The Efficient Cause!
N.B. This reflection was triggered by three separate ‘khalewah” experiences-one three day retreat in the countryside of the Gatineau region at a Wellness centre, one three-day retreat and one six-day end of Ramadan retreat at my apartment with Hadi. All three had a notable effect on the participants “hal” (inner state).The project manager/ MBA types would call that “proof of concept” lol
Aristotle is one of those personalities I love to hate lol. I consider his contributions to modern “civilisation’ (specifically at the level of syllogisms and logical analysis) to be amongst the most corrupting and disruptive influences around! Surpassing that of many other “geniuses” like Marx, Freud and Darwin! Nevertheless, he, like those just mentioned, also has articulated valuable concepts that can help us make sense of the world around us.
In the case of Aristotle, I am referring here to his classification of the Four types of Causes: 1) Material causes(the body);Formal causes(paradigms or blueprints like the species homo sapiens);Final causes(which are really purposes) .In this light, Islam would say that the purpose of man is worshipping and serving his Lord and finally “Efficient Causes” those that lead regularly to specific consequences. It is the efficient causes that we are addressing in this article.
I realized, in my recent reflections, that I have spent the last 45 years searching for the “efficient cause” of spiritual development. In this search I have tried everything I could find! From meditation, a very popular contemporary answer to this quest, seminars and conferences of all sorts, to sitting with the guru/sheikh to individual retreats of varying lengths. All of them have had some effects-some more spectacular than others- some leading to various “hals ‘(spiritual states) but none of them reliably and stably leading to the desired effect-a long-term persistent internal state of connectedness with the Divine!
So… in the spirit of scientific enquiry, not the science of peer-reviewed journals and obsessive statistical analysis but the science of observation and experimentation of Francis Bacon, I stumbled across another methodology! I call this approach the Modified Collective Khalewah! (MCKh if you need an acronym to remember it) That might sound like a mouthful but let me go over it word by word- in reverse order..
Khalewah is an Arabic word meaning retreat or isolation. Classically, the Sufis retreated into the mountains or the caves or in their individual retreat cells in the zawwiya and did their dhikr(meditation) practices for various lengths of time. In the case of Grandsheikh Abdullah Daghestani(the sheikh of Sheikh Nazin) he spent seven years in the mountains of Daghestan doing “laillaha illala’ 99.000 times per day ,fasting, doing “ghusl”-the major ablutions- with melted ice from the mountains! And breaking his fast with seven olives and a cup of tea and restarting the process the next day! Sheikh Abu-Hassan Ash-Shadhili did something similar in the hills around Tunis. And Abdul-Qader Jilani is reported to have done a total of 25 years of khalewah before he finally settled down into his role of teacher and father of a family of 49 children! Personally, I don’t think we are up to those standards nowadays lol!
I have tried these kind of individual retreats but nowhere close to those extremes. The longest retreat I have done is 40 days. But inevitably they all ended up at the same place-tired , burnt-out and discouraged. Didn’t work for me and I imagine the same is true for many other people if they reflect on their own experience
Collective: I have struggled with the Islamic injunction about the jamaat (collectivity) for years. As many other people have said to me as well: ”I am not really a groupie”. I get it. On top of it, we were raised in the West in a very individualistic mindset and although that can be problematic in some ways, it is salutary in others. When I travel to other countries and see the uniformity of the mindset of “traditional ‘ cultures ,it often shocks and dismays me. These countries mostly have the same thinking and the same opinions-about almost everything . I like to say: ”The Quraysh (the original opponents of our Prophet saws) are alive and well in the midst of the Islamic community! i.e. objecting to anything new!
But that is not the whole story about community.! There is an energy in the “jamaat” that you cannot find on your own! Through the support, encouragement and supervision of the group, we can find the motivation to keep going-something difficult to do by ourselves. So, when Islam and its Prophet saws encourage people to pray together, it is not just about group cohesion and community-building as I had previously thought. It is also about the group energy and transmission. That force needs to be harnessed for maximum “efficiency” of cause.
Modified: Why modified? Because we need to go on living our lives and interacting with the community around us! That is what the Prophet saws did. And that is what some of the cultish groups like Jim Jones in Guyana and Rajnessh in Oregon did not do! We must interact with the individual neighbours and the surrounding community- but with the spirit of “khalewah’(isolation in the crowd) and taqwa(God-consciousnes) animating our every effort. If we do that right, we should feel the effect inwardly and that is our most cherished goal-to improve our inward state!That is what we are aiming at ultimately.
Actionable Intelligence:(more American wisdom lol) At this point the specter of Empiricism raises its hoary head lol and asks:”So what do we do now?” Not wanting to disappoint the activists who need to concretize things quickly, here is the plan… We start with short sessions of modified khalewah- in peoples’ homes, in retreat centres that are willing to accommodate us-for short periods of time-from 2-10 days- and we observe the effects. Eventually, my hope is that we can form a community of like-minded people so that we can live this approach on a 24/7 basis .It is the closest thing I can imagine to the community around our Prophet saws in Medina!
Important Caveats:
1.Obviously a lot of glitches and problems will come up in the process of realizing this project. We must be prepared for that and not get too easily discouraged. If you need a model for how that occurs ,study the events that occurred in the life of our Prophet saws when he moved to Madina. Life is never easy or without its challenges. Courage and wisdom and even diplomacy will no doubt be necessary!
2.Attitude : The fundamental attitude needs to be “taqwa” God-consciousness, surrender to the Divine Will. Nothing else will work. Many communal projects have failed because they were based on individual or group ambitions(“good ideas but not perfect ones as Sheilh Nazim said about the project of Dar al Islam in New Mexico that eventually failed.)Other reasons for failure are addressed in the next section-on leadership.
- Leadership! This is the most difficult of all -as competent, skilled leadership is one of the rarest commodities on the planet! Many spiritual communities fail because the leader is corrupt in one way or another-the three most popular forms of corruption are around money, sexuality and power! But there are other forms of corruption around various forms of psychopathology-like obsessionalism(micromanaging and overcontrolling peoples lives);Aspergers(the leader being out of touch with the lived reality around him) and even ethnocentricity-the community only works for a particular nationality with a particular mind-set..
So.. there are many ways this can go wrong and only a very few options that can work .I am betting on that rarety in this project!
Ahlan. please feel free to comment and contribute to this process.
Salaams, Sufi Ibrahim
Addendum.I had a dream in which I saw a world-class clinic that was installing artificial limbs.But these limbs were not the usual ones of plastic and steel .Instead they were made of comfortable materials like organic cotton and flannel!
What I understood, from this dream, was that the limbs referred to the Modified Collective Khalewah I have been talking about.I have done many khalewahs in the past but there was always some obstacle that prevented me from arriving at the goal.
I realized that the major obstacle was that the process was too uncomfortable!For example,in the khalewah I did in Jordan the sheikh locked the door to the cell so that I not be disturbed. I told him I was afraid I couldn’t escape if there was a fire.But he made light of it saying that the materials of the building were not flammable! So much for empathy lol Needless to say,the result was less than satisfactory!
In other khalewahs, as well, the rules were so strict that the nafs revolted.Even the ones I designed myself contained rules that were too harsh -like doing dhikr at every moment that I was awake! May have worked for Grandsheikh but not for me or I assume most of us “normal folk”!
So,we need to design a ‘comfortable ” khalewah-not a slacker one but not an overly super-egoic one either.It should,despite the necessary effort of course,be enjoyable.Then people will want to do more! Rest assured that we are working on it. And long live psychology lol! Salaams,Ibrahim