Elżbieta Wnuk-Lisowska

Khadir, or Khwaja Khadir (Khizr, Khezr, Arabic: “green”, “greenish”), Green Prophet (green symbolising “freshness” and new life) is a popular and familiar fi gure across Arabic countries, Iran, Afghanistan, Central Asia, India and the Far East. The complex and mysterious fi gure of Khezr is connected with Idris, Elijah, Enoch, Saint George, and Skanda, and is associated with the water, cave, and immortality (he lives on an island or upon a green carpet in the heart of the sea, or else in the far northern country called Yuh, which seems to be an earthly paradise). Khezr is reputedly the only soul who has gained life immortal from tasting the Fountain of Life. He is still alive and continues to guide those who invoke his name. In popular Islamic lore Green Prophet is also the mysterious guide, an angel, the immortal saint and the hidden initiator of those who walk the mystical path. He appears in Sura 18, 66 (Al Kalf, “The Cave”) where together with Moses he goes on a long journey to a point where two rivers met. But his wisdom surpasses that of Moses, and has rather a tinge of gnosis, the character of divine wisdom imparted by God to the Prophet Muhammad and the Prophet Khidr.

Philosophical discourse in Islam revolves around God, and God’s manifestation in the world. This article attempts to describe the philosophical concept, and especially the Sufi concept, of God. For Muslim philosophers the question “how does unity give rise to multiplicity?”had a crucial meaning. In Islam God is One, and everything else is two or more. The Oneness of being remains inaccessible to people. However, Sufi s tried to give an answer to the question “What is Reality? What is the ‘face of God’, and what does this notion really mean?”And also “what veils separate Him from His creation?”Sufi s tried to find the answer to all these questions not in the calm of a library but in deep religious experience. Because God in His mercy revealed the Laws in order that people would be able to make choices which lead directly to their felicity in the next stage of their experience. This was a difficult and dangerous process, and it required from neophytes a love of God. In their searches, the Sufi s try to answer the question of what one sees when one throws off the inhibiting shackles of the mind and senses, what does one feel when one crosses the border of the phenomenal world? What kind of world does one observe when one wakes up from a dream which is life? What does one see in the state of illumination?