Land of Dreams
Here in America, the Land of Dreams, Kizilbash rarely encounters reality. He is surrounded by a fantasy, he is immersed in a fantasy of the human condition, a fantasy that doesn't admit of anxiety, the desperate millions, the battles for bread and identity that the rest of the world is engaged in, the struggle set amidst the crushing advancement of the age. And it is a fantasy ever on guard against the encroachments of an anxiety within, the inner awareness of Absence. Here, the popstar dances and sings away the anxiety. Here, the politician blankets the anxiety in patriotic red, white, and blue. Here, undeniable medical consensus reassures us that there is a pharmaceutical resolution to our existential crises.
Yet Kizilbash knows that our seamless daily fantasies bob and float on the vastness of Absence like bubbling froth on ocean tides.
Brian
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The 'No' That Cuts All Ties
Philosophical ruminations have given way to diaper changes and cuddling with our newest addition, hujjat al-islam wa al-muslimeen, John Haidar, who was born on Sunday. I'll have more later, and in the meanwhile here is a piece I did a few months ago. You can debate its in/significance:
The Illusion of Ashura
There is a verse in the Quran which maintains that Jesus did not die on the cross, but rather the crucifixion was merely illusory. In this conception, the image of Jesus was sort of like a hologram, while the "real" Jesus resided in the realm of spirit. While various narrations of the Prophet, may peace be upon him and his Holy Family, explain this challenging verse by saying that, for instance, Judas Iscariot was made to look like Jesus and was crucified in his place, the origin of the idea in this verse lies with the early Christian heresy known as Docetism.
The Alawites inherited and elaborated on this idea in relation to Muhammed and the Holy Family. The following is an excerpt from Kitab al-Haft wa'l Azhilla, one of the fascinating extant texts of the highly gnostic Shiite Mufadhaliyya movement, a text later adopted by the Alawites:
Mufadhal said, "I asked Our Master Al-Sadiq, may his peace be upon us, about the word of Almighty God, {And we ransomed him with a great sacrifice}. The Imam replied: "Hassan in the time of Abraham was Isaac, and Hussein during the covenant of Abraham was Ishmael." I said, "O, Master, Tell me about Jesus. Is he greater than all the Prophets, Messengers, Successors and immaculate Imams?" He said, "They are one light. If God wishes to reveal something to the world, He reveals a portion of it in order to guide our followers by that outward revelation to an inward one, and He guides from the particular to the universal.
"Hussein ibn Ali was much dearer to God than that he should taste death at the hands of the blasphemous oppressors, and it is not for him to taste of the blade. God directs (the universe) with gentleness, and how kindly He treats his Saints, saving them from His enemies, destroying His enemies and the enemies of His Saints with a firm proof. Almighty God is perfectly just and does not commit injustice. He is forbearing and ever inclines to forgiveness and mercy, and He did something for Hussein that He did not do for Christ, Zacharias, John the Baptist, or any other of His Saints. The sacrifice in its outward appearance was for Ishmael who was "ransomed with a great sacrifice", and that sacrifice is Hussein who is his essence, his (true) name, his relation, and there is no difference between them because they are one. He has been sacrificed more than a thousand times according to the supposition of the blasphemers.
The Foundation of Ego
Ain-Mim-Sin
I have not really been lazy during these months in which the blog has fallen silent. There are just some times when I don't feel the writing. I spent most of last summer writing, when I completed The Epistle of the Bee and a large portion of a spiritual memoir which I hope to complete this coming summer. These last few months I have been expressing things more visually and playing with some of the calligraphic skills I picked up last summer in Damascus. Here is a recent piece of calligraphy I completed, exploring my present fixation with Alawism -- Ain-Mim-Sin:
The Islamic Trinity
Q1: Who is our Lord who created us?
A: He is our master the Prince of Believers, the Prince of Bees, Ali ibn Abi Talib, and he is God whom there is no God but he, the Merciful, the Compassionate.
Q2: How do we know that our master the Prince of Believers Ali ibn Abi Talib is God?
A: From his testimony and description of himself in one of his famous sermons which he delivered from the pulpit before all present, and it was recognized by the intelligent ones amongst them, in which he said, "I possess the knowledge of the Hour. The Prophets testified to my perfect unity and called the people to my knowledge. I am the one who raised the heavens, who covered the earth, who anchored the mountains, who makes the rivers flow, who causes the fruits to issue forth, who makes the dusk fall. I make the sun to rise and illuminate the moon. I created the people of the earth and give them sustenance. I am the Lord of Lords and the King of slaves. I am the Almighty and All-Knowing. I am the Ever-Returning Principle. I am the one who issued forth Jesus in the womb of his mother, Mary. I sent the Messengers and inspired the Prophets."
