Mullah, let rip
Your glorious call to prayer.
You are yourself a mosque
With ten doors.

Make your mind your Mecca,
Make your Kaaba your body
Know your Self itself
Is the Supreme Beloved.

In Allah’s name, slaughter
Your rage and mistakes and impurity
Chew up your rogue senses
Become a patient human.

The Lord of Hindus and Muslims
Is one and the same–
Why call yourself a mullah?
Why bother to become a sheikh?

Kabir says: Call me crazy
If you want, but my mind
Like a thief–
Quietly, so quietly–
Has slid into the simple state.

-Kabir, translated by Andrew Harvey in Engoldenment: A Year With Kabir pg. 311

“Call Me Crazy” A Poetic Analysis

This glorious poem of Kabir’s begins with two lines that could have been considered sacrilege. Roughly 500 years earlier, Al-Ḥallāj (the great Sufi poet) was executed for saying more or less the same thing, though with somewhat less tact. He simply said, “Anā al-ḥaqq” which means “I am the truth,” or “I am God.”

Perhaps Kabir learned from this and substituted the pronoun “You” for “I.” Either way, they mean the same thing. If one person is the Truth, or God, (or Ram-Allah as Kabir would sometimes refer to the Holy One), then we all are. The message Kabir brings in this poem is not so different from that of Al-Ḥallāj, or from the “good news” of Jesus, for that matter. All are telling us that the divine is within us. It is all already right here.

Mullah, let rip
Your glorious call to prayer.
You are yourself a mosque
With ten doors.

“Let rip/Your glorious call to prayer.” A call to prayer, Kabir is saying, is not something soft and sweet, or something idle. To call to prayer, you must “let it rip,” as they say. You must allow all of your passion to be channeled into longing. Only then can you truly call for prayer. It is exactly this abandoned passion that he praises as “glorious.”

The “ten doors” refers to the nine openings of the physical body, plus the spiritual opening at the top of the skull which occurs during direct realization of the divine. While for most people, the tenth door stays closed, all of us have the capacity to open it through mystical practice.

Make your mind your Mecca,
Make your Kaaba your body
Know your Self itself
Is the Supreme Beloved.

In the second stanza, Kabir says something even more revolutionary. “Make your Kaaba your body.” The Kaaba, of course, is the most sacred site in Islam, the place to which all Muslims who are able are obligated to go on pilgrimage at least once in their lives. Kabir doesn’t just say “The Kaaba is within you.” This would be wonderful, but it also wouldn’t have departed much from the nondualist schools of thought during his time. Kabir is much more revolutionary than that. He calls specifically to make your body the holiest of places.

In the west, we might interpret this along the lines of the saying, “Your body is your temple.” But I believe Kabir is saying something much more amazing than that. As an evolutionary mystic, Kabir frequently talks about the body as the site of sacred transformation. A seeker does not simply realize God in the transcendent aspect, but rather brings that realization down into the body itself so fully that its very cells are transformed.

This is radical now, but it was even more radical in Varanasi in the fifteenth century, when Kabir lived. The vast majority of mystical, cultural, and religious traditions were transcendentalist – dismissing the body as the obstacle to liberation. Harsh ascetic practices were praised. At best, the body was treated as an instrument to be used for getting out of the body and into the transcendent realms. At worst, it was demonized and degraded. This remains true in many ways, both in India and in the Western world.

In Allah’s name, slaughter
Your rage and mistakes and impurity
Chew up your rogue senses
Become a patient human.

In the third stanza, Kabir makes it clear that to truly “Make your mind your Mecca/Make your Kaaba your body” requires great discipline. The divine is here now, yes, but in order to realize it requires dedication. Rage, mistakes, impurity – all must go. In its place? His instruction is simple enough. “Become a patient human.”

The Lord of Hindus and Muslims
Is one and the same–
Why call yourself a mullah?
Why bother to become a sheikh?

In the fourth stanza, he erases the ego’s identification with tradition, religion, education, standing in society, and the rest. As a universal mystic, Kabir did not teach within the confines of one tradition, but rather recognized all paths as paths to the divine.

He undoubtedly heard many rebukes by both Muslims and Hindus who considered their tradition to have exclusive rights God. Many of his poems shake off the distinctions between the two religions – the members of which were so often at odds – and matter-of-factly point out that they worship the same God under different names. He says these things brusquely, as if he is saying, “Get over yourselves.”

Kabir says: Call me crazy
If you want, but my mind
Like a thief–
Quietly, so quietly–
Has slid into the simple state.

The final stanza is wholly different from the rest – and it can only be read after the ego-pulverizing fourth stanza. Here, he invites us directly into the silence itself. He refers to this experience only as “The simple state,” which is as good a name as any.

I imagine Kabir barking the first four stanzas of this poem out towards a ragged collection of disciples who just can’t get into their heads that God is beyond all thought, all religion, all concept. And in their stunned, shattered state, he gently – and not without a little mischief – invites us in to the simple state where we experience God directly.