Pearls & Gem: November 2016

Friday, November 25, 2016

...All Of Us Can Fly.......

friends, dato and tansri,

we are all fellow travelers on this planet earth.

this short sojourn in this duniya is just like a transient stop under a tree before our forward journey

our next stop is alam barzark.

a relatively very short stop compared to the next

it is just a 'small' station.

the final stop is beyond the atlantic, beyond the pacific.
it is back to our paradisal origin...the alam akhirat.

alam akhirah, just after the sirat, bifurcates into two....al jannah and al jaheem.
there is no return ticket
there is no side station

al jannah and al jaheem are for eternity.

[ oops! correction: there is a small sub station, on a plateau called al a'raf where those with 'equal weightage on the 'al mizan' get assessed and reassessed for a couple of hundred thousand earth years , allahualam, before their on-toward final respective destination ]

here, we have a 'potpourri' of related lectures, old and current, by shaykh ninowy of duluth, usa, to invigorate us into the journey.

i count shaykh ninowy as one of my tok guru

we start in a rather inverted way, we start with the 'top end', three khutbah on the 'awliyas'.

their 'karamah etc and etc

then we go back to the nitty gritty of cleansing the 'heart', the tazkiah an naf tazkiah al qulub ,the real hard work......

shaykh abdal qadir isa, [ circa 1920-1991 ], a syrian mujaddid and doyen of ilm tasawuf from aleppo, , in his magnum opus, ' haqa' iq an at-tashawwuf ', realities of sufism, opined , that the journey starts with taubatan nasuha as the first station.

the next station is muhasabah, or introspection.

the third and the fourth stations, khauf [ fear ] and raja' [ hope ], come together.

the careful traveler goes through life till death with both fear and hope.

then the subsequent stations, shidiq, ikhlas, sabr, wara', zuhud, ridha, tawakal, and shukr..........

the fruit of all these is closeness to allah, mahabbatullah

in a tradition from umar al khatab known as hadith al jibril, ' worship allah as if you are seeing HIM and if you can't , be assured that HE is seeing you! '.

all of us want to be people of ihsan.
all of us can fly.
we just need to re-orientate our paradigm.
we just have to re-calibrate our hearts and minds in congruence with the qur'an and sunnah