Sam Buntz's Islamic Arts and Literature Portfolio

“This preference of the genius to the parts is the secret of that deification of art, which is found in all superior minds. Art, in the artist, is proportion, or, a habitual respect to the whole by an eye loving beauty in details. And the wonder and charm of it is the sanity in insanity which it denotes.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson[1]

From the beginning to the end of this course—after having examined so many different art forms from so many different times and places—one of the questions that first most interested me and that continues to interest me is the problem of a universal in art—in Islamic art or in any art.  To what extent can something that Maulana Rumi finds beautiful or something that I find beautiful coincide?  For me, the sense of a universal—of being able to appreciate an image in Rumi, such as the reed singing of longing and separation after it has been torn from the reed-bed—is intuitive and obvious.  I feel that my ability to enjoy a Rumi poem is not contingent upon my performing a creative misreading of it, re-interpreting it into terms more coherent in my particular time and place (though that may very well—and probably, to some degree or another, will—occur.)  So, while, I’m willing to take this for granted, the world clearly is not.  While social, economic, and historical circumstances clearly effect and determine the structures of all works of art to some degree or another, I cannot believe that that determination is overwhelming or absolute.  Thus, I can read an author like Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who searches for a deeper spiritual or mystical meaning in Islamic art, with relative comfort.  Increasingly, the Islamic idea of the world as a series of symbols or signs intimating a higher unity[2] strikes me as a fine interpretive tool—and it possesses particular relevance to this question—regardless of whether one is content to see that higher unity as God or as a definite and finite principle of self that is shared by humanity as a whole.  Yet, this revelation of a shared universal is always shrouded and clothed in socially-conditioned forms, which inevitably prevent it from shining with absolute clarity—as the great poet, Alfred Lord Tennyson put it, “Words like nature half-reveal and half-conceal the soul within.”[3] (The exception may be Shakespeare, who seems to translate well into nearly every language and resonate with virtually everybody.)  Yet the sense of a definite presence in a work seems to outweigh the sense of an absence, of everything being simply the product of social over-determination.

Jacques Derrida and most other contemporary French theorists would see the concept of art as a tool for reflecting Divinity (however imperfectly) or some other universal (like, essential humanity) as an anachronistic concept—for these theorists, art only can reflect social circumstances, economic circumstances, history, other works of art, etc.  Meaning is always deffered. There is never any real presence or essence to art, they would contend—no universal—just the various conditions and circumstances that go up to make the human condition.[4]  Yet, to my Pennsylvanian intellect, this seems like nonsense—saying that something is conditioned or determined by external circumstances, implies a real object that is being so conditioned.  “Conditions” cannot be the only real objects, because then they wouldn’t be able to condition anything!  That is to say the idea of a condition implies something that is being conditioned.  Social circumstances or economic circumstances could not have their affect if there was not some prior universal substance for them to affect, just as the gods must always assume a mortal guise when venturing down to middle-earth. This is a delicate philosophical point, but I make it only to strengthen my argument that some universal continually manifests itself in Islamic art (or in any art) conditioned by forces from such widely differing times and locations as the Shiraz of Hafiz’s time and the New York of contemporary America. In this opinion, I am indebted to the views of Mircea Eliade as expressed in his book, “The Sacred and the Profane.”[5]

While it seems to me that it’s fairly difficult to translate the universal from its native idiom into another—the tropes and conventions of the ghazal would be one such idiom—I think that it can (though perhaps not to an absolute degree) be done.  As the great American author, Ralph Ellison, put it when describing the universality of certain themes in African-American folklore: “It’s like jazz; there’s no inherent problem which prohibits understanding but the assumptions brought to it. We don’t all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life.”[6]  I do not mean to suggest that God is necessarily the universal presence behind any art-work or to take an explicitly theological position—I’m perfectly content to stop at the frontier of mysticism.  As before mentioned, one could simply call this universal “the self”—whether one takes that in a Sufi sense or a biological sense is perfectly a matter of taste and disposition.  As I understand it, the mistake made by many modernists, was that they attempted to extract the universal from its cloaks and coverings and create a bare-bones architecture—but it is precisely that system of coverings and veils that allows the universal its fullest expression—in the same sense that it is not one particular color that can do justice to the pure light that manifests the visible spectrum.  One requires all the colors in order to combine them and deduce their common source.