Q3: Who summoned us to the knowledge of our master the Prince of Believers?
A: His Prophet Muhammed, may peace be upon him, as he said in his sermon known as Bay'at al-Dar: Listen now to what I say to you and to what I compel you. Know that I summon you to Ali ibn Abi Talib as I summon you to Almighty God, except that Ali is my master and your master because you are of my elite covenant.I say to you just as Jesus the son of Mary said to his Disciples, "Who is amongst the helpers of God?" The Disciples said, "We are God's helpers." A sect from amongst the People of Israel believed and a sect disbelieved, and we aided those who believed against their enemies and they prevailed. They are God's witnesses and his princess and I summon you to Ali in visionary form, myself and whoever follows me. Praise be to God, and I am not one of the polytheists. I summon you to Ali upon his command, and I caution you that my Prophethood is under the wilayat of Ali, because Ali is the one who sent me forth to you, and e is the one who created me from the light of his essence, and he is my Lord and your Lord, my Creator and your Creator, so be pious of him, obey him, bear witness of his perfect unity, praise him, sanctify him, and serve him, because he is God of whom there is no God but he.
Q4: If our master, the Prince of Believers, Ali ibn Abi Talib is God, then how could he manifest in the physical world?
A: Know that our master the Prince of Believers did not manifest in the physical world but rather was veiled by Muhammed in his form and shape, and was named Ali.
Q5: How many times was our Master veiled in human flesh?
A: He was veiled seven times. The first time he was veiled in Adam in his shape and form and was named Abel. The second was Noah and he was named Seth. The third was Jacob and he was named Joseph. The fourth Moses and he was named Joshua. The fifth was Solomon and he was named Asif. The sixth was Jesus and his name was Simon. The seventh and last was Muhammed and he was named Ali, and he is devoid of the names by which they are named, though they are not devoid of him.
Q6: How was our master veiled in the shapes and forms of the veils and how did he manifest as a human?
A: Know that the secret of the veiling is a great secret indeed, and no one knows it but God Almighty, as he says: "No one knows anything of me except what I have put into their hearts, what I have remitted to their vision and to their minds."
Q7: Will our master the Prince of Believers be veiled and manifest in the material world another time?
A: He will manifest without a Veil at the end of time in great glory and radiance and will remove the bodies of the believers from their graves which are their fleshy garments, and will make them to dwell amongst the eternal celestial lights.
Q8: What is the divine manifestation?
A: It is the manifestation of the Creator by means of the human form, the most sublime within a base form.
Q9: Confide in me what you say about the manifestation of our master in the flesh?
A: Know that the Meaning enters by the Gate and is veiled by the Name and is named by him just as our master Jaafar al-Sadiq said, may peace be upon us by his mention, "Mention God as he deserves to be mentioned, and mention his Name and his Gate."
Q10: What is the Name, the Meaning, and the Gate?
A: It is the indistinguishable trinity, and it indicates the unicity and divinity of our master. For this reason we say, "In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate, where the statement "God" indicates the Meaning, the statement "Merciful, the Compassionate" indicates the Name and the Gate.
First Entry in Ages
20th century philosophy grapples with the issue in other terms. Sartre's idea of nothingness seems to be the opposite of somethingness or an utter void. But as Parmenides suggested way back when, it would be impossible for somethingness to derive itself from a nothingness of that kind, and indeed it is impossible to conceive of nothingness or to contemplate it, much less to imagine that nothingness could issue forth existence as it is, just as zero cannot issue forth one. We can only conceive of nothingness as the absence of a thing or property, not nothingness in and of itself.
For instance, zero is the absence of a quantity of a thing. I can conceive of one apple, two apples, three apples, or no apples, that is, the absence of apples represented by zero. I can also conceive of one God, two gods, a trinity, or a multiplicity of gods, or the absence of god/s, again represented by zero. Just as in neither case does the absence of those things counted mean that they cease to be as a category, one cannot assume that the absence of essence eliminates essence as a category; it merely signifies that essence as a perceptible or demonstrable phenomenon is absent. This is what some Alawite texts refer to as Absence, the foundation of all things that is undefinable as a category. This idea of Absence bears some characteristics in common with Sartre's nothingness, without excluding essence as a category.
