Category Archives: Metaphysics

Metaphysics, Modern Living, Psychology, Sufism, Uncategorized

“Respect” A much overused and abused term!

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In our “Progressive, Woke” world there are a number of tired ideas that keep getting used and abused. Terms like “Be reasonable”(which usually means “agree with me” lol) ; ‘Take your time”( which usually means I’m not really into it .Let’s procrastinate together” lol) and for our purposes today” Be respectful”(which usually means “do it my way”).Of course there is a lot of hypocrisy involved but most people talking that way don’t realize it. They are unaware, unconscious.

One of the places   like to start these discussions is with scriptural sources. So the Buddhists talk about “compassion”. The Christians say “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”.And the Muslims say” honour man because he is a creation of God”.None of these are even remotely related to the modernist notions of respect.

Let us look at them one by one. “Compassion” is definitely part of all religious traditions. But it is not at all the same as “respect’ for others- regardless of their behaviour or ideas. In fact, for Buddhists the cardinal sin is “ignorance”. So putting up with the foolishness of people would be promoting sinfulness! For Christians “Doing unto others” is not equivalent to modernist “respect”. Would you like others to tell you you are right when you are not?! Would like others to tell you that you are right  when you are doing the wrong thing? I don’t think so. I certainly wouldn’t? No. In fact, it is Christian and Buddhist and Islamic to push back and call out each other when we are on the wrong path. For Muslims honoring mankind does not mean not confronting them with their false ideas and bad b behaviour. In Islam we have the principle of “Amr Bil Maruf wa Nehi al Munkar”( Enjoin the good and discourage evil) No political correctness there!

One of the great saints of Islam, founder of the Shafii madhdhab Imam Ash Shafii was once asked how he had attained such good character. He replied : “Every time I was criticized , by friend or foe alike, I looked within to see if the criticism had any validity, and if it was so, I did my best to correct it”  Now, none of this could have occurred if he was only surrounded by adabist students lol

So lets look at how this plays out in various scenarios

  1. The parental role.

Parents are now reluctant to challenge and train their children. Out of “respect”. So the children become disrespectful! No surprises there. You can see it any time you go out in public! I even saw a 3-4 year-old probably Bangladeshi child chewing out his parents in an Indian restaurant! Horror of horrors. And the parents said nothing! One of my clients, in my last years as a psychiatrist, was a school teacher. She was complaining about how disrespectful her high-school students were, In their school the children were allowed to swear at the teachers! Only when it became physically violent were there consequences! I then asked her: “How many times in their 11 years of public school education, have they been told to respect their elders. Crickets The answer is zilch! Respecting the elders is old school. Not the new school of transgender and equality and self(i.e. ego) expression!

2) The respect for authority! If there was any of that left before ,the Covid Pandemic has wiped it out. We were lied to over and over again-about early treatment with Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, about the safety of the vaccines, about the origins of the virus etc.,etc. And every day on the news Trump and his coterie are telling us how good the economy is when people know it aint. The American Academy of Pediatrics are telling us that the vaccine mandate is harmless where there are many credible studies to show us they are harmful. 5G installations are being protected while many people are being made sick and there is evidence that the RFs emitted are carcinogenic. And no one ,but no one, wants to study electrical cars health effects because of the potential economic impacts. So to be respectful of contemporary authorities is simply self-injurious!

3) The Sociology of Respect.

I was raised in an Ashkenazi Jewish family. We were taught to be forthright and honest. Americans and Italians I believe are similar .But during my life’s journey I cam in touch with what I call the “adabist” ( “adab” is the Arabic word for polite behaviour) cultures-the British and ,the Arabs ! (I believe the Japanese are similar).They believe in courtesy, politeness and good behaviour -at least outwardly. I was married to a British woman for a long time and have covorted with the Arabs throughout my long history as a Muslim. Through that experience, I have come to appreciate some of the wisdom in that approach. We shouldn’t go around speaking the Truth to people when it is hurtful and unlikely to change anything meaningful in the other.

On the other hand I have seen the hypocrisy and mischief that lies beneath the surface. Even some of the Sufis have fallen for this distortion of the Truth- making “adab” the center of the path. No,no and no! Truth-seeking is the centre of the path-not courteous behaviour! One of the worst cases of this phenomenon was a muqaddam of our sheikh who would go visit him him and say things like; “I am not even worthy of the dust at my teachers feet” and 5 mins. later I would find him doing exactly the opposite of what his sheikh told him. That is how bad it can get  when you are an adherent to “adabist” culture!

The irony to be noted here is  that the most “adabist” cultures( The British ,the Arabs and the Japanese) have been guilty of some of the most violence to others. A recent posting indicated that the British Empire killed more people than either Hitler or Stalin or Mao. I was surprised myself. Then again it lasted a lot longer than the others! The Arabs have been unfortunately involved in much of the terrorism of modern times and the Japanese were abysmally cruel during the Second World War. So if anyone thinks that politeness is the cure-all think again!

A British example. I had a long-time friend with whom we crossed paths on the Sufi way many times. One time I was in England where he lived .I had written to him a couple of times before coming so he could free up his schedule for a meeting. When he eventually found time in his all-too-busy schedule to meet with me ,at my mother-in-laws house in north London ,he stayed for all of 10 mins. My mother-in-law, surely one of the “adabists” extolled his politeness and courtesy. But I was furious  at his lack of consideration.. I came from 5,000 miles and all he could afford was 10 mins, And especially since we had so much in common, so much to learn actually from each other .But that is the culture of politeness! Rigid, ritualistic, unaware of appropriateness to context.

4) The psychoananlytic angle. The psychoanalysts and Gestalt psychologists were very aware of this issue! They know clearly about the tricks of the nafs ( ego).And one of the tricks is the “yes, but” responses. “Yes, I agree with you but…” The psychoanalysts refer to this as “On the Other Hand”  responses. So Fritz Perls, founder of Gestalt Therapy and one of the most astute clinicians used to say; “When there is ‘but’ in a response, it erases everything that comes before it.” The response sounds “respectful” ,but actually it is undermining the Truth in the original statement. The Freudians warned us that if we made an interpretation and the client responded with “On the Other Hand” this represented a form of resistance. They were actually trying to disempower the interpretation!

