Voices of Islam (213 page)

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Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore

Poetry is the original language of humankind. With a little imagination, it might even be said to be the original language of animals, those emotive creatures that must choose resemblances and learn to decode the meanings of things in order to survive. Or it might be the language of bees, those most poetic of insects, scanning the flowery countryside for nectar and pollen the way a good student might scan the lines of a great poem, metrically buzzing in heart and head.

I could even go so far as to say that poetry is the language of cells, who split and join, search and avoid, the way words fall into place to describe and evoke, emerging from silence. Or poetry might be the DNA language, which scans, has a recognizable meter, and a certain grammar or prosody of associations, markers, and signs. However, that might be going a bit too far, although only Allah knows how far we might go in the mysterious workings of the imagination that enters dimensions unreachable by reason alone, before we exceed or betray the truth.

Poetry is also the language of feeling, of spiritual states often and most purely beyond the reach of simple reason. In fact, in many cases symbolic or oblique language might be the best way to connect with the raw reality of things, of how things are, as well as states of intuition and realization that cannot be spoken of directly.

Allah gave Adam the wisdom of naming:

And God taught Adam all names,

then set them forth to the angels, and said, ‘‘Tell me these names, if you are truthful.’’

(Qur’an 2:31)
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Were they the names of the angels, known only to Allah before, or of everything in creation in its pre-verbalized state, animals, plants, rocks, and

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clouds? Adam suddenly had tongue and teeth and an articulation that brought the world into focused being, in a linguistic transparency, for the benefit of all humanity, a veritable (virtual?) dictionary of wisdom language: Poetry.

God said, ‘‘Adam, tell them the names.’’ And when he told them the names,

God said, ‘‘Did I not say to you that I know the secret of the heavens and the Earth?

And I know what you reveal,

and what you have been hiding.’’

(Qur’an 2:33)

Without attempting anything like a formal commentary (
tafsir
), this verse-sign (
aya
) of the Qur’an is truly mysterious to me, and is at the heart of our being human. Were the angels unnamed before Adam named them, or, in another interpretation, did nothing have a ‘‘name’’ until Allah inspired Adam, may peace be upon him, with the linguistic representations of the glorious and multitudinous ‘‘things’’ of His creation? Did these and all other names spring from a secret that is known only to Allah? Is Allah referring only to the secrets (Ar.
sirr,
plural
asrar
) that we hold deep within our breasts? Or is it something wildly deeper, secrets of the universe so arcane that we have to struggle to name them, such that only with Allah’s ‘‘dictionary of terms’’ can we ever hope to do so?

Rainer Maria Rilke, in the ninth of his
Duino Elegies,
echoes the Adamic mystery of this act of naming:

Are we, perhaps,
here
just to utter: house, bridge, fountain, gate, jug, fruit-tree, window—

at most: column, tower, but to utter them, remember, to speak in a way which the named never dreamed

they could be? Isn’t that the hidden purpose of this cunning earth, in urging on lovers,

to realize, through their rapture, a rapture for all?

(William Gass Translation)
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Rapture: Ah, the word that really opens us up to our urge toward true and vivid utterance!

Historically speaking (whether of our physical or spiritual history is of no consequence), I have a vision of the first humans (are we speaking of the first sacred pair, when no one else existed, and their progeny, or metaphorically, the thousands for whom the sacred pair are the prophetic and Gnostic epitome?) in the great mystery of the origins of our consciousness, speaking

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Adam’s prophetic ‘‘poetics’’ of association and perception, resemblances and decodings, from the deepest source that flows both from outward to inward and from inward to outward. This is what makes poetry, where previously there was only silence or
incommunication
(a new coinage meaning, no communication at all). Observations about light spraying through the trees, the weather, the grandeur and awesomeness of the Wooly Mammoth, or whatever it might be, the death of a parent, a child, an animal. The flight of an iridescent bird. The roar of an invisible assailant. The soothing of a wound or an injustice. A falling rock. The sighting of a new star. Which sound in the night to fear, and in which to find solace? Love-stirrings. Overpowering awe at God’s Terrible Beauty.

