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If forgetfulness and heedlessness mark the basic fault of human beings, dhikr (remembrance) designates their saving virtue. Just as forgetting God le… - William Chittick
" "If forgetfulness and heedlessness mark the basic fault of human beings, dhikr (remembrance) designates their saving virtue. Just as forgetting God leads to the painful chastisement of being forgotten by him, so also remembering God leads to the joy of being remembered by him: "Remember Me, and I will remember you" (2:152)... God sends the prophets in order to remind people of the Covenant of Alast. They do so by reciting God's signs and mentioning their debt to him. People should respond to the prophets by remembering God, an act which demands that they mention him in prayers of glorification and praise (thus affirming both his tanzih and his tashbih). Those who respond in this manner are the people of faith, since to have faith is to recognize or remember the truth of tawhid in the heart, to mention it with the tongue, and to put it into practice by following the instructions brought by the prophets.Those people who fail to make the correct response are the truth-concealers. Although they recognize the truth in their hearts, they deny it with their tongues and refuse to follow the prophets' instructions. This, in short, is the drama of prophecy and the human response. All of it is connected explicitly by the Koran to the word dhikr, or to closely related words derived from the same root (such as dhikra, tadhkira, and tadhakkur).
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About William Chittick
William C. Chittick (born June 29, 1943) is an American Muslim philosopher, writer, translator and interpreter of classical Islamic philosophical and mystical texts. He is best known for his work on Rumi and Ibn 'Arabi, and has written extensively on the school of Ibn 'Arabi, Islamic philosophy, and Islamic cosmology. He is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies at Stony Brook University.
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William C. Chittick
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William Clark Chittick
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Additional quotes by William Chittick
The potential infinity of the objects of human knowledge goes back to the fact that the creatures have already been “taught” this knowledge, for it is latent in the cosmos through God’s nearness or self-disclosure to all things. Since we already know everything, coming to know is in fact a remembrance or recollection (tadhakkur). In the process of explaining this, Ibn al-‘Arabi refers to the “taking (of Adam's seed) at the Covenant” (akhdh al-mithaq), when the children of Adam bore witness to God’s Lordship over them before their entrance into the sensory world. The Koran says, “When thy Lord took from the children of Adam, from their loins, their seed, and made them testify touching themselves: ‘Am I not your Lord?’ They said, ‘Yes, we testify’” (7:172).
To be human is to be born with the fitra, which is an innate recognition of tawhid that is represented mythically by the Covenant of Alast and the Trust. There is nothing extraneous or superadded about this fitra—it is precisely what makes people human. But the fitra tends to become obscured by upbringing and circumstances, and then people become less than human. They are "deaf, dumb, blind—like the cattle; no, even further astray." Dhikr is the all-important remedy that makes possible the actualization of the fitra. Dhikr is both God's merciful response to heedlessness, and the human response to God's mercy.
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