Qayyum: Grander half of my father’s name
We sat outside Hinduja Hospital, my father and I, waiting. The report was coming and we both knew what it would say. The doctors had been careful with their words, in that way doctors are careful when there is nothing left to soften. Prostate cancer. Terminal. The words were somewhere inside the building, sealed in an envelope, and so we had come outside to sit by the sea. I am not sure which of us suggested it. Perhaps neither. Perhaps that is simply where we found ourselves, the way people find themselves standing at windows when they do not know what else to do with their bodies. The Arabian Sea moved the way it always moves, forward and back, forward and back, with no interest in what was happening to us on the shore. My father was quiet. I was quiet. There was nothing left to perform for each other. The waves had been doing this long before we arrived and would go on doing it long after. In its terrible way, it was an honest morning. I had read Martin Lings before that day but I had not really taken him in until I was sitting there with my father watching the water. In What is Sufism?, Lings opens with the image of a wave. From time to time, he writes, a Revelation flows like a great tidal wave from the Ocean of Infinitude to the shores of our finite world, and Sufism is the vocation and the discipline and the science of plunging into the ebb of one of these waves and being drawn back with it to its Eternal and Infinite Source. The flow is the descent into form. Into a name, a body, a particular life in a particular time. A man is born. He grows into his years the way water takes the shape of what contains it. But Lings reminds us that the water which the wave leaves behind in the hollows of the shore is not the whole story. The mystic, he says, is the one preoccupied not with what the wave deposits but with the wave itself as it pulls back. The ebb. The return. The soul, Lings writes, like water held in forms, is not essentially different from the transcendent Spirit of which it is a prolongation, like a hand held out and then, eventually, withdrawn. I did not know, sitting with my father that morning, that I was watching the beginning of the withdrawal. There is something I had wrong for thirty-five years and I find it difficult to account for, except that the heart hears what it wants to hear. My father’s name. I had always understood it through its grander half. Al-Qayyum is one of the ninety-nine Beautiful Names of Allah, the Asma ul-Husna. It appears in the Ayat al-Kursi, the Verse of the Throne, paired with Al-Hayy, the Ever-Living: Al-Hayy ul-Qayyum. The word comes from the Arabic root q-w-m, to stand, to sustain, to hold everything in existence. Allah is not merely living. He is the ground of all living, the one upon whom all things depend for their continued being. Nothing stands except through His standing. I heard my father called Qayyum Sahib for thirty-five years and somewhere in that time I let myself feel, without ever quite saying it, that the name was a kind of permanence. That it meant something protective. The Everlasting one. Here. With us. I had simply ignored reading the first part of his name, Abdul. From ‘abd: slave, servant, the one who submits, the one who belongs entirely to another. In Arabic, when ‘abd is joined to one of the Divine Names, it is not a claim. It is a direction. It tells you not what a man is but toward whom he has been oriented since before he could speak. Abdul Qayyum does not mean he is the Everlasting. It means he is the servant of the Everlasting. Not the ocean. The wave. How different the name became when I finally read it whole. He was held, all his life, by the One who holds all things. His death was not the extinguishing of anything eternal. It was the servant being called back to his Master. The hand withdrawn from the receptacle. The report said what we already knew. My father received the news with the quiet of a man who had, somewhere inside himself, already settled this. He told me the doctors would still give him some treatment. Then he asked, almost to himself as much as to me, a curt question: what did I think a medical treatment was? He answered it himself before I could speak. “It is to delay the end,” he said. “Bear in mind the end has to come.” I cannot tell you what passed through him in those moments beyond that, because he was not a man who spread his inner life out for others to see, and that was one of the things about him I most respected. I think of him now the way Lings speaks of the one turned toward the ebb. Not someone who had fled the world. He had worked in it, built a life in it, raised children, carried burdens, suffered as people suffer. But oriented, underneath all of it, toward the Source. The servant of the Everlasting, making his way back to the Everlasting. The sea did not change when we got up and went inside. It is still doing what it does. Inna Lillahi wa Inna Ilayhi Raji’oon. Truly we belong to Allah, and truly to Him we shall return. This verse from Surah Al-Baqarah is said at the moment of loss but it is not really about death. It is about ownership. It is the acknowledgement, plain and final, that what we thought we held was always held for us, not by us. A son does not own his father. A shore does not own its wave. We said these words for him. We say them still. And the sea goes on, forward and back, carrying everything that ever rode upon it, returning it all, in the fullness of time, to where it came from. Syed Abdul Qayyum breathed his last on 11th July 1996. Syed Ahfadul Mujtaba, Retired IGP, Former Member J&K Public Service Commission
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