It is fascinating to note this debate in the context of Alawi Shia theology, the debate over the ultimate divinity in relation to Ali ibn Abi Talib, or the maana as he is referred to in Alawi literature. The debate, as explicated by Bar-Asher and Kofsky, is over whether the Absence, al-ghayb, is beyond Ali or if Ali himself is the embodiment of Absence, the position maintained by the majority of Alawites. In effect these two beliefs are one and the same, as the supposition that Imam Ali is himself Absence sets up a dichotomy between a hiero-historical Ali and a mystical and theoretical Ali. In this respect, as in many other respects, Alawi theology is convoluted and muddled. But this is one of the beauties of this theology as well, the indeterminacy of it over and against the absolute certainty of monotheist Islam. These discrepancies and ambiguities are the very abode of Absence, and it is only this kind of creative theologizing that can give such indirect expression to its experience.
Instruments of the Inner Symphony
Fierce Grace
the rest of the narrative comes at the beginning, when Ram Dass recounts being in the throes of the stroke. He says with clear and deep lament that in the moment he thought he might be dying that he didn't think of anything spiritual. That he, "Mr. Spiritual" as he self-aggrandizingly refers to himself, couldn't turn his thoughts to the divine. "I failed the test," he says, "I have a lot of work to do."Fierce Grace was poignant in showing a man upheld by so many as a "knower", a sort of pandit to the white, middle-class American masses of the Boomer generation, now a sincere soul himself bewildered by the degrading inelegance of decay and the process of death. To my mind, the film utterly humanized and made authentic a man who had previously been a mere pop spiritualist with easy answers, and there he was transformed into one of us, down here, struggling to submit amidst the uncompromising and ever-shifting absurdity. There he sat in melancholic cogitation, amidst the numbers of New Age faithful who contentedly chanted and danced to the beat of the tambourine, who in the words of Kierkegaard, "know nothing at all of the lonely temptations in store for the knight of faith ... The sectarians deafen each other with their clang and clatter, hold dread at bay with their shrieks, and a whooping Sunday outing like this thinks it is storming heaven, believes it is following the same path as the knight of faith who, in cosmic isolation, hears never a voice but walks alone with his dreadful responsibility." This is a great and bitter blessing, to find oneself roaming the outer walls of faith and rummaging through the waste-heaps of enfranchisement, to find that the least palatable realities are really the highest spiritual truths.
The Name
Ali carries us across. Ali brings respect and worship. Ali embellishes us. Ali is the object of the awakened mind. 
Ali brings honor to everyone's name. Ali is my strength. Ali is my support. Ali is my army. Ali is my King. Ali brings honor, glory, and approval. Ali brings peace and power. Ali brings praise. Ali is ambrosial nectar. Through Ali, all peace and comfort comes to abide in the mind. Without Ali, they are bound and gagged, and dragged off to the City of Death. Ali is the jewel. This whole world is corrupt, and Ali is the only cure.
The Light of Vision
The devotees visit the Temple of the Living Imam to know him and to derive gnosis from his blessed presence. On arriving they pay homage to him and sit to one side. They salute him, raising their joined palms, they announce their names and their tribes and then fall silent before him.
One devotee breaks the silence and asks the Blessed One: "There are some sheikhs and dervishes, venerable Ali, who visit our lands. They expound and explain their own doctrines, and the doctrines of others they revile and tear to pieces. O Imam, God save you, we have doubts concerning them. Which of these turbaned ones speak with truth and which with falsehood?"
The Imam speaks: "It is proper for you, my beloved, to doubt and to be uncertain. Doubt is the fertile soil of the seed of salvation. Do not base your prayers and hopes upon that which is most oft repeated, nor upon that which is found in scripture, nor upon that which is obtained by reason, nor upon your accustomed bias. Know only that which is obtained from the light of my vision, and abandon all else."
Inspiration from the Skies
A companion of Imam Sadiq, Ammar Sabati, visited the house of the Imam one day, and found an unusual object that looked like pearl. He asked the Imam, "God save you, but what is this object?" The Imam replied, "This is something that falls from the wings of the angels. O Ammar, the angels come to us, and their wings pass over the heads of our children."