Conclusions: So how do we go forward? People who are aware of my thinking know that I am against “all or none” responses! We can’t throw “respect” overboard completely, nor can we deny truth in the name of not hurting peoples’ feelings. So we need to find a middle way! At  the same time we have to be conscious of priorities! The ultimate respect needs to be not for peoples sensitivities but rather respect for the Truth(which is another name for God. “Haqq” in Arabic. Anything less will lead us down the wrong path-to more misery and suffering. So learn the art of the gentle but firm pushback. That is what I am practicing and likewise teaching my students to do the same .God be with you! Sufi Ibrahim

Metaphysics, Modern Living, Psychology

AI vs. Human Intelligence

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AI is already superior to the intelligence of most human beings! Why is that?! It is NOT that AI is programmable. Humans are also programmed! But their programming is MORE rigid!  When you take into account their genetic programming, their ethnic/national programming, their professional programming and the programming by their immediate environment, you can account for at least 95% of their speech and behaviour! AI is more flexible!

So what does this mean for us?! It is incumbent on the human being, for both his human and spiritual development, to become aware of his programming and to begin to correct the negative aspects. This is no quick or easy matter! I have been at it for 50 years myself! From the first time my girlfriend told me I was a “positivist ( my scientific programming).This work is never completely finished. Some of our conditioning always remains but this is the true sense of the Sufi term ‘jihad-a -nafs ‘( the war with the ego). Most people don’t even get started! Time to get going!

Metaphysics, Politics, Sufism

The Nexus of Causation

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The Nexus of Causation

I first came upon this question in a second year University Philosophy course. David Hume one of the Triumvirate of Empiricist philosophers in the U.K. which included John Locke and George Berkeley began questioning “the necessary link” between cause and effect. This is not the place to go into the intricacy of his argument on this subject but his logic did seem compelling at the time(before I discovered how pathetic logic itself was lol). What he basically claimed was that the connections we observed between cause and effect were observed habitual connections ,what we might call “association” in modern terminology rather than necessary causation. Got me thinking…

Then there was the physics of Stephen Hawking about the Big Bang Theory. There was an original explosion of some gaseous material that caused the creation of the universe. I questioned that hypothesis well before becoming a believer. ”So who caused the Big Bang in the first place?!” I thought. The scientific answer is usually: ” That question is not in the domain of science”. Really?! So science is not concerned with the deeper causes, I see!

Now some ma y see this question of causation as pure speculation. But it is much more than that! Because the causal analysis will often determine our behaviour-our approach to the solution of the problem. Let’s take a medical example for now. Headaches-the second most common presenting symptom in medicine-after fatigue which presents an even more complex series of possible causation!  So for headaches, if the cause is one virus or another we treat it like the flu. If it is meningitis that is a whole other approach often involving hospitalization and I.V. antibiotics.A  migraine is something else again ( now we have the tryptans to deal with them). And of course a brain tumour is a whole other approach. So knowing the cause is vitally important-possibly a matter of life and death.

Now, this article was probably triggered by the war going on with Iran. For the “progressives” in the U.S., this is an unprovoked, unnecessary war. For the Muslims this is obviously due to the Zionists lobbying-of course. Isn’t everything lol?! For the Quebecois separatists all their problems are “la faute du federale” (i.e. the English) And for the Jews its all because of anti-Semitism. This is where our ethnic echo-chambers take over and the villain is always the same- depending on our allegiances. Very poor causal analysis, no doubt!

Now before we go any further, let us look at the various forms of causation.There is “the proximate cause” as in the fraudulent article about Covid in the Lancet that tried to call out the lab leak theorists as conspiracy theorists .The evidence is suggesting more and more that these conspiracists were right! Dr, Luc Montaignier, the famous French virologist who discovered HIV said it in  Jan.2020 right after the gene sequence of the Covid was released. But who needs to hear from geniuses when we can listen to the mediocrities of bureaucratized scientists. So scientists look for “proximate causes”.

In Islam, on the other hand, we are taught the difference between intermediary (read worldly) causes (“asbab”) and original causers (The Divine will). And that is probably the most relevant distinction for our purposes here.

Before we go further in this exposition, let me go to another form of causation-again a moral one. I have noticed over the years a certain group of people attached to corrupt spiritual teachers. I will not name them for now, but suffice it to say they can be from any tradition! I have seen this amongst Buddhists and Hindus and Sufi Muslims. These people are following a leader who is known to be corrupt and/or have bad character with people. Yet, these disciples refuse to acknowledge it. Even after the teacher dies, they maintain their heart connection. They tell me he is deceased but that makes no difference. Until they cut the attachment they can still suffer the consequences.

During the time I was treating Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, most of my patients were getting slowly better(a tough disease to doubt to treat, no doubt. One of them seemed to be completely stagnant in his clinical process. When I confronted him with the possible link,he completely denied it:” That was just crazy wisdom” he said. ”No, that was vice” I retorted. To no avail. And his sad, personal saga continued. May Allah protect us from these forms of ignorance!

Let us take some other examples

1-The Tsunami of 2004 in South-East Asia. It caused 227.000 deaths according to the most reliable of statistics! Now the scientists explained that this was due to the movement of tectonic plates in the area (the proximate cause!). A Muslim scholar, may his scholarly head hang in shame, proclaimed on public television that “this was a geological event, not a theological one’?! Where did he study his Islam?! Confronted with a great tragedy, he forgot all the Islamic teachings about God being in charge of the Universe! The tectonic plates trumped the Divine will! Estagfirullah.

Since a couple of decades now, I have made a practice of researching these tragedies to see if there are any other possible explanations. In the case of the tsunami, the two places it hit the worst were in Aceh province of Indonesia and the Tamil part of Sri Lanka. They both had one thing in common! A Civil War between two different ethnic populations was going on! Looks like Allah doesn’t like that! Tectonic plates are His intermediary causes.

2- The Pakistani Earthquake in Belokot 2005. 70,000 people killed and immense destruction1 Anything going on there?! Well research indicates that al Qaida was organizing in the area! You can draw your own conclusions.

A couple of clarifying Sufi quotes:

1-Ali Jemal of Fes “Everything to you is from you and everything from you comes back to you. This is the sunnat of Allah” The second part many people know as “the law of karma’ but the first part is even more subtle. It says that whatever is happening to you is already from you. It t comes from the Divine will. It could be a punishment( more common actually) or a test for you. In either case it is a teaching.

