Voices of Islam (208 page)

As to Solomon’s second test, which serves to demonstrate why Bilqis could not recognize her throne, the meaning remains much the same as in the alle- gorical interpretation. Here, however, what seems to be present but is in fact absent is the Truth as Object, whereas it is rather a question of Truth in the sense of Subjective Reality. In either case, we are reminded of the already- quoted verse that likens the works of disbelievers to ‘‘a mirage in the desert that the thirsty man supposes to be water.’’ It will be understood from this and the other examples given of the symbolism of water why Solomon’s strat- egy is so powerfully successful. When Bilqis lifts up her robes to avoid wetting them and steps onto the glass pavement of the court, the sudden contact of her foot with the opposite of what it had expected is directly sensed as the experience of error, which is enough in itself to produce a profound ‘‘alchemical’’ effect upon the soul. But this effect is aggravated beyond all measures by her consciousness that the error is, precisely, about water. Thus, her whole outlook, already shaken by her fi mistake, is transformed in a moment from heresy to orthodoxy by the shock of discovering the ‘‘water’’ to be absent, where she had believed it to be present. In her saying, ‘‘I surren- der with Solomon,’’ these last two words are an indication that her surrender is to be understood in the same highest sense as his surrender—namely, the effacement of the self before the Self, which is the condition of his Gnosis.

NOTES

This chapter first appeared in Martin Lings,
Symbol and Archetype: A Study of the Meaning of Existence
(Louisville, Kentucky: Fons Vitae, 2005). Slight editorial changes have been made to the original for consistency of style and for purposes of clarification. The general editor of this set thanks Virginia Gray Henry-Blakemore of Fons Vitae for permission to reproduce this work.

1. Far from being a ‘‘concrete’’ image arbitrarily chosen by man to illustrate some ‘‘abstract’’ idea, a symbol is the manifestation, in some lower mode, of the higher
   

   120
   Voices of Art, Beauty, and Science
   

   reality that it symbolizes and that stands in as close relationship to it as the root of a tree to a leaf. Thus, water is Mercy, and it would be true to say this even without any understanding of symbolism and even without belief in the Transcendent. Immersion in water has an inevitable effect on the soul in addition to its purification of the body. In the absence of ritual intention, this effect may be altogether momen- tary and superficial; it is nonetheless visible in the fact of almost any bather emerging from a lake or river or sea, however, quickly it may be effaced by the resumption of ‘‘ordinary life.’’
   

2. Gnosis
   is the direct and immediate knowledge of God. This word, which is derived from the Greek verb ‘‘to know,’’ is commonly used as the English equivalent of the Arabic
   ma‘rifa,
   which literally means ‘‘knowledge.’’ Sufis use
   ma‘rifa
   to refer to the kind of knowledge that transcends formal, ‘‘book’’ learning or knowledge in general, which in Arabic is
   ‘ilm.
   (Ed.)
   

3. In Genesis, too, the pure primordial substance of the created universe is water: ‘‘The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.’’ The same is true of the duality, which also appears in Genesis: ‘‘[God] divided the waters’’ (Gen. 1:7–8).
   

4. ‘‘And you see the earth as barren and when we send down upon it water it thrills and sprouts. That is because
   ...
   the Hour is coming beyond all doubt and because God raises those who are in the tombs’’ (Qur’an 22:5).
   

5. To speak of death as ‘‘a giving up of the ghost’’ is thus altogether correct, and it is because life is a presence of Spirit, and therefore altogether transcendent, that it defines any scientific analysis.
   

6. The great symbol of life is also very precarious over much of the earth’s face, especially in those regions where the Qur’anic Revelation was first received.
   

7. Ice and waves are parallel as symbols, representing, respectively, the rigidity (or brittleness) and instability of this form-bound world.
   

8. The Arabic letter
   mim
   stands for death (
   mawt
   ) and has the numerical value of
   

1. However, this letter and this number also have the sense of reconciliation and return to the principle. It is said that Seth was able to return to the Earthly Paradise and that he remained there for 40 years. See Rene Guenon,
   The Lord of the World
   (Ellingstring, Yorkshire, 1983), chap. 5.
   

   1. The
      Afrad
      are the few exceptional individuals who are independent of any particular religion but who represent religion in its highest aspect, being, without any effort on their part but by their very nature, as it were, throwbacks to the primordial state of man, which it is the purpose of religion to regain.
      

   2. The Qur’an here as it were traces from Moses only the symbolism of the lower waters, passing over his more exalted aspects, which are themes of other passages.
      

   3. See Martin Lings,
      A Sufi Saint of the Twentieth Century: Shaikh Ahmad al- ‘Alawi, His Spiritual Heritage and Legacy
      (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), 134, 1n.
      

   4. This is an altogether universal principle of the highest practical significance. In Hinduism, for example, either Shiva or Vishnu may be invoked as Absolute, although their hierarchic station is at the level of the higher of the two seas.
      

