Hakim Sanai Quotes

At His door, what is the difference between Moslem and Christian, virtuous and guilty? At his door all are seekers and He the sought. ~ Idries Shah

When you are still fragmentated, lacking certainty - what difference does it make what your decisions are? ~ Idries Shah

The Islamic world is passing through a most devastating period of transition. A history of economic and scientific change which in Europe took five hundred years, is, in the Muslim world, being squeezed into a couple of generations. Such a transition period…makes human beings very insecure. They look around for something to hold onto, that will give them an identity. In our case, that something is usually Islam.
[Islamic Spirituality: The Forgotten Revolution] ~ Abdal Hakim Murad

Physical separateness can never be overcome by electronics, but only by 'conviviality,' by 'living together' in the most literal physical sense. The physically divided are also the conquered and the controlled. 'True desires' - erotic, gustatory, olfactory, musical, aesthetic, psychic, & spiritual - are best attained in a context of freedom of self and other in physical proximity & mutual aid. Everything else is at best a sort of representation. ~ Hakim Bey

He is One, and number has no place in Him; He is absolute, and dependence is far removed from Him; not that One which reason and understanding can know, not that Absolute which sense and imagination can recognize. He is not multitude, nor paucity;one multiplied by one remains one. In duality is only evil and error; in singleness is never any fault. ~ Sanai

Some people like danger and adventure, some like to be free of civilization, and some like to live by their wits. It was those special people who headed west. ~ Joy Hakim

One may always attempt as much insight, love, freedom of thought and expression, justice and tolerance as possible for oneself and the very few people who share one's truest life. To be a 'free lord' in secret is better than being a public slave, a willing accomplice of repression and injustice. ~ Hakim Bey

i am awake only in what i love & desire to the point of terror -- everything else is just shrouded furniture, quotidian anaesthesia, shit-for-brains, sub-reptilian ennui of totalitarian regimes, banal censorship & useless pain ... ~ Hakim Bey

The 'Islamic State', that strange miscegenation of Medina with Westphalia, is always in mortal danger of linking the moral austerity of monotheism with the repressive and supervisor powers of the modern nation state. ~ Abdal Hakim Murad

The sorcerer is a Simple Realist: the world is real
but then so must consciousness be real since its effects are so tangible. ~ Hakim Bey

The traditional ijma' consensus is as objectionable to takfir-validating Wahhabis as it is to homosexualist or feminist exegetes. ~ Abdal Hakim Murad

Knowing what you know, be serene also, like a mountain; and do not be distressed by misfortune. Knowledge without serenity is an unlit candle; together they are honey-comb; honey without wax is a noble thing; wax without honey is only fit for burning. ~ Sanai

Ten years ago a book appeared in France called D'Une foi l'autre, les conversions a l'Islam en Occident. The authors, both career journalists, carried out extensive interviews with new Muslims in Europe and America. Their conclusions are clear. Almost all educated converts to Islam come in through the door of Islamic spirituality. In the middle ages, the Sufi tariqas were the only effective engine of Islamisation in Muslim minority areas like Central Asia, India, black Africa and Java; and that pattern is maintained today.

Why should this be the case? Well, any new Muslim can tell you the answer. Westerners are in the first instance seeking not a moral path, or a political ideology, or a sense of special identity - these being the three commodities on offer among the established Islamic movements. They lack one thing, and they know it - the spiritual life. Thus, handing the average educated Westerner a book by Sayyid Qutb, for instance, or Mawdudi, is likely to have no effect, and may even provoke a revulsion. But hand him or her a collection of Islamic spiritual poetry, and the reaction will be immediately more positive. It is an extraordinary fact that the best-selling religious poet in modern America is our very own Jalal al-Din Rumi. Despite the immeasurably different time and place of his origin, he outsells every Christian religious poet.

