surah 24: the light

all praise is due. all praise is always due for this gift, for this opportunity to bring homeostasis to the Body we all collectively belong to, that we comprise in the Essence. the only thing between us and our Happiness, between us and levitating mountains and walking water is our nafs (ego), our indolence in lackadaisical work ethics that stifle possibility, that keep us from honey.

O you who have believed, do not follow the footsteps of Satan. And whoever follows the footsteps of Satan - indeed, he enjoins immorality and wrongdoing.  24:21

satan is a warning, a figure of distress for those who need imagery of consequence. satan is us, satan is our lack of humility, our individualism, our unaccountability to all others than our sense of self, our lower being. hence the need for surrender, the need for laws that nature makes clear, even when we are apt to disbelieve in laws. laws exist. science makes this clear. math makes this clear. the art of surrender (islam) is geometry - divine mathematics. 

O you who have believed, do not enter houses other than your own houses until you ascertain welcome and greet their inhabitants. 24:27

There is no blame upon you for entering houses not inhabited in which there is convenience for you. 24:29

surah 24 lays out the laws of behavior, of upright being in interactions between those of opposing genders, between people, in matters as seemingly trivial as dinner gatherings. 

And those who accuse chaste women and then do not produce four witnesses - lash them with eighty lashes and do not accept from them testimony ever after. 24:4

Except for those who repent thereafter and reform, for indeed, Allah is Forgiving and Merciful. 24:5

Allah warns you against returning to the likes of this [conduct], ever, if you should be believers. 24:17

ALLAH is merciful, is just, makes the road of de-blocking Qi a reality, a possibility, if only we would listen. 

i realized recently that people need religion. they need religion because religion provides a blueprint for proper action and people don't know how to act. i realize this when i continue to provide free services to people who ask for ayurvedic evaluations and treatments and them exercising the utmost parsimony, knowing i come from a family of struggle, of economic blues, and continue to play this horn like miles and yusef lateef in the 14th street underground tunnel leading from the 1 to the f. 

i'm usually a little surprised, a little saddened, that the people i am meeting with will not even offer me a tea. i'm surprised because they have jobs and make more money than me and my family combined, but always complain of how they don't have enough. i guess i'm taken because of contrasts, because of my friends who are really scraping, because of people like my ammu who will walk a mile for a .25 cent difference in the price of broccoli and use the few dollars i give her a month to whip up miracles for me and everyone else. everyone comes to eat at my parents crib and yet my folks are a dozen times below the poverty line. deep. 

people who come need religion because they forget manners. sometimes they come like vultures, gulp down everything in sight and bounce.

when you enter houses, give greetings of peace upon each other - a greeting from Allah , blessed and good. (24:61) 

simple. right? but maybe you need to be told, maybe you just need a reminder. i do. i forget. i default on the babylon culture of self, do me. i get blinded by this, which may be why so many of the "professionals-class" i know are also like this. they've been educated to cheapen their worth. i'm worth more than that. you're worth more. you're a diamond. no shortcomings if you truly believe in Essence. you are rich. what are you afraid of. but we forget. i forget. luckily i have good examples like my folks n scraping friends. luckily i am still scraping myself. 

so people like my friends and family who talk spirituality, who namaste and talk yoruba, and the importance of prophet muhammad, they need religion, real bad. they, are what surah 24 refers to as hypocrites. 

But the hypocrites say, "We have believed in Allah and in the Messenger, and we obey"; then a party of them turns away after that. And those are not believers.24:47

they seem to believe but turn their face from compassion, sharing, duty, are quick to judge, contribute to effector and receptor neurons acting in emergency mode, setting off histamines and debilitating the Body into greater division between men, between women, between each other and Life. 

the default of health is balance, as ALLAH is just, requires harmonious relationships that are only possible from humility, from truthfulness. 

day 1 away: surahs, sweats, and a beacon

the past couple months i've relished winter in my thumbs, jamming myself into a solitude so deep only bedouin monks in the last car of the 7, q, and 5 train could find me, as i nod off between 2 hour commutes from one end of queens to a dead end road of the bronx. parts of me have already been there, separated by 1990's and the words from the ashen lips of past lifetime friends who lived and breathed those neighborhoods through blunt smoke and cheap liquors that we poured like a movie, until our libations to upstate prisons were a mirror we could fix our curly hair in.

of late i've been dreaming the surahs of the qur'an, imagining what it would be like to read the scriptures on the bed of the arches of utah and hear the echoes of jesus in his gospel of yassein: more important than the written word is the living word; the living word is the scripture of the earth mother. word. all praise is due. all praise is due to the earth. much respect to You, even if the actions of my kin show you the opposite.

i made it into the prayer rug of the prophet muhammad (peace n blessings be upon him and his family of shahids and the lineage of revolution he has brought to planet earth). finally, after returning from the hideout of jesus, as rumored between whispers of the people of south and north and east india (bangladesh), i have made it out of the asphalt zoo, where i paced in a cage and howled at something happening somewhere that set bars closer to my face, bars that were always maya.

here, in the woods, i am returned to innocence. for a week. for a week, i hope to rewire, recable my body and mind with the hudson n catskills and my fake cousins who left babylon like fugitives when the dollar signs of capitalism prophets in the colors of pink-clinton, brown-obama, olive-bloomberg, made it clear.

i'm yodeling quietly, singing little darling, its been a long long long winter, to warrior indigenous women like my amma, like mina, like sadhya, like sarah, like sol, like nana, who beat their chests and cry poetry into the hudson river. i nearly fall and allow myself to take the journey of moses, but not yet.

i'm not ready to go back to the city of strangers, where the parvenu, the bourgeois or aspiring bourgeois of muslim men n women i've occasionally sought  philosophy with at nyu's islamic center, see through me like the wall-sized windows overlooking the urban-renewal of washington square park. i am an invisible-man among these muslims, alive for moments sometimes, until my words slip through the cracks of my feet swaggered by 1980's beat-down culture and the war paint that class wars put on my face, permanently marking me as slums of dhaka, a generation from house-boy. i embraced it though, 1st through tim's and braids, and then through the shawls of bangli rebel poets and ghetto legends who served the words of ALLAH in the basements of lefrak projects in queens. i embraced the battle cry of the people of a past so rich, that the highest incidence of suicide and alcoholism and barbed wire along reservation borders could not stop the ancient call of forests.

all praise is due, i say, at these rejections of character, of people like places of employment, who wear the words of scripture like che-guevera on a gap t-shirt, like a do not enter sign. i enter anyway because i love them. but i leave shortly after, remembering the maya, remembering the road less traveled, were footsteps of messengers john afrika, and abraham, and joseph, and gandhi and harriet tubman and my amma n bhaiyas walked on. the rustle of the leaves here remind me. You remind me. the ice is slowly melting. here comes the sun, here comes the sun...