For instance, I at first found the Five-Percenters’ idea that black men are “Gods” and black women are “Earths” and that God is the primordial Asian black man to be rather strange,[7] mildly discomfiting because of its explicitly racial formulation, and to bear little relation to any other Islamic idea I could think of.  Yet—and probably despite a lack of literal Sufi sources, as far as I know—the images and figures of the Five Percenters possess a certain weird mythological resonance.  The idea that all present and future (black) people image a primal person from a perfect pre-lapsarian past is fairly deep in the mythological and mystical vein—just as, for Hindus, Purusha is the single body from which the multiple bodies of human beings are derived,[8] and as the thirty birds in The Conference of the Birds are a sort of refracted image of the primal unity of the Simorgh.[9]  This is not to suggest that this similarity is due to any sort of direct influence—but the similarity is, at least, intelligible.

In a sort of Talmudic parable—the epilogue to his seminal work, “The Anxiety of Influence”—Harold Bloom narrates the tale of a rider (read, writer or reader) in search of this absolute or universal.  It concludes thusly:

“After riding three days and nights he failed to come to the place, and rode out again. Was it that the place knew him not, or failed to find him?  Was he not capable? In the story it only says one need come upon the place. Riding three days and nights he came upon the place, but decided it could not be come upon.”[10]

This parable highlights the brokenness, the imperfection of any work of art or of any attempt to locate the universal and the perfection that the pure universal implies.  Yet it still implies that that universal is real—but it can only be expressed uncertainly, or in fragments.  Interestingly, the mystical side of the Islamic tradition also uses tropes relating to fragments and broken-ness in order to intimate how divinity is expressed in the world.  For instance, there is the famous trope of the mirror—every human heart is imagined as a heart that must be cleansed—purified through a kind of asceticism (either of the flesh or of the spirit or both)—in order to reflect the divine reality.  Yet consider that this reflection involves removal, emptiness—annihilation.  The universal is dependent to some degree on this purgation, on the elimination of obstacles to the direct penetration of the light of God.[11]  Also, Annemarie Schimmel notes that “finding” for the Sufis is often a synonym for “breaking,” and quotes Rumi: “Wherever there is a ruin, there is a hope for a treasure.”[12]  Perhaps, in a sense, every work of art is just such a ruin, wrecked in its own attempt to image a universal (whether divine or human) that is too big, too multi-faceted, to be fully represented by any one work of art or even by any single human creator (except maybe Shakespeare.)  Studying Islamic art and Islamic mysticism this term has brought me a better sense of this—something articulated by Bloom and other critics before, but which I hadn’t exactly seen reflected in Islamic mysticism and its art-objects until I considered them more closely.

Consider the use of elaborately decorated “beggars’ bowls” in Islamic art.  These bowls are richly crafted out of precious metals…yet, they are still the tools of “beggars”—they are instruments for bearing the wine of divine intoxication, yet they are intended for our use—we, the poor, the homeless, the wandering.[13]  Gershom Scholem writes about the Kabbalistic concept of the “broken vessels,” which bears a certain similarity to all of this mystical ruination.  To far oversimplify his description, Scholem writes of how God attempted to manifest Himself in various primal forms—this is likened to pouring the divine light into a number of “vessels.”  Yet these vessels were not able to bear the influx of divinity and were shattered into so many fragments constituting the stuff of our world.[14]  Whether one considers that light as a metaphor for the common power of the human imagination or takes it as the mystical symbol it is intended to be, it hopefully seems suggestive—perhaps every work of art that manages to achieve something is just such a “broken vessel,” forced into fragments by the weight of its excessive imaginative/spiritual burden.  Having considered examples of poverty or ruination as a spiritual metaphor in Islamic art and in Jewish mysticism, one can locate a roughly contemporary analogue: Wallace Stevens, in the secular American tradition, writes, “…Within a single thing, a single shawl / Wrapped tightly around us, since we are poor / A warmth, a light, a power. The miraculous influence.”[15]  For Stevens, this may be a purely aesthetic epiphany, but aesthetic epiphanies and religious epiphanies tend, at their most intense, to dissolve into one another, anyway.

