Voices of Islam (194 page)

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situated; it is in Islamic esoterism that certain Christly themes reappear, not in their historical or dogmatic content, but as patterns of the contemplative life.

THE
MINBAR

The Arabic term
al-jami‘,
which means literally ‘‘what brings together,’’ refers to a mosque where the Friday prayers are celebrated together. The term has sometimes been translated ‘‘cathedral mosque,’’ since, as a general rule, it is only mosques of this order which have a
cathedra,
a pulpit, called
minbar
in Arabic. The question remains to what extent the
minbar
corre- sponds to a bishop’s chair, or even to a king’s throne. Actually, it is neither the one nor the other, or it is both at the same time, since it is in some way an image of the Prophet’s function and then of the function of his Caliphs, and thus unites in itself both spiritual authority and temporal power.

The prototype of the
minbar
is a sort of stepped stool which the Prophet used in his mosque at Medina to talk to the assembled faithful. According to certain traditional authorities, this stool had three levels. The Prophet sat on the third level and rested his feet on the second. After him, Abu Bakr, the first caliph, sat on the second level and rested his feet on the first. ‘Umar, the second caliph, took his seat on the fi level and placed his feet on the ground. The hierarchical sense of the levels is clear.

According to other sources, the original
minbar
at Medina had six steps. The oldest surviving
manabir
(plural of
minbar
) have from seven to eleven steps, and this multiplication of levels is easily explained by the custom which requires the
imam
to preach his Friday sermon from one of the
minbar’s
lower levels. He stands up to speak, head and shoulders covered in a white cloth and a staff in his hand. Between the two canonical sections of the sermon, exhortation of the faithful and praise of the Prophet, he sits briefly on the nearest step. The upper steps of the
minbar,
and in particular the top one, which is adorned with a headboard in the manner of a throne, are left empty; they recall the preeminent function of the Prophet.

The overall shape of the
minbar
bespeaks the continuity of tradition; it always takes the form of a staircase, fairly narrow and nearly always enclosed by handrails. Since the Seljuk period, this simple structure has been supple- mented by a canopy sheltering the topmost level and by a doorway at the foot of the stairs. These additions have simply accentuated the
minbar
’s symbol- ism, which corresponds to the ladder of the worlds—the most broadly spaced levels are the corporeal world, the psychic world, and the world of pure spirit—and to the throne as a ‘‘polar’’ station. None of these points of signifi- cance was added later; they result logically from the first action of the Prophet in choosing a stool with three steps to preside over the assembled believers.

The fact that the uppermost level of the
minbar,
the throne sheltered by its canopy, remains empty, is strangely reminiscent of the awaiting throne that, in

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both Buddhism and Christianity, represents the unseen presence of the
Logos
or of the
Tathagatha
or, in other terms, the unseen presence of the Divine Messenger. But this is certainly not a case of an influence coming from outside Islam, but of a coincidence due to the universal character of symbolism.