2-Sheikh Hashimi of Damascus “Fi kuli shay hayran”( in everything is goodness) Surprising for most analytic minds lol  There is always a positive side and that positive is not secondary. It is preponderant!

3- Mulay Ad-Darqawi author of the Darqawi Letters said that he never saw a problem that his murids brought to him without there being a defect in their nafs(ego) which accounted for it. H-m-m. Intriguing. So whenever we experience a problem we should look within rather than looking to blame others!

This applies as much to collectivities as to individuals. So when Iran gets attacked, it is easy to say it is the fault of the unbelievers- of America or Israel! Couldn’t possibly be those sweet, pious, loving leaders of Iran, right?! Instead, we need to be accountable-both as individuals and as nations. Otherwise, we are not truly God-fearing. Instead we are defensive, calculating and manipulating! And that is not healthy.

So what am I saying here “Bottom Line”?!

The real causation is not logical /scientific! The real causation is Moral.

That’s why I advise myself and others: ”Do the right thing and the right consequences will follow’!”” Do the calculated, self-interested thing and bad consequences will follow-no matter how precise the calculation”. If you don’t believe me, observe. In both your life and the life of your nation or religious group. May Allah be my witness! Sufi Ibrahim

 

Metaphysics, Modern Living, Spiritual Practice

The Two-Legged Tripod – Where is the Ikhlas

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The Two-legged Tripod of Current Islamic Practice

 


Umar ibn al-Khattab reported: We were sitting with the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, one day, a man appeared with very white clothes and very black hair. There were no signs of travel on him and we did not recognize him. He sat in front of the Prophet, rested his knees by his knees, and placed his hands on his thighs. The man said, “O Muhammad, tell me about Islam.” The Prophet said, “Islam is to testify there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, to establish prayer, to give charity, to fast the month of Ramadan, and to perform pilgrimage to the House if a way is possible.” The man said, “You have spoken truthfully.” We were surprised that he asked him and said he was truthful. He said, “Tell me about faith.” The Prophet said, “Faith is to believe in Allah, His angels, His Books, His Messengers, the Last Day, and to believe in providence, its good and its harm.” The man said, “You have spoken truthfully. Tell me about excellence.” The Prophet said, “Excellence is to worship Allah as if you see Him, for if you do not see Him, He surely sees you.”

I feel like, without pretension inshallah, I have become the conscience of our religion?! At least to me and a few people near to me. That is NOT because of superior knowledge or piety. Many of my co-religionists have more of both of these! But rather because I am a convert and am able to see things from numerous perspectives. Having been through secular Judaism, left-wing politics and Marxism, Humanistic Psychology, Buddhism, New Age Sufism and finally traditional Islamic Sufism I have experienced the world from numerous perspectives. On the other hand, most Muslims have lived their entire lives in an ethnic echo-chamber. Even when they immigrate to a Western country they resist the local wisdoms in favour of their cultural platitudes! So I can see more than most!

Therefore, when I go to the Muslim venues including the holy sites of Mecca and Madina and the grand mosques of Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt and Turkey, as well as local mosques, I have noticed the following phenomena-relating back to the cited hadith

1-The Iman is good-almost everywhere in the Islamic world and even in the West! The mosques are full for jumaa prayer, overfilled for the Eid and well-attended at Tarawih during Ramadan. This tells me that the faith is there! By contrast, at the churches, including the one where we do our group dhikr(another issue to be explained further on) the pews are empty. Some of the Evangelical Churches may well be better attended but that remains the exception in the Christian world!

2- Islam, i.e the outward practices. Most of the Muslims I meet are trying to keep up the outer practices-doing the obligatory ones and avoiding the prohibited things. Most Muslims do not gamble, do not drink alcohol or eat pork. Most Muslims avoid fornication and adultery even though the modern world prevents them from having second wives and concubines- like in the days of the Prophets. Verdict: Islam, the behavioural component, is  well -respected.

3-Ihsan?! I look around the mosques at jumaa prayer and rarely do I see people of light?! The same was shockingly true in Mecca when I did hajj many years ago. I kept walking around the Kabaa looking for people of light. The site was luminous but the people were not! Finally I ran into a group where it was manifest! They were a group of Bangladeshi Naqshbandi Sufis. I found a similar small group in Madina not far from the Prophet’s mosque! But overall the people were in a pitiful spiritual state. The maqamat (the holy sites) were luminous but the people were not!

Interestingly enough, John Bennett tells the same story about the great Indian saint Shivapuri Baba who visited Mecca in the 1890’s!  He made the following statement which concurs with my own observations” The pilgrims at Mecca are inspired with true religious fervour (strong Iman) but I do not find myself attracted to Islam as it is today”. This was before the end of the Ottoman empire when the Wahhabbis had not yet done the damage that they eventually did to the spirituality of Islam. I guess he did not have the occasion to meet some real Sufis! I believe he would then  have felt their camaraderie(like-mindedness) with his own aspirations!

The Causes: How did we get here?! This is, no doubt, a complex question! Our Prophet saws had warned that each generation after him would be worse than that before. Nevertheless, there have been great Sufis throughout the ages from Abu Bayazid Bistami to Abdul Qadr Jilani, Ibn Arabi and Jellalludin Rumi.and Abu Hassan Ash-Shadhili-all many generations after him saws..I think it is safe to say that they all had a high degree of Ihsan! So what happened?!

Did the corruption of the Ottoman empire have something to do with it? Or the wealth in the Muslim countries that our Prophet saws feared so much? All of that is possible.

1-But the one unavoidable factor is the rising up of Wahhabbism/Salafism that started in earnest after the defeat of the Ottomans in WW1.By 1925 they had taken over the holy sites and began imposing their dry, lifeless, despiritualized version of Islam throughout the Muslim world-via their petrodollars.

Nowadays, even when you go to far away outposts of Islam like Trinidad where I spent some time, you find people who know nothing about Sufism and retain a negative image of it! They have lost the essential tool for developing Ihsan!  I consider Wahhabism as the extension of the Khawarij heresy into the modern world. It appears that the great scholar of Islam- Tahir al Qudri- agrees with me on that one.

