Voices of Islam (214 page)

When my wife read my first stab at the opening paragraph of this chapter, she said that she found it a bit preposterous—animals speaking ‘‘poetry’’! She felt that what made us human was the speech that no other creature has to our degree. However, I am not trying to get at the actuality of ‘‘poetry,’’ but rather at the sublingual mechanisms of a metaphorical grasp of reality. Thus, the analogy holds for me that this is what other creatures do in their own poetic way. If they do not have language, then perhaps they are even closer to nature, which is also ‘‘non-verbal.’’

Language itself is a poem that floats on top of the ‘‘objective’’ or ‘‘concrete’’ world. If we look at a blade of grass for a long time, why do we call it ‘‘grass?’’ It is this long, green, blade—but already I am using poetic word- images, ‘‘long,’’ ‘‘green,’’ and ‘‘blade,’’ to bring the thought to mind. In itself, it is simply what it is (sounds like a rap song!). I often amuse myself won- dering what it might be that ‘‘grass’’ calls itself, if anything, or what ‘‘lions’’ call themselves, or ‘‘redwood trees.’’ We call other peoples by names that we have given them, and are often surprised to find that they do not call them- selves by the same names at all. ‘‘American Indians,’’ for example: a name given to them by mistaken identity on the part of Columbus, who thought he had reached India. The people themselves might call themselves by a tribal name by which, somehow over time, they have become distinguished from other tribes. Very often, people in their own languages simply call themselves, ‘‘The People,’’ although it may also be a kind of na¨ıve arrogance to say that we are the only ‘‘real people’’ and that all the rest of us are lesser creatures. Thus, a blade of grass, ‘‘looking around,’’ might think itself different from, say, a cloud, and call itself—well, you make one up. However, if you do make one up, it will be either a lovely, sibilant musical sound with no rational mean- ing, or a metaphorical analogy, such as ‘‘vertical verdant eyebrow with no eye that grows upward from the ground,’’ or as Walt Whitman called it, ‘‘the handkerchief of the Lord,’’ or ‘‘the beautiful uncut hair of graves.’’

All I am saying, really, is that poetry is the probing and expansive imagina- tion living in the sounds and meanings of words. It is an act of heightened

Moths and Scattered Flames: Some Thoughts on Islam and Poetry
149

speech to make the world more transparent and its more intimate meanings to emerge, even if evanescent or emotive. It is to get down to the core, to look more deeply into the flame before flying in. Better, it is to see the Names of Allah behind every manifestation, by virtue of verbal corrective lenses, and then to go through the manifest names to He who manifests them, Allah, the unified single Name that contains all names. This gets close to what Shaykh Muhammad ibn al-Habib of Fez (may Allah protect his secret) says in his
Diwan:

Truly created beings are meanings projected in images.
6

For me, the purpose of poetry is illumination, a form of remembrance (
dhikr
) with transformative capabilities. In poems, illumination springs either from the humblest beginnings of simple human events or earthly objects and situations in which the poetic imagination sees the galactic dimension, as it were, or from a self-contained inspiration (
wahy
) that comes unbidden, enters the heart, lays waste to the kingdom of control, and takes over utter- ance into a new articulation. Illumination and ecstasy: I call my website, ‘‘The Ecstatic Exchange,’’ hoping that the reader on the other side is the gainful bargainer. Without this yearning or urge for a new wisdom, setting out in a poem seems like a humdrum project. The model for this can even be someone like Antonin Artaud, the great, mad French poet and theatrical theoretician, whose visceral screams in words show human energy at its most fearsome, but who shows the way for a poetry that tries to go somewhere uncharted, takes risks of life and limb, and is fearless. For me, Blake does this as well. In the modern age, many of the Beat Poets showed us all to go candidly and nakedly into raw thought and its bardic yawps to awaken the hearts and heads of the world.

Sufi poetry does nothing less than this, but in a way that is, perhaps, more Apollonian, to use a Western differentiation. This is because the illumination of the Sufi saints who wrote illuminative poems was beyond the dimensions of passionate rage or frustration, although they entered the high light of intense and often delirious compression. Something cosmically impersonal happens, even though the Sufi shaykh poets were full and complete (
kamil,
‘‘perfect’’ in Arabic) human beings, the likes of which we rarely see today (although I think that they have always been rare). They are the proof of divine inspiration, the inspiration I think all poets long for when they set out to express the inexpressible. We pray for divine intervention between our hearts and our pens like nothing else. ‘‘Take me over!’’ we cry. ‘‘Don’t let any of these words originate in me alone!’’

In the world, but not of it: the great masters who are also poets illuminate others by their words, which glow from a burning core, and whose passage into the world opens our hearts to the glories of Allah. In this sense, poetry is pure praise.

