“La ilaha illallah Muhammadur Rasulullah. La ilaha illallah Muhammadan abduhu wa rasuluhu.”
Muhammad was a voluntary slave. Slavery is something that the world sees as subjugation, as something that is put upon people against their will. So, the concept of voluntarily being a slave is contrary to a lot of what is understood by people.
So what does it mean to be a slave? What does it mean to surrender your will? What does it mean to be without the need to impose your point of view? It means a lot of things and it means them differently to different people. But let’s start somewhere; in order to be truly in unity with God it means that personal ambitions, personal will personal desire has to be abandoned. Abandoned for what? Abandoned for the will of God. And how do you learn to abandon your will? How do you learn to give up the need to impose your ideas, your thoughts and the way you want things to be?
Well, it’s like the question, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” You practice. How do you practice? Well, the Hadif tell us that marriage is half your deen, half your religion, half your path. So, what’s that mean? It means that in marriage you practice how to culminate your being into reality, and what is the end of that path? The end of that path is total absolute surrender. So, in marriage, you practice what? You practice surrender. You practice being in a relationship with somebody on this earth who you can allow to overwhelm your will without any reaction, who you trust to the degree that what they say is ok without a question. Because of the relationship, and because we need to have that kind of companionship within the world in order to understand our relationship in haqq.
We need to have relationships in the world that emulate what our relationship with Allah should be. So, we need relationships in which we can surrender, in which we surrender willingly, in which we surrender without objection. The most predominant example of this relationship within Sufism is the relationship between the Dervish and the Master. The Dervish surrenders to the Master’s will. He surrenders to the Master’s will because of the Master’s overwhelming love which creates overwhelming trust, which creates the atmosphere where this surrender can occur.
So, there are a lot of components to this surrender but at the beginning of it, there is love, because it’s through love that surrender becomes possible. Without love, surrender retracts, surrender becomes animosity. What needs to happen is: there needs to be love to induce trust and that induces surrender. So the Sheikh becomes the example of what is true, of what is loving, of what is non-menacing, of what is mercy and compassion and through learning through that example with the Sheikh, you can then transfer that to Allah.
It’s the same thing in human relationships. Not everyone has the opportunity to have a Sheikh, so you have to find people within your community where those kinds of relationships can occur, and the most evident one is the relationship of husband and wife…