2- The second obstacle, a descendant I believe of the Mutazili heresy are the movements like Ikhwan Muslimeen. Like the Mutazilis, even though they are not often recognized as such, they emphasize reason beyond anything else As Joshua Philipp, of Epoch Times,  pointed out in his astute reporting on the Islamic Brotherhood, Sayeed Qutb studied social sciences in the U.S. and then brought Marxist thought into the Islamic paradigm. ( Quite an achievement of understanding for a non-Muslim!) From there, we start hearing more and more about political Islam -the very type of Islam so popular in the modern world that my sheikh-Sheikh Nazim denounced every time he met them!” You do not understand our religion” he would say! “People get the governments they deserve .You cannot impose Islamic governments from above”. What insight that man r.a. had!

3- A third source is the modern world-full of Materialism, Empiricism and Rationalism. The scientific paradigm, economic planning and all other types of over-planning and overthinking. When we consider this “toxic soup” of Wahhabism, Ikhwanism and Scientific Materialism , we should not be surprised that the Islamic world is in such a pitiful state spiritually!

 

The Consequences :  I will make a bold statement here!  I would state that almost all the problems in the contemporary Muslim world and yes that includes Palestine and Iran and Lebanon etc.,etc. come from this loss of Ihsan (P.S. I will be writing a future article on the Causal Nexus as most Muslims have bought into the logical version of causality rather than the moral one.)   What we find is a lack of subtlety, a lack of refinement, a lack of empathy and a lack of the true sense of the sacred. It is like we have a body without blood and without breath. Emptiness and Deadness. Men addicted to porn sites. Hijabi women walking the streets of Western cities looking miserable and bitter. Parents who do not understand their children and marry their daughters to the first rich man they can find( Yes,it’s still happening!) Dissatisfaction everywhere!

 

The Solutions:

So what are the answers?

Bring back the Sufis! They contain the lifeblood of the religion. Bring back the group dhikr and the Samaa and the Hadrat. Bring back the private dhikr with the name of Allah. Push back on the critics of Sufism-whether they be Wahhabbis or Ikhwanis or Orientalists. What we see instead is the glorification of scholarship! Scholarship has its place, no doubt. But it is not the highest nor the deepest part of the religion. We can learn our Shariah from them , how to recite Quran with proper tajweed, how to do wudhu and ghusl. But mostly they are cerebral people with limited hal-for those who can perceive hal in their souls.

The real Sufis, however, are glowing and energetically powerful. The first one I met, in Jerusalem, put me into the hal of fana immediately and the second one had me in a state of ecstasy that made it difficult to find myself in the streets of Philadelphia-the city he was residing in at the time. These are the people of God! These are the carriers of the most intense forms of Ihsan. These are the people we need to align with. Not the people who have memorized the most Islamic ilm. These are the people who can revive the nation. The others are more like University professors and less like true awliya of Allah. May Allah fortify and invigorate our Ihsan.

Salaams, Sufi Ibrahim

 

Metaphysics, Modern Living, Psychology

The Adversarial Position

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The Adversarial Approach-

The Great Hoax of Modern Times

One of the most commonly accepted truisms of Modern Times is that the way to the Truth is through the Adversarial Approach. So, on the legal front, you have the prosecution and the defense. In politics you have the Democrats and the Republicans or alternatively the left-wing and the right wing. Somehow through the confrontation of these opposites, one is supposed to be able top discern the Truth. This is a deep-seated error in Epistemology. In reality, instead of getting to Clarity and Truth, this approach leads to confusion and animosity. If you don’t understand what I mean, just look at what is happening in America currently. But like lots of consensually held illusions (think of the sun revolving around the Earth lol) they die hard. Partly because much of this conviction is Unconscious.

If you need a concrete example of this process watch the Senate hearings in the United States.These hearings were intended to seek clarity .But instead you have a bifurcation of expressed beliefs. The Democrats have one point of view and the Republicans have another. So what is being set up is a game-the game of who is the best debater. In the end everyone is a loser-especially the public that is just either more partisan or more confused after the event.

Another instance of this can be seen on the news networks. Just watched an interview by Dana Bash (left-leaning CNN) and a Republican senator. Each speaking over the other. Neither of them listening except as an occasion for a gotcha moment that can be played over and over again. The best part is at the end of the interview Dana, who by now has certainly built up a pile of animosity, states in an obviously hypocritical way.”and thanks for coming” Ya right. Now she can make a dartboard out of his picture to be able to release her frustrations when needed lol

There is a strange irony in this adversarial belief-system. We could call this belief, from a philosophical point of view , “Dialectics”. Dialectics claims that from the thesis-antithesis clash we get to synthesis on a higher level.  But that is exactly what Marx and the Communists call their point of view. ”Dialectical Materialism”. So we are on the same plane-the plane of ignorance! Have you noticed that wonderful synthesis in China and Russia LOL?

In the field of Sufi Islam, we are repeatedly warned about this approach. The teacher of my Sufi teacher, Sheikh Abdullah Daghestani, says in his book: ” Argumentation destroys faith” In traditional Islam, one of the four great Imams, Imam Malik was known to walk out of the mosque if some-one started arguing. And in the Quran Allah says:” Man is mostly disputatious” He swt was surely not encouraging this bad tendency!

Now, when I examined my own learning process, I realized that I had learnt very little from discussions with opposing points of view. Mostly those discussions led nowhere and created more animosity than clarity. So I asked myself the question: ”How did I learn?” Yes, I do believe I have learnt a lot in this life journey lol. And the answer came back in an irrefutable manner.” Through listening to people who knew a lot more than me about the subject”! No, not discussing with them, debating with them or even interacting with them! Simple, honest, open-hearted listening. And that shifted my life course on several occasion.

People who are familiar with my approach know that My Epistemology is based not on logic and rationality, certainly not on debating, but on “Seeing”, “Hearing “ and” Feeling”. Let me give you a few examples

1-We will start with Hearing.

Two examples-neither from great scholars. lol In my pre-Islamic days like the people of my generation I had a girlfriend who was both highly intelligent and depressed. Her treating psychiatrist invited me in for a session one week. ( Did he think I was part of the problem lol. Maybe!). I outrightly refused in a way that can only be described as ironic given what followed. ”Psychiatry.That’s a bunch of bunk .It’s not even scientific” was my response. Have come a long way since then. My girlfriend, suitably upset, then went to talk with her also intelligent girlfriend and came back saying:” Me and Miriam decided that you are a “positivist’! I didn’t even know what positivism was! But it hit me hard and I knew I had to find out!

