Hasan Spiker@RealHasanSpiker
My wife and I had a 12-hour layover in Cairo today, and so I was tremendously privileged to be able to make a quick visit to the maqām of Imam Husayn. The sublime energy of pure light in that place contrasted forcefully with the demented chaos of urban horror that surrounds it for endless miles of rubbish-strewn concrete outgrowth, around which brutal traffic swarms.
The British were the first to attempt social engineering through soul-destroying urban planning here, when they maliciously cut Islamic Cairo in two by driving a busy modern traffic corridor right through Imam al-Husayn and al-Azhar, thereby separating them. In doing so, they badly impaired the environmental cohesiveness of the area, and thence, indeed, impeded the ability of the spirituality that both informed and supervened upon that environmental cohesiveness to flow therein.
They did this because they were afraid; they wished to attempt to curb, in whatever small way, the alarming power that radiates from Islamic civilization when it is true to itself, and thence imbues its corresponding urban environments with the beauty and goodness that allow us to live and move and have our being within environments which affirm our deepest metaphysical convictions, rather than calling them into question.
Naturally, the post-Islamic secular authorities dutifully followed suit in their rush to ‘keep up’, to genuflect to ‘modernisation’, to assure their former colonial overlords (and more than anything else, to assure themselves ) that they were not backward natives, even if they were regrettably still surrounded by such great swarms of them. Only spineless sycophantic stooges such as these could have allowed the tumoral malignancy of modern Cairo to fester unchecked around one of the greatest and most beautiful cities of Islam. This reminded me of the hadith in which we are told that we should expect the Hour when authority becomes standardly invested in those unfit for it. The worst of people.
And so this vomitous vision of hell surrounded us the entire way from the airport to Imam al-Husayn; until the ancient mosques from the days of the splendour and majesty of Islam began to appear, and we quite suddenly found ourselves enveloped in an effusion from the timeless reality in which that glorious past had participated so fully, and upon on whose vestiges that baraka still supervenes.
Yes, the Islamic city, and indeed, the Muslims, used to be something else entirely. Our dīn was founded in dhawq or direct tasting of spiritual light, and this taste inspired us to establish truth in our vision of the world, beauty in our environment, and goodness in our conduct. If we find ourselves comfortable in the dehumanising nightmare of the modern post-Islamic city, it is because we have lost that ability to taste. And we thus have very little to do with the pure light of the maqams of Imam Husayn or Sayyidatuna Nafisa, or the spiritual radiance of the Old City of Damascus, or the luminous maqam of Shaykh Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani in Baghdad. We share nothing with the spirit that enlivened the Islamic past other than proximity in location; and indeed, when we are untroubled by its disfigurement, we have become its active enemies.
