Talk delivered at the Mosque of Granada
on Friday 29 August 2003 by Hajjah Sabah Samawat

A Messenger has come to you from among yourselves
Your suffering is distressing to him;
He is deeply concerned for you
He is gentle and merciful to the muminun. Tawba, 9: 129

A Prophet is one who is sent to speak to the people on behalf of their Creator. A prophet originates among the people to whom he is sent and speaks their native language. A prophet is neither a legend nor a myth. The prophets ate food and walked in the market places of history. They married and had children.

We never sent any messengers before you who did not eat food and walk in the market place. But We have made some of you a trial for others to see if you will be steadfast. Your Lord sees everything. Al Furqan 25:20

The prophets inhabit a space inside our selves as well as a place in our human history. We ignore them at our peril. The prophet is closer to the believers than their selves. The Prophet has closer ties to the muminun than their own selves. Al Azhab 33:6.

They are the main legitimate conduit between the human creature and the Lord of Worlds. When We made a covenant with all the Prophets- with you and with Nuh and Ibrahim and Musa and ‘Isa son of Maryam- We made a binding covenant with them. Al Azhab 33:7.

The prophet transmits both a promise and an admonition from the Creator to His creatures. To be in touch inwardly and outwardly with a true Prophet is the foundation of all human advancement. When we lose touch with the Prophets, confusion and degeneration is the inevitable result. We live in a time in which those who govern our lives have usurped the position of the prophets and are leading the mass of humanity into increasing disaster. In the emerging regime of our brave new world we are invited to replace our faith in the prophets with faith in the scientist. What about the Creator of the scientist?

Mankind! An example has been made so listen to it carefully. Those whom you call upon besides Allah are not even able to create a single fly, even if they were to join together to do it. And if a fly steals something from them, they cannot get it back. How feeble are both the seeker and the sought !
Surat al Hajj 22:71

All their knowledge is derivative and devoid of compassion. The summit of their achievement is to grow the legs of a fruit fly coming obscenely out of its head. They are incapable of origination.

The Alhambra is Islam made visible. Grace and power combined. If you want to see Islam in all its aspects, from the discipline of collective worship, the administration of community and commercial affairs, down to the gracious and intimate environment of family life, it is reflected in all the Islamic monuments of Andalucia. The construction of the Alhambra and the way of life it enshrined was an act of worship, because the observance of Islam is complete and no aspect of human existence can be excluded from it. The inspiration and raison d’etre of all the architectural splendours here in the Iberian peninsula was a man who often tied two stones to his belly from hunger, and lived in a compound of barely furnished one roomed dwellings of unbaked brick. He was a prophet and a Messenger. Without this man there would have been no Alhambra palace, no social and cultural splendour in Cordoba and consequently no European enlightenment, since this was rooted in the deep and extensive research of the Cordoban scholars. It is safe to say that European culture and it’s ensuing global dominance owes its original impulse to this one human being the Prophet of Islam, Muhammad, peace and blessings of Allah be upon him.

The question of Islam is not academic – to examine something academically is to extract it from life. Islam is for life, your life, my life, our lives. It is immediate and ongoing like our genes. It is what is called hanif which means unfolding naturally and purely from the organic world. It is the adjective Allah uses to define Islam in the Qur’an, deen al hanif. Why the controversy surrounding things Islamic today? Perhaps because Islam calls upon the sleepwalkers to awaken; perhaps because it represents the only genuine alternative to the vulgar rapacity of our consumer society. Islam in advocating a reconciliation with a natural time-tested way of living is equivalent to the difference between food naturally grown and food genetically modified and industrially processed. This is not ‘going backwards’ it simply preserves connection to the natural matrix of existence. Islam offers a human ecology that preserves the natural form of man and woman. The application of the divine commands expressed in the shari’ah [Qur’anic jurisprudence] of Islam strengthens and protects the immune system of a community against degenerative social diseases. These divine laws regarding the conduct of human affairs take their origin from the same place as those that keep the Sun and Moon rising and setting in regular motion, that bring the seasons in their time, that bring forth the butterfly from the chrysalis, that implant the 3 billion chemical letters in exact sequence into each DNA molecule, that keeps the earth spinning in its orbit.

