Al-Fatiha

All things come to those who wait.  I received this copy of the Quran three years ago, on a visit to Turkey.  In the Istanbul hotel where we stayed, the shelves in the lobby were lined exclusively with it, rather tellingly all in English.  I felt as if I had discovered the Islamic equivalent of the Gideon headquarters, or the Christian Science Reading Room.  Hundreds of identical bindings, arrayed with the quiet aggression of a battalion standing at attention.  The title Decoding the Quran did its job on me, however, and I submitted.  The desk clerk was surprised, but assented gleefully when I asked if I could take a copy with me.

And it turns out to be exactly what I wanted: a faithful translation of the text, but with commentary and interpretation.  Ahmed Hulusi, the commentator, turns out to be a Sufi mystic with a perspective that lines up almost too perfectly with my own at this moment in my quest.  Everything he says in the introduction resonated with me, and my spirit vibrated enthusiastically in agreement as I read it.  We shall see if the text itself is as agreeable as the commentator, for in a confluence of exactly the sort that I have come to expect from this life, I also happen to be at the point in Gibbon's Decline and Fall that deals with the origins of Islam.  The character of Mohammed (saw) leaves much to be desired from Gibbon's account, and that author's opinion of Islam is rather at odds with what Hulusi describes.  Nonetheless the line between Sufi and Sharia is clearly drawn, and I feel no conflict accepting one and discarding the other, as I have done with Christianity, Buddhism, Bahai, Confusianism, and Daoism already.  So without any more adoing,

Epigraph:  I am acting under the assumption that these words, which seem to introduce each book, are the author's own, or at least unique to the Sufi interpretation to which I am about to yield.

1. Hulusi gives an incredible weight to the first letter of the first verse: ب , but he has not yet explained its significance.  This is one of many pieces of information that I am eagerly awaiting as part of this reading. The choice of Rahman and Rahim to introduce the nature of Allah here draw attention to the nature of existence as first a reflection of the nature of Allah and all His names, and secondly as an observable manifestation of the nature of those names.

2. And it is telling that the first admonishment of the book is to suspend judgement, seemingly in the sense of ascribing qualities such as good or bad, of these wordsm and to simply take them as they are: a neutral description of reality as it is.

3. And as the Rahman and the Rahim are again invoked, Hulusi in his commentary sets up a distinction between the two as representing the potential and the actualized reality of the various names.

4-5. The idea of submission is the one that turned me off when I was looking into Bahai. Without Hulusi's observation that it refers to the necessity of surrender to to the unity of reality, and the abandonment of our attachments to duality, no matter how momentarily pleasing and seductive, I might have been turned away from the path here as well.

6. Yes, this.  This is all I want from this life at this moment.  All my other quests are distractions from the realization of my innermost reality.

7. I see that I am going to have to overlook the gentle fiction of the divine personhood, for it is not Islam alone that finds it necessary for the benefit of the followers.  I wonder if Mohammed (saw) was aware of the fiction as he was presenting it.