Islam and the New Millennium ~ Abdal Hakim Murad

No tongue can tell Your secret
for the measure of the word obscures Your nature.
But the gift of the ear
is that it hears
what the tongue cannot tell. ~ Sanai

The alpha male must not be a wife beta. ~ Abdal Hakim Murad

How many leaders in the Islamic world are really familiar with the ideas which underpin modernity? I have met some leaders of activist factions, and have been consistently shocked by their lack of knowledge. How many can even name the principal intellectual systems of our time? Structuralism, post-modernism, realism, analytic philosophy, critical theory, and all the rest are closed books to them. Instead they burble on about the 'International Zionist Masonic Conspiracy', or 'Baha'ism', or the 'New Crusader Invasion', or similar phantasms. If we want to understand why so many Islamic movements fail, we should perhaps begin by acknowledging that their leaders simply do not have the intellectual grasp of the modern world which is the precondition for successfully overcoming the obstacles to Islamic governance. A Muslim activist who does not understand the ideologies of modernism can hardly hope to overcome them.

Islam and the New Millennium ~ Abdal Hakim Murad

What I was utterly convinced of, and still am, is the idea that the only responsibility the free intellectual has is vis-a-vis himself. He is not responsible to either a political party or a ruler. ~ Tawfiq Al-Hakim

Poetic Terrorism
WEIRD DANCING IN ALL-NIGHT computer-banking lobbies. Unauthorized pyrotechnic displays. Land-art, earth-works as bizarre alien artifacts strewn in State Parks. Burglarize houses but instead of stealing, leave Poetic-Terrorist objects. Kidnap someone & make them happy. Pick someone at random & convince them they're the heir to an enormous, useless & amazing fortune--say 5000 square miles of Antarctica, or an aging circus elephant, or an orphanage in Bombay, or a collection of alchemical mss. ...
Bolt up brass commemorative plaques in places (public or private) where you have experienced a revelation or had a particularly fulfilling sexual experience, etc.
Go naked for a sign.
Organize a strike in your school or workplace on the grounds that it does not satisfy your need for indolence & spiritual beauty.
Graffiti-art loaned some grace to ugly subways & rigid public monuments--PT-art can also be created for public places: poems scrawled in courthouse lavatories, small fetishes abandoned in parks & restaurants, Xerox-art under windshield-wipers of parked cars, Big Character Slogans pasted on playground walls, anonymous letters mailed to random or chosen recipients (mail fraud), pirate radio transmissions, wet cement...
The audience reaction or aesthetic-shock produced by PT ought to be at least as strong as the emotion of terror-- powerful disgust, sexual arousal, superstitious awe, sudden intuitive break ~ Hakim Bey

There is great joy in darkness.
Deepen it. ~ Sanai

If knowledge does not liberate the self from the self, then ignorance is better than such knowledge. ~ Sanai

The Law waits for you to stumble on a mode of being, a soul different from the FDA-approved purple-stamped standard dead meat - & as soon as you begin to act in harmony with nature the Law garottes & strangles you - so don't play the blessed liberal middleclass martyr - accept the fact that you're a criminal & be prepared to act like one. ~ Hakim Bey

Only the dead are truly smart, truly cool. Nothing touches them. While I live, however, I side with bumbling suffering crooked life, with anger rather than boredom, with sweet lust, hunger & carelessness ... against the icy avant-guard & its fashionable premonitions of the sepulcher. ~ Hakim Bey

When the path ignites a soul, there's no remaining in place. The foot touches ground, but not for long. ~ Sanai

The dullard sees no eros in fine champagne; the sorcerer can fall intoxicated on a glass of water ~ Hakim Bey

Where our knowledge of beauty harmonizes with the ludus naturae, sorcery begins.
No, not spoon-bending or horoscopy, not the Golden Dawn or make-believe shamanism, astral projection or the Satanic Mass
if it's mumbo jumbo you want go for the real stuff, banking, politics, social science
not that weak blavatskian crap. ~ Hakim Bey

Mummies are dehydrated & they long for the blood of living words. ~ Hakim Bey

He introduced himself to us out of kindness: how else could we have known him? Reason took us as far as the door; but it was his presence that let us in. ~ Sanai

Religion is never more tested than when our emotions are ablaze. At such a time, the timeless grandeur of the Law and its ethics stand at our mercy. ~ Abdal Hakim Murad

I was a big fan of Raven Symone, when 'That's So Raven' was out. I used to say, 'Oh my God, that should be my show!' ~ Imani Hakim

