“We do not lack a rib, we lack a lung.”
Eve (Hawwāʾ) was created from Adam, and had no mother. The foolish claim that this denotes her inferiority. They forget that Jesus (ʿĪsā) was created from Mary, and had no father. This did not denote an inferior status - far from it: the truth telling Gabriel (Jibrāʾīl) had promised her ‘a boy most pure’ [19:19].
The rib is aʿwaj, bent. This, for the Shaykhs, signals her inclination towards him, and towards her children. She cannot stand up, away from them, without the risk of breaking. But there can be no void within him, and thus God creates a yearning. The space within him that craves her is ‘spiritual’, an ‘air’ (hawwāʾ)
God places this love for her in this third lung. Everything of Adam - we might say, his DNA - was complete in that rib. Her derivation from him indicates that they were once ‘a single soul’ [4:1], from which ‘He created its spouse’ [4:1]. He intuits that she, like himself, is after the ‘form of the Real.’ The saintly man or woman thus yearns for union, which is a reconstitution of primal unity, and hence of peace. ‘It is of His signs that He created for you, from your own selves, spouses, that you find peace in them; and He appointed love and mercy between you.’ [30:21]
Man and woman find holy peace in each other, and this, if the ego is put away and Revealed Law is revered, bring them to God’s presence. Yet modernity’s chill wind has filled our lungs with fluid, and chronically afflicted by this pneumonia, our tragedy is that we find it hard to breath the Real’s fragrance in in the presence of a spouse.
— Shaykh ʿAbd al-Ḥakim Murad
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