Pearls and Coral

"He used to discuss subjects of deep knowledge that had never been spoken of before. At the age of seven, he said to the spiritual masters of wisdom of his time, 'If I speak what has been put into my heart of Divine Knowledge, even saints will cut my throat.'"
—Concerning Grandshaykh 'Abdullah al-Fa'iz ad-Daghestani

Narrated Abu Huraira:
"I have memorized two kinds of knowledge from Allah's Messenger (ﷺ). I have propagated one of them to you and if I propagated the second, then my throat would be cut (i.e. killed)."

The Shell, the Pearl, and the End of Symbolism

There is an outer dimension of Religion and there is an inner dimension. There is the shell, and there is the pearl contained within it. There is the robe, and there is the one clothed in the robe. There is the sign, and there is the Reality toward which the sign points. One of the great tragedies of Religion is that human beings become so attached to its outward forms that they never penetrate into the wisdom those forms were given to preserve.

The two statements above tell us something the modern religious mind does not want to hear. Knowledge was not spoken openly to everyone, and every hearer was not prepared to receive it in the same degree. Grandshaykh ‘Abdullah al-Fa’iz ad-Daghestani said as a child that if he disclosed what Allah had placed in his heart, even the saints would cut his throat.¹ Thirteen centuries earlier, Abu Hurayra said that he memorized two vessels of knowledge from the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, that he spread one of them among the people, and that if he spread the second his throat would be cut.²

He did not say the second vessel was lost. He said he kept it. He did not say the people were not worthy of it. He said they would kill him for it. That is a different statement entirely, and it indicts the hearers, not the knowledge.

Our Grandshaykh taught: “The best of knowledge is the secret wisdom in it, not its outside shell.” He gave the example of the oyster. Anyone may walk the shore and gather oysters. The one who wants a pearl must go down into the water. Then he adds the sentence that keeps us from running to the opposite extreme: “The shell is the keeper of the pearl.”³

The shell is not useless. It preserves something. The outward form of Religion carries and protects an inward Reality, and that is why Allah gave it to us. The mistake is not in possessing the shell. The mistake is in believing that the shell is the whole thing. A man can spend sixty years collecting oysters, filling his house with them, arguing about them, teaching classes on the classification of oysters, and die without ever having held a pearl in his hand.

Shaykh al-Akbar Ibn ‘Arabi taught the same principle. He explains that the traditions possess an outward and an inward dimension so that people may worship according to their capacity. The prophets spoke “in the language of outward things and of the generality of men,” trusting that those who possessed knowledge and had “ears to hear” would go further.⁴ The message had to reach the common person. That does not mean the first outward meaning exhausted what was inside it.

Ibn ‘Arabi puts it in terms of clothing. The sciences the prophets brought were clothed in robes fitted to ordinary understanding. One man sees the robe and stops, admiring the stitching as though the garment were the destination. The man of subtle understanding looks at the same robe and says, “These are robes from the King.”⁴ He does not throw the robe away. He studies it more closely, because now he knows what it is telling him about the One who sent it.

The outward form does not become false because there is a meaning inside it. Its value increases once we understand what it is carrying. The movement of spiritual intelligence is not out of Religion and into the abandonment of Religion. It is from form into meaning, from symbol into Reality, from the sign toward the thing the sign was made to reveal.

Rumi draws the same picture from another angle. He compares the perfect speaker to a host who sets many different foods before his guests, so that each one receives what is suitable for him, and he compares such a teacher to the Qur’an, “which is sevenfold in meaning.”⁵ One man reads a verse and learns how to conduct himself. Another finds a moral lesson. Another sees something about the human soul. Another goes into a spiritual Reality the first reader never suspected was there. The Book did not change. The capacity of the hearer changed.

Now look at what unites the Muslim world today. It is a surface level religious expression: rituals, terminology, dress, architecture, inherited vocabulary. Reach past the surface into the root of the matter and you find extreme disagreement, sectarianism and confusion. We face the same direction. We pronounce the same Arabic. We hold the same Qur’an and perform the same movements. None of that proves we possess the same Understanding.

Water represents the Truth and the Divine Revelation received by the Prophet and his followers. Over time that water froze and became ice. Not the Revelation. The understanding of the people who laid hold of it. To freeze means to hold something at a fixed level or in a fixed state, or to become suddenly motionless, paralyzed with fear or shock. That is the condition of Religion right now. Believers who claim faith in Allah the All Powerful are paralyzed by fear of the devils. A world of Islam that once carried the Qur’an across the earth in a fiery spirit is now motionless, and inherited interpretation is treated as though it were identical with Revelation itself.

