The Game’s Afoot: Faith as a Mystery Worth Solving

Excerpt from The Song of the Human Heart: Dawn of the Dark Feminine in Islam. Available on Amazon.

The first revelation in Islam was in the cave, the eve of Islam’s holiest night called Laylat al-Qadr (Arabic for the Night of Power, sometimes called the Night of Destiny).What did Prophet Muhammad feel when he first received revelations from the angel Gabriel in the cave in Mount Hira (Jewel) also called The Jabal an-Nour (Mountain of Light or Hill of Illumination), near Mecca?

In the Quran, Laylat al-Qadr is one night that is said to hold more power than a thousand months. Laylat al-Qadr is the third sign of the non-linearity of time folding a thousand nights into one, the first being the non-linearity of the Quran’s unfolding, and the second is the story of Hijrah where God is moving us beyond human time.

The power of God is found in the dark, through the Dark, in the womb of the cave, in the Night, through the ether brought by solitude or dreams, or dreams in meditation as they may have come to Prophet Muhammad. What called to him from 2000 feet away, into the heart of a mountain that was to be illuminated with song, with spirit?

Everything in Islam is pointing to the Dark. There is an entire world out there that even in the brightness of day, is hidden and unseen as if it were in the dark to human consciousness. It must have been terrifying, the full power of an angel resonating through mountains touched by the spark of God, a song. That Prophet Muhammad initially feared the first revelations is a testament to his humanness. Yet that first fear is often used by critics as a stain against Islam and against the Messenger. It was something I struggled with too until I read Austrian poet and novelist Rainier Maria Rilke’s poem, “The First Elegy” in which he speaks of the terror of angels.

We have this quaint idea that angelic beings are docile servants of God. Rilke — rightly — offers another view. A being so powerful beyond the realm of man and capable of being of service to a God of all things would be powerful beyond human comprehension: “Every Angel is terrifying.”

“Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angels’ Orders? and even if one of them pressed me suddenly to his heart: I’d be consumed
in his more potent being. For beauty is nothing

but the beginning of terror, which we can still barely endure, and while we stand in wonder it coolly disdains
to destroy us. Every Angel is terrifying.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke, The First Elegy

Islam is brimming with non-linearity that, if understood and embraced, would help us break the gridlock of the static world and submerge our consciousness into a rich metaphysical reality that wouldn’t be beyond the pale of our day-to-day existence.

The Jewel of the Crown

A complex portrait is forming: The Dark, a pantheon of goddesses, an Islam born in the womb of earth, and seeds of a 1400-year-old faith beginning to germinate in the hearts of its women.

At this point, when I was originally writing this piece, Boldy by Lee Harris starts playing, and the message from the Mystery is coming in clearly: “Sound From the Ground is Coming Right Through Me.” A choir whispers the verse with bells chiming, and a woman’s operatic voice rings through the ground as a bell suspended in song, like a Tibetan singing bowl.

The woman in the song is for now a representation of the Mystery, the breath of faith moving through the mountains with the same ease as if She was running between them as wind, moving like light. Was this the first revelation of Islam to Muhammad? Was the Revelation a sound of light ringing through the mountain like a bell announcing an arrival? Not the doom and gloom, the seriousness with which the story of faith is always told to us — but a story of wonder, celebration, magic, and mountains rich with life, a song calling to the heart of a man 1400 years ago, calling him up to the mountains, calling him to within. A night of power and destiny, the beginning of a new song, another note in the chorus of humanity.

I’m reminded of what Alan Watt’s said about reality:

“Time isn’t the ticking of the clock…
It’s [the sound of a Tibetan Bowl being struck]”

Time is the suspended song ringing through a space. That theory of time explains why the moments of time-crossing in Islam (The Hijrah and Laylat al-Qadr) hasten time, making things grow quickly or adding the value of 1000 nights in one.

Hastening time so that time begins to sound like a song, like a bell chime suspended in the air. The sound of days passing set on a fast-forward time loop would create its own song, just like fastened human speech sounds like birdsong. By nesting the miracle of faith in the Dark Feminine aspect of God, we’re invited into a new frontier in faith, one that we are only ready to cross once we’ve cracked the code and solved the mystery for a game that’s been afoot since The Night of Power.

A grave message, a message beyond the grave is brought with joy and celebration. It’s a celebration. There the message through the emotion of the song is a celebration, which is entirely counter to every story I’ve been told that treats the passing of religion with the sobriety and gravity of a funeral. Everything about this experience I’m having is saying that the birthing of a new consciousness is like the play of children for divine creatures — celebratory but with a theatrical elation of imagination. Think of the entranced children become when they’re deep in play, deep in the rich state of creation: that is the religious experience when religion merges with faith. In a suspended state, that is nirvana. Nirvana is the highest state of enlightenment, where the elixir of mystery flows through every channel of your being in an endless loop. That is the fully alchemized human, master of the magician’s eight, the infinity sign that cascades to and fro across an always spiraling universe. The sign is a symbol of breaking time, of being beyond time — timeless.

