Iman and Education

Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as- Sufi

Klntal, Switzerland
14/4/1990

I want to shift your perspective on the Islamic Shariat. Properly translated it

means the road as opposed to Tariqat, which in Arabic means the path or the
personal road. Just as Roman law is a system of structural principals deduced
from specific cases, so this is actually the opposite. Shariat is a natural law. It is
something we understand in the European tradition because the greatest
European was Goethe and Goethes whole philosophy was to recognise that not
only was the natural law a metamorphosis, unfolding and transformation, but also
that the human being was part of it. We are not outside this process.
I also want to touch on the spiritual importance of Nietzsche who is, however
wayward, a son of Goethe. When you read his writings you see what enormous
awe he had for the spiritual being of Goethe. He saw that Goethe, in his being
and in his engagement in life, had many of these very qualities that he had
indicated as belonging to the bermensch, this over-person that he called upon
to save consciousness from obliteration by the mass spirit. Nietzsche, with his
prophetic awareness in an intellectual sense foresaw this coming disaster.
We have discussed the Shariat of Islam as something natural, and also as
something built in with the evolutionary aspect of fulfilment not an evolutionary
aspect in the Darwinian sense, but in the ordinary sense of growth and
development. Now we come to Tariqat which is the path, the little Shariat, which
is in relation to the personal, social nexus. Tariqat is the second part of what is
the whole of Islam, which is defined in the Islamic legal language as Iman. Iman
has a list of things which the Prophet, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, defined and

they began with trust in Allah. This list went on to include things which were all
about what you might call an invisible landscape the Unseen, a whole
dimension of existence that is not visible.
What is very interesting is that there is simply no way that you can talk about the
Unseen with this modern creature which has been created by machine society,
the technique state, and so a whole portion of human existence is ignored. It has
been divided up among pseudo-scientists who have been created in the modern
world to handle precisely these elements of disturbance among the masses this
creature who is still of the species, you might say, but who says, There are
things I cannot see, There is a world I cannot see, I have had a dream, I
have had a vision, A dead person spoke to me, and so on. All this they have
divided up and they have created the esoteric market to handle it.
They have created a romantic interest in ancient religion, in anything esoteric and
attractive which will never threaten the machine culture, but will allow those
people with a bit of imagination to be canonised in a corner, where they can
indulge their interest in these things, even waving them up to a pseudometaphysical importance.
Another type of person says, Well, I did see it. I was awake and I saw it. Then
they say, Ah well, this is stress you see. So they put this person into the medical
category, thus a whole zone of spirituality gets subsumed under medical analysis
and becomes a medical problem. It becomes a problem of neurosis and in
extreme is psychosis. The psychotic sees what is not there, he actually sees
things that other people do not see, and since they do not see them, the common
agreement is that the person is mad, which is also why you have amongst some
intellectuals and some medical intellectuals, a questioning of the modern idea of
what is mad. Not a questioning of madness itself, but of this modern defining of
madness which somehow they recognise as politically involving a rejection of the
identity and freedom of that other, however intolerably different and other that

person may be.

We cannot escape the fact that certain genuine experience, and I am not talking
about fantasy, has been degraded in its evaluation, and politically devalued in its
being subsumed under the identity of the psychotic. This is very important. You
must remember that the last part of Jungs life was dedicated to finding a way of
talking about the human self in a manner that would not negate the validity of the
Unseen. All his writing on alchemy and Greek symbols is really a spiritual quest,
and in fact a quixotic one because of what he came from in the world, to confirm
the reality of the Unseen. His work remains of monumental and enormous
importance not his theory of how he interpreted it, but his recognition both
clinically and intellectually that this existed.
Denial of the Unseen has a political, a mythical and an intellectual dimension. For
the masses it leaves quite a serious industry of magazines and books. You will
now see in any bookshop a significant section, almost as big as the section on
physical health, for the occult, for the interpretation of dreams and so on, in order
to structure this rather tiresome frustration of consciousness that seems to
produce this irritating evidence of something that is apparently not there.
All the elements of Iman: belief in Allah, His Books, His Messengers, the rising of
bodies from the dead and so on all these things to do with the Unseen world
define Iman. Iman in itself means trust. Trust that is a moral, ethical value which
has been removed and is not in the curriculum of mass or even superior
education, has been downgraded and its teachers emerge with the same ethos
as in the mass schools.
Trust is not an ethical value unless it is embodied. Trust, unless it is experienced
existentially, cannot be experienced, recognised or identified philosophically with
the higher self. If trust is not already built in to the consciousness it is not going to
appear as an abstract value and so this affects the whole concept of business