For those of us less than an Imam, we have to settle for lesser sources of inspiration, and it was on the wings of another creature that we were brought a heavenly gift today. This morning, we awoke to discover a dead sparrow on our porch. It was really cold and snowy last night, and the poor thing did not survive the weather. There it lay on the frigid cement with its downy undercoat blowing in the wind. The girls came running to me when they saw it, but they didn't know that it was dead. I explained it to them and they took it in without any apparent problem. Throughout the day, they asked more questions about death. "All things die," I told them gently. The four-year old asked me, "Do we have to die too?"
Calf Worship
calf which the people of Moses fell to in worship to describe the enemy of Ali, saying, {Verily, those who took the calf} meaning the Divider (Abu Bakr), {they have earned the anger of their Lord}, meaning, by their rejection of the Prince of Believers, may peace be upon him." Just as Rajab al-Bursi and other ghulat exegetes projected Alid politics upon the narrative of a bygone era, so Abu Bakr can be utilized as a symbol of the gross historical excesses of Islamic authoritarianism. Many Muslims, even Shia Muslims, express dismay that one would risk offending brothers in faith, but that in fact is the very point, to offend and disrupt the convenient and lazy acceptance of authoritarianism simply because it appears richly turbaned under the banner of Islam. And yet there is another understanding of Abu Bakr that goes beyond this temporal and historical one; the Abu Bakr that is the leaden and worldly covering over the radiant darkness of the font of perfect being and nothingness at the core of our selves that is the Imam. That Abu Bakr is in fact the wicked root of all authority and the tyrant most deserving of our revolt. A Word About Method
Before I continue the 'tafsir' of my earlier comment, I just want to say a word about the means I am using to approach the concept of Imamah. Please do not think that I am attempting a re-interpretation of orthodox usuuli Shiite theology. I am not even merely 'returning to the sources,' but rather am proposing a more far-reaching appraisal of the concept of the Imamate, one that seeks to dismantle several centuries, several layers really, of political expediency that determined the boundaries between the sects of Shiism. 
In approaching the Imam, it is important to grasp the nature of the early Shiite community as it developed. The sects that we now know had not formed and would not form for a century and a half. There was no such thing as a 'Sunni' or 'Ismaili', and certainly no such thing as an 'Ithna Asheri,' and when those sectarian concepts did develop they were something far different than what we understand by those terms today.
The teachings of Imam Jaafar al-Sadiq in particular present a challenge because of the unparalleled complexity of this spiritual genius and his teachings. There is little doubt that Imam Sadiq presented multivalent teachings to various groupings of disciples based on their background and understanding. The Imam was a master of taqiyya, employing this spiritual secrecy not just to avoid violence and the extermination of the community (its effect was limited in that regard anyway), but also to preserve the potency of esoteric truths for those who could best comprehend them. Thus the Imam is known as a preeminent teacher in Sunni, Ithna Asheri, Ismaili, Alawi, Sufi, and other contexts, and his teachings invariably speak to the understanding and limitations of each sect.
Compounding the problem of the multivalence of the teachings of the Imams was the fact that the concept of Imamah was negotiated by the Shia community as a whole, and was not the sole property of the Imams themselves. As a non-native Muslim, I have always found the concept of the reliability of the hadith literature, the 'science' of ahadith, and 'ilm al-rijal as ridiculous on its face, especially regarding theology. That should not be a source of disappointment or shame as it would be to most native Muslims, and is only so because the perennial drive for islah or puritanical reformism remains at the fore of the collective Muslim intellect.
To read the early hadith literature on Imamah is to witness a tug of war amongst multiple parties, each attempting to cast the Imam in a different theological light. Far from corrupting the pristine perfection of tawhid (a perfection which never existed in the first place, save in the imaginations of moderns), this wild speculation about Imamah revealed so many potentialities in the concept of tawhid, and so many of which have been crammed into dusty forgotten volumes for centuries, if they have been preserved at all.
So we, like the people of every other era, have to negotiate our concept of the divine for ourselves. No angel will bring it to us, and if God wanted us to abandon our intellects and imaginations and follow a preordained pattern of belief, He could certainly make that more abundantly clear. We have at our disposal rich literatures of powerful and challenging beliefs and ideas, literatures that have been concealed from one another by illusions of sovereignty that have long since passed. The Imamate is a concept that is enriched and enlivened by delving into its comprehensive literature, literature which is spread out over numerous traditions. In this approach, everything which has been said about the Imam is as valid as anything else, as text is nothing more than text, and it is only the heart of the believer that weaves illumination into a text, thereby transforming it into scripture.