   5. On this point, see Lings,
      A Sufi Saint of the Twentieth Century,
      114, 2n.
      

13
‌

I
SLAMIC
L
ITERATURES
: W
RITING IN THE

S
HADE OF THE
Q
UR
’
AN

•

Shawkat M. Toorawa

The adjective ‘‘Islamic’’ has come both to denote practices related to the reli- gion of Islam—such as Islamic law, Islamic dress, and the Islamic calendar— and to connote broader cultural phenomena arising from the civilization of Islam—such as Islamic architecture, Islamic medicine, and Islamic Spain. In the rubric ‘‘Islamic literatures,’’ although the latter broader usage seems to be implied, the former narrower one is usually meant. Indeed, the term ‘‘Islamic literatures’’ in the wider sense is little used, although it is to be found in the title of James Kritzeck’s
Anthology of Islamic Literature
1
and in an article in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
by Anne-Marie Schimmel, a noted scholar of Iranian and Indian Islam, who observes that the term ‘‘Islamic literatures’’ ‘‘virtually defi any comprehensive defi on.’’
2
In 1986, the Pakistani English-language poet and critic Alamgir Hashmi circumvented the vexed question of the use of the adjective ‘‘Islamic’’ by calling his anthol- ogy of ‘‘modern and contemporary literature of the Islamic lands’’
The Worlds of Muslim Imagination.
3
His stated concern was with ‘‘the Muslim imagination, its literary engagements and manifestations, but not with Islamic pieties.’’
4

‘‘Islamic literature,’’ then, is best understood as the
total
literary output of Muslims and those influenced by Islamic civilization. Accordingly, it comprises works in Arabic, Chinese, Hausa, Indonesian, Persian, Swahili, Turkish, Urdu, and dozens of other languages, including English. This output encompasses everything from the Qur’an,
5
an Arabic scripture that emerged with Islam in the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century
CE
, to the Hebrew poetry of the Iberian Judah Halevi (d. 1145
CE
),
6
to the fifteenth century Sundiata (Son-Jara) Epic of Mali,
7
to
Noor,
an English-language novel by the U.S.-based Pakistani writer Sorayya Khan.
8
Limitations of space do not permit such a comprehensive survey here. Instead, using the Qur’an as something of an axis, this chapter highlights a sampling of genres, writers,

122
Voices of Art, Beauty, and Science

and works, with less of an emphasis on poetry as this has typically received greater attention in surveys, scholarship, and translation.
9

In 978
CE
, the Baghdad bookseller Ibn al-Nadim published
al-Fihrist
(The Catalogue), a comprehensive and annotated list of every book that he was aware of that had
ever
been written in Arabic or translated into Arabic.
10
This work has provided posterity with invaluable information about works that no longer survive (estimated at a staggering and depressing 98 percent of all works written in Islamic languages) and about the ways in which Muslims of the tenth century
CE
—during the so-called Golden Age of Arabo-Islamic culture—viewed their literatures. Ibn al-Nadim divides the literatures of his time into 10 categories, as follows:

1. Languages and scripts; scriptures of Muslims and other ‘‘Peoples of the Book’’
   

2. Grammar and lexicography
   

3. History, belles-lettres, biography, genealogy
   

4. Poetry
   

5. Scholastic theology
   

1. Law and Hadith
   

2. Philosophy and the ‘‘ancient sciences’’
   

3. Stories, legends, romances; magic, conjuring
   

4. Doctrines of the non-monotheistic creeds
   

5. Alchemy
   

Not surprisingly, script, scripture, and grammar have pride of place, appearing at the beginning of the work and altogether accounting for one- fifth of the whole catalogue. Though the
Fihrist
includes books from other languages, it only mentions these if they were translated into Arabic from their original sources. Knowledge of Arabic then, as now, was a premium for Muslims. Today, in the early twenty-first century
CE
, only 20 percent of the Muslim world speaks Arabic natively and an even smaller percentage is fully literate in the language. However, Arabic is just as necessary today as it was in Ibn al-Nadim’s day for anyone interested in the study of Islamic civili- zation.
11
Knowledge of Arabic gives one access to the Qur’an in its original language, as well as to a vast output of religious and nonreligious scholarship. The
Fihrist
was itself the product of nonreligious scholarship, written by a man who was a courtier (or the son of a courtier) and a bookman. Such schol- arship was possible because of the explosion of translation and writing since the ninth century
CE
. This birth of multiple literary forms was to a large extent due to the availability of paper,
12
a Chinese import, which in turn resulted in the various kinds of ‘‘Islamic literatures’’ that Ibn al-Nadim recorded.

By definition, the first example of Islamic literature is the Qur’an, a series of revelations in Arabic believed by Muslims to have emanated from God,