“We have entered into a completely image-based civilization, where the word is being moved. We’re even speaking in icons now. When you enter into that image-based culture, you lose the ability for abstraction, for real abstraction, and the ability to understand essences.”

HY: And it’s also Kantian, this idea that there’s no correspondence. I think Muslims are very much committed to correspondence truth.

UFA: That is exactly what the fiţrah is. The fiţrah enables you to know the world, because you’ve got it in you. The critiques of modern science say that physics doesn’t believe in red apples, because it believes there are just molecular structures that you make into an apple, and it tastes sweet and it nourishes you. It’s all about probabilities.

HY: This leads to a type of Gnosticism. I think we’re very much in a gnostic world in many ways. Even despite the materialism, there is an occult element that’s very strong—this idea that none of this is real, that we can’t know reality, that this might be simply a solipsistic worldview in my head. We have young people now going in and shooting up people in schools. It’s a complete divorce from reality [to say] that they’re not really inflicting pain on other people. That’s a very demonic reality.

We have entered into a completely image-based civilization, where the word is being moved. We’re even speaking in icons now. When you enter into that image-based culture, you lose the ability for abstraction, for real abstraction, and the ability to understand essences—like the chair, to understand what makes a chair. The idea that you can have a Chihuahua and a Great Dane, and see the doggy-ness that they share, is amazing. We can look at [people] in the Amazon or in an aboriginal culture who are completely different from us in the expression of their humanity, and yet we can still abstract that essential human nature and see that this, too, is a human being. That’s being lost in people. The image-based culture where people are divorced [from reality] I see—with no offense to the people afflicted with this—as a kind of autism that the Arabs translated as tawaĥĥud, the idea of going into the individual self and losing a sense of other.

HY: What we’re seeing now in the West, and increasingly affecting people in the East, is a real change of this fiţrah. It’s being altered in people. What advice would you give us to protect that principal nature, to nurture it? We have this idea of takhliyah, taĥliyah, and tajliyah, [or] emptying out a vicious character and filling up a virtuous character in order to experience the divine.

UFA: If we look at the hadith on the fiţrah—I have those in my book—one of the things we see in them is that there’s nothing easier for us than to live according to our natures. It’s very easy for us to do that, and there are a thousand ways back to our nature. The traditional Islamic city was a garden city. To be a valid city in Islam according to law, you have to have land, you have to have water on that land or above it, and you have to produce all the food you need for your city in your city. You can’t depend on the outside. We were garden cities, and we had lots of animals. I believe, according to my teachers in our tradition, that without animals, you can’t be human. So contact with the soil, contact with animals, contact with nature, contact with each other—with other human beings, talking, visiting—are very important. These bring us back to our nature.

You should learn the language of nature. The Aborigines, who are incredible people, teach children to listen. If a child asks a question, they say, “Go ask your mother.” What do they mean? Go listen to nature; listen to what nature says about this. And you can do that here [in Northern California]. You have this incredibly beautiful environment. You can find yourself a sitting spot in the forest. Learn the language of the forest, learn the language of the birds. The birds will come to look at you; other animals will come to check you out. So these things are very good for us. It’s about being out of our analytical brain that’s always worrying and always analyzing and concerned about stuff. It’s very easy to come back to the fiţrah.

I spent hours with the Aborigines in Australia, [including] ones who are basically like spirit doctors. Everything they say is knowledge. For example, they don’t have a word for health; they have a word for healing. That’s because you have to heal yourself every day. You have to get the negativity that’s in you out of you. There are vital signs that are being lost. We have to bring ourselves to life, but we have to be life givers, as well. When we do that, we will find a lot of good people in this society—Christians and Jews and others who are on the same pages that we’re on, and [God willing] we will work together in this.

