What is Freedom?
Apr 1, 2015
In the name of the God.
Many people ask me what I mean when I talk about freedom. I speak and write about freedom as one of the main goals, one of the main tasks of the correct and true thinking, of a properly organized language. Because freedom is actually something that arises as a result of a deep program of interpretation of the sacred text of the Qur’an, and it is something that must be achieved through the application of correct thinking that is associated with the interpretation of the Qur’anic text. So what is freedom? Freedom is a very difficult thing, which of course is not correlated with how West and liberals understand it. First of all, our freedom is correlated with the fact that we are servants of Allah(the God). Each of us is “Abdallah”. And as one of the companions of the Prophet said (pbuh) “Whatever you imagine, whatever you think, no matter how you expanded your experience, your contemplation — Allah is opposite to this.” We are servants to the One who is the opposite of everything we can think of and imagine. All our experience is only a support for what is not included in this experience, and that this experience, ideas, everything that can be postponed and spun off from this experience is the opposite. Thus, if we are the servants of the One who is out of our sight, who is “Huwa” which means “He” who is not given to us in any way other but in revelation. If we are His servants, then we are free from everything else. We are free from everything that fills our experience, clogs our brains, clogs our psyche, our unconscious, and so on. This is a liberation. But what kind of liberation is this? This is not freedom to make choices. Western freedom is said to be the freedom to choose between two kinds of goods or so. That is like freedom of customers in the supermarket.
The freedom of a Muslim is completely different. I’ll just give you an example of how this freedom works. Once, in an interview I explained that there are three types of freedom: internal freedom, existential freedom and political freedom. I was asked: “But what did you mean in that interview talking about three types of freedom?”. And I tried to give an example that would quickly, clearly and brightly explain what I’ve meant. Back in the days I had a good French friend, a doctor at the French embassy. He used to be a student of mine, as one can say. We talked a lot and he listened very carefully to what I was saying. It seemed to me that he is a follower who is passionate about our communication and what he learns from me. But somehow we were in a Moscow in some apartment, it was November, these were the early eighties. It was times of Brezhnev. He looked at the falling snowflakes, at the slush, at the gloomy figures of people moving there in the dim light of the lanterns. And he exclaimed: “How I want to be in the society! How I want to be a member of the normal society! How I want to be in the square in front of the Grand opera now, to see the Parisian crowd emerging from the show, these lights, this Eiffel tower in garlands, to be a member of society. Because I feel like I vegetate senselessly, lost in here!”. I was shocked. As I remember his name was Chretien. I said to him: “Chretien, have you just completely ignored, thrown out, bracketed everything that we have talked about so far? It seemed to me that you understand me. What are you talking about? What society you are talking about? Do you really feel some sense of being only by being a screw in a social machine?”. He continued, without listening to me, whimpering that he wants to be in Paris now, because everything is meaningless if he is not really a gear of this machine. I remembered this example, I explained to the questioner that in this case it is a very good illustration of the question “What are the three types of freedom: internal, existential and political?” in the Islamic way of understanding.
This Chretien had internal freedom, because he could listen to me. He had enough freedom to listen to me and understand me somehow, because there are some people who are so deprived of the freedom, that they cannot listen to anything that does not matches to their matrix, which does not matches to the way they had been stamped. They only listen to things that fall within the narrow scope of their program. And he had the freedom to listen to me with great interest. But he did not have existential freedom, because he could not experience what he had learned from me. After all, existential freedom is an opportunity to experience, not only listening to what is not included in your matrix, but also to experience as a truth what is alien to your matrix. That means to distance yourself, to free yourself from involvement into this Parisian crowd. He hadn’t such freedom. Now I am not talking about political freedom. But there are some of our brothers who, firstly, being born non-Muslims, convert to Islam. That is, they already have a manifestation of inner freedom, which allows them to step over the matrix in which they were programmed. And then they go to the Middle East and take part in the fateful actions that decide the fate of the Islamic society. This is both existential and political freedom. When they can not only experience, not only hear, not only accept, but also experience and then perform actions that can lead them to the witnessing. This is so to speak, a manifestation of perfect political freedom. These are the three levels of freedom in the name of the Almighty, the freedom of Abdullah(servant of Allah) which absolutely distinguish us from all others, which make us free from any matrix. Because the orientation towards Islamic law is not being programmed to the matrix, but this is a conscious, clear and inclusive orientation.
This is primarily a will to justice. It is not a rejection of something that we were taught from our childhood, just like two times two is four or “Grandpa Lenin is a friend of the Octobrists”. But our freedom is based on the fact that we want to see a meaning in everything, in any act, in any phenomenon, in every gesture, and so on. Because we are told that Allah did not create anything in vain that He has created. And we want to achieve this goal, which the Almighty meant, to realize in our actions and our experiences. This is a real freedom.
Translated from Russian language