Yet wading through socio-economic-cultural conditions, in order to get at the absorbing Fact, the universal, can be somewhat like the quest to which Walt Whitman invites the reader at the end of “Song of Myself”: “You will hardly know who I am or what I mean / But I will be good health to you nevertheless / And filter and fiber your blood. / Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, / Missing me one place, search another, / I stop somewhere, waiting for you.”[16] And for the final resolution of the quest—as both an example of and a commentary on the existence of a universal—one could turn to The Conference of the Birds: “Then, as they listened to the Simorgh’s words, / A trembling dissolution filled the birds— / The substance of their being was undone, / And they were lost like shade before the sun; / Neither the pilgrims nor their guide remained. / The Simorgh ceased to speak, and silence reigned.”[17]

 

The cipher hidden

Like a new moon against the night sky,

 

More occluded, even, than the Twelfth Imam

Still living at the bottom of whatever well.

 

The stars have grown indifferent in their alignment

No longer do the sun and moon carry themselves with a like comportment—

 

As two lovers argue, picking at a pair of cold tv dinners,

The celestial and the terrestrial shudder in their rotations…

 

Fingers reach to decode eternity’s bright Braille

The code still elusive, mysterious…

 

The long halls of these matrices stretch on and on.

 

***

 

We live in the eclipse, rude confusion of night and day,

Dwarven shadows of what we are—

 

The worm wraps around the roots of the rose—

Her thorns grow long, grow sharper.

 

Life grows long.  God taps His watch.  The ditchdiggers dig,

While planets swim in the purple dust of morning.

 

Tender words perch on the porch of the epiglottis,

And recede down to dusk, like whirl-a-gig seedpods—

They split their husks and lurch to a quick green death.

 

Still, the rose blooms, against all expectations—

Out of the tangle, out of gibberish, again

Repeating, ever-returning,

 

Bright petaled rose, burnished in the sun.

 

I tried to use themes and images from the Five Percenters’ “Supreme Mathematics” along with symbols from the Sufi and broader Islamic tradition to express certain half-expressible feelings about the modern era that have been bubbling at the back of my mind.  At first I found the “Supreme Mathematics” a rather unusual system, but I started to sense how deep in the mythological and imaginative vein at least SOME of the ideas were (despite the oddly racial constructions of that particular form of mytho-poetics.)  Yet, I used them to express points about generational change, the relationship between men and women—I don’t want to be too explicit about my scheme, but you can use the “Supreme Mathematics” to decode some of it.  For instance, stars are children/the youth, the moon is (generally) feminine, and the sun is masculine.  The rose is a representation both of eternity and of the feminine—so, together, the eternal feminine.   I mixture of sexual and spiritual critique is undoubtedly present.

I was also inspired by how some of my favorite poets from the past—T.S. Eliot is always at the back of my consciousness—used elements from the popular culture of their time in otherwise serious “high” art.  For instance, in “The Wasteland,” Eliot references popular dance-hall songs, which would’ve been the equivalent of hip-hop for his time.  I failed to appropriate any rhythms or metrical innovations from hip-hop, however, (which I think needs to be one of the big experiments and challenges for poets in my generation—trying to get that to work right), settling for the easier work of appropriating imagery and symbolism.

(It begins in the middle of things—perhaps over tea, perhaps walking down the street.)

MODERNIST: …Look, we spread around the world in a century or two—Islam was selling like hotcakes, baby.  What made the difference, though?  Why didn’t we just peter out immediately like the Mongols or the Huns?

TRADITIONALIST: Well, we had the divine cognitive music of the Qur’an on our side, obviously.

MODERNIST: Pfff… Naw.  It was the edge, the technological, philosophical edge that did it.  We’d salvaged Aristotle from the wreckage of Greece and Rome…  What were they doing in Europe?  Singing hymns, weeping for their sins, tearing their habits or whatever they’re called.  They wussed out, sacrificed their virility.  Islam was strong, manly. We thought more.  The mind was our domain—not the emotions.

