Master of the Jinn Official Ebook

Salaam and Greetings of Peace:

Alhamdulillah! Master of the Jinn now has an official Ebook for sale through Mobipocket, which is owned by Amazon.com.

And it is only $4.99.

Read Master of the Jinn on your PC with Internet Explorer, or on Palm0s, Windows Mobile PocketPC and Smartphone, SymbianOs and Blackberry. And the Mobipocket reader is free to download.

To check out Mobipocket and download the reader, go HERE. To buy Master of the Jinn as a Mobipocket Ebook, go HERE.

Ya Haqq!

God First

Salaam and Greetings of Peace:

When I was around nine years old and in public elementary school, our teacher was a kind young woman who made a deep impression on me much later in life. The memory of her face and features is vague now. I think she wore glasses. But she was a very good teacher, and one day a student said, “You’re nice.”  She said, “That’s because I live by one simple rule, and someday you may find that it’s the best way to live: God first, others second, myself third.”

I looked at her as if she were speaking a foreign language. “Who, what?”  At nine, the only thought I had in my head was of myself. Now more than fifty years later, I finally understand that in those six words she had distilled the teachings of every Holy Book from the Bible to the Qur’an, and had also summed up the blessed life of all the Prophets of God, including Jesus and Muhammad (peace be unto them), and the loving-kindness and service of the Saints and Sufi Masters of every age. The entire length of the Sufi path is in those six words.

God first, others second, myself third.

I don’t remember her name, or know whether she is still alive, but may Allah bless her soul, who so long ago spoke wisdom to children. 

Ya Haqq! 

The Language of Love

The language of love has no words
Listen
For God’s sake

The syntax of the heart’s longing
Is silence
Neither noun nor verb nor consonant

Why all this talk then, O Lover?
Sit and wait
Slow the heartbeat, ease the breath

Unless you become thought
Less
There is no room in you for Hu

Poetry is self-indulgence
Words a veil,
Silence, silence, silence

And the Beloved bursts forth
Everywhere
And all is Love

– Irving Karchmar,  © May 2007

The Soul of Mercy

Salaam and Greetings of Peace:

It is related that after the death of the great Sufi Master al-Shibli, a friend saw him in a dream. The friend asked him what God had done with him, to which al-Shibli replied, “God placed me before Him and asked if I knew why He had forgiven my sins. I said that it might be because of the good works I had done, the prayers I had performed, my fasting and pilgrimage, my having associated with pious people and my journeying in search of knowledge. God replied, “O Shibli, these were not the reasons. Do you remember when you were walking in the lanes of Baghdad and you found a small cat made weak by the cold and ice, and out of pity you took it and put in inside a fur you were wearing so as to protect it from the pains of the cold? Because of the mercy you showed that cat, I have had mercy on you.”

– Excerpt adapted from Sufis and Saints’ Bodies: Mysticism, Corporeality & Sacred Power in Islam by Scott Kugle.

Alhamdulillah, that souls resonate with each other beyond all material or bodily boundaries, and any soul is like all souls combined, for beyond the illusion of  material separateness all souls resonate in an interconnected web of unity. For Sufis, this is a spiritual reality that is denied by human reason but affirmed by intuition and confirmed by scriptural revelation. “Whoever kills a person, it is like one who has killed the whole of humankind. And whoever saves the life of one person is like one who has saved the lives of all humankind.” (Q 5:32)

O Allah, have mercy on us as we have mercy on the least of Your creation!

Ya Haqq!