transaction. In Islam, all business transaction is based on this, on the mans

worthiness to fulfil not just the exchange, but the delayed payment. Even debt
itself is not the same as a debt existentially in the epoch of trust, because a debt
is something forgotten until paid by both parties. But a debt in a non-trust
society, which is now, is something not forgotten. You live in it, and the anxiety of
your non-fulfilment and the anxiety of the one to be paid who believes he will not
be paid, is the condition of the person. They not only do not trust in the moment of
the contract, but they live within a non-trust experience of existence: I will not be
paid!, I cannot pay! The whole Third World debt is an existential separation of
millions of people as unworthy because they cannot pay.
The second head of the World Bank was asked about why they made more
money out of the debt of countries than they gave in loans. To cover up their
embarrassment, he said, Well, we have a completely new programme now,
because we are giving money and not getting payment, and we are not going to
pay money to rats any more to live in sewers. This was his view of the majority of
the human race! This is the society in which we live and also the evaluation which
affects the ordinary domestic situation.
This in itself is offensive but what is amazing is the passivity with which it is
accepted. There is a disdain for people that is not mental. There is nothing in the
world that can be mental among the same population. There is no real mentation
as such, the only real mentation that does not connect to the physical intricacies
of existence are the mentations of the psychotics who have cut themselves off
from the body because the house of the body is not a place in which they want to
live anymore. So they have elected to be on the moon or wherever they can
project the self to a safe place. I think there is no mentation. Even if you are
thinking abstract ideas or doing mathematics it is all actually an expression of
your existential everyday existence, your Being.
Iman then, is how we relate to the Unseen and our acceptance of it. How can we

accept it if we are already tuned in to an anxiety that does not permit us to go

beyond a view of the Unseen which is that the others hiddenness, which is after
all their selfhood, is totally untrustworthy and will not honour us because honour is
not taught? There has been no concept, no doctrine and no teaching of the
ethical value of honour since the reconstruction of mass schooling from 1945 to
1950 in Europe. I cannot talk about the rest of the world. I am told by Chinese
intellectuals that Confucian teaching is not taught in the Mandarin schools which
might be an equivalent, thus making it a global phenomenon, but I have to deal
only with what we know as our European tradition. This is why the cities have
collapsed, nobody is safe, and people endlessly have conversations about how
you used to be able to leave your door open and so on and so on.
In an Islamic society, you were safe in the city and it was considered that in the
country, in the wild places, you were not safe and there you had to go armed.
Where men and women lived together there was this Shariat, this natural law, so
you were safe. Today, it is the other way around! If you go into the country,
peoples doors are open and you are safe with them, but in the city your chances
are reduced daily. Some cities are beyond the limits of danger as a policeman
said to me in New York: New York is fine, just dont go out of your hotel! It is too
dangerous.
This has not happened just by the production of Rock and Roll and the marketing
of drugs they are the effects and not the causes. The drug is an effect of a
society that has taken its values and removed them. At the heart of this you
cannot have these ethical elements of honour and trust based on material
experience of the encounter of the other as this person in front of me because the
whole element that is trust is to do with the Unseen. Unless you believe in the
fundamental basic element, which is that Reality itself is to be trusted, then you
cannot have trust in any specific context.
If you do not have Iman, if you do not have trust in Allah, then of course you are

going to think, What He has set up is malevolent to me, and if what has been set
up has not been set up by a Creator who is merciful then I am in an exposed and
dangerous position. But that belief in itself is not an intellectual belief, it is
transmitted, and it is also an educational process.
I want to talk about education not in the sense that it is used pedagogically, but
education in the sense of the English word upbringing the raising of the child.
Some of what I say may sound strange and some of it may sound new, but you
have to understand that the Sufis are not esoteric, they are not people who go to
texts and interpret them in a way that moves people to have a nice feeling. This is
not tasawwuf. Abu Madyan, the great Sufi of Morocco said, Sufism is nothing but
study. Shaykh Muhammad ibn al-Habib, radiyallahu anhu, said, As far as we
are concerned, the Shaykhs are the doctors, the Salihun the people of noble
qualities are the nurses, and the world is the hospital.
When this teaching is alive it does not become involved in personality, rights,
rituals, Shaykhs, Tariqats, initiations, giving the hand and all this garbage this is
not interesting. What is interesting is the raising up of people, because that is
what the Islamic phenomenon is about, and it is, to put it in modern parlance,
what is needed. Man has been downgraded. He is now already sub. We have
been made sub-human. So we must take the Nietzschean image of reaching the
bermensch as an Islamic duty, an Islamic call. The Dawa of Islam is to call
people to be more than they have been. As Nietzsche indicated, you cannot just
suddenly have an Overman, you have to create a bridge to an Overman by
saying, The way we are is not enough, we have been down-graded, so we must
consciously transform ourselves.
We cannot transform the masses, because the masses are of every sickness, but
those people of consciousness must re-educate themselves and from that reeducated elite they will produce heroic people who will be able in their turn to
bring the thing back to its perfectly ordinary level ordinary humans which has

