chapter 110

I have found myself, and multitudes around me, trapped. In my eyes, we are all trapped. Others may or may not feel trapped but I see them trapped just as I see myself trapped. Trapped in what sense? At least in two senses.

1. I am trapped (and in my eyes, as I said, others are too) in the sense that I constantly suffer the loss of all that I love and find beautiful. I cry out for these beautiful things not to be taken from me. I even find people appealing to god to not take these things from them (they tell him that ‘you have given met these but please don’t take them now’) and ask him to let them have them and give them more of them.
2. I am trapped in the sense that I am helpless in making sense of my deep pain and suffering with loss. I try to overcome this pain – I make friends, i go to the gym, i try to (in the words of a younger interlocutor of mine), find some way to increase my dopamine levels (whatever it takes) so as not to feel depressed and trapped in a hard life of struggle whose purpose eludes me and the lack of it bothers me. I feel trapped – unable to escape the need for meaning.

I know many people read chapter 110 of the quran as some past or future fantasy about millions (or more!) of people ‘taking shahada’ and becoming muslim (this is their understanding of what it means to enter the ‘din’ of God in multitudes). If one reads revelation without any concern that one needs to know if it is true (and revelation from God) or not and whether it makese sense or not, I can sympathize with people who read the verses in this way (or something like it).

To me, the verses point me to reflect on the ways in which I am trapped (if at all) and, in those senses of being trapped, need an “opening”. I, and all those who in my eyes, the multitudes who are trapped, need to find peace and respite from our traps. How can we do that? The second verse claims that the respite I need (and that I want for others) is the respite that comes from finding satisfactory (and satisfactorily meaningful) my present condition (the experience of beauty, the experience of loss of beauty, the pain of helplessness before the loss and its meaninglessness) and this satisfaction is possible if I surrender myself and my needs and sense-of-being-trapped, and entrust all other people and their needs and sense-of-being-trapped to God). The beauty is from Him, the love of beauty is from Him. The pain that He creates by making me experience the loss/absense of beauty is from Him. And all these things are surrendered to God and seen as bearing news to me about God (and hence ‘opening’ to divine meanings and not dead-on-arrival), if and ONLY IF I see human beings receiving them, as a help, from God! If I see beauty, following this revelation, as a help from God, that “helps” me see that God is the posessor of beauty and see that He loves for me beauty, IF i see that my pain is His promise of perfect and eternal togetherness with all that He has made beloved to the soul, IF i see that surrendering the meanings of things to God opens those meanings to eternity instead of burying them into this lower realm – then I don’t feel trapped and instead I see help and opening arriving from God (for me and for others I entrust to God). I make them enter (in my mind/heart) into God’s “din” – the surrender to Him of all they have, all they lose and yearn for, I don’t feel trapped and oppressed by existence and meaninglessness anymore. In that state of realization, I want my preivous pain-causing heedless perspective to be erased and forgiven and I praise and glorify God for the Helper and sustainer I have now realized him to be.

I need to see myself and human beings around me receiving God’s help which opens them to God, which opens the way for me and for them to escape our traps of loss and inescapable suffering into surrendering all our needs, pains and loves to God. If I am not being helped by my maker to find Him, I have been left to suffer without relief by him. In the former case, I find a need to seek his forgiveness for my self-inflicted wounds and praise and glorify him. In the latter case, I do not and cannot find him praiseworthy and find myself unforgiven.