The secret of the meaning of friend: Khalil

If friendship is a relationship between equal and free people, then the friendship between the absolutely omnipotent God and the servants He Himself created, together with their wills, powers and choices, appears to be a complete enigma. The key that can solve this enigma lies in thoroughly grasping that the feeling and relationship of friendship, too, have been created by God, who creates everything.

God, who created in human beings the will and the capacity to choose to be friends with one another, and who placed this feeling within them, has already determined the whole horizon, the limits, the possibility and every dimension of friendship. When the angels, who had not been given the will to resist Him, received the news about the human being He had decided to create, they expressed their astonishment in these words: "Will You place upon it one who will shed blood, while we exalt You with praise and sanctify You?" Yet God knew what they did not know, and when He taught the names to Adam, whom He had created, and presented them to the angels, their final answer was: "Glory be to You; we have no knowledge except what You have taught us."

To the human being who has been taught the names, the capacity to be, or not to be, a friend of God is also given; this freedom is the basic condition for being a friend. Through the names, the human being is also charged with the desire to know what lies beyond the mere transience of having been created. He experiences the passage between knowing God and knowing himself, and when he lives this experience, by declaring God to be absolutely transcendent, as the absolute Other, he also grasps the horizon and the experience of absolute friendship.

Søren Kierkegaard, one of the philosophers who best examined the philosophy of the friendship of the Prophet Abraham and of the trial on this path of friendship, says that in Christianity God, seeing that humanity could not be raised to the divine, decided to descend to the level of humanity. Of course, the step that makes friendship possible comes from God. But for this the servant too must take a step. When someone draws one step closer, God draws ten steps closer.

Without doubt, the friendship between God and His servant has very typical examples in the lives of all the prophets. But on this subject the friendship of Abraham, who lives up to his name, holds an altogether distinct place for understanding the very nature of friendship.

The attribute Khalil, which has almost become a proper name for Abraham, is a description of his relationship with God Himself. Abraham is Khalilullah, the beloved friend of God.

In truth, he is bound to God, to his Khalil, with complete submission. He confesses all the doubts that occur to him about God's act of creation with the most naive, the purest mind, and asks his questions as one asks a friend. For the sake of his heart's being at peace, he wants to know and to see how a bird that has died and whose body has been torn apart can be brought back to life. It is not out of disbelief; a friend wants to be put at ease by the word of a friend, and he is in a state of comfort in which he can ask in the purest and most sincere way whatever occupies his mind, without fear of being rebuked or blamed. From this state of comfort Abraham asks this, and then, testing in his own mind the power of the false gods imposed on humanity as lords (the sun, the moon), he eliminates them one by one for the sake of his friend.

As someone who grew up in a particular social and historical environment, his mind is of course not a tabula rasa. Yet he is fully open to correcting, with the words of his Lord, Khalil, all the prejudices he carries in that mind.

On the path of his Lord, he sets out together with Him against His enemies, against Nimrod and his men. While he moves together with his Lord, trusting in Him, he has materially no power or means to deal with Nimrod's armies and weapons. That he took on this asymmetric struggle together with Him is itself a sign of his boundless trust in his friend. On this path he is willing to be thrown into the fire and to burn and blaze in the flames of that wood. When he accepts this, he is certain that the burning he will undergo will surely bring a light through the promise of his friend, but he has no prior knowledge that this light will extinguish the fire. Otherwise it would have been a matter of hidden reservations, a staged fight. He never even considered making his friendship with God conditional on a miracle. He had already accepted the burning, becoming ashes for the sake of his friend, but the fact that the fire he agreed to be thrown into did not burn him came about as a gift from God to him. This gift is in fact something that God continually repeats, at every moment, in the life of ordinary people, with the health, the well-being and the blessings He gives.

One of Abraham's heavier trials came through his child. He had shown that there was nothing he could not sacrifice on the path of his Lord, who had made him Khalil, a friend. But towards the end of his life, the preoccupation with the child that had been given to him, again as a gift from Him, had come between this friendship. For Abraham, who had been able to give up everything else for the friend, the time had come to be tested with the heaviest of trials, to be tested with this one and only, beloved child as well.

Satan whispers doubts about whether what is asked of him is really based on certain knowledge. On the way to the sacrifice, at Aqaba, he deals with every kind of factor, whisper, ideology and piece of advice that tries to lead him astray from his path, to dissuade and tempt him away from this heavy burden of trial. He overcomes them all and closes all the gaps between himself and his Khalil, and clears out whatever has slipped in between (one meaning of the word khalil is "gaps"; another meaning, through its derivatives, is a fermenting process, the fusion experienced in togetherness, and the way this fusion creates an intimacy among friends, the removal of whatever has slipped in between), until he removes even his one and only child from between himself and his friend.

Just as when he was thrown into Nimrod's fire, here too, as Abraham puts the knife to Ishmael's throat, he of course does not know that a ram will come to him from heaven. Abraham's attachment to his child should not have separated him from the path of being a friend to the truth, nor drawn him away or led him astray. Here there is also a strong indication that blood ties cannot take the place of friendship. The friendship that a person can choose, decide on and prefer is not like the brotherhood or the sonship that he cannot choose; it is superior to it. Indeed, it is far more important that blood ties do not take the place of the friend. But in any case human life does not consist solely of friends or of friendships. Other things that slip in between, that become a khalil, require a ransom.

One must be ready to pay this ransom. And when one is ready, the friend does not leave the ransom to you anyway; He pays it Himself. After all, giving gifts among friends is in the nature of friendship.

God Himself pays the ransom corresponding to His friend's child, and thus Khalil Abraham, having successfully passed the heaviest trial of friendship, becomes the secret of the meaning of friend.