Now, if I had read a little, I could have come back and debated the issue. I could have defended Empiricism and debated her philosophic and Artistic Idealism. But for some reason, I didn’t. Instead, I began a long research project starting with a Sabbatical from medical school-a research project that is continuing up to the present moment. This research has made me question the so-called scientific process. Instead of debating, I heard the Truth of it. And I have not regretted it for one moment.

Another “listening event. I was in California looking to learn about the latest alternative psychotherapies. I didn’t go to Esalen but I went to the Esalen bookstore in Haight Ashbury.There was a young lady serving at the bookstore (probably early twenties) who noticed that I had a non-Californian accent and asked what I was doing in San Francisco.” I’m here to study Gestalt Therapy” I said, somewhat simplifying the process. She then looked at me with utter contempt and said: ”Gestalt Therapy, that’s not where it’s at, man” (typical language of the day lol).I thought to myself: ”This is the dumbest chick I have ever met’(also typical language of the day lol) and decided to leave. But as I was walking out of the bookstore shaking my head in disbelief, I turned around and said: ”Ok then where’s it at?” “Spirituality man, that’s where it’s at”. I walked out of the store still shaking my head ! However, the phrase kept repeating itself in my head like a beloved song from high school. ”Spirituality, man. That’s where its at”. Sure enough, soon after I got back to Montreal I met my first spiritual teacher, a Buddhist Lama sent to Montreal by the Dalai Lama to attend to the Tibetan community in Longueuil! And the rest is history.

Now if I had done what the current zeitgeist would recommend (Discussion? Debate? Conversation?) and debated the issue-spirituality vs. psychology) in all likelihood it would have led to an impasse and bad feelings .Instead, this seemingly banal interaction  led to a life-changing experience!

 

2- Example of Seeing. I am in Jordan. I am out shopping when a Muslim “brother” meets me and invites me to dinner. It doesn’t take long for his small group to go into their Wahhabbi discourse and begin criticizing Sheikh Nuh ,my spiritual teacher of the time. I do my best to defend him (the debate mode lol) and after a few more minutes, I look at the group and say “ I can see no nur(light) in your faces. How am I supposed to believe your words.” And I left. Btw I had a very similar encounter with a Shia group in Montreal!

Example 2- a secular one. I was a Marxist at the time?! I am in a large meeting of left-wingers. All the local bigshots are there! I look around and at the Front Table only to realize that these people are worse than the democratic liberal government under Robert Bourassa. And that it would be a catastrophe to help them into power! End of my career as a Marxist!

3-“Feeling” (Alternatively could be titled “intuition” or “knowledge of the heart) I am in Plateau Montréal -the “in” area of Montreal, still searching. I go to a bookstore dedicated to the works of Alistar Crowley. I knew nothing about him before entering. But I knew it felt weird, very weird and I didn’t stay long. Later I learnt that he was a well-known Black Magician from England. My “feelings” had led me to the right conclusion!

 

Now, there are some prerequisites to achieving these kind of perceptions.. Some people have good instincts to start with.It is like a genetic endowment. Most of us have to work at it . Firstly we must be able to listen. Most people are listening through the veil of their belief-systems. Seeing and feeling are the same. If the ideas do not conform to what is already in their mind, they reject them. Many, many people simply reject anything new or unusual. And they are stuck in that way.

So what can we do to enhance our openness to the Truth. That is the Essence of the Sufi way. We pray, we do dhikr( mediation),we listen to wise teachers. But, most of all, we oppose our nafs (ego).It is called jihad-a-nafs. This is no mean feat. Most of the Muslims I have met don’t have a clue! They think wearing hijab and eating halal meat is enough. But the process of jihad-a-nafs goes far beyond that .It goes to the essential task of character-building. People who do that work seriously are like precious gems as opposed to stones. And you can learn to see them as such.

May Allah be with you on your journey. Sufi Ibrahim Kreps

 

Metaphysics, Modern Living, Psychology

“Facts are Facts” Really!

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Context: A discussion about the state of the American economy after a Rachel Maddow opinion piece on the internet

This discussion involved a couple of old friends, both trained in well-respected MBA schools and with a long history of investment portfolio management( i.e much better informed then me about business and economics!). Both still believe in “facts”- whether they be government reports such as the Labour Board statistics or other economic reports or private company reports. Both are still Empiricists-despite decades of feedback by yours truly about the limitations of that approach lol!

I, myself, was very fortunate. At a young age I was confronted by a clever girlfriend for being a Positivist( another form of Empiricism) That challenge changed my life-over 50 years ago! But most of the people I know ,educated in the West, still believe in “facts” .In medicine they call that “objective evidence”. In science it is called statistical analysis in peer-reviewed journals .In politics it is whatever suits your political narrative lol

Getting back to Rachel Maddow for a minute, her thesis was that, as opposed to the Trumpian narrative that the U.S. has all the cards in its trade deal with Canada, America was going to suffer more from the tariffs than either Trump or many of the economists think and that Canada might actually gain an advantage in asserting its own independence.

The usual “ad hominem” critique then followed. Rachel Maddow is a well-known leftist with MSNBC , a Trump-hater and on top of it not that well-informed about the “facts”. in this particular dossier. However, despite all of that, her primary thesis may well be correct. Why do I say that?

As those who have been following me for awhile know, I reject the contemporary Epistemology of “objective evidence” and favour an Epistemology of “seeing ‘,”hearing” and “feeling”( in Quranic Arabic that is “basirat”, samiyya” and “fuad”)This way of accessing Reality includes looking at peoples hearts ,listening carefully to anecdotes and “searching the neighborhood” to see what is really going on!

When I apply this model ,I notice the following. Many, many people in both Canada and the U.S. are worried. Only 37% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the economy. I hear more and more stories of people having a hard time finding jobs( I believe this is not only true in Canada but in the U.S. as well).I see more and more stories of small businesses having a hard time with the tariffs. Some are even closing down.” Poppy-cock” say the Empiricists .”The macro picture is unchanged” i.e. more government statistics lol.

And perhaps most of all, Americans are unhappy! They are now divided into Trump-haters, who are unhappy because he is in power and Trump sycophants who are unhappy because they have to embrace his lies as part of the package and embracing lies and denial is NEVER a formula for happiness!

Then there is the rest of the World that is increasingly anti-Trump and anti-American. The Canadians who are avoiding travel to the U.S. and plenty of other countries’ citizens doing like-wise I am sure. Being hated is rarely a formula for success! America which once was a beacon of freedom and success is now seen as tyrannical, bullying and manipulative.

