Ahmad Saad
A Story of Search and Fulfilment
It is never too late to learn; yet, by the time we realise our real need for learning something or knowing about someone, we come to know that we have missed a lot. This is exactly how I felt as I received the news that Shaykh Hassan Abdul-Hakim, better known as Charles Le Gai Eaton or Hassan Le Gai Eaton has passed away.
I was summoned to take care of his final rituals; namely washing his body and preparing him for burial. Out of the blue, it was as if fated to do the job although I had just come to know the man, remotely still, some weeks earlier.
In the sole one visit I paid him only two days before his departure from this world of vanity, I was captivated by the amount of serenity and truth that shaded the man sleeping in his bed waiting for the command of Allah, with a heart full of peace and acceptance. When, on that Friday, happily coinciding with the birthday of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), I got a call telling me that the 90 years old sage had passed away.
I finished my Friday service and rushed to his hospital to fulfil what I was trusted with; taking care of the man’s ritual preparation. Being my first experience to deal with washing the dead body of someone, I was touched not only by the experience, but by the message sent to me from the afterlife through this man ready to meet his Lord. Realising how our bodies are so meaningless; good for nothing apart from being a vehicle for our thirsty soul that looks for a sip from the cup of Divine contentment and connection, I went home with a decision; I must explore the man’s philosophy and unveil the secret of his serenity. I wished I could pay a quick visit to the Hereafter to ask these people about the secrets of life and the secret of death, or at least dreamt someone can pay us a visit from the other world to quench some of our thirst for unveiling this mystery. Of course, the Qur’an tells us a lot about it, but experience is another thing. Fortunate or unfortunate, none has got the chance to travel back to tell us and none of us managed to visit them for a short period; it has always been a one way ticket; a permanent stay, the term ‘returnees from the afterlife’ has not been fulfilled in the world of physical existence, only in our dreams.
I started exploring the man through his last book; and, so fascinated with his style, wisdom and simplicity yet depth, the book was as sticking to my hand as my wedding ring. I decided to introduce this man to people who know him and those who know him not. It is my account of his experience since he has written his own account in his autobiography ‘A Bad Beginning and the Path to Islam’; it is my reflections on this man who inspired many British Muslims to come to Islam and put many well-celebrated Western philosophers to shame.
The Birth of An Agnostic
Born in Switzerland of British parents in the New Year Eve of 1920, Charles Le Gai Eaton, a child of war witnessed the final peace treaty ending the First World War which was signed in Lausanne. Gai was the name his mother, Ruth, picked for him from a hotel chamber maid who, enchanted by the baby’s cheerfulness, exclaimed: “Comme il est gai, ce petit?”
As early as the age of six, the little Gai, who now returned to England, began to wonder what is after all these fences surrounding his house and the neighbouring ones. ‘What is at the end of all this; there must be something, but was there after that something? If there was nothing, how could one imagine nothingness?’ he exclaimed. Driven by this need to know, this mysterious or say primordial longing for the Source and the Destiny, ‘he visualised a steel ladder which ultimately disappeared above the clouds and went on for ever and ever, with platforms at intervals in which the climber could rest, the first only bare boards but the higher ones increasingly comfortable and increasingly beautiful.’ These simple questions in the heart of this innocent child were but what Islam calls fitrah, primordial nature, which, once left untainted will lead, as it did with Gai, to the natural choice of Islam; the religion of submitting the will to Allah. Born away from home, torn between different countries, distributing his early life between England, Switzerland and France, it felt as if he had no homeland. As he himself later observed, ‘this strange childhood was a good preparation for adherence to Islam.’
Looking for the Missed Reality
Later in his life, he continued to cherish this need to know the purpose and the meaning of his own existence; nothing has filled this vacuum; his longing for reality was not quenched by social gatherings and occasions well-attended by bejeweled ladies and fancy-dressed gentlemen. There was something missing. ‘These robes and uniforms are masks. They masked the body, obviously, but they also masked the personality, presenting the individual as a ‘type’ or in terms of a function. But if reality was missing, where then, was the ‘real world’ to be found? That was his question, which he carried with him to Charterhouse as a teenager student and later to Cambridge Kings College as a student of history. Obsessed with the need to discover truth as such, the ultimate Truth, he wondered, ‘how could anyone live their lives in an impenetrable fog of unknowing? This thirst is, of course, an aspect of what makes us human.’ He began to read philosophy and tried Kant, Descartes, Hume, Spinoza, Schopenhauer and Bertrand Russel and got to nothing but being depressed by their mental gymnastics and unfounded faith in logic and reason.
Indeed, many of us, driven by the fact that we are endowed with the ability to think and reason, do place too much trust in our own minds, forgetting or neglecting the fact that these are limited human minds; poor human minds. As Huston Smith puts it out; ‘I am not against science, but I am saying we cannot write science a blank cheque’, I am not against mind, I am merely saying, just remember it is a limited human mind that is bound to stay by the law established by the Creator. Failing to understand things is just another indication of its limitedness; yet, not an excuse to deny them. As Abu Bakr As-Siddiq said: ‘Failing to realise, is in itself realisation’
Life and death were two important things that needed some thinking, and realising that people refuse to think about death although sooner or later, they must die, he came to the conclusion that life itself is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.
Coming to know L. H. Myers, described at his time as the only philosophical novelist England has produced, through his writings and later on corresponding with him, he thought the man must have achieved unshakable peace and was looking for the secret behind it. Yet, later on he wrote to Myers, ‘It seems to me, if I may judge you from your letters, that you have put all the serenity you possess into your books, leaving none for yourself.’ Myers replied; ‘I think your comment was shrewd and probably true.’ The years of war came to put Gai in a new experience and once finished his years in the army, he started writing and his time has come to know Rene Guenon, the French philosopher who embraced Islam and got the name Abdul Wahid Yahya. ‘Guenon undermined and then; with uncompromising intellectual rigour, demolished all the assumptions taken for granted by modern man, that is to say Western or Westernised man. No one who read him and understood him could ever be quite the same again.’ That was the start of Gai’s finding his path.
When he was accepted for a teaching post at Cairo University, something he never expected, it was his time to come and see things himself for real. Gai’s stay in Cairo was not very long yet, it was his moment with his fitrah when he met Martin Lings, known also as Sidi Abu Bakr Siraj Ad-Din who introduced him to Guenon and it did not take him long after weekly visits to his friend Martin Lings to declare his shahadah and announce that he has found his way.
Gai confesses, he made a decision to sow a seed in his heart ‘in the hope that the seed would one day germinate and grow into a healthy plant.’ It did indeed I must say, and the fruits of that healthy ‘tree’ were tasted by many people who found their path following his footsteps, many who came to understand their own faith through his writing, many to whom his person was an inspiration and even at the last minutes of his earthly existence he continued to quench their thirst for the ‘Truth’, the pure enlightening Truth.
References:
A Bad Beginning and the Path to Islam; Gai Eaton, ArcheType
A Story of Conversion by Eaton himself www.salaam.co.uk
on islam