been lost. It is a question of whether you want it recovered or not. If you

consciously want it recovered, then this is where the challenge of Tariqat takes its
place, where you move away from being a passive receptor in a world state of
technique which dictates everything to you and replaces conscious, active
participation in the life process with an ongoing, passive, built-in, lived-in anxiety
about an unpayable interest-increasing debt to people whom you have never set
eyes upon because your debt to the bank is not a debt to Mister Smith or Mister
Jones, but a debt to a temple and you have not even met the priest who will, by
that token, wreck your life, or put it on hold until you die, whilst leaving the
business of your burial to make an increased debt for unfortunate relatives, sons
and daughters, and aunts and uncles having to bury you, or, if they are lucky, to
have you quickly cremated and finished. This is the situation.
Tariqat is for those people who want personal transformation in order to create a
new society. Therefore this means an elite that have to be spiritually educated.
This is what Tariqat is, and what it always has been and in each age it has had
different disciplines because each age has its sicknesses. Imam al-Ghazali, the
great Sufi said, If you go to a land of drunkenness, lean heavily on the Shariat
forbidding drink. If you go to a land of sexual libidinousness and indulgence, lean
heavily on the laws against adultery and sodomy, in order to raise up the people.
Now, we are in a land of usury and we have to lean heavily on those laws that not
only forbid usury but indicate that you must make war on it, otherwise you cannot
change the system.
This is the fundamental arena, about which I am speaking today. This has
elements and is really a matter of which order we take them in, but it amounts to
the same at the end of the day. People are not able to think anymore and of
course, this is not my statement, it is the statement of the greatest philosopher
since Nietzsche, the philosopher therefore of the generation of the babies of this
congregation of people. Heidegger said that philosophers do not write for the
present they write for the future which is an echoing of a statement of Nietzsche.

When I say people cannot think: yesterday I thought a man was thinking along
the same line as myself, but I saw in fact that because of his existential, everyday
existence, he had taken our exchange for some kind of clear, objective zone from
which he could operate. To use terms like neurosis and psychosis are wonderfully
inadequate actually, because they melt into each other with astonishing
swiftness! You think you are making a rational statement to someone who will
therefore receive a rational statement and either say a yes or a no to it, but you
realise that it has not got through at all because they have got this inner
landscape about how things are that you cannot penetrate.
This goes back to the encounter between Ibn al-Arabi, the Shaykh al-Akbar, the
greatest Khatubi, the greatest of the Sufis when he was a youth, and Averroes
Ibn Rushd, the greatest of all the medieval philosophers who brought the whole
technical apparatus of thinking upon which German philosophy eventually was
established and therefore the system of technique, under which we now all live.
Ibn al-Arabi was brought by his father to the great Ibn Rushd, who was by then a
very old man who was teaching his class. The young Shaykh al-Akbar, Ibn alArabi sat in the corner and he listened to everything that Ibn Rushd said. At the
end the boy said, Yes! Yes! Yes! Ibn Rushd said, What a clever chap! He said
to the father, You have a very clever child, he is going to go very far, he can
come tomorrow. So the next day Ibn Rushd gave his class on Aristotelian
philosophy and Ibn al-Arabi sat and listened, and then he said, No! No! No! Of
course the philosopher did not like that at all, so when the class was finished he
said to the father, You know, you have got a very difficult child here, I can see
you are going to have problems with him. Then he looked at him and said, Why
did you say No to me? Ibn al-Arabi looked up to the great teacher and said, It
is because I suddenly saw that between Yes and No many throats are cut and
many heads fall from their shoulders.
This consciousness is what is necessary. Let me translate it into modern

language: what the child Ibn al-Arabi was saying is that if we create a society
based on rational structure, it will cause the death of millions, which was what
happened in the twentieth century both by fascism and by communism: We will
structure a state which is good for the people two almost identical models
which resulted in the deaths of millions of people and the devastation of the whole
culture.
Now that does not leave one with an anarchy of chaos. It leaves one with the
position of Ibn al-Arabi which was to understand existence. This is the Sufi way,
to understand how it works. What we are talking about is not ideas in the sense of
concepts, it is not ideological it is a matter of how you do things. It is like
cooking discussing before making the dish how you are going to make it,
because you could make it the Italian way or you could make it the French way.
Are you going to use butter or oil? In the end, how do we arrive at a dish which is
palatable and attractive? This is really the sort of thinking that is required, but it is
not the sort of thinking that is applied to the matter of human education or selfeducation, which has been more or less abandoned.
We cannot mix what we are doing here with any sort of decadent, unlicensed,
esoteric, unacceptable thing calling itself Sufism there have always been these
people in the world. They must understand that this is a process which does not
allow you simply to develop yourself inwardly and then continue as a human
being to bring up your children the way they are doing out there: this has made
Zurich a nightmare instead of a beautiful, enchanting city, New York a hell, and
Berlin worse horrible heartbreaking cities that have been literally broken.
I am proposing a view of transformation of yourself that involves the responsibility
of the transformation of your children. Or, to use a Goethean expression, to allow
your children to emerge, not to try to do to the child what the fascist and
communist states did to its members.