This is how something living becomes merely religious. A Prophet comes and men are changed. Generations later, their descendants still possess the vocabulary, the clothing, the buildings, the ceremonies and the theological arguments that grew up around his work, but the Spirit that produced those things is nowhere in evidence. The water is still there in substance. It has become ice. The shell is still there. Nobody is diving.

The End of Symbolism

The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan addressed this directly in his Second National Address on October 7, 1979, under the heading “The End of Symbolism.” Mankind, he says, has reached the end of the signs, the end of rituals, and the end of symbolism. Then comes the conclusion: “We must, now, have the reality of what God intended by these signs and symbols, or nothing at all.”⁶

The sign was never false. A sign is true precisely because it points past itself. If a road sign tells me Mexico City is fifty kilometers away, I would be a fool to stop the car, embrace the post, build a shrine around it, and inform my passengers that we have arrived. The sign was valuable because it was sending me somewhere.

In that same address the Minister asks what good it is to glory in the Cross, the Crescent, the Star of David, a church, a cathedral or a mosque, while the believer stays locked inside the symbol and never arrives at what the symbol represents. He puts the Islamic prayer service itself under examination and asks what good a ritual is when it is practiced without the Spirit it was designed to produce.⁶

The argument is not against ritual. It is against the separation of ritual from transformation. Religion has to produce something. If we have prayed for twenty years and prayer has not increased our consciousness of Allah, the fault is not in prayer. If fasting has given us no mastery over our appetites, if knowledge has only produced arrogance, if Scripture has become raw material for argument while the heart stays diseased, then something has gone wrong in the equation and we had better look at it.

The Qur’an distinguishes between lip profession and actual action. That distinction permits us to set aside what people say and examine what their Religion is producing, and to come to a mathematical analysis of the situation. If the result is envy, sectarianism, confusion and bloodshed, then repeating that our theology is correct settles nothing. The scholars have divided the house of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and what they have produced is more confusion and more bloodshed. Mathematics is not moved by credentials. Mathematics looks at the result.

Mecca, the Ka’bah, and the Reality of the Sign

In Table Talks of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, a brother asks him about the spiritual significance of Mecca and the symbolism surrounding the Holy City. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad answers that this is a place where the people “practice the sign of the coming of Allah and His Messenger.” He speaks of the pilgrims going down to the Ka’bah and kissing it. Then he says: “Okay, now here is the real Kabah. They come here kissing me.”⁷

Read the method. The physical object is being treated as a sign. The question is no longer, “What do Muslims do at the Ka’bah?” The question becomes: What does the Ka’bah mean? What is the action teaching? What Reality is being rehearsed every time a man walks those seven circuits?

The conversation goes further. A brother asks whether the same Holy City of Mecca will be used in the Hereafter, or whether there will be another Holy City. He answers: “There’ll be a new one. This one won’t stand.”⁸

He spoke about the Black Stone in the same way:

I am Elijah of your Bible. I am the Muhammad of your Holy Qur’an; not the Muhammad that was here 1,400 years ago… then they put up a sign of the real Muhammad. It’s there in Mecca, Arabia; they call it the little Black stone. I looked at it. I made seven circuits around it. I kissed the little black stone, but I didn’t like kissing it, because I knew what it meant… So, what you have been told, it was told to you to understand. It was not given to you to understand before time; this is the time that you must know the secret to all truths which has been put into symbolic language. Now, today, the veil must be lifted, do you understand?⁹

It was told to you to understand. Not to be defended. Not to be circled forever. Understood. The meaning was in the sign the entire time men were kissing it, and the ignorance of the worshipper never proved the sign empty. It proved the time had not come.

The Mosque and the Man

Consider the mosque. Men raise millions to build a magnificent structure of marble and gold, fine carpets, calligraphy, an elaborate dome. Every event is a fundraiser to build a bigger one. And the same men who walk into that beautiful building carry hatred, jealousy, arrogance, greed and hypocrisy inside them. So we ask the only question that matters: what was the building supposed to produce?

There is nothing wrong with raising money for a mosque. There is something very wrong when the building does not function as a mosque and does not produce what a mosque exists to produce, which is a spiritually civilized person and a spiritually civilized community. Shaykh Hisham Kabbani said that instead of being used as places of guidance toward goodness and for the saving of souls, they are used to discuss this world and its concerns, politics, fund-raising, and the encouragement of people to spend their lives pursuing worldly matters.¹⁰

The Honorable Minister Farrakhan has taught this for decades:

Do you know that there’s no church, no mosque, no synagogue more valuable than the human being? Did you know that the Ka’abah at Mecca, the Basilica at Rome; and the fine hands of man that have made these magnificent structures: Not one of them is equal to the Handiwork of God, which is this magnificent human body. This body is the real House of God, but you have to let God in His House!

