The word Sunna, meaning the Practice, derives from the root SNN, meaning 'to form'. It is nothing less than the form of man, that is, man as a living social organism, man in his wholeness. Any mechanistic or legal idea from your Judaic or Christian background must be removed before you can open to this reality which is utterly organic, physical and metaphysical, a spontaneous human creature in harmony with his creation being the end result, and not an inhibited and outwardly controlled animal. The error of the Jews was not that they failed to obey the Law, but that they turned what was a scientific Law about man – that is, if you do this, that happens – into a legalistic structure exterior to and imposed on man. The error of the Jews made it inevitable that when the existential reality of lawfulness, in its organic sense, the Messiah, appeared, they could not recognise him. So involved were they with the theory, they failed to identify the practice in a living and perfect exemplar. The error of the Christians was its counterpart – so determined were they to enshrine the metaphysical aspect of man's nature, so terrified were they of losing the secret of man's glory, that they felt obliged to enshrine it in a Mystery, in symbol and ritual, letting its protectors be an elite whose raison d'etre was to guard the Secret, until in the end these men did not feel obliged to respond to the social obligations of the teaching, so that they became immoral and corrupt in the name of the perfect Teacher. These two attitudes are what may be understood as 'religion', they are the forms that bind together (religio) a people in an exploitation that must inevitably lead to tyranny.

In the world of forms there is no god.

This is not absolutely over that. Allah is not, in this declaration of the Messenger, presented as the ground of being or as the infra-structure, nor is It presented as being identical with the totality of forms.

What we are presented with is an uncompromising affirmation of Unity. One reality, of which the forms are but appearances. The forms are certainly taken seriously and there is a whole science of how to be among forms, how to view them and treat them, including your own. But in affirming the One reality the forms are negated.

No god. Only Allah.

Properly speaking the Messenger, blessings and peace of Allah be upon him, abolished the state as the model of societal order. This does not mean he established either anarchy or some kind of mystic individualism, like Buddhism. Where the state was based on canon law and the imposition of order by force, empowered by taxation, the new order established in Madinah was altogether different. The Islamic community is itself a freely chosen social contract of believers who agree to live within its parameters. The proper translation of Shari'at is a road.

Abu Huraira reported the Messenger as saying, 'When a submitted one or a trusting one washes his face in the course of wudu every wrong action he contemplated with his eyes will come out from his face along with the water or with the last drop of water. When he washes his hands every wrong action they did will come out from his hands with the water or with the last drop of water. And when he washes his feet every wrong action towards which his feet have walked will come out with the water, or with the last drop of water, with the result that he will come out pure from offences.' Muslim transmitted it.

It is clear from this that what we are dealing with is a process of effective purification that is suited to man. Every creature has its grooming pattern. The cat's grooming is formal and an essential part of its life. The sign of an animal in captivity losing its life pattern and becoming ill is when it ceases to groom itself. This act of wudu is in quite the same way necessary to man. It is in the nature of the human creature that he imagines his actions adhere to him as idea-forms which he 'carries about with him' until this imaginary load makes life intolerable for him and he breaks under it. The man who has cast aside any recognition of an Unseen reality, and who has rejected any belief in a unified benign energy governing the total existence of the cosmos is, unsurprisingly, far from being liberated from this unfortunate tendency to hold to the idea-form of his actions and to feel burdened by his own illusory selfhood, which to him is nothing other than this accretion of mistakes and misfortunes on the one hand, and triumphs and pleasures on the other. Wudu by its acting upon the surface of the organism at the same time as upon the experiencing centre repeatedly makes a break in consciousness between action and the nafs. Actions have no reality. This is the shock impact of this first ritual action of the Way. The wudu in its turn, according to the Hadith, is useless unless accompanied by this vital inner awareness. That is why in the execution of the wudu, it is essential that there be vocalisation of the Supreme Name, for the act of calling on the Reality during the act is a guide to unifying the outward and the inward aspects of the event. When someone begins the practice of wudu, they will find that there are two basic tendencies of malpractice, one is to be careless and undefined in the separate acts of each state of the washing, and the other is to go through the whole process in slow motion, caressingly as if anointing oneself. Either of these extremes must be scrupulously avoided until the mean is discovered, filling the act with both vigour and dignity and remaining somehow anonymous, so that your doing of it resembles that of the person next to you. There is no individuality in any of the basic practices.

All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development - in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent god became the omnipotent lawgiver - but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. Only by being aware of this analogy can we appreciate the manner in which the philosophical ideas of the state developed in the last centuries.

Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if he were mad enough to do what the other man or woman is doing.