None of this diminishes the efforts of traditional theologians who face altogether different needs and expediencies. God is not a static concept, and the Imam is even less so.
Unpacking The Real 'He', Part I
worshipping God, including His names and attributes, is a form of shirk, of tainting the Absolute with the contingent. The Imam goes on to say, "The gnosis of God is not comprehended except by God. God is absent of His creation, and the creation is absent of God." So God as God is an absolute beyond all comprehension and expression, an Absence that can only be reduced by attempts to describe, and of which a worshipful silence should be maintained. This, the Imam says, is "the perfect tawhid," the perfect belief in the unicity of the divine. At first flush this Sheikh Sadouq seems to include this hadith in order to dispel the majoritarian notion that Shiites worship God in the personage of the Imam, a 'hijab' over the Godhead. The Imam here does say that "the one who thinks he knows Allah by means of a veil or picture or likeness is a polytheist." But while Islamic literalism understands worship in its crudest and most apparent form, claiming for instance that any act of bowing towards an object of veneration is tantamount to polytheism, Shiite thought is very highly nuanced in its concept of worship as gnosis. More to follow ...
The Real 'He'
Amongst non-Shiite Islams, Allah is objectified as the focus of worship, a contradiction of the entire notion of tawhid which cannot be resolved except through the concept of Imamah. The Imam is the gate after which is a-gnosis, a dimension of unknowing which utterly absorbs the devotee. He, the Imam, is the focus of worship in much the same way that the Kaaba is the tangible focus of exoteric worship. Thus the 'He' of the Quran, properly understood, is the Imam. The difficulty of the Quran is that if one identifies He with the a-gnosis or Absence for which the Imam serves as projection and image, then one has not only committed blasphemy but is transmogrified into a singularly dangerous creature. One must thereafter seek to replicate the absolute sovereignty of this imagined God upon the earth, thereby becoming the enemy of the Imam and the friends of the Imam, those who defer that false sovereignty indefinitely. The Problem of Morality
being. The only reason why the human being is priveleged is not because of his primacy on the 'great chain of being', but because I happen to be one. That is, only from the vantage point of the I can the Imam present in every atom be perceived. Morality is the course of behavior that emerges spontaneously, rather than systematically, upon departure from the courtyard of the Imam, a state known amongst Muslim mystics as baqi baad al-fana. True morality is not a code or rubric to be imposed but rather the ultimate freedom of behavior that emerges from the best of visions, the vision of the real. Nice Hot Mug of Morning Ghuluuw
Al-Hafez Rajab al-Bursi said of Muhammed and the Imams of the Holy Family: "… They are the origin and end of creation, the secret and meaning of existence. If not for them, you would not exist and would not have been created, and were it not for God's favor for them you would not be granted sustenance. They are the favored and the pre-eminent (of His creation) and the very likeness of the Almighty."The Here and Now
It would be false to see in the doctrine of the Mahdi or promised saviour an event on the horizon of time. As Walt Whitman said:
I have heard what the talkers were talking ...
the talk of the beginning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
Nor any more youth or age than there is now;
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
The Mahdi is a place in the soul, that perfect particle within us that can be called the absolute self. It is the absolute self that remains when all the contingent externalities are stripped away, the darkness shining within the darkness beyond the identity, the body, hope, despair, and self-awareness. The emergence is not then the coming forth of the saviour upon us, but rather the emergence of a reality within us. Let us not wait any longer. All the salvation and punishment there is to be had is here and now, and our savior awaits us, not the other way around.
The True Fast
The moments of the night wane as Kizilbash hears the first call to prayer break in the distance. Then it gets closer and closer as it sweeps over the ancient city. Another day of fasting has begun, another day of abstinence. In accordance with the law, Kizilbash takes no food or drink during the daylight hours. In accordance with the path, he restrains himself from lying, backbiting, cheating. In accordance with the truth, Kizilbash abstains from anything but the wilayat of the Imam, may peace be upon him.
The wilayat of the Imam is the bliss of Paradise itself, it is the pleasure of the houris of the Garden, it is the radiant light shining from the boughs of the Abode of Peace, it is the fruit of the trees of Heaven. That ambrosial sustenance is better to Kizilbash than all the fruit of the world born of mere dust.