14. Freedom, Fate, and Flow (2)

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When believers are doing their best, the Divine Will ‘takes over’ their actions:

There is nothing forced or robotic about this sense of destiny at work. Rather, as reported by those who have experienced it (including myself), it feels as if a great stillness has descended upon the intensity of one’s actions, slowing time and imparting an amazing sense of vitality and peace.

In this state of ecstatic dynamism, it would be absurd to insist on or even think of one’s individuality and independence; that is the last thing one wants. One wants this seamless interplay between the mortal and the ineffable to go on indefinitely. It cannot last, of course; it fades and dies, and later one wonders how one could have ever tasted it. It was not summoned as a genie by the spell of a magician; no, it came unbidden, as if to say, ‘This power is not yours, but try it on for size anyway. This is a foretaste of things beyond your ken.’

We see this again in the anecdote concerning the servant from among Our servants (Q18:65), usually identified in commentaries as Khidr, whom Musa (peace be upon him) was directed to follow in the hope of learning what his Lord had taught him. From the very start, Khidr could see that Musa would not be able to ‘follow’ the paradoxical flow of Omniscience untangling the knots that baffle most of us most of the time. Of course, the whole point of his three lessons is that it is nothing but our ignorance, and our ignorance of that ignorance, that deny us guidance and tighten those knots of pain and failure. Throughout these demonstrations, Khidr is not a zombie mindlessly operating on a remote signal; he is living in the moment, acting calmly and decisively, and totally aware of what he is doing. And at the end, he simply says, I did not do it on my own. (Q18:82). Yet he had done what he wanted . . . because he wanted nothing more than to do the Will of GOD.

This story was retold by the Prophet (may GOD bless him and give him peace), and evidently he enjoyed the ‘flow’ of it so much as to say (in Jami’ut-Tirmidhi, Book 47, Hadith 3442):

As revelations such as these are unravelled to us, the evocation (ijad) of a higher plane of being (wujud) is attended with the ardour (wajd) of love and ecstasy (wijdan). All four words in Arabic are derived from the same triadic root of w – j – d. The basic meaning behind them is ‘finding’. It is not something we produce or invent, like an art object; rather it is the stuff of the universe, already there, alive and waiting, found in whatever we do when we do it beautifully. Our lives, once we have tasted it, are constantly circling back in search of it, like something lost within the shadows of our selves.

Alive to the potential of this tremendous victory, we need only enough freedom to pursue it. Or Freedom comes of its own accord, pursuing us.

If any freedom can be said to be our right, this is it – the freedom to act as one with GOD. For this the early Muslims fought and died, and for this the ardent faithful have sacrificed their all in every age.

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