Can It Become That?

Mahdawiyyah, Part 32 · The Architecture of Guidance, Part 16 · The House Beside the Grave, Part 8

Can It Become That?

Last week you found out the question is old. Tonight you find out whether it happened to us.

Look at the verse in the Qur'an that forbids religious excess. It is not about people who hated God and wanted an idol instead. It is about people who loved a prophet — truly, and to the point where they said something about God that was not true.

And the verse does not tell them to stop loving him. Read it again and see what it actually forbids. The prohibition is not on the affection. It is on the claim.

So here is the question this evening exists to answer, and it is the one left hanging at the end of last week.

If every system God gave can be corrupted — has ours been, at this particular point, and how would you know?

First, the objection, at its full strength

You are told that your line is a mood. That it is all about intention, and intention is invisible, so your answer can never be checked by anybody.

That sounds unanswerable — until you notice that the Book has a word for a limit and uses it constantly, and that the root of that word means prevention. The edge of a sword. The line where transgression begins. The boundary of a property. And the word for iron.

That is the vocabulary God chose for a limit. Nothing in it is soft, and nothing in it depends on how anybody feels.

And there is exactly one being in existence with no limit — who put one on Himself, in writing, with nobody to enforce it.

Then an afternoon in Samarra

A man is sent to the eleventh Imam, peace and blessings be upon him, by two factions who cannot agree about the family they both claim to serve. He is corrected three times before he leaves the house.

Once for what he thought about a garment. Once for a question he never asked out loud. And once for the question he actually came to ask.

Two of those three corrections do not come from the Imam he came to see. They come from a small child behind a curtain — the Imam of our Age, may our souls be his ransom and may God hasten his return — and his father's only comment afterwards is to ask the visitor why he is still sitting down.

And then the hard edge, and it is ours

An Imam of this house was asked directly about people who claimed too much for him and for his fathers. He answered in four words, and he used the exact accusation that gets painted on this community from a thousand pulpits — about our own.

Then he listed eleven ordinary things — sitting with them, eating with them, marrying into them, leaving something in their keeping — and said what each one costs.

Nobody came from outside and told us to write that down. We wrote it. We kept it. We still read it.

There are two ditches, and you have only been warned about one

The second half is harder than the first, because it does not let anybody sit comfortably.

Forbidding yourself what God made lawful is itself a crossing of the limit — and there is a verse that says so, using the same verb as the verse on God's limits. Its occasion is three men who made three vows, none of them running from God, every one of them trying to get closer.

And the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, his family, and his righteous companions, did not send a private word. He called the congregation, went up the pulpit, and said not of me — to three men trying to be more religious than the religion.

What the evening covers

• The verse that forbids excess, and who it is actually about. Not idolaters. People who loved a prophet and could not stop raising him.
• What a limit is, in the Book's own vocabulary — and the One with no limit who took one on anyway.
• Three corrections in one afternoon, and the child who gave two of them, named rather than hinted at.
• What an Imam of this house said about people who claim too much for it — in his own words, kept in our own books, and read here without flinching.
• The ditch nobody warns you about, forbidden from the Book and from the pulpit, with the Commander of the Faithful standing in it.
• Where the line actually falls — and how to say it in one sentence to somebody at work.
• A verse about people who took their scholars as lords — and our own commentator explaining that they never called them lords at all. That was never what it took.

And nothing in the evening tells you to stop. Go to the shrines, go to your parents' graves, take the children, say the greeting out loud. The verse we open on did not tell a community to stop loving a prophet, and that has never once been the correction.