None of this augurs well for the future of America. But so-called “experts” fixated on macro-economic data ” can see none of this! Empiricism and its sister philosophy Materialism has done so much harm! We can see this so clearly in the countries that embraced “Dialectical Materialism’. Now we can see it coming in those countries that have embraced “Scientific Materialism”. God help us all!

 

 

Comparative Religion, Metaphysics, Modern Living, Psychology

The Cause of Suffering

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The Cause of All Suffering-

Individual and Collective.

Context: Looking at the horrible suffering in the world around us.

Byron Katie is a non-sectarian New Age spiritual teacher similar in her evolution to the better-known Eckhart Tolle of “The Power of Now” fame. I attended a couple of her workshops in America in the past. She made  the following statement in front of a mid-sized auditorium.It was like a thunderbolt for me when I first heard it.! “All your problems come from the same place: You believe in the contents of your own mind”. Wow! Ajib. The Truth of it  resonated deep within.

When I then looked at the international situation, I realized that this truth applied to collectivities as well as individuals. Let us see how that plays out.

But before we do, let me situate this statement in a theological Comparative Religion framework. The traditions that understand this statement best would be the Hindi-Buddhist tradition- not my chosen path however. These traditions understood and still understand that the mind (“manas” in Sanskrit ) is not our friend but our enemy!  The reason that the Western traditions are not aware of this is that they have all been corrupted to a certain extent by Greek Philosophy which worships the mind, rationality and logic. Christianity grew up in the midst of this Greek culture(Greek was the intellectual language at the time of Jesus).In much the same area the Jews as well were absorbing the Greek mind-set. We can see this in the elaborate mind-productions of the Talmudists ( third to sixth century C.E) Btw there is no common measure between the statements of the great Jewish Prophets like Jacob and Moses and David and these Talmudic cerebralized scholars-except perhaps their belief in One God Lol!

And finally, the Muslims began translating the Greek texts into Arabic beginning during the Abbasid period and it reached its apogee during the time of Andalusia. For Muslim readers if you don’t believe me, read the hadith and the statements of the Sahhabis and contrast them with any of your preferred scholars and you will see the contrast. And btw ,it was not arbitrary that Allah chose Mohammed, saws, an unlettered man,for his final Prophetic Mission! I have seen the same phenomenon manifest amongst the shuyukh I have studied with and followed. There is an inverse relationship between their level of scholarship and their spiritual hal. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, O admirers of Harvard and Oxford and Al Azhar lol.

Before continuing, it must be stated that these “mind-productions” of the collectivities are also underpinned by very strong emotions. That is why it is often so difficult to untangle them from reality.

Now let us see how this plays out on the international front. Three situations of utmost misery will be highlighted although there are many more-beyond counting!

The Middle East-Specifically Gaza :

Israeli Jewish Thought: “This land was promised to us by God in the Bible. The greatest error of Israel is to push its military to harsh and unusual punishment out of what can only be termed vengeance.

Arab Muslim Thought:” This land is ours. We have settled here for hundreds of years.There is no place for Jews here. The Jews are colonialists from Eastern Europe. Thus: ”From the River to the sea” The greatest error of the Palestinians and the Arabs was to not allow for the legitimate presence of Jews on their territory.

Reality: The Children of Israel and the Arabs have been fighting about this land over and over again since Abraham had two sons-Ismail-the father of the Arabs and Issac-the father of the Jews. That’s about 4000 years! The Jews had been mostly absent for a long time because of political and religious oppression. Now they were called back by Divine destiny (Muslims should not be denying the hand of God in all of this as the concept of ‘qada’ is basic to our religious beliefs!) But the Arabs and Islam have their rights as well. Did Allah not tell us in the Quran that he made many nations-so that they would know each other?!  Bottom Line: the Arabs and the Jews need to make a just arrangement. Everyone outside of the Muslim and Jewish tribal world knows that! But these outsiders are not subject to the same collective, tribal ideologies and sentiments as the latter two.

 

  1. B) The Russia Ukraine Conflict

Russian Thought: Ukraine is not a real nation. They should be part of the Russian Empire as they were in the past

Ukrainian Thought: We are a sovereign country We want to be part of the Western world

 Reality: Russia and Ukraine have a lot in common. They are both adherents to the orthodox Church. They both have a long history of corruption and anti-Semitism. Even their languages sound similar. A suitable arrangement needs to be made that allows for their similarities and differences.

N.B. As a Canadian I think we have a workable model to present to the World-the arrangement between the English and the French Canadians who also have a lot in common and notable differences.(  For the naysayers, we will leave aside for now our treatment of the indigenous people which Canada is trying to come to terms with just as America is trying to come to terms with its history of slavery)

 

The Mass Deportations of Illegal Immigrants in America:

 

 Government Thought: We have far too many illegal immigrants in our country. Many, if not most of them, have criminal records. We need to get them out as soon as possible. We were elected to do that

 

Immigrant Defenders’ Thought

Many of us have been here for a long time. We have worked hard and raised our children here to build a new life. This mass deportation is cruel and unjust.

Reality:

For whatever reasons, America has allowed in more immigrants than they can manage. ( In Canada which has been more honest about this issue, if not more generous, we have no such problem. So America brought this upon themselves) Whatever the reasons, they are unlikely to be of the benevolent nature. Many were allowed in to furnish cheap labour or for a political calculus by the Democratic party who saw future left-wing voters. In any case, they are here. Now that the borders are more or less sealed, America needs to do whatever it can needs  to do about  deeportations in a manner that is judicious, law-abiding and humanitarian. Treating all immigrants prima facie as if they were criminals does a disservice both to the immigrants and to the traditions of the founding of America itself.

As you can see from these few examples, ideology, principles, beliefs with all the emotions that underpin them leads to more and more suffering.

The only solution possible is to observe Reality clearly. Once properly perceived, that Reality will lead to proper decision-making. May Allah help us all !

 

 

 

 

Metaphysics, Modern Living, Politics

“Lies,Damn Lies and Statistics”

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“Lies, Damn lies, and Statistics”: Multi-Disciplinary Debate

This is from a conversation with an old friend of mine-trained in the Epistemology of MBA school at McGill and Concordia University while I was being similarly brain-washed in  McGill’s medical school lol. See if you can follow the logic/illogic of it. I am responding here to his assertion that according to “the facts’ the Trump initiatives are not having as much effect on the economy as were predicted.

