The Mosque: The Heart of Submission

Chapter 4. Humankind

4. Humankind As it was God who offered us the covenant based on ‘‘confidence,’’ His obligation is the greater. There is no ignorance or violence in God: He is Complete. This means that His trust in the covenant that results from the offer is also Complete. The fact that this covenant with God is a relationship of choice, of confidence—rather than one of submission and servitude without free will, as is the case with ‘‘the sun and the moon, the stars and the mountains, the trees and the beasts’’— necessarily leaves us prone to ignorance and violence. And yet we have the potential to bring our will into compliance with the will of God by entering this covenant of mutual trust with Him, so that one and the same trust may be made reality in His image, as God says through the Prophet Muhammad, the Praiser: My servant draws near to Me through nothing I love more than that which I have made obligatory for him. My servant never ceases drawing near to Me through supererogatory works until I love him. Then, when I love him, I am his hearing through which he hears, his sight through which he sees, his hand through which he grasps, and his foot through which he walks.1 14 / The Mosque Thus, when our will conforms to the will of God, we are the complete image of our Creator. Nothing in that image resists the Creator; everything reflects and bears witness to Him. This makes us into His mosque, the locus where the Divine will finds expression. In being His mosque, we know every sign in the outer world to be a message which speaks its contents, a missive for us to read from the One in Whose image we are made: We shall show them Our signs in the horizons and in themselves, till it is clear to them that it is the truth.2 This ‘‘We’’dissolves the duality of hidden and revealed, showing that the opposites are really one—We in I and I in We. Here a triad may be seen: We, the signs in the outer world, and the signs in the self. The ‘‘We’’ shows the signs to ‘‘them,’’ so that they may know that ‘‘He is the Truth.’’ ‘‘We’’ is merely another way of saying ‘‘He, the Truth’’: first as active principle, the one who shows, and then as recipient, that which is shown. The signs ‘‘in the horizons’’ are the macrocosm or outer world, and the signs ‘‘in themselves’’are the microcosm or inner world. Since the macrocosm is also concentrated in every human self, it exists in a multitude of forms, though in the Self it is one and the same. Both the macrocosm and the human self reflect this other side of existence: this is the law of reciprocity, which shows how phenomena that are differentiated and visible correspond to the undifferentiated and invisible. The seeker’s goal is to unite, in the Self, the three expressions of reality —God, macrocosm and microcosm, all three of which are mentioned in the verse quoted above. The conditional nature of the signs points toward the Complete; but when the seeker understands that there is no reality but Reality, he attains oneness. God is Completeness—which means that all potential lies in Him, including non-Self. As soon as His hidden nature is revealed, existence becomes linked both to Self and to non-Self. The reality of Humankind / 15 every phenomenon lies in its link with Self, and non-reality in its orientation toward non-Self. The potential for both is what we know as free will. Human beings can achieve self-realization insofar as their will freely conforms to the Will of the Self. Each new moment, however, can impose and undo this relationship, and our acceptance of this trust inevitably implies both remembering and forgetting. The world is never equal at any single point in time, and though we owe our reality to Reality, our will both helps and hinders our efforts to achieve selfrealization through awareness of this debt. The stronger our awareness , the greater our submissiveness. And the greater the submissiveness of the self, the more the signs in the outer world correspond to those in the soul, revealing Reality all the more clearly. Everything in the inner and outer worlds, and every work and deed...