150
Voices of Art, Beauty, and Science

The Lebanese–Syrian poet Adonis says in the final essay of his book,
The Pages of Day and Night,
that with the appearance of the Qur’an, the sense of divine inspiration was co-opted. According to Adonis, the Arab poets before the Qur’an went into deeper ‘‘subconscious’’ states, communicated with otherworldly forces, and were inspired by the unearthly, often attribut- ing their brilliantly metaphorical allusions to helpful spirits (
jinn
). However, with the advent of the Qur’an and Islam, this approach became suspect (the art of poetry has always been suspect in Islam), and the poets were left with expressing refl commentaries on the Qur’an, the pinnacle of Arabic poetics having been reached and surpassed by the Qur’anic language. An analogy of this is the way poets in English have Shakespeare’s shadow to contend with, either imitating it or contradicting it. (One may be either like Hart Crane, a Shakespearean poet, or like William Carlos Williams, a plain speaker breaking from Shakespearean rhetoric, with inspirational jolts from Ezra Pound.) Adonis cynically sums up his view as follows:

Islam did not suppress poetry as a form and mode of expression. Rather, it nullified poetry’s role and cognitive mission, endowing it with a new function: to celebrate and preach the truth introduced by the Qur’anic revelation. Islam thus deprived poetry of its earliest characteristic—intuition and the power of revelation—and made it into a media tool.
7

I think that this view is overly reductive, and that the post-Qur’anic Sufi shaykh–poets like Rumi or Fakhruddin Iraqi or Yunus Emre of Turkey went into their poetic states as true messengers. They were messengers of the truth but not messengers as prophets in the Qur’anic sense. However, they helped bring forth the continuous and uninterrupted message of the Qur’an from an imaginal realm that was, nonetheless, a lesser sibling of prophecy. After all, if dreams, according to the Hadith, are a fractional part of prophecy, then the poetry that springs from the same deep soul-sources must be a fractional ‘‘part’’ of prophecy as well. The Prophet Muhammad, may peace be upon him, stated, ‘‘In poetry is wisdom’’ (
Sahih al-Bukhari
). However, he also cautioned us against poetry’s low excesses and its brutish exaggerations. These faults can be found, after all, in every human endeavor.

As a coda, bringing us back to my original claim for a kind of creaturely poetry, the American poet, Robert Duncan, in his
Structure of Rime
series, writes:

‘‘In the Hive of Continual Images the Bees, angelic swarm, build in the visible cells a language in which they dance.’’
8

NOTES

This chapter first appeared online at
www.deenport.com in 2005. It is reprinted here by permission of the author, who retains full rights to the chapter.

Moths and Scattered Flames: Some Thoughts on Islam and Poetry
151

1. Thomas Cleary,
   The Qur’an: A New Translation
   (Chicago, Illinois: Starlatch Press, 2004), 2.
   

2. William H. Gass,
   Reading Rilke: Refl ctions on the Problems of Translation
   

   (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 214.
   

3. See Edward William Lane,
   Arabic English Lexicon
   (1863 original repr., Cambridge, U.K.: The Islamic Texts Society, 1984), two volumes.
   

4. Walking with the Wind,
   Poems by Abbas Kiarostami, (Cambridge, Massachusetts/London, U.K.: A Harvard Film Archive publication, 2001), 85.
   

5. Karen Armstrong,
   Muhammad, A Biography of the Prophet
   (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, A division of Harper Collins, 1992), 52.
   

6. The Diwan of Shaykh Muhammad ibn al-Habib
   (Cape Town, South Africa: Madinah Press, 2001), 75.
   

7. Adonis,
   The Pages of Day and Night,
   trans. Samuel Hazo (Evanston, Illinois: The Marlboro Press/Northwestern University Press, 2000), 102.
   

8. Robert Duncan,
   Ground Work
   (New York: New Directions, 1984), 54.
   

15
‌

M
EDICINE AND
H
EALING IN
T
RADITIONAL
I
SLAM

•

Laleh Bakhtiar

Every religion emphasizes an aspect of the Truth. For Islam, the emphasis is on knowledge. With the light of grace as its source, knowledge is integrated into the principle of Unity or the Oneness of God (
tawhid
) that runs as the vertical axis through every mode of knowledge and being. The primary source of knowledge in traditional Islamic medicine is the Qur’an and the Hadith, the customs and sayings of God’s Messenger Muhammad. The Sunna of the Prophet Muhammad is the Tradition of Islam. The Qur’an is the Logos or Word of God as revealed to the Prophet Muhammad over a period of 23 years. Each of the more than 6,600 verses of the Qur’an is called a Sign (
aya
), as is everything in the universe including the inner human self: ‘‘We shall show them Our Signs upon the horizons and within themselves until it is clear to them that it is the Real (the Truth)’’ (Qur’an 41:53).
1

The Qur’an and the Tradition of Islam are seen as extensions of nature, in which the cosmos and the natural order overflow with divine grace (
baraka
). The cosmos is the manifested Word of God and the natural order is the macrocosmic Sunna (
Sunnat Allah,
Qur’an 48:23), the perfect model in following the Word of God. The human being’s relationship with nature ideally comprises a sense of unity and oneness. Through knowledge gained by contemplating nature in all its facets, the human being learns to read God’s Signs and act upon them, thus becoming a channel of divine grace. The Qur’an encourages the human being to seek knowledge in all its facets.
2
Over more than 1,400 years of Islamic history, this quest for knowledge has led to the development of what has been called the ‘‘Medicine of the Prophet’’ (
tibb al-nabi
) or ‘‘Prophetic Medicine’’ (
al-tibb al-nabawi
).