutely private things i can

just mention first world scriptures very watery world scriptures world scriptures maybe there is a huge canon but you are not able to follow all that so surprisingly i would say read thought teaching of toys daoism it's a very small text read for example bhagavad gita read upon the shadows okay there are 100 over 100 opening challenges one

from this buddhist canon similarly one can finish in a week or so basic canon of world religions it's not a huge list i think and one can you had mentioned earlier on the uh translation uh by darashiko is that in print is it the darashikosi it is

and and then secondly i would suggest to read commentaries on the scriptures by the most tragic authentic representatives of various traditions for example if we want to understand islam we should not read it from the original size it should be read from the ghazali ibn arabi these people who have been who have been treasured by tradition as in a way their own spokespersons and they have been in a dialogue certain way so and for untranslated christianity you should read people like aquinas for example or augustine so and to read vedanta you should read

shankara and other my my point is and then reading list would include plato you can never miss it so all your reading list seems to be the classic authentic text i mean i mean yes scriptures and then major writings of major philosophers and daily dose of poetry so i mean major points major epics who are your favorites huh who are your favorites who or who are they who are your favorites they're poets well it's i mean it is

is a sin called originality in poetry tradition even in religious tradition there is no originality the old is gold the truth has been said numerous times yeah one can only set in a refreshingly new way no one can invent and one cannot invent a new truth that's why classics are important we can find ourselves through tradition that's something that is why heidegger said nothing great has ever been said outside tradition because tradition is so central tradition to find out the horizons of meaning in which we engage so if we understand if you have to involve and try to

for everyone half understand half is the most i think reading half is one finds the meaning of life if one can if he and if one fails to find the meaning of life one cannot find it in any other part we find some mystically oriented poetess who sound more who resonate more with certain sensibilities especially some secular sensibility they are harder than that they should be right holland and religion

okay these are poetess german poets that's about whom heidegger wrote that is [Laughter] it's the task of philosophers to explain poetry oh in allah words of freud he said wherever i've been i've uh he said i've never in his words he said i've never found myself somewhere except that a poet had preceded me allah so that's uh well it's been absolutely amazing

uh dr martin if people want to reach out to you and connect with you and um you know maybe pick your brains or research or whatever it is what is the best place to for people to reach out to you is it social media or is it uh social media but i am i have i have one of my friends is maintaining a blog roofshopblogspot.blogspot.com okay and i'll share that on these youtube newspapers so most of my writings are on academia.com or on this dot they blogspot.com there and i am accessible through email i would love to

learn from my anyone who is interested i would love to learn from them because every dialogue is really god teaching us we are not teaching ourselves god is teaching us through the other so that is the essence of teaching in islamic tradition wow so people if what i'll do is i'll share in the youtube description as well the blogspot uh address and if you want to reach out

you can reach out there and if you want from there you can get hold of dr marus email and connect if you want to connect um well it's been absolutely amazing dr saab i really appreciate you taking out the time um thank you once again from the from my heart for taking and i i do hope to get you on again inshallah pick your brains on there's been so many things we haven't discussed there's just so much to discuss here thank you for inviting and hosting and all that it is a pleasure right well guys likewise if uh

do uh hit up inshallah dr madhu's blog page and check it out have a read do connect he's a very good friend as well of dr mee faisal who we've had on before from quantum research in canada and do you remember to check out if you're into that stuff to reach out to dr mead faisal as well amazing individual i think kashmir kashmir is a panini there's like intellectual geniuses everywhere i'm like uh kashmir was called sharda pete or saraswati that's called the land of knowledge traditionally it has been called we hope

we try to have some glimpses into that we try to be true to that legacy where very small people were not able to but it has been that it is traditional place it is that's why also buddha said if you want to find nirvana go to kashmir because the argument of beauty and address is best in kashmir the beauty of kashmir makes you naturally more more poised more mystical

kashmir it was it's been said by the mughals isn't it that the if there is paradise on earth it is here yes yes yeah yes right well once again guys much love if you haven't already subscribed to my page i'm gonna put it up my exit page you'll see uh youtube the regular social medias sites facebook twitter instagram and also patreon situa's patreon for those of you that want to subscribe on the uh you can show your love and on youtube we're getting close to 20 000 so people spread the love get it out there click notifications

doctors have once again i'm gonna say a very big thank you shukran women people does not truly thank god so thank you once again for taking your time out shall we okay alaykum