***
Let us start with the education of the child. It is based on the assumption that we
have agreed that how things are is not tenable and that people already have a
conscious desire to change themselves, to be demonstratively educational to
another generation and also to be, by that token, the leaders of a new society. If
you take on this programme you become quite directly, not by titles, organisation
or name, the leaders of society because you are the only free people in it. What is
interesting is that most people think that education in the pedagogic sense means
playschool but it simply means getting the child off mothers hands. Mother is in
the bourgeois house, probably alone, and the husband is out doing this thing
called working to earn their living, which they are not doing because the child is
in playschool, the mother is looking out of the window wondering what country
she is in and he is being shouted at by someone in an office this is the living
they are earning.
Playschool is an excuse. It does not have very strong intellectual foundations. If
you go to a playschool, what you see sometimes are nice people, some of them
quite tolerable, but basically involved in two things: one is the manipulative
therapy with objects and with crayons a horrific idea that all bourgeois
Europeans dealing with children have which is that you give them crayons and
they do something called expressing themselves! They, of course, are absolutely
destroying the psyche of these poor unfortunate creatures. They also see that the
child is not ever by itself but always integrated into the group, so here is the
actual factory for the production of mass man who tolerates others and who has
no inwardness whatsoever.
After that comes the preparatory school, the Junior part of education where you
know what the curriculum is. Then there is the Secondary, the serious part which
is between the Prep school and the University where they are in the hands of
curriculum and teachers, all of whom are products of the state and of that same

10

system.
Remember that everything that is education now, even the very good public
school, is in fact from the state. It is not comparable qualitatively or materially to
what was before 1939 as that whole system was wiped out. What they are
teaching basically takes its ideology from Frankfurt, from a group of philosophers,
ninety-nine percent of them Jewish, who called themselves the Frankfurt School.
We could call this teaching critical depreciation as its technique was to be critical
and to question everything. Thus the educational process is to prevent trust, to
look at the object and be sceptical about it. You must doubt it is there, and you
must take it apart and find out what its thereness is! In doing so you will have
devalued it because you will have taken it from its total oneness, and by making a
partitive examination, it will always be for you the sum of these parts.
Again, this is precisely what Goethe was arguing about through all his life and in
all his long letters with these scientists: both the so-called anatomists of the day,
the emergent evolutionists who were studying the relationships between animal
skeletons and the human one, and of course the botanists and the biologists. This
was what Goethes vast correspondence and his very significant series of essays
are about: warning against a scientific research which in its end is then applied to
man so that man himself is dismantled. Goethe says that if you dismantle it, you
will not get it together again and it is only because that process happened that it
was possible for Hitler and for Stalin to say, These people are a nuisance to the
state so we will put them in a forced labour camp. Once you have done that it is
another step to saying, Well, if they are going to be difficult, kill them! or, Well,
we are short of food so do not give it to them, give it to our people! So in the end
the concentration camp victim and I do not like the word victim the citizen of
the concentration camp, or the ruler, becomes something arrived at, which is a
serious rational process of this critical depreciation. That is what the Frankfurt
School taught.

11

What is interesting is that the ideology that ended with the persecution of the
Jews was intellectually also their contribution, which in its virulent form was
responsible also for the creation of the atom bomb. This thinking took apart the
atom and they said, Oh, when we take it apart it is more interesting than when it
is all together! So in other words, creation, which in itself is life, if we destroy, destructure and deconstruct it, it will not only deconstruct the atom but will destroy
the city at the same time. So this weapon was a product of a thinking that was
this critical taking apart of everything in order to control it to be the masters of it.
This is the fundamental methodology, not ideology, of post 1945 western
education and therefore it is the opposite of what the Sufis consider education to
be. I would like to make a claim that we can demonstrate that the way of the Sufis
is the correct way, while their way is the opposite of that, producing the opposite
result.
For example: you are a university student who has a masters degree and you
want to be a doctor of philosophy, I want to be PhD. So you take a subject
which you do not know and you take it to pieces, criticise and devalue it, reject
certain things, accept certain others, and then reassess it within a framework of
everything else which has been deconstructed and reassessed. Then you say,
That thing, now I evaluate it as this, not that, but this. And when you have gone
through this process they say, Now you are a member of our society, you are
now Doctor of this.
This is not only against the Sufis, it is against Plato and the whole western
tradition of learning, because from the academy of Plato to the circle of the Sufis,
teaching has always been the same, it has been to sit with the teacher. Teaching
is not idea, it is transmission. To sit in front of the teacher is like putting a camera
in front of an object. The receptive learner is like the emulsified film which when
the light comes takes the image takes the whole thing directly from the teacher.
This is very far reaching.