The person of the Messenger is the prototype of the pure natural human being. There exists among those that emulate him a continual unseen activity within the self made visible and external in the act of collective worship at the appointed cosmic times, flowing out into the life of community and the administration of society. There is no division between the deep inner self of the individual who is on the way of the Messenger and the outermost public action either in worship, commerce or jihad.

In houses which Allah has permitted to be built and in which His name is remembered there are men who proclaim His glory morning and evening not distracted by trade or commerce from the remembrance of Allah…. Nur, 24: 36

It is a ripple effect. The prophets are leaders and shepherds - of their people delegated by the Originator of existence. The person of the messenger embodying the message creates a gravitational field that binds the community into one body. This message that has been repeated through different mouths throughout recorded time, carries GOOD NEWS. It is the call to prayer from the One Who brought us all into existence and Who is never absent.

The Prophet Muhammad – the final Messenger - came to refine and re-establish community. And the refinement of a community is in the refinement of its people. Islam is community – its coherence is perceived only within a social nexus. To the extent that there is no community there is no Islam. He had fourteen close companions as well as thousands of others; these constituted the first community of Islam and they were the most scrupulous and the best; the first pressing. Islam can never be a purely personal affair. It is not private. The Alhambra was a community of governance as was the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. Islam did not need to be imperial because its ‘constitution’ was a revealed text, universal in its scope and regionally interpreted and applied. The constitutions of modern nations are substitutes for revealed texts that place the state in the role of the Divine. The observance of the injunctions in the text throughout the Islamic khalifate was always by mutual consent and never externally imposed. There is no compulsion in the Deen. The Islamic khalifate was not an empire it was a global federation of consenting national groups under a prime leader – the khalif, standing in for the figure of the Prophet himself. In the Islamic system there is no nationhood in the modern sense of the term. The principle of unity was a human being not an ideology. People clustered around a person familiar to them who they accepted as an amir [leader] to enact the Quranic injunctions. The Hajj is the perfect the mirror of the Muslim world revealing a complete fusion of unity in diversity.

Muhammad was the organic form of man – ‘a pure natural believer in Allah’ [Al Hajj 22. He was sent as Messenger and ruler. He came to exemplify the Message. His wife ‘Aisha described him as ‘the Qur’an walking’. He describes himself thus:-

Gnosis is my capital. Intellect is the basis of my ‘deen’. Love is my foundation. Yearning for Allah is my mount. Remembrance of Allah is my intimate companion. Reliance on Allah is my treasure. Sorrow is my companion. Knowledge is my armour. Patience is my cloak. Contentment is my booty. Incapacity is my boast. Doing without is my profession. Certainty is my food. Truthfulness is my intercessor. Obedience of Allah is enough for me. Jihad is my character, and the coolness of my eye is in the prayer.

The system of Islam is cellular or stellar in structure; following the pattern of universe, free flowing and orbiting like all organic structures around a nucleus of leadership which pulsates at the centre radiating outwards in every direction, not rigidly and pyramidically from the top downwards. The leader – the Amir - regulates rather than controls his people, like a pacemaker. One of the Prophets closest companions and the second Khalif, S. Umar ibn al Khattab, may Allah be pleased with him, wore a garment with so many patches that none of the original robe was left. He would walk through the city at night incognito to acquaint himself with the difficulties of his people. When emissaries from potentates came to Medina to see him they would ride past him without recognising him. He would put his family last in line of protocol. He was incorruptible by the normal avenues of corruption – obsession with the family, desire for wealth and power, physical appetites, narcissism.

do they imagine that in the wealth and children We extend to them, We are hastening to them with good things? No indeed, but they have no awareness! Surat 23:56

