Showing posts with label Ali. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ali. Show all posts

Monday, November 19, 2012

There is nothing else but the Self

The beginning, the end, the manifest and the hidden.
The seer and the listener, all is Him,
He is in everything yet He is beyond,
there is nothing else, everything is Him;
abandon the duality of me and you,
see one, there aren't two at all,
understand this and disappear in it;
when you are not, then truly He is.

- Hazarat Ali

Hazarat Ali was the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad. Sufis identify him as the founder of their strain of Islam. For his courage, wisdom and compassion he is revered by Muslims (the Alawis even consider him to be an incarnation of the Divine), and he has also been greatly praised by Western scholars since the 18th century. The poet Kahlil Gibran wrote of Ali:

"In my view, ʿAlī was the first Arab to have contact with and converse with the universal soul. He died a martyr of his greatness, he died while prayer was between his two lips. The Arabs did not realise his value until appeared among their Persian neighbors some who knew the difference between gems and gravels."

The Prophet, Ali, Husayn and Hasan in Paradise, public domain image from wikimedia commons.

Friday, July 03, 2009

Hazrat Ali


Name of Hazrat Ali, The Lion of Allah

"The strongest amongst you is the one who subdues his self (ego)."
- Hazrat Ali

Foreseeing literalism/fundamentalism, Hazrat Ali, the nephew of the Prophet Muhammad, taught that the Quran has many possible interpretations. The earliest Muslims understood that the text, is a poetic work with vast possibilities. Fundamentalism is a form of blasphemy, as it dares to limit the creative possibilities of the word of God.
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The Shrine of Lord Ali


Hazrat Ali, Incarnation of Lord Brahma, the creative aspect of the Self, instructed that his burial place should remain secret. According to legend his body was placed on a camel which was driven from Kufa. The camel stopped a few miles to the west, and here the body of Hazrat Ali was buried secretly. No tomb was raised and nobody knew of the burial place except a few trusted persons. It is narrated that more than a hundred years later, the Abbasid Caliph, Harun-ur-Rashid went deer-hunting outside Kufa, and the deer he was pursuing sought sanctuary at a place where the hounds would not follow. On enquiry as to why the place was a sanctuary, Harun-ur-Rashid was told that it was the burial place of Hazrat Ali. He ordered a mausoleum to be built on the spot, where, in due course, the town of Najaf, in present day Iraq, grew around it.

"Unless and until you take Hazrat Ali’s name your Swadisthan Chakra cannot be cured."
-Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi