الإسلام والغرب: نحو عالم أفضل

Islam and the West… for a better world @

It’s high-roading of this kind, from epiphanic place to epiphanic place, one finds in the initiatic (I’d rather say : exitiatic) tales of Avicenna and Sohravardî. ’My name is The Live One, son of the Watchman’, one reads in The Story of Hayy Ibn Yaqzan (composed by Avicenna during his imprisonment in the fortress of Fardajân in Persia). My homeland is the Land of Light. My profession is that of traveller. I travel to the distant shores of the world.’ To travel to ‘the distant shore’ means to leave, not only any kind of spiritual comfort, but any merely oppositional, re-actionary position in which one howls one’s anguished soul or hits out blindly ; it means turning one’s back on a heavy, opaque world, breaking out of the prison of determinisms and positivisms, and undertaking an exodus, a passage ; it means an itinerary of research and discovery. The traveller abandons collective precepts, common consciousness, closed dogma, the weight of mere opinion. The effort is to go beyond not only those who forge fictions, mixing the true with the false, but also beyond all symbolic structures, even those charged with sacred meaning. As one advances on the way, the practice becomes finer and finer, until, at the ultimate stage, one practises a ‘meditation outside meditation’. It’s this kind of progradation (a finer notion than ‘progress’) that one finds in Sohravardî’s Western Exile and in Avicenna’s Bird Flight. The idea is to ‘go East’. But, says Sohravardî, ‘you’ll be making a big mistake if by “the East” you understand Damascus or Bagdad.’ To ‘go East’ means to escape from the condition of exile from one’s real self, from one’s creative energies, it means a de-conditioning. ‘Be always on the wing, don’t attach yourself too much to any nest, because it’s in their nests that birds are captured.’ Once ‘on the wing’, one may have to cross territories of uncertainty and zones of darkness. But if one perseveres, one can arrive at a place without a name ( Sohavardî’s Nâ-Kojâ-Âbâd ) in which one can

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