Voices of Islam (23 page)

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M
OSES AND THE
S
AINT

•

Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore

A story goes that

Moses, peace be upon him, went to find a saint in the desert

said to be one of the greatest masters alive.

He went into the arid wastes, made a camp, went further, made

another camp, went further perhaps than anyone dared go, being Moses, and

found, out where the world ends, in a blazing nothingness of sand and

sky, lying face down with his chin on the

ground, his saint,

saying with each breath, in a barely audible voice, only:

Allah—Allah—Allah

The sound of his tongue and the heartbeat of his body boomed all the dunes around him to ring in harmony with that Name.

Moses was struck dumb.

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Voices of Tradition

Here, without food, without water, lay the Master of the Age, dry as bone, nearly naked, more like

the sand itself than a man.

He sat respectfully, the

saint not seeing him, but keeping his invocation throbbing on dry lips with a dry tongue:

Allah—Allah—Allah

At last the saint opened his eyes and saw Moses, who bowed, and, as good servant to master, asked if there was anything the saint needed.

The saint said, in a small voice Moses had to bend close to hear:
‘‘Yes. If you could only bring me

a blanket against the cold nights, I would be

grateful.’’

Moses got up

and set out across the dunes again to his

last camp, grabbed his blanket and

brought it to the man, who was now dead.

Shocked, Moses sat in

wonder at the sight. Then he got up and went

off across the desert to his camp again to bring a shovel to bury him.

When he arrived, the body was already dust.

Moses and the Saint
99

Only

bones remained.

Amazed, Moses set off again into the glare to get a receptacle for the

bones, to bring them back to bury them in the town of the saint’s birth.

When he arrived back at the place where the saint had died, Moses found

only a swirling whirlpool of dust where the bones had been, and

nothing left but

spiraling drifts of white powder twisting in the wind.

Moses sat down, his eyes on the ground.

Then he put his

face on the ground in the ache and questioning of his heart, and asked:

O Allah! What is the meaning of this.? Your saint gone like a

breath in the desert wind?

And God’s voice in the heart of Moses replied:

So long as My friend needed nothing but Me I gave him all he required.

As soon as he needed something from other than Me, I

took him.

4 Ramadan

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Voices of Tradition

NOTE

This poem fi t appeared in Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore,
The Ramadan Sonnets
(San Francisco and Bethesda, Maryland: Jusoor/City Lights Books, 1996). Reprinted from Jusoor/City Lights Books and republished in the Ecstatic Exchange Series. This poem is reproduced here by permission of the author.

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P
ROPHETS AND
M
ESSENGERS OF
G
OD

•

Joseph Lumbard

THE SIGNS OF GOD

In the Qur’an, all of creation is presented as a sign (
aya
) of God. Nothing exists but that it is a means whereby the divine reveals a part of its glory. A bird, a tree, the stars, and the change from night to day—God is directly present in each of these. In this way, every part of creation, no matter how big or small, is like a word or a letter in an ongoing revelation. The Qur’an continuously recalls the wonders of creation as a means of reminding the reader or listener of God:

Truly in the heavens and the earth are signs for the believers. And in your creation and in that which He spreads [over the earth] from among the beasts are signs for a people who are pious. And [in] the alteration of the night and day, and the nourishment that God sends down from the sky, then by which He revives the earth after its death, and [in] the dispensation of the winds are signs for people who discern. These are the signs of God. We recite them to you with truth. So in what account after God and His signs will they believe?

(Qur’an 45:3–6)
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Reminders like this permeate the Qur’an such that the signs of the first revelation, the revelation of God’s creation, are made to speak through the verses of the Qur’an, the final revelation.
Aya,
the word used for a sign from God, is the same word as that used for a verse in God’s revealed books. Just as with the revelations made known to the Prophets in the form of books—the Torah, the Psalms, the Gospels, and others—every aspect of creation is con- veyed through God’s angels.
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In this way, all that is around us is seen as a message and is sustained through Messengers. The great Messengers of reli- gious history—the Prophets of God—have not been sent with anything new but with a renewal of the first message, so that human beings may reflect

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Voices of Tradition

and return to a proper understanding of God, the cosmos, and their relation to both.

PROPHECY

The means by which the Prophets bring this message is revelation (
wahy
). Revelation is not seen as a product of reason or reflection, or as mere inspira- tion. Muslims maintain that revelation is cast directly into the heart of God’s Prophets through the Angel Gabriel, the Faithful Spirit (
al-Ruh al-Amin
): ‘‘Truly it is a revelation of the Lord of the Worlds that the Faithful Spirit has brought down upon your heart [Muhammad]’’ (Qur’an 26:192–194). The message of revelation is true and beyond doubt: ‘‘Truly it is naught but a revelation revealed, taught by the One of Intense Power.
...
He revealed unto His servant what He revealed. The heart lied not of what it saw’’ (Qur’an 53:4–5, 10–11). The reception of an unerring message is not particular to the Prophet Muhammad. All Prophets are preserved from erring in the reception and deliverance of the messages revealed to them by God (Qur’an 72:26–28). One of the signs of God’s infinite mercy is that there is no time in history when humankind has not had access to truth through revelation.

When human beings forget and alter the content of a previous revelation, it is time to send a new Prophet to remind them of God’s message. However, the message of a new Prophet is not different in its essential content from what came before. Muslims maintain that the Qur’an has been protected from alteration. As God says in the Qur’an: ‘‘Truly, We have revealed the Remembrance [i.e., the Qur’an] and are its preservers’’ (Qur’an 15:9); ‘‘Falsehood does not approach it from before or after’’ (Qur’an 41:42). This is not taken to mean that human beings will not err in their interpretation of the message, but only that access to the true meaning of revelation will remain until the end of time. Muslims thus acknowledge and revere a pano- rama of Prophets to whom God has sent a message of truth. This cycle of prophecy began with Adam and ended with Muhammad, who is the ‘‘Seal of Prophets’’ (
Khatam al-Nabiyyin
) (Qur’an 33:40) and who said in his famous farewell address, ‘‘O people, no Prophet or Messenger will come after me and no new faith will be born after me.’’
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The station of prophecy is not attained through human aspiration. It is bestowed by God before the beginning of time. This pretemporal origination of prophecy is referred to by the Prophet Muhammad in a famous saying: ‘‘I was a Prophet when Adam was between water and clay.’’
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The Prophets are sent at different points in human history to reestablish the relationship between the Divine and the human. According to the Qur’an, God’s Mes- sengers have been sent to all human communities: ‘‘We have sent to every people a Messenger, that they may worship God’’ (Qur’an 16:32); ‘‘For

Prophets and Messengers of God
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every people there is a Messenger’’ (Qur’an 10:48). Each Messenger is sent to teach Divine Oneness (
tawhid
) and submission to God (
Islam
): ‘‘We never sent a Messenger before you save that We revealed to him, saying, ‘There is no god but I, so worship Me’’’ (Qur’an 21:25). God specifi says to Moses: ‘‘I am God! There is no god but Me. So worship Me’’ (Qur’an 20:14). The Prophets Noah, Hud, Salih, and Shu‘ayb (Jethro) are presented as saying to their communities: ‘‘O my people! Worship God! You have no other god but Him’’ (Qur’an 7:59; 7:65; 7:73; 7:85). For this reason Mus- lims are commanded to believe not only in the Prophet Muhammad but in all of God’s Prophets as well: