Kun Fayakun — Be, and It Is
The Teaching
His command, when He wills a thing, is only to say to it: Be — and it is. — Qur’an, Surah Ya-Sin 36:82
The Qur’an is the Word of God — Kalam Allah — uncreated and eternal. It did not begin with Muhammad’s reception of it. It always was. What he received was the eternal Word making itself heard in human language, as it had spoken through the prophets before him.
Kun fayakun. Be, and it is. The single utterance through which all creation proceeds. The universe is not the product of divine labor. It is the consequence of a word still being spoken.
Commentary
Kun fayakun — “Be, and it is” — is the Quranic formula for creation, and it recurs through the text as the basic mechanism of how things come to be. God does not assemble or construct. God speaks, and what is spoken exists. The creative act is an utterance.
The doctrine of the Quran as Kalam Allah, the uncreated and eternal Word, is the closest thing in the Abrahamic world to John’s Logos and to the Kabbalistic teaching of the creative letters. The book, in this understanding, is not a record of God’s will but the eternal vocabulary of reality itself, always already present, received by Muhammad as it had been received before him.
The Sufis pressed it further. Ibn Arabi’s tajalli — divine self-disclosure — describes the cosmos as the continuous speech of God, the Word spoken at every instant rather than once at the beginning. Every appearance is God speaking. Creation is not behind us; it is the standing present of the divine utterance. It is John 1 in Arabic, and Nada Brahma in another cosmology, and the thing McKenna heard, reached this time through the Quran rather than the Amazon.
Themes
Connections 10
Arose apart
Both took shape before Christianity and Sufism were in documented contact (from 700 CE).
Unsure
No documented reading of Sufism by Terence McKenna.
Unsure
Sustained exchange between Hindu and Sufi thought is documented in South Asia (al-Biruni, the Chishti order, Dara Shikoh), not for Sufis elsewhere. Any line to this teaching is unknown.
Unsure
Hermeticism and Sufism were in contact, but no influence of Sufism on Hermeticism is documented. Hermes was identified with the prophet Idris, and Hermetic texts circulated in Arabic.
Arose apart
Both took shape before Hermeticism and Sufism were in documented contact (from 800 CE).
Unsure
The Egyptian Sufi Dhu’l-Nun al-Misri (d. 861) was said to read hieroglyphs. Argued.
Travelled
Sufism reached Judaism by 1080 CE. Bahya ibn Paquda’s Duties of the Heart (c. 1080) draws on Sufi ethics, and Abraham Maimonides (13th c.) led a Jewish Sufi circle in Egypt.