12

If I tell you this first story, the esoteric people would say, Oh how wonderful, how
lovely! and think of it as something magical but I will then show you that it is
something quite serious, practical and real. I was sitting in Abu Dhabi one
afternoon with a group of Sufis and there was a very old, blind Shaykh from
Hadramaut who had great love for me and we used to meet twice a week and sit
together and we would have conversations. Extraordinary things happened
between us and I always treasure them. He was called Shaykh Ali. One day he
said, I am told that you have a very beautiful Wird. I said, Yes, it is the Wird of
my Shaykh. He then said, Give me the permission of your Wird, give it to me,
give me your Wird! His students did not like any of this and they said, What are
you talking about? And he said, Shut up, sirs! Tell him to give me the
permission! So I said, I give you the permission of my Wird. He said, Oh! This
is wonderful! I give you all my Wirds! I give you all my Dhikrs that I have had from
all my Shaykhs, it is all yours, I give it all to you! Now you give me all of yours!
He said, Now I have everything you know and you have everything I know! One
man was smiling and saying, This is beautiful, this is wonderful, whilst others
were furious and very angry! Others said, What is going on, what are you talking
about, what is this?
Another example of this is that I sat with my Shaykh for over three years. I sat
with him and up until the last year I did not really understand a word that was
said. Sometimes things were translated for me, but when he was there I sat there
and never moved until he was gone. One day, I was giving a discourse and an
Arab who knew Shaykh Muhammad ibn al-Habib, radiyallahu anhu, sat there and
started to cry and he said to Hajj Abdalhaqq, Every word he said, Shaykh
Muhammad Ibn al-Habib said. Everything he said, they are things Shaykh
Muhammad ibn al-Habib, radiyallahu anhu, said. So this is transmission.
Otherwise you can just get it from your computer, but that is not the same.
One of the reasons that Islam has not been able to be of its true nature, is

13

because of the scholars who collected the Hadith. What they did was brilliant, and
I am not saying they are inauthentic, on the contrary, it is an astonishing thing that
they collected all the things the Prophet, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, said,
hundreds of years ago, and they made a science of it. However, people say Oh,
there is a Hadith that says so, and others says, No, there is a Hadith that says
such and such. But go to Tunis and meet their Shaykh, Shaykh Shadhili an-Nifa,
who is now an old gentleman. He knows all the Hadith and has the biggest library
in modern Islam, but he was taught one hundred Hadith by his Hadith teacher
who sat in front of him and said to him, My Shaykh so and so had it from Shaykh
so and so who had it from so and so, who had it from the companion of the
Prophet so and so, who said that the Rasulullah said such and such: Boom!
and he said it.
Do you see what has happened? That had come face to face right down to
Shaykh an-Nifa to the one that he taught. This is the key. When I declared that I
was Shaykh, one of the people of Shaykh al-Fayturi because there is all this
jealousy among Murids went to him and said, You know, Abdalqadir said that
he is Shaykh, what do you say? First of all he said, Shaykh Abdalqadir has a
known station, but then he said, What he has, he had from me hand to hand
and face to face. This is teaching.
There is an official violinist, whose wife was pregnant, and he used to go and sit
with his wife, which he thought of as just sitting and he would sit with her, and
because she could not move as much as she would like to and was used to
doing, he would take his violin and play to this lady who was large with child.
Every day he would play the same piece and she would sit and do whatever thing
she was doing to pass the time to get through the days, thinking of all the things
she wanted to do, until the child was born. At a certain point when the childs
fingers were fully developed and strong, it must then have been about five or six,
the violinist took his violin and gave it to the child, putting it under the childs chin,
showing it where the hands go on the strings, putting the bow in the childs hands,

