In the name of God All-Compassionate Most Merciful

Freedom, Longing, and Injustice

We talked last time about discovering the experience of God at the point of our greatest need. We also talked, in the practice session, about the presence of the divine breath within us as the origin of our sense of freedom, and of the possibilities of freedom. Breath is the agent of transformation in the world. When we are moved by the divine breath, we are carried by something beyond ourselves from being shut down to being opened up. Through breath we are revitalized. Through breath we grow. Breathing is what mediates a developmental interchange between the inside and the outside of anything created: bodily inhalation and exhalation participate in this universal process. All creatures develop according to where the universal breathing takes us. That is what is referred to as ruh, or spirit, and it is never absent where life is present. The creative action of God – the divine breath – tastes like freedom to human beings. 

But wait – if I encounter what God is at the point of my greatest desire, my deepest need, isn’t the compulsion in that need a negation of freedom? I’m driven by it, after all! God may be free, but what about me?  Am I only the slave of my needs?  I’m supposed to have this breath within me, somewhere. It’s supposedly my heritage as a human being. Yet often I feel like I have no choices at all. I may cherish in my memory a moment of freedom in which I was transformed, yet I observe that my everyday habits continue. Can I ever not be trapped in the endless cycle of petty satisfactions and frustrations that seems to define my life, and many people’s lives?

The tradition suggests that anything less than our heart’s deepest desire will, indeed, drive us with a greater or lesser degree of compulsion, of unfreedom. But the heart’s yearning is much bigger than our passing attractions. It’s bigger than whatever we think we want. It’s as big as the need of the world to be other than it is. If we are willing to take risks, and if we don’t give up, then our yearning pushes us forward to wherever it is that is the furthest we can go, toward the greatest development we can attain in the context of this striving world. And that, ultimately – the point that turns out to be the furthest we can go – is  where we meet what our lives have truly served. It is either finite or infinite. 

When our yearning is as profound as it gets, embracing the whole human condition, when nothing merely selfish satisfies it, then (they say) we will discover it to be God’s yearning. It’s a daring notion, that humanity’s deepest longing to become directly mirrors God’s creative freedom. Classical Islamic theology has always taught that God needs nothing, but wants something. The Sufis say that what God wants is us. Once our desire coheres with God’s desire (those who know tell us), we no longer experience longing as compulsion, but as fulfillment. God’s yearning is the creative power active everywhere in the world, and it is the very core of what it means to be yourself, because God made you to be really and truly yourself. God’s being fulfills your yearning, and your being – together with all other being – fulfills God’s yearning. 

As a great saying central to the Sufi conversation puts it, God has declared: “I was a hidden treasure and I longed to be known, so I created the world.” The hidden treasure that is longing to be known is present and happening in everything, all at once. That is God’s position in creation.  If we think it is OUR position – our private gift, our personal vision –  so that what we go after with the full power of our desire is limited to self-expression…then, the tradition tells us, we are veiled. 

There is a teaching that God is veiled from our understanding with 70,000 veils of light and darkness. The veils of light can be radiant in themselves. (The world of the arts comes to mind.) The veils of darkness, on the other hand, can be very dark indeed. When we talk about oppression, we are talking about some of the darkest of these veils. Tyrants of all stripes are devoted to expressing themselves fully, at whatever cost to others. They are intoxicated with their own personal importance. Nothing is more valuable than their own freedom! If they are political or religious tyrants, then they and they alone are capable of bringing true peace and glory to the cause, to the nation, to the world, and they will seize whatever it takes to pursue that goal. Any opposition must be removed, because the tyrant takes himself to be the embodiment of divine power. He alone is good. Questioners are blasphemers, for only the tyrant’s story is allowed to be told. 

The process of my becoming is not just my process. God is not just “my God.” God is not just “our God.”  The God of the traditions to which we adhere, through which we are engaged and held accountable, the Abrahamic traditions, is simultaneously the God of each, and the God of everything at once. Muslims are asked to remember and praise God many times a day as rabb al-`alamin: the cherisher and sustainer of all the worlds. 

