After the February 6 Kahraman Maraş earthquake, fear and anxiety gripped the whole country. The fact that even new, sturdy-looking buildings, which were said to be earthquake-resistant, turned into graves of bricks and rubble turned us all into great sadness and fear. Almost all the buildings in the earthquake zone have either been demolished or will have to be demolished. Due to this situation, the realization that our country is in a general weakness in the face of a sudden disaster such as an earthquake at any moment anywhere in our country has put us all in a panic mood to the point that we want to enter the earth science and construction professions.
Almost everyone is looking at the columns where they live, trying to calculate the vs30 value of their neighborhood and thus trying to understand the ground and building balance. We have all memorized the fault line map. In addition, geoscientists (geologists) are bombarded with questions about various regions of our country on all social media, and the hour-long lectures of these experts on popular media channels are listened to with rapt attention as if they were sacred words.
Behind all this, the fundamental concept that dominates this business and that people have been searching for all their lives is trust (reliability). Our people are looking for trust. We are all in need of trust.
The word trust (emân) is one of the fundamental concepts of our religion and customs, which we are also familiar with the words faith and believer. There is a famous hadîth-i-sherîf in which the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) describes a believer as “one from whom people are sure about their lives and property”. In this context, the hadith that faith has seventy-odd branches, the lowest of which is to remove a stone from a road that is a nuisance to people, is also very famous. Our Prophet ‘A’isha reports that in every verse of the Holy Qur’an, where Allah begins with the words “O you who believe”, He will command or forbid something to the believers. In other words, when the call “O you who believe” comes, it is an address that should be understood in our minds as follows: O you who have the trust, O you whom people trust with their property and their lives, do this which I command you, and abstain from that which I forbid you. Because by believing, we become officials whom Allah has chosen and directed for His other creatures. The believer is a civil servant; he produces a work, he solves a problem, he fills a gap. Believing is not just a simple act of believing, as it is commonly believed.
Religion is a debt. If religion could be formed by believing, religion would not be a debt, a duty. Because whoever wishes can imagine what he wishes and believe in what he wishes. But debt cannot be paid through imagination. A debt whose essence is imagination is not religion. Therefore, faith should not be considered simply as a belief. If faith is to be taken as a belief, then faith is God’s belief in His believing servant, not the servant’s belief in his own imagination and memorization. For it is only Allah who can make a belief real. Therefore, a believer is someone in whom God believes and to whom God confides.
Allah only makes those whom He loves and believes in trustworthy among the people and makes them a trustworthy official for His people. Otherwise, trust is not possible. All trust belongs to Allah.
Ancient people considered faith to be a matter of a high level of security. This is because they understood that nothing that can be sensed, thought or reasoned can stand firmly on its own without Allah, and they knew that whatever they had, including their own souls, could only be established on a firm foundation by being brought to Allah. That is why they considered marifah, the knowledge of God, to be the most urgent task to be fulfilled. No knowledge, no occupation, could distract them from the urgency of this situation. A very famous name among them, Junaid al-Baghdadi, expresses this very clearly as follows:
“If I had known that there was a more important work under the heavens than marīfah, I would have done nothing but to acquire it, but I have not seen any work under the heavens more urgent and more important than marīfah.”
The famous zāhīd Zunnūn al-Misrī is reported to have said something much harsher on this matter. When he was asked, “Who is a despicable person?” he replied, “He is the one who does not strive to know God.”
If one considers the fact that faith is a matter of high-level security together with the fact that faith is a matter of marvel, then Misrī’s statement becomes clearer. An unworthy person, that is, one who acts with ordinary knowledge, is not aware of the danger. Because he is not aware of the danger, he has neither the knowledge nor the ability to protect himself nor anyone else. If he knew the danger, he would know how to protect himself from it, and he would be trustworthy in this regard, and therefore he would be a valuable and important person. But he believes that the things he holds with his hand, sees with his eyes, and knows with his mind are standing on their own, and so he cannot understand that they are in danger of being destroyed, corrupted, and demolished. Yet he has no proof that these things can stand on their own. What such a person has is only a strong belief, no matter how sound his reasoning and how well-organized his knowledge. This is because sound reasoning and braided knowledge do not tell us anything of the nature of things standing on their own.
