Extended Article
“Submission as Science”
by Victor Sinow
Spring 2026 Column
Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim
Blessings of renewal with the arrival of Spring. In this edition, we look at a discipline common to both science and spirituality: the act of coming to know a law so completely that the law becomes an extension of one’s own action. In science, this is how the impossible becomes ordinary: flight, orbit, and the moon under our feet. In the teachings of Shah Nazar Seyyed Dr. Ali Kianfar and Seyyedeh Dr. Nahid Angha, it is how the seeker is transformed. The operation is the same – submission.
Begin, as an experiment, with the scientist. “How do you submit to the law?” Seyyedeh Dr. Nahid Angha asks. “Once you know the law, you don’t fight it. You learn and follow the teachings. Science is based on knowing and submitting to the law – then understanding as deeply as possible.”
Consider what this has meant for flight. For most of human history, we looked up and tried: we climbed, we jumped, and we built machines that never left the ground. Leonardo da Vinci drew wings that never carried him. We wished to fly, and we fell. Then Newton made gravity legible, and across the 19th century the laws of motion and lift became known – and once we stopped fighting those laws and instead learned to work with them, we flew. We orbited. We landed on the moon. Gravity was never the enemy; it was the precondition.
This is the scientist’s submission: not a lowering of the self, but the disciplined act of coming to know a law so completely that the law’s creative power becomes available. “Scientist and law become one,” Dr. Angha teaches. “Whatever the law creates, the scientist creates because they are the one.”
This is the shape of the scientist’s work. The seeker performs the same operation, but on a different law: the law that governs the self. To understand this law, Dr. Kianfar begins with the Qur’anic account of Adam. Adam, he teaches, is the pure, abstract part of every human being, the side of the self that is not the body. Surah Al-Baqarah describes Adam’s first meeting with his Lord:
“Then learnt Adam from his Lord words of inspiration, and his Lord Turned towards him; for He is Oft-Returning, Most Merciful.” (Qur’an 2:37)
What are these “words of inspiration”? They are the seeker’s version of the scientist’s equation. Just as Newton’s law of gravitation is not a description about the world, but the pattern by which the world actually moves, so the Word is not information about the divine, but the very structure by which the abstract self is constituted.
And just as the scientist must submit to the equation – returning to it, working with it, until it becomes second nature – the seeker must do the corresponding work with the Word. This practice is called Zekr: the quiet, disciplined repetition of a name or phrase received from a teacher. Zekr is not recitation, and it is not affirmation. “The Word acts upon the self as a magnet’s energy acts upon iron,” Shah Nazar Seyyed Dr. Ali Kianfar teaches. “A new movement begins in the heart.” He describes that movement as a longing: the body suddenly felt as too confining, like a bird in a cage sensing the open air and wanting to be free. How this longing then ripples through the heart is a larger subject; here we stay with the earlier moment: the act of submission itself.
And in the second half of the verse, something striking happens: when Adam has received the Words, his Lord turns toward him. The law responds. The scientist knows this experience. The equation that was opaque, after submission, becomes generative. The seeker knows the same reciprocity. To submit is to be met.
What this meeting feels like from within – the aligned heart, the antenna tuned to the divine frequency, the resonance of an inner life pulled into phase with an outer reality – is territory past editions of this column have explored. This article sits earlier in that chain. Before alignment, there is the act of bending toward the law. Before the heart can be tuned, it must be willing to be tuned. Zekr is that willingness, made rhythmic: a daily practice of submitting before what is vast, so that vastness can work upon the self.
Dr. Angha describes the culmination: “The Sufi becomes one with the law and can be blended with the Creator. The one who knows, knows. One dissolves into the existence that remains.” The parallel with the scientist is exact. The scientist who has fully absorbed a natural law no longer reaches for first principles in the moment of use – her hands move with the law, and the experiment resolves before the calculation catches up. So it is with the seeker. Having fully absorbed the Word, she no longer struggles toward it – the Word carries her.
Spring is a good time to notice this. The bud does not argue with the season. It submits, and becomes the flower. Blessings on the work of renewal.