What a stunning, poetical, and magical view of religion, of Allah’s Islam, of Islam of the Dark Feminine. And nothing about this woman is docile, of peace that is blind to the world around Her. She loves and rages with equal passion, with equal devotion.

Instead, we have been sold a pacifist image of Islam, along with the illusion that Islam is a religion of peace. Islam is both peace and war, and discrediting Islam’s feminine duality only weakens us.

What is Islam is one of the most important questions of our time, regardless of whether you’re Muslim or not. It’s a question that we keep getting wrong, and every time we get it wrong, we all lose. Humanity loses. We lose money, time, resources, wars, life, trust — but most importantly, we’re losing truth. We’re losing our faith.

Islam as Submission to the Wilderness of God

Islam is submission to the wilderness of God. We find peace in our own willing submission to a wilderness that is lush with a metaphysical reality that breaks the laws of time to create hyper- realities that can compress a thousand nights into one. At every turn, Islam is speaking to a wondrous multi-dimensional reality. Islam is science futurism, speaking to us in a language that hasn’t yet developed and still cannot completely be understood by the human mind. We have a jewel in our hands, a jewel worth understanding and worth protecting. Islam is the crown of monotheism, but the mysteries of the Dark Feminine aspect of God is the jewel in the crown.

In Man’s Islam, all the world was to be warred against.

In Allah’s Islam — the Islam of the Dark aspect of God — the first war is the war within. If we can win that war, only then are we worthy as warriors for the sacred.

The task of the sacred warrior is about tending to the landscape within, tending to the complexity of our inner world, and bringing harmony into our hearts. I don’t know about sudden and lasting enlightenment — that’s not something I’ve experienced yet — but I do know that the song of the warrior is a song of mastery. It’s a song of tending to the impurity of our hearts like you would tend to the weeds in a garden. It requires discipline and presence, to show up repeatedly and master the storm in your heart so that you can command that storm at will and in service to God.

The Japanese Samurai, a specialized warrior class in feudal Japan, were known for perfecting two forms: warfare and art. They dedicated their practice to mastery of weapons use and fighting form on the battlefield. The second mastery would be practice in art, calligraphy or tea ceremonies were common arts of the time among the nobility. They did not separate between art and war; both called for a ritual of presence we hold for sacred spaces like prayer, temple observances, and death rites. Each of these moments calls for a gravity toward spirit, which for sacred warriors isn’t just a moment, it is an entire orientation.

I always saw the merging of art with warfare as a devotional practice toward taming the self through beauty, so that what is wild within doesn’t become feral and destructive. The arts are tended to with care. The precise movements of a brush stroke to create a mark in as few steps were studied with the same attention that measured the number of steps it took to strike a blow with a sword — usually three steps. The warrior and the artist are both elevated as devotees to the sacred. What is of the world, whether it is war or art, becomes sacred because of how we walk through these landscapes. Are we following orders, mimicking the environment, or are we with discerning eyes mapping out another territory that is far more precious?

With care.

Al-Qadr in Arabic is said to mean power, but it always meant something different to me. I’m not a native Arabic speaker. I don’t know what these words mean beyond Googling them; but Urdu is my first language. In Urdu, qadr or qadar means with care, dignity, and honor. Between Arabic and Urdu, root words are often shared or hold comparative meanings. Qad means height or size (so relational to power) and Quds means holiness (what is treated as reverent). Al-Quds is an Arabic synonym for Jerusalem, for example, so a holy place would be treated with qadr. The roots of these words point to holiness. They are part of a map for charting our understanding of the sacred:

Power and care are synonymous.

What does it mean for the warrior to wield power with care? The more I looked at Islam again through the eye of the Dark, the richer and more complex all of faith became. The world carries so much profound meaning and we are just at the tipping point of its wonder.

In Urdu, a rich and beautiful mother tongue that falls lifeless when translated to English, there’s a very sacred word: qudrat. As best as can be translated, Qudrat (pronounced qud-rut) is the witnessing of God’s power of creation. And yet, even the Urdu understanding of the word qudrat is devoid of its beauty, its depth, and its darkness.

As a South Asian woman, I’ve always seen the beholding of something magnificent be followed by someone announcing, “Allah ki qudrat” which roughly translates to “God’s blessings and handiwork.” I’ve heard it said always with the same momentary focus as when we toss a coin into a fountain as part of a wish. It’s the same energy as when we rush through prayers or when I see people thoughtlessly signaling a cross across their body before they enter holy ground.

When you watch the natural world express beauty and dignity, it is God’s qudrat.

When your garden blossoms, when the tide glows with life at night, when the earth sings and the moon sighs…it is qudrat.