What is community? This is the urgent question of today. It is a human habitat –now endangered - within which there is a natural ebb and flow between the community and the self. In which the human scale collective with its social system responds to the needs of the individual self, and the individual contributes to the welfare and organisation of the group. The individuals within community have an opportunity to discover among themselves an ‘esprit de corps’, which expands the being of each one and then the community becomes more than the sum of its constituent parts, it develops a group persona. Outside the embrace of community the individual becomes either a slave or a criminal. Terrorist activity arises in situations where family and community have broken down; see Palestine and Chechnya. In its internalised European form it appears in all urban centres in the form of hooliganism, graffiti, urine defaced public buildings, domestic violence. Terrorism and hooliganism are siamese twins born of despair and impotent fury. This melt down in communal living is a direct result of global capitalist financial practices, the applied science of usury. Usury as we are now made to believe is not a relative term but describes any attempt whatsoever to seek profit from a loan ‘be it by a blade of grass’. Usury according to the Islamic definition covers any practice that unjustly distorts the natural process of commercial transaction and trade. In the assessment of the Prophet Muhammad usury is worse than the most abominable form of incest.

For those women who have not been conned by the progress myth, community free of capitalistic financial exploitation is a sine qua non of motherhood and family life. As a ‘60s feminist I realized that what the woman/child dyad lacks in modern Western Society is community. Not electronic community, which is subject to power cuts, but flesh and blood, organic neighbourhood community.

A Turkish friend of mine who is a historian of the public institutions of the Ottoman Khalifate told me of an incident in the soukh of her hometown Izmir. She was buying leather socks for her friends in the States and was haggling with one of the stallholders. She wanted to buy a largish quantity. Suddenly the merchant said “sorry madam but I have run out of socks you must buy them from the man in the next stall”. Seljuk was puzzled because she saw shelves full of socks in the stall. She pointed to them and asked the man “you have lots of socks why wont you sell them to me?” He said, “look madam I have sold many today, my friend next door who has a large family has sold none, so please buy the rest from him”. This is community in Islam. This is community. And it bubbles up from the heart of an individual who is aware of the presence of his Lord in every situation. When there are two of you I am the third…. This kind of consciousness is the sole guarantee of social harmony and community justice. It is the true Islamic consciousness. The supermarket does not offer this kind of high motivation or neighbourly concern for the other. It invites people to social indifference and theft. The supermarket vampirises community life and according to Islamic trading criteria they would be banned. The Islamic laws of commerce and trade are for the protection and nourishment of the community not for its pillaging and abuse as is the global capitalist system.

What is happening to each one of us in this instant is life, your life, my life. This moment is a living universal heartbeat. Nothing that happens is accidental, meaning nothing and going nowhere. You and I are never tourists, we are voyagers through existence until the moment of our last breath. If we allow ourselves to be defined as tourists we have become yet another product. We have ceased to take responsibility. Travel in the land and see what became of previous peoples….. This means to read the signals which constantly surround you out in the world as well as inside your own selves; in the Qur’anic words - the signs are on the earth and in your own selves if you will but look. We have to regain literacy in existence. We can read the paper but we cannot decipher our own experience.

