Irteqa

I wrote this poem to underline my rejection of the superficial Sufism that pervades Islamic thinking, following in the wake of Plato’s metaphysical rejection of the material world. Although the strands of Sufi thinking predate Plato and can be traced back to Pythagoras and others before him, the idea that the material world was a lesser copy of the Ideal world originated with Plato in more definite terms. This has had, in my view, a disastrous impact on Christian and Islamic thinking, and the unreal attitudes which regard human life on earth as something from which to escape to a ‘better and more lasting’ world in the hereafter.

Irteqa (which translates as ‘evolution’) emphasizes the miracle of the ‘here and now’, the amazing beauty and reality of the material world in which we are placed. In superficial Sufism, there is a disregard for and ignorance of the environmental depredations caused by human presence and activities on the planet. Here, Plato’s material world of the ‘lesser reality’ can be ignored, used, and left behind, depleted in the onward march of Islam towards the ideal world of the hereafter. Heaven is the reward for the pious, hell a place to suffer and languish in eternity. But man has no place in eternity. Together with all other life forms on this planet, we are in a state of showing up and decaying into dust and oblivion. Life itself perhaps is not impermanent, and will survive our presence here in one form or another. But that should not take away from the fact of the eternal beauty of the material world, and from the amazing and spectacular miracle of what is displayed for us while we are here.

This poem of mine rejects the notion of man’s destiny as the centerpiece of creation. In conclusion it expresses a deep lament on the destruction of the natural world, of which we are the main cause. The seas are frothing up in anger.

irteqa