TOMBS

That a great many mausoleums are found in Islamic lands is something of a paradox, for the glorifi ation of the dead is foreign to the spirit of Islam. ‘‘The most beautiful tomb,’’ said the Prophet, ‘‘is one that vanishes from the face of the earth’’; and the Qur’an says ‘‘All who are upon it [the earth] are fleeting, and there abides only the face of thy Lord full of majesty and generosity’’ (Qur’an 55:26–27). This paradox is explicable by two factors that are in a way ineluctable, the first of which is the ambition of sovereigns to perpetuate their names; implying as it does a wish for personal glory, this ambition is perhaps not altogether Islamic but it is, after all, fairly natural and it is made legitimate by the hope that the soul of the deceased shall ben- efit from the prayers offered up for it by the visitors to the tomb. The second factor closely follows the first and consists of the wish of the community of believers to honor the saints, whom they see as the true kings of the earth as much as, or more than, princes. The proliferation of princely mausoleums coincides historically with the coming to power of the Seljuks who, perhaps, retained and transposed the funeral customs of their Central Asian ancestors, for their tombs greatly resemble ceremonial
yourts.
In the same period, that is, from the twelfth to the fourteenth century, the general veneration of saints, among both people and sovereigns, reached its defi form with the organization of Sufism—the mysticism of Islam—into orders or brother- hoods, each with its chain of founding or renovating masters. The Muslim saint (
wali
) is nearly always a contemplative whose state of spiritual perfection fi permanent expression in the teaching bequeathed to his disciples. To this bequest, to a greater or lesser degree esoteric, there is generally super- added the spontaneous veneration of the people, and it is this that affects his ‘‘canonization,’’ and not some ecclesiastical institution. We have no hesi- tation in translating the Arabic term
wali Allah,
literally ‘‘friend of God,’’ by the word ‘‘saint,’’ for what is understood by the one term as much as by the other is a man who has become the object and instrument of a divine grace. What is sought at the tomb of a
wali
is his
baraka,
his ‘‘blessing’’ or spiritual infl ence, which remains active and is in a way linked with the corporeal remains of a man who was in life a recipient, as it were, of the Divine Pres- ence. Moreover, the saint is not thought of as being dead, but as mysteriously alive, according to this passage from the Qur’an: ‘‘Say not of them that were killed in the path of God that they are dead; they are alive, but ye perceive not’’ (Qur’an 2:154). This verse refers in its most immediate sense to those

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who fall in the holy war, and many of the tombs venerated are in fact
martyria
(
mashahid
), burial places of those who fought against the enemies of Islam. But since the Prophet described the struggle against the passions of the soul as ‘‘the greatest holy war’’ (
al-jihad al-akbar
), this verse applies
a priori
to all those who have sacrifi their lives to the contemplation of God. The veneration of saints is, moreover, a kind of refl tion of the veneration accorded to the Prophet, whose tomb at Medina is second as a place of pilgrimage only to the sanctuary of Mecca.

Whereas the mausoleums of princes were usually built by the persons who expected to repose in them, those of saints were the gift either of their disciples or of sovereigns, like the famous tomb of Salim Chishti at Fatehpur Sikri built by the Emperor Akbar, or of the nameless common people.

Besides the mausoleums of princes and the tombs of saints, there are the funerary monuments dedicated to descendants of the Prophet. Their architectural forms give all these monuments an equal dignity; the mausoleum of a great conqueror like Tamerlane is simply a glorification of God, and the tomb of one of ‘‘God’s poor’’ often stands as a token of homage to his spiritual kingship.

The interior of a mausoleum generally contains a cenotaph indicating the spot where the deceased is buried, or laid to rest, in a crypt of indeterminate depth. There is also a
mihrab
showing the direction of Mecca, but so placed that persons at prayer shall not face the tomb.

Mausoleums of princes are occasionally grouped around the tomb of a saint in such a way as to constitute, together with all the more humble graves that come to be placed near by, veritable ‘‘cities of the dead’’ like the necropolis of Shah-i-Zindah (‘‘The Living King’’) at Samarqand or that of the Mamluk tombs at Cairo. These ‘‘cities of the dead’’ have nothing mournful or sad about them; as in all Muslim cemeteries, the dominant note is serenity.

There is one architectural formula that has come to be most prevalently used for relatively simple mausoleums, namely, the cube crowned with a cupola, the transition between the two usually being mediated by a polygon. Funerary buildings of this sober form predominate in Muslim cemeteries and rise as landmarks on the edges of the desert and the seacoasts from the Atlantic to India. Often whitened with lime, they attract the eye from afar and hold it by their image of an equilibrium that reconciles heaven with earth.

