This was left as a comment (by Shuja Mirza) on the article “Danish cartoons and the sacred” at Islam from inside. However, being such a comprehensive (traditionalist) comment and conveying so expressively the fall away from metaphysical connectedness that the article only touches upon, I felt it deserved to be highlighted in a separate forum. […]
“O Ali, Since mankind seeks to come near to their Creator through all kinds of piety, bring yourself close to Him through activities of the intellect, so that you may arrive there before all of them.” (hadith of the Prophet)
Symbols, texts, iconic personages, and rituals are the architecture, the geometry, the symbolic worldly aspect, the formalized representation of metaphysical realities and of the human connection to these realities. For Muslims, the Prophet is the human representation of the writing of the Divine pen. He is the one on whose heart God wrote His revelation […]
The Qur’an is composed of words and some approach it as words like other words - but some approach it as “a revelation from the Lord of all worlds” (Qur’an 26:192) - as God’s commanding and guiding words that entered in substance into the heart of the Prophet, expressed themselves encoded into the form of […]
“Alas for the servants! there comes not to them an apostle but they mock at him.” (Qur’an 36:30)
According to the Christian gospels, when Jesus was arrested the Roman soldiers charged with his capture were at once amused by and spiteful towards him. Their spite was tinged with a sense of the superiority they felt through […]
The Prophet’s internal reality is connected to the source from which the revelation descended - to seek him only in history and circumstance is to neglect his metaphysical nature, to give little weight to his “sublime character”. (Qur’an 68:4) The revelation is the indicator, both clear and encoded, that points to the source. It is […]
The Qur’an’s verses contain open, apparent meanings and simultaneous inner, deeper meanings - the inner allusions layer one upon the other all simultaneously combined and concealed in the external arrangement of words upon a page. The words enter the mind and begin to come to life, displaying refractions of nuance and purport, showing the concealed […]
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