“Well, how can I let Him in?” Open your ear to His Word, because He’s coming in through The Word. Once you let The Word of God in the ear, and it enters the heart, then He begins to change you in accordance with The Word.¹¹

That does not empty the physical mosque of meaning. It tells us what the physical mosque is for. The building exists to help build something else. In the uppermost part of the mosque there is a dome, and in the uppermost part of our own body there is a dome, and the Minister asks who is the king in that dome. Is it the King-dome of God, or do we carry the mark of the beast in our foreheads? If Allah rules the dome, then the thinking that comes out of it produces action, and the hands send forth goodness. The Prophet, peace be upon him, said that in the Day of Judgment a man’s hands will tell on him.

Every sacred form works this way. The outward prayer points toward inward submission. Fasting points past physical hunger toward mastery of the self. The mosque points toward the sanctification of the human being. Scripture is not ink and paper. It is a Word sent to enter the personality and change it. A sacred form reaches its purpose at the moment what stands outwardly begins to appear inwardly in the believer.

The Two Vessels of Knowledge

Which brings us back to Abu Hurayra and his two vessels. One he propagated. The other he kept, and he told us why: they would have killed him.

Abu Hurayra is not a Sufi invention of the fourth century. He is a Companion, and the report is in Bukhari. He himself believed that not everything he had received was fit for public dissemination. So when men today insist that Religion is one flat surface, equally available to every hearer, with nothing beneath it and no degrees within it, they are not defending the Sunnah. They are contradicting a Companion of the Prophet.

Look at the agreement across the centuries. Abu Hurayra speaks of two vessels. Ibn ‘Arabi speaks of prophetic sciences clothed in robes. Rumi speaks of a table set with different nourishment for different guests. Grandshaykh speaks of the oyster and the pearl. Four men, four images, one principle.

This is the Sufi distinction between ẓāhir and bāṭin, the outward and the inward, and they are not two competing religions. The outward preserves, disciplines and gives form. The inward penetrates, unveils and transforms. The shell and the pearl belong to each other. Disaster comes from two directions: the man who throws away the shell and loses the pearl with it, and the man who polishes the shell his whole life and never learns that there is a pearl.

Breaking the Cross and Killing the Swine

Once you see this, prophetic language opens up. The Prophet said that when the Mahdi arrives he will break the cross and kill the swine. He will not be taking a wooden cross down off a wall to snap it over his knee, and he will not be out hunting pigs. The Minister explained it: he will kill the swine, the appetite in people for filth and indecency, and he will break the cross, not the cross on your neck, but the cross of the duality in human nature.¹²

The work described by the symbol has to happen inside the human being. The language stays exactly where it was. The veil over it is lifted. The symbol becomes a window into a work of transformation, and the man who was attached to the wood is left holding a piece of wood.

That attachment is why people react with such violence when someone reaches underneath a symbol. Once a form has become identical with Religion in a man’s mind, explaining its deeper significance looks to him like an attack on Religion itself. This is the same opposition Abu Hurayra anticipated, and it has not gone anywhere. The teacher who destroys the idols that ignorant worshippers have set up becomes a target, and history is full of the ones who were silenced for it.

When the Sign Becomes a Veil

Here is the great danger in spiritual life. The thing that was given to lead us to God becomes a veil between us and God.

A scholar can become a veil. A Shaykh can become a veil. A school of thought can become a veil. A ritual can become a veil. Our own interpretation of Scripture can become a veil, the moment our attachment to the interpretation grows stronger than our desire for the Truth the interpretation was supposed to serve.

This is the engine of sectarianism. Each group is possessed with the vain belief that its way is best and correct, that its Shaykh is the best, that its school of thought is superior. Pride follows, and blindness follows pride. That belief itself is not necessarily the corruption. Shaykh Hisham Kabbani teaches that Allah places in the heart of every wali the sense that he has reached the highest station — a mercy that keeps each one content with his rank rather than resentful of another’s — and the same mercy is why a sincere murid feels his own Shaykh has no equal.¹³ The corruption begins when that private certainty turns outward into contempt for the next man’s path. A man becomes so devoted to his understanding of God that his understanding becomes his idol, and he does not know it, because the idol is wearing the name of God.

This is why prophets, saints and reformers disturb religious people more than criminals do. A true reformer makes familiar things unfamiliar again. He forces us to ask whether we are serving God or serving what we inherited about God. The most dangerous idols are not carved from stone. They are ideas, institutions and interpretations that have occupied the mind so long that the man can no longer tell the difference between them and Truth itself.

So take the Minister’s phrase in its full weight. The end of symbolism does not mean the symbol was a lie. A sign has completed its work when it has brought us to the thing it signifies. In Grandshaykh’s language, the shell has done its job when it has preserved the pearl and delivered the diver to it.