The simplest way to understand this is to see that the very things that make reasoning and knowledge possible are themselves in need of grounding.
Is the reasoning by which we operate grounded in itself? Do the senses, through which we acquire knowledge about things, stand on their own? Do the sciences, through which we form knowledge about things, have a ground of their own? Without asking such questions and without pursuing them with extraordinary care, we end up falling into baseless pipe dreams. And because of these vain dreams, we cannot realize that things are in danger of collapse. The one who fails to realize remains, to put it mildly, ignorant. It should not be forgotten that ignorant is defined as someone who cannot see the truth at the end of his nose.
A person who acts with unsound conceptions about things is like a person who is victimized by an earthquake but has no remedy for it, neither in terms of his knowledge nor his authority. Such a person is in need of those who have the authority and knowledge to know the nature of things in a sound way. Because of this need, he has to resort to those who know and learn from them. Of course, for such a recourse, one must first realize that one is not standing on solid ground. One who is not on solid ground and does not realize the situation he is in cannot realize that he is in danger. If he does not realize that he is in danger, he does not feel the need to seek the trust. For such a need to arise, one’s world must be shaken. Once a person is shaken and sees that the foundations on which he relied until then are now shaking, he will not be able to stand again until he settles on a firm foundation. This is true for every living being without exception. No living being goes about its ordinary, everyday business where it is in danger. The first and most urgent agenda of a creature in danger is to eliminate the danger and establish a safe space. Living things do two things to eliminate danger:
Fighting the elements of danger,
Fleeing the danger zone if it has realized that it cannot overcome it through fighting.
We encounter these two options, in different guises and forms, in every place and at every level of life, in every living being. Otherwise, we could not talk about life and living beings, because life is based on trust.
Just as we need strong and reliable houses, structures and shelters in order to lead a physically healthy life, we also need a strong foundation and a solid conception of existence in order to have a solid knowledge of our existence and to stand on our feet.
Because “man does not live on bread alone.”
The word “existence” in the expression “conception of existence” refers to the things we know, recognize and have at hand; the word “conception” refers to the way in which these things are seen. One cannot have an existence in the world without envisioning it. At a breakfast table, are you happily breaking your bread; there is no one there exerting physical force on an object that he can consume only to satisfy his hunger. There is someone who, to say the least, conceives of “someone”, “self”, “place”, “thing”, “division”, “other”, “movement” and “constancy”, who recognizes pleasure and pain, who escapes from pain and deprivation and turns to pleasure and utility. Everywhere, from the simplest to the most complex tasks, we act with many fundamental imaginations of which we are not aware, just as we act with the physiological and anatomical features of our bodies, of which we act without being aware and without being involved in their management.
Conception, more precisely, is actually the way in which one builds, establishes one’s world. One cannot act without establishing, without building. Therefore, one cannot do anything without envisioning.
The word tasavvur means “to give form” in the dictionary. The verb to give form to something is called “to depict”. A person envisions through depicting, that is, formalizing, painting. And through imagining, one beholds the forms. Otherwise, it would not be possible for him to watch, that is, to act by seeing. To formalize something is done by connecting something that has a form to something that has no form. Just like building a house or making a human being out of a blank page that has no image on it, by means of colors with images. We use the word “making” here specifically. Because we are indeed in a constant state of construction at every moment of our lives, and this is no different from building a house or a building.
If we look at it in the context of the painting example, conception requires the existence of at least two things, one without a form and one with a form. If existence in the “conception of existence” is thought of as form and its opposite, non-existence, is thought of as formless, then the buildings we build every moment and the way we establish them are nothing more than connecting and weaving existence and non-existence together. In other words, in essence, imagination refers to the way we establish the world, that is, build it, like the embroidery of an embroiderer, by constantly connecting existence and non-existence to each other and in this way weaving the formless into forms. And the first and most fundamental building that we build without realizing it through imagination is ourselves. If this building is not sound, our world will collapse on us and danger will arise. And when we realize the danger, if it is not too late, we are forced to deal with it or migrate from there.
