IMAGE: UNKNOWNBismillahir Rahmanir Raheem.
The Arabic term ‘Islam’ means to submit or to surrender and the root meaning, salima is to be whole and it’s a cognate of the Hebrew word shalom, which is related to the same idea. Shalom in Hebrew means wholeness. The idea of peace is a wholeness and the idea of being in a state of submission is being part of a whole. Because what happens when we are out of sync? For instance, we feel pain and suffering in our body is when one part of our body is no longer working with the whole and so we experience pain and trouble. We also have the idea of conflict when one part is out of sync with the whole; or several parts within a whole are out of sync as well, just as you can have multiple illnesses in a body.
You can also have multiple aspects of a society that are out of sync. If we look at the world around us, if we look at the natural world, what’s most notable about it is order. There is order in the world and people can deny it but any casual observer over a period of time can see it. For instance, on March 21st we entered into spring, which is a season that comes every year. There is a cosmic event that occurs when our planet reaches a certain point in its orbit around the sun, and because of the tilt of our planet in relation to the sun. We have these four seasons as we move around the sun and there is an order so that trees know when to give fruit. They don’t give fruit in the wintertime in the north. They give fruit, I’m literally looking at a fig tree right now, and the figs are green on it, and by September they are going to be ready to be picked and that state that the tree is in is a state of submission to the natural order. And so that’s why it’s in a peaceful state; it is not conflicted in itself nor is it conflicted with the environment around it and if I come and I chop down the tree, then obviously, I’m changing the state that that tree was in and if I do it for no reason, then it’s really a criminal act against nature.
Submission is about really getting in sync and if you look at children; children from early on, if they are allowed to progress naturally without a lot of interruptions, they know exactly what to do. They are in a state of submission in that they’re following a natural order and pattern, just as when we were in the wombs of our mothers all our cells knew what to do. They knew…the liver knew to become a liver and the heart knew to become a heart and our circulation knows how to circulate. Our body knows to stay within a homeostatic balance and keeps our internal temperature, irrespective of what the external temperature is, at around 98.6 ºF. When we get sick there is a disruption in that order and so in the same way we can see this order and disruptions in this order. Also in our associations in our communities, in our societies, if children are treated in certain ways it has certain effects on their behaviour and on their attitudes. If they’re belittled and held in contempt as children, they respond with certain pathologies that are actually in many ways quite discernible and recognizable for people that are trained in those types of observation.
So you know, submission to me is, I mean, we have this thing called Islam which has become a world religion and it identifies a category of people. But my understanding of Islam is that it’s much deeper than that. It’s really a state of being. It’s not a sociological identity. It’s a state of being and that’s why the Quran says: Aslama man fis samaa waate wal ard. That everything in the heavens and earth is in that state of submission. That it is a state the trees are in, the sun is in, the moon is in and the human beings, because we have been given free will, we have this ability to be outside of that state. If you look, for instance, at these videos that are kind of emerging out of Iraq of Iraqi soldiers killing people, putting dynamite onto people and blowing them up and then laughing. You know, I don’t care whether those people identify themselves as Muslims or not, as sociological category, they aren’t in a state of submission to divine order. They’re deeply sick human beings, and part of the problem and one of the real barriers for people to understand Islam or to have any attraction to it is that the Muslims themselves become the greatest barrier between Islam and the people.