When you see life grow in the womb of a mother, it is qudrat.

When you find a beautiful jewel buried in a cave, singing with life, you are in the presence of God’s qudrat.

When I study my son’s face with love for the depth of his innocence, I am gazing at qudrat.

In qudrat, what is sacred becomes holy when it is beheld and alchemized by the heart. Like so much of our human language, qudrat has lost its meaning in the hearts of people. Qudrat has become something to smile at in temporary remembrance of God. Across human history, women have been held with the same sort of temporary remembrance, seen only in the periphery and offered token gestures. But it isn’t just women — it’s also children, education, arts, marriage, birth, and even in the ways we pass time.

How many wine and paint nights have we secretly dodged, dying inside that art is reduced to generic copycat paintings under harsh lighting, paired with cheap wine in plastic cups? How many times is the moment of birth marked in a public announcement with the afterthought utterance of “Mom and baby are doing fine” — generic labels in a generic status update that tells us nothing of the woman who just survived a battlefield and a new life that just took first breath beyond the wall of the womb.

Man’s Islam is just the most recent and noticeable carrier of the separation from the qudrat of God’s world — no better, no worse.

Not the full wonder and awe of God — but just simply another momentary thought. The feminine and the qudrat are both held with the casualty of the mundane,
As another occasional pretty thing to smile at.
The full awe and wonder of our being left unseen.
They don’t see us for what we are.
Our breath is spirit, our hearts are temples, and our bodies are channels.

We are the qudrat.

We are the Qudrat.

When we are witnessing the qudrat and beauty of God crafted by a High and Most Intelligent Artist, the Architect of Wonder, the awe we feel becomes holy ground. What we feel in those moments allows us to be moved within, for our cells to drink in the beauty, for our bodies to submerge into our senses, and for us to rest in the intimacy of being human. This is particularly our gift as women, but it’s also a gift among children and sensitives. By leaning into this aspect of the sacred that is available to all of us as an experience, we create a pathway for a slower presence and pace of being for those around us. The qudrat, the beauty and the blessings of God’s majesty, is all around us, always. The practice of practicing intimacy deepens our capacity to see through the lens of the heart, and stay within that holy ground even when we walk away from the landscape.

The landscape is ever-present,
A realm of heaven within our reach in every breath of our being. The landscape is us.

Faith isn’t something we give or subscribe to. Faith is what we cultivate in our relationship with God. Like a garden, the landscape of the Dark is a qudrat of a different kind, a qud-rath (a holy Night). The qudrat of faith is when our entire life is held with the sanctity of pilgrimage, of holy terrain upon which we are always flowing, like a song across the water into a boundless existence.

There is another time, another kind of timing in which memory, experience, and reflection fold onto each other in ways that break open other planes of existence, a diversity of being. This is the field the Persian Sufi mystic and poet Rumi spoke of:

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about.”
— Jalal al-Din Muḥammad Rumi

When we are of Islam, we’re not boxes in an identity grid. We are a swarm moving toward a landscape, a field beyond time. We are invited to transcendence through surrender to the mystery of God and spirit.

If this message feels too radical or too mythical, consider this: They say if you ask ten Muslims what it means to be a Muslim, you’ll get eight different answers. But there’s only one answer that matters when someone is looking to convert to Islam. If you convert to Islam, all that is required of you is your faith. All you have to do is take the oath of faith (only one pillar of Islam). When the take the shahada professing your belief in God, you are anointed back into the fold of the Dark, your one-true home to which you always belonged (which is why conversions are called reversions). Anyone can become a Muslim — but to be of Allah is another matter entirely.

To become Muslim is to know that God’s Throne dances on the water like light. To be of Allah is to swim in that water as light.

Here is where the true journey begins: the second pillar of Islam. The second pillar is the pilgrimage (hajj) to the Kaaba, but really the pilgrimage we’re always on is the eternal pilgrimage of the heart. In the pilgrimage of the heart, our entire lives are an act of prayer (another pillar), and the work is a charity (a pillar), with a remembrance that we can only be nourished by the dark. The last pillar is the call to fast. A month of fasting is a yearly ritual cycled by the moon. For 30 to 31 days every year, Muslims practice that while the masculine aspect of God (the Sun) gives us life, it is in the Dark where we can become nourished, rested, and restored.

Everything is pointing to the Dark.

There is something more to us as people than the surface-level reality we’ve been sold. Fragments of a richer expression of human life call to us through the Dark. The complex underworld of our own being — that cannot be colonized or programmed, that cannot be erased from the remembering our heart carries to what is true and real — waits for our return. The path of the heart is like the cycles of the waxing and waning moon in a forever dance across the black sea of night. One of the practices of being human is being able to hold the balance in that sway like a whirling dervish, listening for the divine song that holds one ear to the earth and one ear to our dark celestial heaven.

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