THE ART OF APPAREL

We have alluded to the liturgical role of clothing. Let us make clear that there are no priestly vestments in Islam because, properly speaking, there is no priesthood; but neither is there any clothing that is Muslim and profane. What determines Muslim costume in general is fi of all the
Sunna,
the

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example given by the Prophet, and second, the fact that clothing must suit the movements and positions of the prescribed prayers. It is in this latter respect that Imam Malik condemns clothing that clings to the body; in fact the traditional clothing of all Muslim peoples is distinguished by its ample cut; it conceals the body, or part of the body, at the same time as adapting itself to the body’s movements.

The example given by the Prophet amounts to no more than a few guide- lines that permit a great deal of liberty in the art of dress, while indicating the limits set, on the one hand, by spiritual poverty and, on the other, by the dignity of the
Imam,
which pertains in principle to every Muslim of male sex and mature years. It is known that the Prophet took the occasion to wear clothes of various colors and various places of origin as if to demonstrate that Islam would spread to different ethnic surroundings; however, he preferred white and rejected excessively sumptuous materials, while insisting on the need for certain of his Companions to mark their rank and standing in the community. He forbade men to wear gold ornaments or silken robes, reserving these for women. Gold is by its nature sacred, and Islam reserves it for the domain which is, for Islam,
sacratum (haram) par excellence,
that of woman, conjugal love, and family life sheltered from all public gaze.

It is fashionable to question the authenticity of traditions extolling the wearing of the turban. Now whether the saying ‘‘the turban is the crown of Islam’’ is the word of the Prophet or not, this saying is, in any case, expressive of the inherent signifi ance of this item of manly apparel, which proclaims both the majesty of the believer who is ‘‘God’s representative on earth’’ and his submission (
islam
) to God’s will. In the Semitic environment, it is always a token of reverential fear to keep the head covered, no doubt because to expose it to the sun is symbolically equivalent to exposing it to the divine rigor. It may well be suggested that the turban became an integral part of Muslim costume because it was worn by the Arabian Bedouins, but this is not proved nor, for that matter, does it disprove our point. It was only natu- ral that Arab costume should have been spread by the Islamic conquests, but the positive value of this phenomenon lies in the simple fact that the Prophet had taken over certain Arabian and Bedouin customs, rectifying them and transposing them into a spiritual ordinance. It is extremely probable that loosely cut garments, which are eminently suitable for the desert climate with its extremes of temperature, are of Arab origin, and one can be certain that garments of very simple cut like the
‘aba’a,
or the seamless
ha’ik
that covers the head and shoulders, are of nomadic origin. It is perhaps the Maghribi costume—a long tunic, a rectangular robe with or without sleeves, burnous, and turban wrapped in a
litham
—that constitutes the most typically Arab and Muslim style, for it sits equally well on the scholar of Islamic sciences, the warrior chief, and the man of the people. Its beauty and dignity are at one with its simplicity. In the Islamic East, Turkish and Mongol influences are responsible for a greater diversity in forms of dress, which, however, are never

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incompatible with the general Islamic style of apparel; a host of Muslim pilgrims from the most diverse countries is always recognizably a host of Muslims.

We are considering masculine garb in particular, for women’s dress has far less unity since it is made for life at home, and women go veiled in the streets. Feminine garb is happy to hold on to certain items of a regional character and to retain occasional forms of apparel of great antiquity, such as the robe made from a single piece of unstitched cloth, draped around the body and held together by two clasps at the shoulders, which is found in particular among certain tribes in the Sahara.

Men’s garb in Islamic countries makes for the effacement of social differen- ces, with the exception of certain extravagances of dress deriving either from princely courts or, again, from groups of ascetics who have cut themselves off from the world. These latter may well follow the example of the Prophet, who occasionally wore a robe made up of pieces of cloth stitched together.

The art of apparel is made all the more important in Islamic countries by the absence of any human image; it is the art of clothing that in a way conveys the Muslim’s ideal image of himself as a Muslim. There is, moreover, no art that has a more telling effect on a man’s soul than that of clothing, for a man instinctively identifi himself with the clothes he wears. It is vain to say that ‘‘the habit does not make the monk’’; in a certain sense there is no monk without an appropriate habit.