HY: When I was in Mauritania, there was a shaykh whose name was Mohammad al-Amin. They called him Mino. When I visited him, I think I was twenty-two or twenty-three; he was I think in his eighties. He told me, “I’ve never wished for anything to be different than the way it was, but today I wish I was a young man so I could go with you to Murabit al-Hajj to study.” Then he picked up some earth and he said, “My advice to you, don‘t get far away from this. This is your mother, the earth.” I think one of the things that technology is doing is it’s really distancing people from just being with the earth. We’re fortunate to be in an incredibly beautiful environment here. There are a lot of places to go. So I think that’s really good advice about being in nature.

One last point and question to you about beauty and the importance of beauty. When the Prophet, peace and blessings of God upon him, was wearing nice clothes and a good sandal, a man asked him, “Was that from arrogance?” And he said, “No, it’s [because] Allah loves beauty.” One of the things that I find really notable about premodern people is that they adorned things. They didn’t have a lot of things generally, but what they did have they always made beautiful. When I was in Mauritania, their traditional pen was a bamboo pen, but they started using BIC pens. But the women would adorn them with leather and make them very beautiful. So they would take the plastic, and they would just do a design on it and then put little frills at the end of it, and the students would write with these pens. When I asked one of the women why they did that, she said, “It’s so ugly,” referring to the BIC pen.

What is the thing in humans that [makes us do that]? Why not just have a functional carpet, why put the tree of life on the carpet? Why not just have functional walls, why put wainscoting with designs? What is that [impulse to beautify] and how do we restore it? You don’t see the caliphate of God in that human being anymore. How is that restored?

UFA: Tell me any traditional society that was not beautiful. Look at the First Nations of this land, look at the Inuit, the Eskimos. Everything they did was beautiful. Look at the Aborigines. You can’t believe how beautiful everything they make is. And we were like that, too. We were a highly skilled society. We were a society of crafts and guilds, and everything we made was beautiful. That’s because God is beautiful, and He loves beauty.

Beauty is the splendor of truth. That means God doesn’t love ugliness. Ugliness is the mark of falsehood. Ugliness means you’ve gone astray. If you love God, you become internally beautiful. That’s the universal routing. Then what you produce is graceful and beautiful—even the way you walk, even the way you talk. Even the words you use [are beautiful], because you want to use beautiful words. You want to know what your words mean.

It is very important to get back this beauty in everything. That makes us human. Al-Māturīdī, who is one of our great theologians, talks about how God holds us back from evil by putting us in a natural setting. We still do evil, but the natural setting tells us this is wrong. This is wrong. This is wrong. What happens, however, when you put people in an ugly setting—broken windows, broken glass, graffiti, rats, and so forth—is that you can’t believe there’s such a thing as truth anymore. You can’t believe there’s such a thing as goodness anymore. That’s why beautification is something we have to do to ourselves.

Beauty is our means, right? Making beauty. One of our teachers who studied metaphysics spent his life studying great metaphysicians. Once he was visiting a particular place in Pakistan, and he came out late at night. He had to be taken to his hotel, but there was nobody [to take him] there. Then out of the darkness came this [rickshaw], and the driver was a poor man. So the teacher spoke to him in Persian—he didn’t know Urdu—and said, “Could you take me to the hotel?” The [driver] answered in Urdu; he could understand [Persian] because the languages are close. The teacher got in the [rickshaw] with this poor man, who began to recite to him from Hafez and Rumi in perfect Persian. [The teacher told me], “In those forty-five minutes, I learned more about metaphysics than I learned in thirty years.” So beauty is the language of truth also. When you put that into poetry, when you put that into rhyme, when you put that into art and into beauty, then everybody gets it. Beauty attracts you then to those meanings.

HY: Thank you. On that note, I want to thank you, Dr. Umar, on behalf of the community here for coming this way. May we benefit from what we’ve heard tonight, and may you all return to your homes safe and sound, and have a blessed sleep with some dream time. May you see beautiful things in your dreams tonight, God willing.

UFA: One of the signs of the end of time is many beautiful dreams that are true. You see, this is one of the ways that God is merciful to you, because you live in a world where so many people don’t believe. So He sends to you these incredible dreams. So may you have beautiful dreams, sweet dreams.