Let us briefly touch on one point here.
It is a common practice to outsource the hard work of constructing buildings through the imagination of existence to those who specialize in such work. In order to create a high-rise or richly equipped building, the work is usually left to some experts. In the same way, some of the grounds and buildings of the buildings of life are left to some experts, and one enters the world that comes out of their hands. These experts can be found, for example, in the fields of “science”, “philosophy”, “art”, “politics”, “theology”, and so on. These experts, using the materials of their specialty, create pictures of the world in such a way that all conceptual objects of the world are self-subsistent, move these pictures in their own way, and make buildings out of the moving pictures and a world out of these buildings. This world behaves like the real world. Because it only comes into existence by covering the real world. And sad to say, the veil that covers the real world is the very minds that are invited into the buildings of this world. In other words, this veil comes from the signature of the inhabitants who do not build these buildings themselves but rely on them. Unfortunately, the inhabitants of these buildings do not know that being subjected to oppression is haram, just as oppression is haram. We will discuss this important point later.
It is a common behavior to outsource the difficult construction of buildings built through the imagination of existence to those who specialize in such work. In order to create a high-rise or richly equipped building, the work is usually left to some specialists. In the same way, some of the grounds and buildings of the buildings of life are left to some experts, and one enters the world that comes out of their hands. These experts can be found, for example, in the fields of “science”, “philosophy”, “art”, “politics”, “theology”, and so on. These experts, using the materials of their specialty, create pictures of the world in such a way that all conceptual objects of the world are self-subsistent, move these pictures in their own way, and make buildings out of the moving pictures and a world out of these buildings. This world behaves like the real world. Because it only comes into existence by covering the real world. And sad to say, the veil that covers the real world is the very minds that are invited into the buildings of this world. In other words, this veil comes from the signature of the inhabitants who do not build these buildings themselves but rely on them. Unfortunately, the inhabitants of these buildings do not know that being subjected to oppression is haram, just as oppression is haram. We will discuss this important point later.
Scientists, philosophers, theologians, and all other experts of description who paint the world, that is, build the world, by explaining that the world, that is, the form, is self-subsistent, are similar to contractors, civil engineers, and architects who build buildings, skyscrapers, dams, that is, all kinds of underground and aboveground structures. Ordinary people who do not understand construction and architecture enter and reside in the visions of existence that these experts build and establish. Ordinary people find it easier to believe these contractors, even though a casual inquiry into their soundness can never inspire sufficient confidence.
Whereas the layman, the worthy person, will not trust any building whose ground he does not know and whose erection he did not personally undertake, nor will he sign a document attesting to its soundness and reliability. Such people are tough, and a tough person is not welcome in an easy and free world, especially by developers who are eager to sell their building quickly and find a resident.
We would like to conclude this article with a word from the middle of the book, leaving for another article the nature of the buildings erected by contractors and engineers who appear in fields such as science, philosophy, theology and art.
If it is not possible to exist in this world without imagination, if it is not possible to behold existence, and if this existence can only be sustained by connecting the existent and the non-existent, then the path of those who seek a solid and reliable foundation begins with demolishing the worlds of those who envision buildings by connecting the existent and the non-existent at every moment. Believers are those who realize that they cannot escape from danger until they have brought everything in their possession, including their own souls, to God. Reuniting with Allah is a transcendence beyond the imagination. For Allah is the unshakable pillar beyond the relation of form and formless. Surely from Him we have come, and to Him we shall return.
Esteizubillah: (I seek refuge in Allah from Satan)
“Better is he who builds his building on the fear and pleasure of Allah, or he who builds his building on the edge of a tomorrow that will collapse and he himself will collapse with it and go to Hellfire? Allah will not guide the wrongdoing people; and the building they have built will be a doubt in their hearts until their hearts are torn asunder. Allah is All-knowing, All-wise.
(Surat al-Tawbah, verses 109 and 110)
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