14

and the child played this whole piece, note for note!
So you see, the first story is this Sufi story but the second story is an interesting
Sufi story because it is called scientific research and that is educational. That is
how values are transmitted. If you omit this transaction and then hand your child
over to the state, out will come this creature who is broken, and if they are not
strong then they are ready for the drug market. If they are wildly in search of a
personality they will be caught in sexual deviation. If they are completely under
the desperate eye of the domesticated father they will simply become a paralysed
carbon copy without any individual life and any originality, or if they have some
marvellous blessing, they might run away. This is the situation, spiritually
speaking, of the bourgeois home.
I was talking about the education of the child and saying that what they call the
pedagogic process does not create the person. I am not saying there should not
be a pedagogic process, of course there has to be, and we want to accept
processes of consciousness, knowledge and development that we have, and we
want to be able to assimilate them, but what we want is a whole human being
who will decide to take on any of these specialised knowledges according to their
attraction to them and their interest in them. I have found something very
disconcerting in my examination of children at the beginning of ordinary school
age, which is that the ones who are attracted to the computer are defined by the
state schooling system as being the ones of superior intelligence. These are the
ones who are, basically, very seriously in peril as human beings because they
prefer to deal with the computer. They simply cannot sit with human beings as the
price is too high emotionally for them, so they would rather be with this thing to
which they can pump in commands and get back a response.
I spent two days recently in a Zurich hotel and I turned on French television and
there was an astonishing program which was about some men and women who
conducted not a pornographic, but a quite lonely, romantic exchange with people

15

they had never wanted to meet or intended to meet through the Unitel computer,
which is a French national computer system to which you send messages.
People were actually having this kind of romantic love affair without any intention
that it would lead to an encounter it was based on an agreed principal by both
parties that they would not meet!
So from these beginnings of education I would like to come to the ambience in
which the child is, to a basic model which Strindberg called the lighthouse,
which is the man and the woman trapped in a kind of white oblong room. All the
crises of these two becomes the whole world, because that is where they have
the thing that is their life. First of all, if you see that oblong within the normal
bourgeois framework, it means either the man, woman or both are out to work
because they are doing this thing of earning their living. But in fact the living is
the bit after they have done it, which is usually the evening, the weekend, and the
holiday when they are already exhausted, so even the social, erotic, human
encounter in every dimension not only has the stress of all that happened in the
day, but has an intensity that cannot be re-tuned up to.
Thus the very thing that is at the heart of a womans spiritual being, without which
the man is not fulfilled, is denied her. So she is almost jealous, rightly, and this is
not a criticism of woman, it is saying that woman is spiritually seeing what is really
happening, with or without her realising it. The process that is the office, the shop
or wherever you are is like a mistress. When he comes back it is like she has not
got him, the lovemaking is like a second lovemaking, it has not the passion of the
first one and this affects everything. Therefore an aggression sets in but not the
necessary aggression, the blessed warfare that is between man and woman, out
of which comes resolution, union and the fulfilment. This is taken away because
the woman is in the role of the wife/mother to the man whose mistress is the
work.
One day a man of our community came to me and said, I am so worried, my wife

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is a burden for me. I said, What a horrible thing to say. And he said, No, no,
she is wonderful, but she is an anxiety for me because I have to get her this
money to pay the bills. So I said, Well, this is extraordinary because to modern
man, his wife is an anxiety and a burden, and his work is a lover! His eroticism,
his passion goes into this work project, his ego and his position in society. Now in
this there is another kind of aggression, not what Lawrence called the aggression
of the wolf, of the erotic war, but the wonderful thing in The Ring where Siegfried
can only conquer Brnnhilde if he is not afraid, but the one fear he has is that of
Brnnhilde. However, what he discovers is that his fear of Brnnhilde is sweet, he
has to surrender to Brnnhilde and so this thing that he thought was dreadful
turns out to be delicious! What Lawrence says is that the encounter between man
and woman cannot take place because it is short-circuited. Now this means
another aggression takes place, and that aggression then cannot successfully fall
on the husband or the wife but on the one most easy to attack the child.
Therefore, whatever pedagogic process comes to absolutely bury the child, the
wounding of the child comes from inside the home.
You find that by compensatory guilt, what is offered to the child are the
substitutes for this genuine encountering. I am not going to say love because as
Lawrence quite rightly said, If you want to have children survive, please stop
loving them, but to avoid the encounter you find that the child has its own
concentration camp, this thing called the nursery, as if it were another species, as
if it were a bird in a cage or a dog in a little basket, and in that nursery you find
there are things called toys. A toy in the eighteenth century was anything in the
house that was small like scissors, a reel of thread, any small household object,
but suddenly we have a fantasy world created, not by highly intellectual people
wanting the development of children, but by an industry wanting to make profits
that has an annual general meeting at which a group of adults, most of them men,
sit around and say, What would make that child do this to that thing rather than
that thing. This produces a crazy, non-existent domain in which they will live,
which is then extended by television in animated designs of non-existent

