Berbagi Mimpi

Diketikkan beberapa paragraf dari bukunya Seyyed Hossein Nasr dengan judul "Three Muslim Sages":

...All attempts at a profound rapprochement with the other religions made by Muslims today can and should be based on the rich foundations prepared by Ibn 'Arabi and Rumi.

Ibn 'Arabi's attempt to transcend the external forms of revelation in order to reach their inner meaning did not in any way imply a rejection of them "from below"; that is, a refusal to accept the outward ritual and dogmatic forms of religion. Rather, he sought to transcend the exoteric level by penetrating into the heart of the exoteric rites and practices which themselves are an integral aspect of religion and are his quest of the spiritual life is to be really fruitful. It was through these formal, or exoteric, aspects of religion and not in spite of them that Ibn 'Arabi, like other Sufis, sought to reach the inner and universal meaning of the Revelation.

Essentially, the "burning of images," or the rejection of the external and formal aspects of religion, means that one must first possess these images and formal aspects. One cannot reject what one does not possess. And it must be remembered that when Muhyi al-Din and the other Sufis declared their independence of religious forms and rites, they addressed a collectivity in which the observance of religious practices of all kinds was taken for granted and not a world like that of the present day in which the possibility of rejecting the formal aspects of religion, without having ever practiced and lived them, looms very large on the horizon of the reader's consciousness. Ibn 'Arabi spent much of his life in praying the traditional Islamic prayers, in repenting before God for his sins, in reading the Quran, in invoking the divine Name, and it was by means of these practices and not in spite of them that he came to realize that the divinely revealed paths lead to the same summit and that to have lived one religion fully is to have lived them all. It was at the very heart of the revealed forms that he found the formless and the Universal so that he could sing in his famous and oft-quoted poem:

My heart has become capable of every form: it is a pasture for
gazelles and a convent for Christian monks,
And a temple for idols and the pilgrim's Ka'ba and the tables
of the Torah, and the book of the Koran.
I follow the religion of Love: whatever way Love's camels take,
that is my religion and my faith.