Higher Project of Life

“What Shaykh Abdalqadir is speaking of is not an erudite academic exercise, but an existential encounter with our self of the utmost exigency. The man must go out, not stay at home. His project can not be his family and his business to support it. He must have a higher project and it is that he establishes justice. D.H. Lawrence saw that that man, “with that spark in him” was the endangered specie, under threat by what he called the “money man”. 

The new economic man fears the censure of the other, and therefore the negative discourse begins: that his wife may complain, that the mother-in-law would berate him. It is not that he does not take care, but that he should not be enslaved under an imposed tyranny. The father-in-law may appear to be successful yet has long since faded from himself, as T.S. Elliot called them ‘the hollow men…the stuffed men.’ 

But society says you must be responsible – to the family, to the mother and what of the children and their needs! How can he go off and be so irresponsible? So what on earth is this business of the heroic?”

'Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi - Leading Intellectual of Our Time' – by the late Hajj Abdallah Luongo, raheemahu'llah.