When I heard this hypothesis, I immediately heard the inner voice saying ”false” lol and started scanning my experiential  world and the first thing that came to mind was Vermont!

Just one example-the effect on Vermont ! I am sure there are many others-like scientists and hard-working federal employees who lost their jobs without justification and hard-working illegal immigrants trying to build a life in America. Much of this may not show up in the official figures. That’s why I don’t believe those figures are ” The Realty” In fact many of those figures are designed to hide reality rather than expose it! 

 

From AI!( verified by yours truly lol)

Yes, Vermont is experiencing a noticeable decline in Canadian visitors, impacting the state’s tourism and economy. This drop is attributed to a combination of factors, including political rhetoric and uncertainty surrounding tariffs. 

 

 

 

Reasons for the Decline:

  • Negative Political Climate:

President Trump’s rhetoric and trade disputes with Canada have created a negative perception among some Canadians, leading them to reconsider travel to the U.S. 

 Economic Concerns:

Potential tariffs and trade tensions have made some Canadians hesitant to spend money in the U.S., impacting spending habits and tourism. 

  • Shifting Travel Patterns:

Some Canadians are choosing to travel within their own country or to other destinations, rather than visiting Vermont. 

  • Reduced Cross-Border Traffic:

Official data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection shows a significant decrease in travelers crossing into Vermont from Canada, especially during peak travel periods. 

Impact on Vermont:

  • Tourism Revenue Decline:

Reduced Canadian tourism is hurting businesses, particularly in northern Vermont and towns near the border.

  • Reduced Spending:

Canadian credit card spending in Vermont has decreased significantly, impacting local businesses and economies.

  • Economic Downturn:

Tourism is a vital part of Vermont’s economy, and the loss of Canadian visitors is having a noticeable effect on the state’s overall economic health. 

That’s why, in my Epistemology, personal experience, anecdotes and even hearsay are much more significant than official figures. Wasn’t it one of our Yiddishe ancestors Benjamin Disraeli who talked of” lies, damn lies and statistics” lol Still relevant 150 years later!

 

PS I think you could do us all a service by doing a “deep dive”, as they call it, into many of these official economic statistics to see how they are jerrymandered and manipulated- most of them I suspect.

I am by no means an expert (as if that gave someone any credibility nowadays lol) but I remember hearing about how they generate unemployment statistics! They don’t count the underemployed (part-time people or people not working in the area for which they were trained) So a licensed engineer working as a pizza deliverer is considered fully employed?!  As is a part-time Taco Bell employee! And then they also don’t count those who have given up looking for employment-for whatever reason. Thus the statistics becomes very misleading at best.

So if I want to understand what is going on in employment I watch those people around me looking for jobs and see what happens.

Just ran into an old friend who was trained in heating and air-conditioning but was never able to find a job in that area despite being assured by the trade school he attended that there were jobs for ALL graduates. So he worked at slightly above minimum wage at a finance company for years. Then he lost the job and it took him 18 months and numerous applications to finally get a job as a greeter at Walmart! He seemed happy to get anything he could!

Then there was my Sufi student who entered the job market as an IT programmer. Our prime minister was touting the field and saying Quebec needed many more of them. But each time he applied there were 200 other applicants! Not exactly a sellers’ market lol

Where does that show up in the employment statistics?

I would be interested to see what you find if you really look seriously into how these statistics are generated. I think you will discover a lot of surprises-as I did when I first looked into medical studies and listened to others who had done likewise.

Let me complete my thought here. So, if we begin looking at the employment situation, and start with “the facts” lol( which is what we see on mainstream media all the time) we conclude “best employment situation ever! Lowest unemployment rate ever!” But if we look at it from my Epistemology (my experience and the many people I am in touch with) I would conclude “Difficult, perhaps very difficult employment situation”. Who is right lol? Can there be any doubt?! And then you ask : “Why do people not get it?! Because they are being lied to on a daily basis, since birth! It’s the lie of Empiricism. And it needs to be challenged over and over again if we are to break the spell!

 

Happy Trails to you lol, Joel Ibrahim AKA Sufi Ibrahim

 

 

Metaphysics, Modern Living, Psychology

Data!

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As opposed to the current consensus I see data as toxic! It clouds the heart ,dulls the spirit and stresses the mind. But we need some of it ,not nearly as much as the scientific mind-set thinks, in order to proceed.So I recommend doing what we did in psychopharmacology lol Using the lowest ,effective dose!I call that attitude “Essentialist” and that is where I stand Think about it.

Islam, Metaphysics, Politics, Psychology

Materialism-The Second Scourge of the Ummat

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Materialism: The Second Biggest Scourge within the Islamic Ummat

We have already written about the First Scourge- Islamism or Political Islam. This is the Second. In a way it is the deeper of the two and underpins the first one in terms of attitude. We shall explain this in the ensuing article.

This hadeeth was narrated by al-Tirmidhi (2352) from Anas (may Allah be pleased with him), according to whom the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) said: “O Allah, cause me to live poor and cause me to die poor, and gather me among the poor on the Day of Resurrection.”

This hadith is not saheeh. It is considered gharib which means part of the chain has only one transmitter. That does not by any means mean that it is untruthful! And boy do the ulema have a problem with it- doing all kinds of intellectual acrobatics to not take the most obvious meaning of ”miskeen” which is poverty. So instead they say “miskeen” means humility which is a secondary meaning of the word!

Yet, they know well that the Prophet himself saws lived in poverty , died in poverty and said when he saws visited the heavens that most of the people there were from the poor folks.

So what’s the problem?! There seems to be a current within Islamic fiqh of wanting to justify wealth if not justify seeking it outrightly. Perhaps this is simply to distinguish themselves from the pious Christians who praised and practiced renunciation. But in that approach they seem to forget all of the teachings about greed and worldliness. Remember the four enemies?! One of them is ”dunniya” (worldliness) and a large part of this dunniya is about wealth.

The following sahih hadith should, in fact, close the argument!

Amr ibn Awf reported: The Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, said, “By Allah, it is not poverty that I fear for you, but rather I fear you will be given the wealth of the world, just as it was given to those before you. You will compete for it just as they competed for it, and it will ruin you just as it ruined them.”