TRADITIONALIST: First of all, I only made that Qur’an riff because it seemed like something you thought I’d say (though I don’t entirely disagree with it). So, forgive me if my irony was lost on you.  But, still, I hardly think that’s fair to them or to us.  I mean, consider Galileo.  Consider Iqbal—the heroes of the modern world.

MODERNIST: Well, that’s when the edge switched over, you know?  The Renaissance.  And for us it was all down hill from there.  Sure, there were some bright spots.  But the Ottomans went, the Caliphate crumbled.  Hell, we didn’t really see any significant political figure—any genuine savior—come around until Ataturk showed up.  As for Iqbal, his vision was never properly realized—he remained a significant visionary.  But little more.

TRADITIONALIST: Oh, don’t talk to me about Ataturk.  He wasn’t a Muslim—he suppressed Arabic, pad-locked the Sufi lodges.  The guy was a jerk.

MODERNIST: Yeah, maybe.  But he was a jerk who knew what worked.

TRADITIONALIST: Well, a toilet might work pretty well.  But it’s still a toilet and not Socrates.

MODERNIST: No need to get offended!  We’re just having a friendly discussion.

TRADITIONALIST: Don’t worry.  I’m not offended.  I’m just put off by your time-based philosophy.

MODERNIST: Why, excuse me.  I didn’t know I had a “time-based philosophy.”

TRADITIONALIST: You wouldn’t.  People who have time-limited philosophies never know that there’s anything outside of time, any eternal patterns.  Therefore, they can’t see their own errors, not knowing that there is any other, extra-temporal perspective to be had.

MODERNIST: I don’t believe there is any other perspective.  Well, no other legitimate perspective.

TRADITIONALIST: Well, I’m telling you there is.  In fact, your philosophy is just as time-centric as that of the Taliban or any other fringe Islamists you’d like to pick out.

MODERNIST: Now, I actually am genuinely offended.

TRADITIONALIST: Yes, but you don’t even know what I mean yet.

MODERNIST: Alright, fine.  Continue.

TRADITIONALIST: I’m saying this—you find too much meaning in the historical cycle.  It’s material advancement that matters for you, just as it does for the zealots in Al-Qaeda—a veritable scorpions’ nest of medical doctors, advanced certificates in urban planning, engineering PhDs and the like.

MODERNIST: Well, what alternative is there to taking up arms in the struggle, one way or another, on one side or another?  I, for one, prefer Pepsi and happiness to hatred and tap-water.  The years go by, and, unless we exert ourselves, they waste and wear us down.  Best to go with the tide of the times—keep your eyes on the clock.

TRADITIONALIST: Surely you know there’s a story in the Qur’an that makes quite the opposite point?

MODERNIST: Having been largely educated at the Ecole Normale Superiere, my knowledge of the Holy Qur’an has consequently been somewhat limited.

TRADITIONALIST: Abraham walks outside, wondering what he should worship—

MODERNIST: Well yes, I’ve certainly heard of Abraham.

TRADITIONALIST: And he looks at the sun, and considers worshipping it, before he sees that it’ll go down.  He does the same with the moon, and the stars.  Finally, he realizes that God is all that abides.  All else is fleeting and temporary— and you’re suggesting that we base our lives on the fleeting and temporary—on technology, satellite dishes—mere fads!

MODERNIST: Well, now, don’t get me wrong.  I’m not an out and out atheist.  But, what you say is more or less true—where is deity to be found if not in the struggle up-hill?  The soul walking from one state to the next?  I would favor a more progressive mode of Divinity, without question.  I read an author once who said that he would prefer to be an ascendant ape than a fallen angel, and I would say that much the same is true for myself.

TRADITIONALIST: Well, personal preference hardly comes into account when the question is a matter of truth.  But I hardly see how being a fallen angel and an ascendant ape are mutually exclusive options.  The point I’m making is that God—through His Messenger, peace be upon him—set certain patterns for humanity—eternal patterns.  The only way in which we can orient ourselves in this world of fleeting appearances and panoramic mirages is to adjust ourselves to such a permanent state.  Otherwise, we have but an interval—tremulous and brief—filled up with an assortment of distractions.  We exist on the shambles, and we recede into the shambles.  Without piety—without the same feelings and perceptions that our forefathers felt—we exist, as it were, in the midst of a tempest.  Blown about by violent winds—forever inconstant.