There is no contradiction in honoring the shell while going after the pearl. Ibn ‘Arabi’s robe came from the King, and for that reason alone it deserves careful study, but the robe is supposed to produce desire for the One who sent it. Rumi’s table holds food suited to every guest, and the purpose of food is nourishment. The Ka’bah is a sign, and a sign is given to be understood. And the Minister calls mankind past the possession of signs and rituals to the Reality God intended by them.

What is needed is not the destruction of religious forms. What is needed is the resurrection of their meaning. The water has to flow again. The Word has to enter the ear and reach the heart. The ritual has to produce the Reality it was designed to produce. The mosque has to produce a human being in whom the Word of God is alive. The robe has to lead us to the King. The shell has to be opened.

Allah did not send His Prophets to teach men how to look religious. Religion was sent to transform the human being. If we preserve every outward form and never become the thing those forms were pointing at, then we have guarded the sign with great care and missed the destination entirely.

The question is not whether the shell has value.

The question is whether we ever found the pearl.

Footnotes

1. “Shaykh Abdullah al-Fa’iz ad-Daghestani,” The Naqshbandi Golden Chain, Naqshbandi.org, biographical entry on Grandshaykh ‘Abdullah al-Fa’iz ad-Daghestani. The passage describes him as discussing subjects of deep knowledge from an early age and records his statement that revealing what had been placed in his heart of Divine Knowledge would cause “even saints” to cut his throat. naqshbandi.org ↩

2. Sahih al-Bukhari 120, Book 3, Hadith 62, narrated by Abu Hurayra. The Arabic reads: ḥafiẓtu min rasūl Allāh ṣallā Allāhu ʿalayhi wa-sallam wiʿāʾayn…, “I memorized from the Messenger of Allah two vessels [of knowledge]…” Abu Hurayra says that he disseminated one and that if he disseminated the other, his throat would be cut. sunnah.com/bukhari:120 ↩

3. Teaching of Mawlana ‘Abdullah al-Fa’iz ad-Daghestani, as transmitted in the photographed Mercy Oceans material, p. 39: “The best of knowledge is the secret wisdom in it, not its outside shell,” followed by the oyster-and-pearl metaphor and the statement, “The shell is the keeper of the pearl.” ↩

4. Ibn ‘Arabi, explaining that traditions possess exoteric and esoteric dimensions and comparing the prophetic sciences to robes, culminating in the statement, “These are robes from the King.” The source excerpt does not supply enough bibliographic information to identify the original publication with certainty, and no speculative title or edition is supplied here. ↩ ↩²

5. Jalal al-Din Rumi, Mathnawi, III, 1895–97. Rumi compares the perfect speaker to one who distributes different nourishment to his guests and compares such teaching to the Qur’an, “which is sevenfold in meaning.” ↩

6. Louis Farrakhan, “A Tribute to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad: The Ultimate Challenge—The Survival of the Black Nation, Part 2,” The Final Call, vol. 1, no. 3, edited version of Farrakhan’s Second National Address to an Oppressed People, delivered October 7, 1979, at Medinah Temple, Chicago. See the section headed “The End of Symbolism.” ↩ ↩²

7. Elijah Muhammad, Table Talks of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad: The Transcripts, vol. 2, “The Holy City of Mecca,” p. 95. The discussion identifies the activity at Mecca as a “sign” and contains the statement: “Okay, now here is the real Kabah. They come here kissing me.” ↩

8. Elijah Muhammad, Table Talks of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad: The Transcripts, vol. 2, pp. 96–97. ↩

9. Elijah Muhammad on the Black Stone as a sign, quoted in Jameel, Death of the Scholars, ch. 1. ↩

10. Shaykh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, on the misuse of mosques for worldly concerns, as quoted in Muhammad Jameel, Death of the Scholars (2018), ch. 1. ↩

11. Louis Farrakhan, on the human being as the true House of God, quoted in Jameel, Death of the Scholars, ch. 1. ↩

12. Louis Farrakhan, on “breaking the cross” and “killing the swine” as a work upon qualities within the human being, quoted in Jameel, Death of the Scholars, ch. 1. ↩

13. Shaykh Hisham Kabbani, Hierarchy of Saints Series — Characteristics of the ʿAbdāl, suhbah delivered 14 August 2010, Burton, Michigan (Ramadan Series 2010): “Allah (swt) puts in their hearts that they have reached the top level, the top point, and they feel they are at that highest level. Although they might be in a lower level, to them it looks like the highest level… That is why you see there are 124,000 walis and every one thinks he is taking directly from Prophet (s).” sufilive.com ↩