The Womb, Nearness and Distance

The word for the mother — the word for raḥmah in Arabic: if we say mother here, the word in Arabic for mother, for the womb, is raḥim, which in Hebrew is raḥim too. They have the same idea; the Jews have the same idea. Raḥim is the same root word as raḥmah: it is through the womb that raḥmah comes into the world. Without the womb there is no sense of raḥmah. And the womb is seen as one of the greatest of mercies, because, for one, it is a raḥmah in that this helpless creature is protected in the womb by a caring, loving individual who does not want harm to come to that which is growing in her, and which is being nurtured because of her mercy.

The idea of the mother is the compassion. It is the idea of compassion: the mother is forgiving; with the father, it is more difficult. And how many scenarios do we know in the human condition — how many scenarios do we know where the father throws the child out, and the mother lets the child in the back door? This is very common in human conditions. The father will have nothing to do with it — that is it. But the mother cannot.

There is the account of a Jewish man who became Muslim, and his family held a funeral for him after he became Muslim. He was still alive, but they considered that he had died. But his mother used to send him cookies on his birthday. So the idea is that the mother — even though this person has done something so severe in their tradition that he is cut off — the mother does not cut him off. It is very difficult, by nature. And this relates to the womb. The womb is empty. There is room in the womb for forgiveness. There is room there for forgiveness. Look at the womb: by its nature, the womb is a very small room in the midst of a woman, and yet it can expand to take in so much. It has this flexibility, and it bleeds. It bleeds. The womb bleeds; it renews itself. And these are very powerful metaphors and images for this idea of immanence.

Looking at it in terms of nearness and distance, and how this relates to human beings: nearness is related to gratitude; distance is related to ingratitude. Nearness is related to īmān; distance is related to kufr. So if a person accepts God, and wants and strives to come to know God, that is a drawing-near process. This is where we differ from the angels. The Qurʾān says there is no angel except that he has a fixed place:

The angels are fixed. It is not an upwardly mobile job. They are fixed. The Cherubim, the Muqarrabūn, are the nearest; and also the great angels — Jibrīl, Isrāfīl, Mīkāʾīl. These are the close angels in the angelic realm. But they are fixed. They do not disobey God. They only obey God, out of jabr, compulsion.

The human being has this interesting aspect to him or her: the human being can choose one of two things. This is where we begin our journey. The Qurʾān talks about two phenomena. One is called darajāt, which are upward. Darajāt means stairs moving up — Jacob's ladder. Darakāt are stairs moving down. Darakāt are easy; darajāt are hard. And the difference between them is the letter jīm and the letter kāf. The jīm, in the Arabic science of the letters, is a shiddah letter. It is a hard letter. The kāf does not have the same shiddah; it does not have the same hardness.