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creatures in a complete fantasy world in which it never meets any genuine human
emotion, even rage, because even these rages are these short-circuit rages that I
have described, they are not even the rages of fury but just nerve-ending
domestic explosions.
So the child, if it has any humanness, withdraws and goes off and becomes this
new kind of child that was not on the earth before: the new teenager who is this
sort of adult but has been not just anaesthetised but cauterised. Its nerves, its
feeling-life has been cauterised. If you take a red-hot thing and cauterise the
wound it just seals it up but there is always scar tissue that never goes away. So
you find these wonderful looking men and women, beautiful, all with special kinds
of beauty that this fantasy household has produced, but all cauterised, unable to
feel, and cold and distant.
In the mid-twentieth century the dominant psychosis of the masses was
schizophrenia, which is almost a wonderfully poetic thing as schizophrenics would
say wonderful things, make surrealist drawings, and were very highly
individuated. Now the dominant madness of this bourgeois existence is the
autistic child, who is cut off without feeling-life, and who has the elements of
schizophrenia in that they do not differentiate between their body filth and what is
clean, between food and shit, but their main quality, you may say, is that they can
only echo back what signal they receive. If you say to an autistic child, Is
something wrong? They will say, Is something wrong, is something wrong, is
something wrong, is something wrong? until you want to go mad, because you
cannot bear it. If you make a gesture, they will repeat that gesture back to you like
some incredibly sophisticated mockery of the inauthenticity of your signal.
These are direct results of a way of living which has an end. The implication of
what I have said is that you cannot have this change which we need in society if
you go to an esoteric group and do Yoga or some bio-energetic thing for yourself
because it is not going to have any effect. If you say, I want my child to be

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brought up properly, and you then say, Where is this nice school I can send it
to? It is not going to have any effect. Unless you transform the total process it is
not going to have any effect.
At the heart of that social process is something about which we are at present
completely helpless, which is the usury transaction. But a conscious, evolved
awareness of what it does to you and your children means that the thing is
different. You say, Well if you want deconstruction, I will give you deconstruction!
I know that the motor of the total process is everything that results from the debtinterest existence in which I am enslaved. Thus the first independence from it is
just an awareness of it. Equally we cannot be ideological, because its
deconstruction is not anti-usuryism and the smashing of banks as that would not
solve anything. They have constructed their anti-antithetical, dialectical, modular
society so that to oppose it is to strengthen it the critical method is that you find
a weak point and then re-enforce it. By that dialectic the terrorist is the upholder
of the state. The state needs the terrorist because he is a complete nihilist who
says No! But it has no effect and it confirms this intolerable Yes. Jnger says
of democracy: My no is their licence that they are right in their yes. I am the
one no and they are ninety nine yeses so I am the one that proves it is all OK,
I cannot make my no. So not-making the no already breaks the whole thing
because there is a change in consciousness.
At the moment it is only possible with an elite group of people who have the
courage to begin the procedures of your re-education, the restructuring of the
manner in which you live and therefore the possibility of creating a generation that
is a bridge to the Overman, in that perfect metaphor of Nietzsches, which is really
the Islamic metaphor of making whole human beings. In truth, all the intelligent
women I have ever talked to, want it. Then there are some men who intellectually
agree but damn well are not going to make any change in that domestic structure:
Yes, intellectually you are correct, but I am not going to change this thing. When
the son arrives I am there to tell him what to do and I shut the door. They are

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going to go to the school. Such people are not going to change the social nexus.
A group of people who want these changes have to enter not a critical, but a
conscious understanding of how all transactions of wealth take place, which is not
just that we do not use interest, but that all transaction and trade itself is based on
trust. We must work with each other or with people whom we can trust, and this
means the de-domestication of man, not humanity, of men who is the most
difficult and the most inhibiting factor towards this evolution. Because of the
signals they give, the truth is that the bourgeois women who are already defined
will just give back the signal they want.
The tragedy is, in the dialect of the state system, that the womens movement
was designed for the woman who said, No, I want the man to be another kind of
man, in order that I can be me, this new woman. Yet they designed a dialectic
which instead of allowing that collaborative event to happen, guaranteed a
dialectical opposite of that which was like a kind of war, whose own logical
outcome then became a form of inversion. It could only end in a sexual inversion
that was a rejection of men being helpless. So the very most heroic women, with
their strong, inspired energy of womanhood and feminine power were given, as it
were, a role in a play which stopped the very thing they wanted to happen. It was
the very dialectic that was the equivalent of the structuralist state, which would
guarantee that it never happened, it would guarantee its opposite.
Nevertheless the intelligent woman today recognises this and can confirm and
collaborate with it. The difficulty is to find men who have the actual existential
courage to live differently from the way they are living. There seems to be this
incredible fear and astonishingly it is a fear about provision. But what is fear about
provision if it is not that existential anxiety of the remembered incertitude of
childhood in that bourgeois situation with the anxious mother and the food that
was given but was not given? Again, just to take the image of breastfeeding, I
remember Hajja Khayria saying to a young woman who had her child at the

