On Unification

2:260 (Quran)

The story of Ibrahim and his request to Allah to see the dead brought to life is awesome in its own right. He asks Allah to show him that He can resurrect the dead. In response, Allah tasks him with splitting a dead bird into 4 pieces and to subsequently place each piece on separate mountains (a tedious task, one might say). Then, in a stunning display of His Awesomeness, Allah accelerates the pieces together into a single living, beating bird.

Besides an obvious demonstration of Allah’s omnipotence, perhaps this unification this similar to how Allah revives dead hearts. Our hearts are everywhere; they are scattered and diluted by the mountains of the dunya (money, women, etc.). But when one sincerely turns to his heart (uduhunn), Allah will facilitate its unification. By tilting our heart singularly to Allah as one unified whole, we are resurrected from our morbid material attachments and allowed to transcend. We soar and sing like the birds, rising above the mountains, whose heights we once thought were by themselves insurmountable. Gravity, however, is no problem for the bird. Its home is the heavens.

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