Now this word rabb is interesting. Usually it is translated as “Lord,” which is incomplete, but valid. Our rabb is, indeed, that which our lives ultimately serve. (The “cherisher and sustainer” I have used above was proposed by Muhammad Asad, who was searching to communicate some of the tenderness in the term.) The way we use rabb as Muslims parallels, to a degree, the way we have recently heard the Jews use Adonai, which also is translated as “Lord”: it’s an intimate word for addressing a mystery much greater than we are. It’s a name to use when talking directly to God.  It connects the personal to the universal. The God of relationship, the God that meets one’s deepest private yearning – the angle on the divine that we have been pursuing recently – is what we are referencing when we talk about ar-Rabb. 

The God of All, that which fulfills the deepest yearning of the whole of creation, is what we are referencing when we say Allah.  

In Sufi tradition, the point of highest spiritual development arrives when a person can truthfully say, “My Lord is Allah.”  Despite the fact that the statement is always true, very few of us can truthfully declare it!  The level of serving only Allah, as Allah, is the level of the prophets. But it is the level of our aspiration, if we are their heirs. We would wish to go there. 

Sufi tradition encourages us to wish as hard as we can to go there…but not to expect to get there. The level of being present with God alone is not one at which the vast majority of human beings will ever be able to function. The force of the desire of the One for the all, and of the all for the One, is too enormous for most of us to endure. Even our ideals tend to fall far short of such a goal; our governing motivations nearly always do. Such is the human condition, and it configures the spiritual work. Yet the heart’s longing toward an ever more profound realization of Allah is the only thing that moves humanity forward. If there is such a thing as progress, then that is the direction in which it travels. 

Sorting out what we are actually calling upon when we are in need, and its relationship to the ultimate need of all creatures, has an experiential side, and it has a cognitive side. First we must taste our own encounter with the divine. Then we must find a a context in which our experience becomes understandable and useful. After that, of course, we must go ahead and use it. Knowledge without action is a curse!

So at this point, let me introduce you to the Qur’anic concept of zulm.  Zulm is one of the central descriptors for the problem the Qur’an addresses and against which prophetic praxis is directed. The word is frequently translated as “wrongdoing.” I think this is a pretty dodgy interpretive move, because to translate it that way depoliticizes the idea, while the word in Qur’anic and prophetic context is highly political. 

Politics is the realm of practical action, and in that realm, desires contend with other desires over which of them will be realized today. The realization of some desires automatically excludes the realization of other desires in any given moment. We have two hours, and a few dollars. Shall we go to the movies, or shall we go to the store? If our most pressing need is to rest our minds, we may choose the first, and if our most pressing need is to fill our bellies, we may choose the second. In a healthily functioning person, the more urgent need will prevail. When that need is satisfied, or moderated, another need will come to the fore, and a dynamic balance among them all will keep that person on course, responsive to her own condition and to all the interactions that surround her.

In a dysfunctional, unhealthy person, the same limited set of desires will present themselves again and again, regardless of whether they represent needs, because artificially restimulating a set of desires can become a habit. When a system repeats in this way, needs outside its habitual pattern remain unaddressed. Perhaps we devote ourselves obsessively to feeding our fantasies, and never manage to eat a decent meal. After awhile, our neglected needs will begin to call out to us to inform us that our habits must change. Perhaps we get too fat, or too thin, or develop pain, or feel scared all the time, or mess up our relationships. We can change our habits and get better, or we can cling to them and get worse. There is very often a choice – but we frequently don’t want to do what needs to be done. 

In a group, whenever the restimulated desires of some are privileged over the unmet needs of others, there is social dysfunction. We call this state of communal illness “injustice.” 

Zulm means injustice.  Most of the time it points directly to what activists speak of as structural violence.  

Structural violence is chronic injustice. It is injustice that presents itself as inevitable, as the natural order of things. Like all injustice, structural violence is an unhealthy condition built out of habits that feed an artificially stimulated, self-reinforcing series of limited desires. (In this context, we sometimes call them “private interests.”) The condition is held in place through the general adoption of a toxic story.  Structural violence depends upon the broad circulation of a hypnotically convincing narrative that justifies the institutional exploitation of some groups of people by others. When this condition prevails, a part seizes permanent priority over the whole. It claims the dignity due to the whole of humanity for itself alone. It no longer serves the divine. It owns the divine. And it will insist that everyone else must buy its story. 