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breast and who was looking out of the window as if she were on the moon, When
you are feeding it, look at it! Now this is a Hadith of Rasulullah, sallallahu alayhi
wa sallam, who said, Umm al-madrasa the mother is the university, the
school. He said that the mother gives milk to the child and along with the milk the
mother gives wisdom. It is the gazing on the baby that gives it humanness, and if
she does not, it will not be complete.
That is what teaching is and it is the same thing as the sitting in front of the
Shaykh, the man playing the fiddle before the womb of his wife, and the thing that
makes differentiation as opposed to this trance-like gatheredness which you now
see in teenagers. They all have a common factor in their trance-like state you
think they are smoking hashish when they are not but when they get it they are
very happy, it is not something strange for them because it confirms how they
already are, it is how they have experienced existence.
All this implies the ability of the men to de-domesticate, to come out of the house,
to be able to sit with other men and not fight with them and not respond in a low
dog-level of sniffing and barking; to not make subjective assessments of them as
a defence mechanism to prevent social change, but to be able to put the matters
in front of each other and to agree to do things. This is what brotherhood is, this is
what sallallahu alayhi wa sallam meant when he said, The Muslims are like two
hands washing. How can they be like two hands washing if they will not come
together? This is what the Sufis have to say. If I was in Tashkent at the time of
Rumi, I would have something else to say, because they were under different
pressures, governments, dangers, temptations and defamations.
But we are living in this age and unless we come to terms with these things there
will not be any humans anymore to ask what tasawwuf is and to be able to say
shahada. We are not trying to make a utopia or to make the whole world like us,
we will never do it. Look out there! Go as I have gone to Malaysia and see the
future, it is horrible! There are millions of them and you will never be able to do it,

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even if you introduce all the birth control in the world and get the population down,
you are still not going to be able to do it! What you have to do is let it be
somewhere and it should be where you are, because generosity begins inside
your own house. One of the companions of the Prophet came to the Prophet and
said, Look, I have some extra money, where do I give it, who do I give it to? He
said, Give it to your own family. He said, I have given them something. He
said, Then give it to the people in the house next door. He said, I have given
them something. He said, Then give it to the house next to that. He said, Oh, I
have given them something. Then the Prophet became angry and turned away,
because it meant the man had not understood. If you cannot understand that then
you are an idiot. It is the opposite of social welfare and pensioning, and if you are
taking money from the state you are finished before you have begun, you are a
cripple and your children are doomed! You cannot do it! You have got to begin to
have trust in Allah.
Allah will provide for you, Allah will feed you, you will eat till you die and you have
to understand this. Rejection of that is not because you say, I do not believe in
God, I will not become a Muslim, it is because you do not believe in your mother
and you do not respect your father; you do not think she fed you and you do not
think he will protect you because either he has left or you have been told he is a
rotter.
Unless you can create this you have not created a human situation. You cannot
do it alone en famille because en famille is hell, so you must open the doors of
the household and liberate the imprisoned wife in the lighthouse. Do not consider
the home as the cave to which you return after the days hunting, but evolve to a
higher consciousness in which there is a shared spiritual reality between the man
and the woman and in which you care, and responsibility for your children is
neither pedagogic nor imperative. It is to pass the child through all stages, giving
them what little things you have learnt that are yours and of use to them, without
mania and obsession. So these are the basic principles of what would be a

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proper and truly spiritually elite group of people that when they gather to sing the
Diwan and to do the hadra, would produce an atmosphere so profoundly different
from what we already experience, that it would be something people would come
from the furthest ends of the world to see. In itself it cannot aesthetically be
realised, it can only be realised by your courage to transform the lives that you
are now so disastrously living.

Glossary
dhikr remembrance, mention or invocation of Allah.
diwan a collection of (Sufic) poetry.
Hadith reported speech, particularly of the Prophet.
hadra dance of the breath, invocation of the Divine name.
Iman trust.
murid the student of a Shaykh of instruction. One who wills what the Shaykh
wills in order to discover who he is. Literally one who wills, he wills what the
Shaykh wills.
radiyallahu anhu may Allah be pleased with him.
Rasulullah the Messenger of Allah.
Salihun developed people of right action, who are in the right place at the right
time.
sallallahu alayhi wa sallam may Allah bless him and give him peace, said
when mentioning the Messenger of Allah.
shahada the witnessing, the first pillar of Islam Ash-hadu an la ilaha illallah,
wa ashhadu anna Muhammadar-Rasulullah, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam.
Shariat literally, a road; the legal and social modality of a people based on the
revelation of their Prophet.
Shaykh leader, spiritual guide.
Sufi one who practices Sufism, the science of the journey to Allah.

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Sufism the science of the journey to Allah.

Tariqat the inward path, a Sufic order.
tasawwuf Sufism, the science of the journey to Allah.
Wird dhikr constructed to contain in it certain patterns of knowledge and self
awakening.

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