The Mosque: The Heart of Submission

Chapter 16. The Ascension

16. The Ascension Human dignity is inseparable from free will, which comprises all potential , from self-realization to the furthest bounds of non-reality. This means that only the self can choose to face the Self or the non-Self. Everything else in existence chooses the Self by its very nature. The human heart is sensitive not only to all these changes, but also to the distinction between the Real and the non-real. Yet the fact that humanity is subject to the duality of all that exists means that we are caught between remembering and forgetting, between knowledge and ignorance. The Real lies in the very path of those who orient themselves toward it. But Reality possesses all that exists; and nothing that exists possesses Reality. We are wholly dependent on it, but it depends on nothing. Our ability to call out to the All-merciful includes His response to us. God asks us to ‘‘Turn thy face towards the Holy Mosque; and wherever you are, turn your faces towards it.’’1 Though its time and place constantly changes, the heart knows the flux of all things: hence, wherever we are, we are in a mosque: ‘‘The whole earth has been made a mosque for us,’’ the Praiser says,2 and the human center looks toward the outward center. The human center is pure only if it acts for God and for all people. 62 / The Mosque The human self is solitude. If the self repudiates suffering and death, if it refuses to submit to the Self and opposes His Will with its own, it remains excluded from the oneness of all that is God. But if it concentrates on the Holy Mosque, which receives every orientation at its center, the self becomes purified and empty of all save the Self. When the self draws close to the Holy Mosque, it becomes inner purity and openness to Oneness:‘‘All things perish, except His Face.’’3 This is because ‘‘He is God, One.’’4 His Oneness is Unity—and the human heart is open to that Oneness, is its pure image. By turning toward the Holy Mosque, the pure heart confirms that it chooses nothing but the Self, and the self that it realizes itself in remembering, in turning toward God. God tells in the Recitation how the Praiser journeyed in a single night from the Holy Mosque in Mecca to the Further Mosque in Jerusalem . But each of us is always in the mosque of our heart, whether our soul be pure or benighted. Hence our mosque is the Holy Mosque, and every other mosque the Further Mosque; and when our soul subordinates itself wholly to the Spirit, we pass from the Holy to the Further Mosque, joining them together in the oneness of our heart. Our heart then becomes wholly illumined with the Holy Spirit, and we hear how all the signs in the outer and inner worlds praise God’s Name. All the mosques in this world, seen from the perspective of the individual self, are like the Holy and the Further Mosque. They can be linked only through their heavenly counterparts, described in the Recitation as the Lote Tree of the Utmost Boundary5 and the House Inhabited .6 Both names testify to God’s throne, to God as first and last, inner and outer. With the Night Journey and his Ascension, the Messenger showed how all the temples are united in praise of God’s Name: Had God not driven back the people, some by the means of others, there had been destroyed cloisters and churches, oratories and mosques, wherein God’s Name is much mentioned.7 The Ascension / 63 People’s responses to one another are a conversation in which every utterance is translatable from the language of the speaker into the language of the listener. This translatability is made possible by the Common Word, around which all human diversity has the potential to gather. This Word is the expression of God’s love to be known. The Common Word remains hidden, even when uncovered, but it may be called through His myriad names, each of which proclaims and confirms it: Say: ‘‘People of the Book! Come now to a word common between us and you, that we serve none but God, and that we associate not aught with Him, and do not some of us take others as Lords...