Yet as soon as such a claim is made – no matter how persuasively it is made –  it is only a matter of time before it will be proven false.  The yearning for God – which is the yearning of God – will arise in the subordinated groups. A closed story suffocates. People will long for freedom. The whole process of of the world will demand a breath.  

Zulm is like trying to hold your breath: it can only go on for so long. Something, eventually, will force open a closed story. The more closed the story is, the more painful that something is likely to be. It is better to open your story proactively, to share power gracefully before it is taken from you, to listen as well as speak. Sadly, the owners of divinity seldom do. And then their own violence can rebound upon them. As the Prophet Muhammad (s) put it, “The sword of God is the empty bellies of the poor.” 

One of the greatest exemplars of zulm in the Qur’an is a figure well-known to all of us, and that is Pharaoh. The story of Moses and Pharaoh is referenced more often than any other story in the Qur’an, because it speaks to the core of the divine drama as played out repeatedly among human beings, including the people of the Arabian peninsula at the time of the Prophet.  It keeps speaking to us today.

Egypt, of course, was the largest, richest, most integrated, most ideologically coherent civilization of the ancient Western world. The pinnacle of achievement! Egyptian civilization was the end of history: the story was over. So in the Qur’an, Pharaoh makes a claim that seems obvious to him: “I am your highest Lord.” But Moses replies: “No, that isn’t true, and the proof of it is, that my people will not be serving you anymore. Our business is elsewhere now, outside of your story. You have a very convincing and developed story, that is true. But we will not be defined by your notion of your own finality. We serve something else, much higher than you, and we are going to let it lead us outward into the unknown. We are, ourselves, the limit of your power, the failure of your claim. Whatever you may believe, or try to do, you cannot stop us fracturing your story.”

Liberation is always a matter of breaking out of someone else’s story. But what are we breaking in to? Around that crucial question, much conversation, much reflection,  much prayer, and much mindfulness are required. Can there really be such a thing as an open story? How would we tell it?

I will not argue now, I will simply propose, that the fundamental unit of oppression is the rigid ego, and that the story which constructs such an ego is the delusion of sufficiency. Out of these routine but perilous internal processes, structural violence is built. It rests on an elementary confusion over what to serve, and how to serve it. In Islamic terms, zulm grows out of shirk. 

Shirk is what the Abrahamic traditions have encoded in the notion of idolatry. Shirk is that which primal monotheism rejects. Yet there is no single English word that can adequately translate the Qur’anic usage of shirk. It does not merely refer to performing acts of concrete worship before the concrete image of a divinity. It means assigning to a limited creature those rights which are only held by ultimate reality. It means to claim that a construction – any construction – is the same thing as the origin of us all. It means giving our lives to an insufficient god. 

The divine voice declares in the Qur’an: “We have honored the children of Adam.” That honoring is unconditional. A god I can own, a god smaller than I am, a god that will never lead me beyond my own partial desires – a god that does not honor me with the divine breath – is no worthy god at all. Shirk seduces us into worshiping something that seems greater than ordinary humanity but is actually much less. It chains us to “gods that set.”

Day One of transformation is to take stock of what our lives actually serve, what our Lord actually is, and then to ask the Abrahamic question:  “Is this god worth worshipping?”  If the answer is no, the journey begins.

Shirk is what’s wrong with idolatry, and it’s wrong because agreeing to be less than what we really are sets the processes of violence in motion. That’s what we’ve been talking about for the past two weeks, as we’ve talked about open and closed systems. Shirk makes us crave ridiculous amounts of power. It’s what makes egotism problematic. It’s what makes `asabiyya problematic. It’s what messes up almost everything we try. It’s why people create stories to justify the evil they do. It’s what we need to contend with in ourselves, and in the world. To keep shirk from destroying even one more human being is the aim of the heirs of the prophets.  

It’s an impossible desire – the only kind worth having. May we long ceaselessly for the impossible in pursuit of the real. La ilaha… ila Allah! 

Rabia Terri Harris
Stony Point Summer Institute for Young People
Stony Point, NY
Nisfu Sha`ban, 1434