If the roots of the Arabic language are, as it is claimed, deep in the soil of the human earth, and are at their base associative and many-faceted in meaning, then this protolanguage, which is also the Arabic language that is in use today, is itself a poetics, symbolic and evocative, even if the stilted fl of journalism and the modern media have tried to iron all of its original poetry out of it.

Andre´ Breton, the French Surrealist, said, ‘‘Astonish me!’’ Should not believing Muslims be in an even more constant state of astonishment than French Surrealists? Out of the void, a lush world of existence blooms with all its streamers rippling in the cosmic winds. Irrational elements arise within it—mysteries, astonishments, and buffooneries. Yes, even buffooneries! As Dante shows us in the
Divina Commedia,
our proper attitude before God is one of bewilderment, where language stutters out of control to become the tongue-tied stuttering of ecstasy, given its proper latitude in the teach- ings of our Prophet Muhammad, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, who was no poet and did not ‘‘practice’’ poetry. However, his revelation has shown us the poetic scope of truth’s possibilities—epic grandeur couched in a language of deep and excavatable meanings—a text, capable, through the engagement of the heart and the mind, of yielding varied interpretations from the most literal and earth-surfaced signs or
ayat,
to those that are the most deeply plumbed, esoteric, and heart-stirred. However, as the Prophet himself cautioned, this grandeur is often beyond the reach of the human understanding, the intellect, and perhaps even of the secret of the soul—the
sirr
—in which case, the only true understanding of what Allah means is by the living embodiment of His words.

Often, the isolated root words of the Qur’an go back to a resonant concrete object as an image, a life-snapshot in motion of some actuality, a glimpse of reality that goes beyond materialism to the more ‘‘abstract’’ numinous realities that extend past the boundaries of all the living dimensions in both this world and the unseen. A familiarity with dictionaries such as E. W. Lane’s
Arabic-English Lexicon
shows an abundance of abstract concepts that arise from root words referring to concrete details (the straightforward names of things) concerning camels, swords, light,

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water, and so on.
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Poetic analogies or ‘‘ideas’’ are extrapolated from these concretions, etherealized, internalized, and made multifaceted by the grammatical extensions of the basic root letters.

From this whirling ocean of worldliness words emerge, fall into forma- tions, and even structured formalisms to become comprehensible sentences: bursts of word combinations, exclamations, questions, longings, the whole human gamut of expression that language, even fl ed language, is privy to, which can soar to the angelic, but also can descend in guttural tailspins to the demonic. However, taking into account the Spanish poet Frederico Garc´ıa Lorca’s understanding of the
duende,
the dark under-soul of our hearts, a different and less evil understanding of ‘‘demonic’’ might instead mean energetic and passionate illumination. William Blake, the most ‘‘Sufi’’ bard of the English language, often fi the energy of Heaven and Hell interchangeable, one with the light of the other, going to the source, as it were, of visionary enlightenment. This is why I prefer Blake to T. S. Eliot, because Blake understood with visionary immediacy the depths of Gnostic understanding. The Sufi poets Rumi, Ibn al-Farid, and Hafez would probably have found in Blake a true enlightened companion, but they would have found T. S. Eliot to be perhaps too excessively Churchy, pinched, and elitist, who distrusted ‘‘inspiration’’ as Blake and the Sufi poets experienced it. Think of Shams of Tabriz’s ‘‘transgressive’’ attempts to expand Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi’s heart to the true
ma‘rifa
(immediate knowledge) of divine recognition.

However, words can also float on the surface of the heart-beating urge to speech, and while poetry can be very simple, at the same time it also engages one in complexities of response. Take Haiku, for example, the exquisitely wrought Japanese form of a few lines in a strict metric quantity. This has also been practiced in a way by the Iranian poet and filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami in the Persian (Farsi) language:

Autumn sunshine— a lizard alert

on the mud-brick wall.