Natural biorhythms, regular mealtimes and extended familial relationships, are being ravaged by voracious giants who impose what is known as a 24/7 – (24 hour day, 7 day week) work system. The end of natural time means the end of personal life, means the end of human community and the end of human relationships, means the end of humanity. Divorce is declining in Western Europe because people are ceasing to get married. The end of marriage is the end of relationship. In marriage is half the observance of Islam. The population is aging because childbirth has given way to the reproduction of consumer goods. The human self is reduced to a mere cipher within the global work force. But hey! The work force is the Market Force! We are the market forces, the all-powerful consumers. The customer is god. But this god is also a slave, an indebted employee, manipulated to the point of madness by the techniques of the interest/debt system that governs all our lives. An analogy was made recently in The Guardian newspaper between obesity, smoking and debt, asking why debt was not also seen as a health hazard. I quote “relying on consumers to become even more addicted to debt seems a pretty rum [‘rum’ es un colloquialismo para ‘extrano’] way to run an economy”. The dogma of this schizoid system declares that communal life, original trading patterns, wholesome behaviour based on mutual respect and fear of the Almighty are ‘backward’ and that natural time, natural eating patterns, natural gender patterns, natural family patterns have to be stripped out of a truly developed society. When the planetary ecosystems are finally brought to their knees there will be no places of refuge. This is a challenge for our selves, the market forces. But there is a way out. Islam is the way out, and that is why it evokes so much hostility from the forces that govern our lives. The threat of Islam is not in futile hooligan actions involving bombs, but in it’s direct challenge to the cruelty of the capitalist world order. We really do have a choice. There is a way out of the trap. Follow the Messenger of God.

Conflict is a natural part of the human condition and is personified in the form of Satan who stands for the principle of selfishness, which is at the root of all aggression. This inherent predisposition to conflict necessitates governance, which is why there is always a system of justice where there is human community. There are no utopias. A perfect moonlit summer evening will be shared with the mosquito. Through the intellect – that is by the faculty of discrimination and choice, which defines humanness – man is offered a way out of the trap of the conflictive self. He can choose. This organic guidance is offered to the intellect and in the choosing man attains his highest possibility.

We sent you only to bring good news and to give warning. Say ‘I do not ask you for any wage for it – only that anyone who wants to should make his way towards his Lord. Put your trust in the Living Who does not die and glorify Him with praise. He is well aware of the wrong actions of His slaves’. al Furqan 25:56-58

However there is more to community than containment of conflict by just governance. It should provide an environment for the realization of man’s highest spiritual, intellectual and aesthetic aspirations. It must provide an arena for the cultivation of diverse vegetation, songbirds, consummate artistry and deep thought. You only have to stretch your gaze across the gorge of the River Darro to the Alhambra adorned by its gardens in a vision of majestic power and lyrical beauty, to perceive the afterglow of an Islamic community in its fullness. The soul of a system is reflected in its buildings of worship and public affairs, for better or for worse. In obedience to Allah and His Messenger the Spanish Muslims of Granada are striving to recreate a community based on the original example of the people who lived alongside the Seal of the Messengers in the city of Medina. This new mosque is the flower of their endeavours and seeks to resonate in a living way with Granada’s Islamic past.

The metaphor of the modern citizen is in the animal of industrial farming, caged off from the others, his herd instinct destroyed, abandoned to a passive resignation and indifference to his neighbour’s fate. Is this not the family in a modern housing estate? We, the human species, are being intensively farmed by the global Corporations. Having stripped out man’s spirituality and doctored his intellect all that is left is appetite. Uncontrolled appetite ends in conflict, consequently individuals are at war with one another. Children who are shown nothing but appetite become obese, consume drugs, or consume machines and kill each other on the motorways. Have we become so degenerate as a species that we no longer care what becomes of our own children?

No society is workable once it detaches from the trace, the imprint of the Messenger. At the core of the community there must be this prostrating, compassionate, governing human figure. This is the Islamic archetype. The people in order to become a strong community need to find at the heart of government a figure they desire to emulate – one that is based on this primal irreproachable prophetic form. This universal figure both lived without being divine and was yet a bridge to the divine, and remains there at the heart of our own personal possibility – a hope of trans-formation. At the heart of modern society now there is only a derelict space with giant billboards covered in brand names.

The profound reality is that human society left to it’s self is the extension and mirror of one human self. Community flowed from the heart out through the very fingertips of the Messenger – from his behaviour deep within his own heart, to his relations within marriage and in the family, to the conduct of war and the resolution of disputes among the people or between communities. It still flows like the source of a mighty river from tiny fissures in the human heart out into the great ocean of humanity. Society can always be an environment for the expression of the fullest and most perfect possibility of the human self. That is the truly prophetic community.