In the past, traditional art was based on making manifest what is enduring in man, like love, jealousy, hatred, envy, and greed ... Today art has to look again at these unchanging qualities, because society is no longer unchanging. It is up to art today to show us what has become of these unchanging qualities in a world which is moving and changing. ~ Tawfiq Al-Hakim

I just would like to be challenged. I want to push myself to the limit, and constantly challenge myself and grow as an artist. That's where I want to go. Explore different things, different characters, in film, and just everything! ~ Imani Hakim

As long as you cling to your self, you will wander right and left, day and night, for thousands of years; and when, after all that effort, you finally open your eyes, you will see your self, through inherent defects, wandering round itself like the ox in a mill; but, if, once freed of your self, you finally get down to work, this door will open to you within two minutes. ~ Sanai

When people say, 'If you could do anything else, what would you do?' I would be an actress. That's something that I would do - I can't see myself doing anything else. ~ Imani Hakim

All of the strife in this world is due to three people: a newscaster, a news seeker, and a news listener. ~ Ibn Al-Qasim Al-Hakim

But if you have a book that needs urgent reading,' she said, 'then Hakim is your man. ~ Khaled Hosseini

Let us admit that we have attended parties where for one brief night a republic of gratified desires was attained. Shall we not confess that the politics of that night have more reality and force for us than those of, say, the entire U.S. Government? Some of the "parties" we've mentioned lasted for two or three years. Is this something worth imagining, worth fighting for? Let us study invisibility, webworking, psychic nomadism
and who knows what we might attain? ~ Hakim Bey

If the dominant ideology is to be liberalism - a doctrine of tolerance - then to what extent can liberalism tolerate anything other than itself?

Liberalism seems to be increasingly coercive. 'You must have such and such a curriculum...You must have certain views on alternative sexualities...You must have certain views about gender...etc etc' in an increasing set of boxes which one is expected to tick, which seems to sit ill with the basic premise of liberalism which is to open the horizon for people to think and behave as they will as long as they do not constitute a threat to public order. The current strange liberal inquisition in the schools: Thou Shalt Be A Liberal, is just an example of the paradox of this Late Liberal or Coercive Liberal Project. ~ Abdal Hakim Murad

True artistic renewal does not mean being stripped of fetters. It means moving into new fetters. ~ Tawfiq Al-Hakim

While reason is still tracking down the secret, you end your quest on the open field of love. ~ Sanai

If rulers refuse to consider poems as crimes, then someone must commit crimes that serve the function of poetry, or texts that possess the resonance of terrorism. ~ Hakim Bey

Avoid trouble. This was the operating principle of Abdul Hakim Husain, an idea so fiercely held that it seemed imprinted on his physical form. ~ Katherine Boo

Turn to yourselves rather than to your Gods or to your idols. Find what hides in yourselves; bring it to the light; show yourselves! ~ Hakim Bey

Life's too short to drink cheap wine... ~ Cliff Hakim

He who runs to the doctor, vaidya, or hakim for every little ailment, and swallows all kinds of vegetable and mineral drugs, not only curtails his life, but by becoming the slave of his body instead of remaining its master, loses self-control, and ceases to be a man. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

I was beginning to feel that there would never be another American uprising, that the energy was gone, and I have some reasons to think that might be true. I like to point out that the crime rate in America has been declining for a long time, and in my opinion it's because Americans don't even have enough gumption to commit crimes anymore: the creative aspect of crime has fallen into decay. As for the uprising that takes a principled stand against violence, hats off to them, I admire the idealism, but I don't think it's going to accomplish much. ~ Hakim Bey

Allah has names of Beauty: the Compassionate, the Merciful, the Gentle, and many others. But He also has Names of Rigour: the Overwhelming, the Just, the Avenger. The world in which we live exists as the interaction and the manifestation of all of the divine attributes. Hence it is a place of ease and of hardship, of joy and of sorrow. It has to be this way: a world in which there was only ease could not be a place in which we can discover ourselves to be true human beings. It is only by experiencing hardship, and loss, and bereavement, and disease, that we rise above our egos, and show that we can live for others, and for principles, rather than only for ourselves. ~ Abdal Hakim Murad

Have you ever heard the phrase, it is better to keep your mouth closed and have people wonder if you are stupid than open it and remove all doubt? (Hakim al Harbi) ~ Vince Flynn