Or alternatively this hadith Source: Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 3158, Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 2961

One day he (Abdur Rahman Ibn Awf) heard the Messenger of Allah (PBUH) saying to him, “O lbn `Awf, you are a rich man, and you are going to crawl into Paradise. So lend to Allah in order to set your feet free.” Ever since he heard this advice from the Messenger of Allah, he started lending to Allah a goodly loan. He was being warned about the dangers of wealth.

Or from a previous Revelation…Jesus a.s. said  “Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” from Matthew 5:3 in the Bible- part of the Beatitudes.

 So what is this materialism that is so endemic in the modern world- including amongst the Muslims? Ever noticed lol? The opulence of the lifestyle of The Saudi Royal family and the kingdoms in the Gulf. The great buildings and towers in that part of the world.The sultanat of Brunei and its petroleum resources. Qatar -its buildings, its institutions it’s attempts to join the Western intelligentsia with its financial perks  and it’s World Cup hosting. The list goes on and on! In this article we will look at three forms of materialism and its implications.

 

  • Obvious Outward Wealth

This is what we just mentioned. No one can miss it!  It is most obvious. And although people like Trump may love it and be obsessed by it, most Muslims are wary. They know the dangers of excessive wealth. The Quran is full of stories of previous empires that had such wealth and then crumbled-sometimes in one fell-swoop catastrophe.

 

  • Ideological Materialism

This is what we were talking about in the previous text about the scourge of Islamism or Political Islam. In this form of Ideology the belief is that by establishing a Muslim state i.e. outer Islam, people will submit and become good and pious by default! What Tarek Fatah calls the “Chasing the Mirage”. All the  historical evidence-think Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran -not to mention ISIS! -all those countries and movements that declared themselves  Islamic states and look at their records .Like the previous Materialistic philosophy, Marxism, it has all failed to live up to expectations. For those who need to be reminded Marxism was a form of Materialism, called Dialectical Materialism   It, too, believed in the state as the solution. In that case it called the State “The Dictatorship of the Proletariat”. And I think it is not unfair to call the Islamic state “The dictatorship of the ulema”. In fact in Iran they call it such “Velayat e Faqih.” (Governing by Jurisprudents)
There is an interesting corollary to this “Materialistic” philosophy. It is often, if not always, coupled to the ideology of Rationnalism. I have often been surprised to hear The Wahhabbis and more recently the Ikhwanis(Muslim Brotherhood) to claim to be the most Rational of Muslims. If they mean “most over-thinking”, “most hypercebral”,”most out of touch with the inner dimensions of Faith and spiritual experience”,then ,for sure lol, they are right. Sheikh Nazim liked to refer to these approaches as “mind-productions” and he taught us to distinguish them from truly sacred knowledge.

Materialists and Rationalists. What I call the “no-nur” people of Faith. Get me out of here!  Anecdote: I was once trapped in Amman by a group of Wahhabbi (Salafis)s who had invited me into their home for lunch.They were very critical of my sheikh of the time, Sheikh Nuh Keller, and of Sufism in general. At first I argued back but then I realized it was fruitless. So in one last attempt to affirm the Truth, I looked at the whole group and said; ”I don’t see any light in any of your faces! So how can I possibly accept your words?” And I ran out .What chutzpah! But I was proud of myself.

 

3)The most pernicious of all aspects of materialism and it’s real philosophical meaning-seeing only the outer (In Arabic that would be “thaheeri”)

Now Muslims are by no means unique in this outlook. We can see it in the atheists and the agnostics. We can see it in the science types (Philosophically called “scientism” or making science into a religion).We can see it in the data crunchers-the government officials, the news reports about polls and economic numbers, demographics, statistics. It is all around us -polluting our thinking as surely as burning coal pollutes the air!

But what form does it take in our religion?! Let us look at a few examples:

: The emphasis on outer form rather than inner essence. How many times during my Islamic career have I been corrected on details of ritualistic practice. ”You didn’t make sure the water went between your toes”, ”your ruku didn’t have enough of an angle to it”. “Your hair is too long”, ”.Your mustache isn’t clipped enough” etc. etc. Not once, not even once, has someone ,outside of sheikh Nazim lol, said to me “your face is illumined” OR the contrary “you are looking darker than usual today” Not once. They don’t notice. They don’t notice the scholars with “nur” in their faces and the scholars (more of them actually) with darkness. Who needs to notice that when you can check how well their nails or their mustaches have been clipped lol

: Then there is the obsession with the hijab! Is it perfect? Does it cover every single strand of hair? Is any of the neck exposed?. And in that obsessional vigilance, the fact that the perfect hijabi lady is exposing every curve in her body below the neck by her tight-fitting clothing is completely bypassed So what is the “hayat” (modesty) that our religion speaks of. Too subtle for many. Too inner a concept.

: And the marriage negotiations. Does he have a good job? Does he own his own apartment? Does the family have money? Is he tall enough? More materialism. How many Muslim ladies have I counselled whose family foolishly pushed them into a marriage that they themselves felt was wrong, because the man had financial stability?!

When I was living in Jordan, I rented an apartment upstairs of a man who had 3 daughters in their mid to late thirties. When I asked them why they were not married, they said their father required their suitors to have a good job, an apartment that he owned and $25,000 in U.S. cash. Very few people, outside of the Royal family lol, could meet such conditions.

On an alternative note, when we were honeymooning in India , we met a family with five unmarried daughters! They claimed their father was too busy with dhikr to arrange marriages for them?! But they seemed quite happy in comparison to the Jordanian ones. I guess they knew that they had avoided a lot of grief lol

And yet, our religion is full of the “inner” in its doctrine and language. In fact, the Quran begins in surat al Baqarah by Allah saying the believers are those who believe in the “ghaib”( the unseen). There is “Iman” (Faith), ”khushua” (sacred humility in prayer), ”tawakuul” (trust in God) .

Particularly in Sufism, we find terms about the inner. We talk of “hal” (spiritual states), ”afiya” (inner well-being), “basirat” (inner vision ) and “samiyya” ( inner hearing) and “fuad( the subtle feelings in the heart), “muhabbat( love)  and “sir”(the mystical secrets). These terms exist all through the sacred texts. But who needs that if you have measurements-concrete, empirical realities  that you can rely on- just like the Materialist scientists?!

God help us to recover our souls and spirits!