(
Walking with the Wind: Poems of Abbas Kiarostami
)
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Often, the most disarmingly unselfconscious ditty will have the most reso- nant meanings, as in the case of Emily Dickinson in the American tradition of poetry, or again Blake, or some of Lorca’s gypsy songs. When a poem lodges in our hearts because it is strange but somehow familiar, going into a place in our consciousness like a flashlight into an attic, beaming itself in unforeseen corners, or when it seems to have such potential, then, I think, we are looking at poetry. Poetry need not be ‘‘difficult’’ or ‘‘esoteric’’ at all, and may even be all surface, when it is a matter of true vision, an entirely new perspective from

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an unforeseen angle as if from an otherworldly inspiration. Or it may be the torn heart in the throes of incredible yearning, a lament making up for its lack with utterance to bridge its feeling of separation.

When we look at the ecstatic poetry of Rumi (and even his more ‘‘sober’’
Mathnawi
is a heart-opening, head-swirling experience), who always maintains the dimension of both loss and total unity—with jokes and asides and Gnostic teaching in-between, with giddiness, plainness, surreal but meaningful symbolism and abstract contemplation, and even a few buffooneries thrown in for good measure—we see the possibility of a true spiritual literature.

What I am getting at in a kind of irrational and impressionistic way is a very deep and passionate conviction that our most subterranean consciousness- soul is connected with the mysterious movements of the universe, and that the language of poetic utterance is what opens this connection up to us. If I say that the DNA is ‘‘reciting’’ poetry, or that the amoebas are poetic fiends, meandering around in a state of inspiration, I hope I can be forgiven, because it is from this conviction. Although poetic inspiration does partake of revelation, it in no way matches the Prophetic revelation, which comes unbidden and untaught through prophets and the Prophet Muhammad, may peace be upon him, whose only ‘‘poetic’’ skill was utter and unfl ng truthfulness. In her book,
Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet,
Karen Armstrong comes very close to saying that the divine revelation of the Qur’an was an act of creativity on the part of the Prophet. Referring to this accomplishment, she says, ‘‘To
create
(italics mine) a literary masterpiece, to found a major religion and a new world power are not ordinary achievements.’’
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I would not say this. If the state of the Qur’anic revelation may be thought of as a mode of poetic action, then Allah is the poet, not the Prophet Muhammad. Still,
wahy
—revelatory inspiration—continues to exist in Islam, and to a lesser degree by far, the poetic project can ‘‘open sesame’’ many treasure vaults of truthful understanding, on the molecular as well as the stellar level. We are sentient pieces of lint fl ting in Allah’s vast universe, singing to ourselves. What are we singing? This is what touches my heart, this knowledge and the hope that what we sing elevates us to our true dimension, beyond, as Allah Most High says, that of the angels! I want to be a poet among the birds or among the high breakers of the sea. A poet of seismic convulsions and star-births. Star bursts! I can only do this by expunging myself as much as possible, by stepping aside to let the lightning speak on its own behalf, by bringing to the event a taste for language and a deepened and apprenticed skill in catching the firefl of lightning in a mortal dimension, so that others (and myself) can view them without being burned entirely to a crisp. Prophecy and saintliness, however, do not work at ‘‘poetry.’’ They do not carry a notebook in a little shoulder bag for noting instant inspirations. They do not type out poems or send them to

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magazines, hoping to be published. I cannot imagine Rumi worrying about getting published!

The Surrealists, the French mostly, but also the Latin American and Spanish Surrealists, as well as the
Mathnawi
of Rumi, were my opening to Qur’anic understanding. They went about creating expression in a new way, almost turning away their senses from the ‘‘object’’ in order to dig deeper and find a stratum unknown or unexpressed before. When Sufi poetry came along, I could recognize it for the expression of the spirit’s elusiveness that it is, and hear the music of its language as if from Tahitian tom-toms, or better, from Balinese
gamelan
gongs, as if surging up from the bottom of the sea—or for the rational-minded, from the ‘‘unconscious’’ or ‘‘subcon- scious’’—though I dive down and fi phosphorescent fish in the dark, following the glow of their headlamps.