MODERNIST: That might be a bit rhetorically high.  But I know that for myself I can only see the square illuminated by my own dim yet adequate headlights as the road unfolds ahead of me.  (He shrugs.)  Permanence, changelessness—these things are nice to entertain.  But the only permanence I find in my own life is the will to change—that will remains constant.

TRADITIONALIST: Hmm—I’ll need to think about that.

MODERNIST: And I’ll try to turn a few of the things you’ve said over in my mind—though I do live a harried and unreflective existence.

(Train whistle sounds)

MODERNIST: Well, I need to be off.  I’m glad for this conversation, even if we’ve reached no harmonious synthesis.

TRADITIONALIST: It’s just that we mustn’t cease to contradict one another.

MODERNIST: No, no.  On that we can agree.

TRADITIONALIST: To contradict is real communion.  “Opposition is true friendship,” as it’s said.

MODERNIST: Ah, so you know more of Western proverbs than you let on?

TRADITIONALIST: Only a few poets.

MODERNIST: Well, I’m off then. (Removes a hip flask.)  To a future of lasting contradictions! (He leaves, taking a sip from his flask.

TRADITIONALIST: If I drank, I would undoubtedly drink to that…  Yes.

(Pauses. Frowns.)

Or no.

 

***

My dramatic dialogue was inspired by the section we did on the writings of Iqbal including his “Complaint” and “Answer to the Complaint.”  Iqbal was interested in Hegelian philosophy (as discussed in class) and here I tried to demonstrate (in a necessarily more minor manner than in his classic poems) how the dialectic might play out in a lively discussion between a (culturally if not religiously) Muslim modernist (an Ataturkite, more or less), and a traditional but probably Sufi Muslim who believes in timeless truth and eternal patterns rather than endless process as the proper guide to life.  Part of my goal was to put believable points into the mouths of both speakers—though I think I probably gave the Sufi traditionalist more ammunition (the modernist says intelligent things, but they’re often phrased in an annoying or shallow manner).

There are plenty of (witty?) allusions and jokes in this little fragment—I think I was probably most inspired, formally, by the sparkling intellectual debate between Don Juan and the Devil in George Bernard Shaw’s great play, “Man vs. Superman.”  And I stole the idea of a “time-centric” philosophy from Aldous Huxley’s still useful and informative book, “The Perennial Philosophy.”  It was my own idea to use the Qur’anic parable of Abraham and the sun, the moon, and the stars to illustrate this idea (see Sura 6: 74-82).  Also, scattered within this are veiled references to William Blake, the science-fiction author Terry Pratchett, and others—which the reader is invited to find and discover.  Plus, the Modernist can rather oddly be seen looking back to the scientific-philosophical work of Muslims in the Islamic “golden age”—recovering Aristotle—as being exemplary.  I think he probably would’ve been down with Averroes and Avicenna, whereas the Traditionalist, temperamentally, would be much more likely to be a fan of Al-Ghazali.

In my set of comics based on “The Conference of the Birds,” I tried to pictorially represent crucial moments and metaphors from the story.  I was inspired by the direct black-and-white pen-on-paper style of “Persepolis,” but rather than treating a historical/biographical subject as it did, I wanted to try to apply it to a fictional comic book storytelling format, possibly directed at young people living in Islamic societies where figural representation isn’t particularly frowned upon.  The important metaphors and historical examples I relied on—all of them mentioned at the conclusion of “The Conference of the Birds”—were the “moth and the flame,” the Simorgh/thirty birds pun climax, the birds reading their sins in the book of judgment, and the martyrdom of Hallaj as an analogy for “fana.”

I know that “fana” is probably one of the most commonly referenced subjects in many of these creative projects—yet it can’t be helped!  It’s of absolutely absorbing interest…  When the thirty birds seem themselves reflected as the Si-Morgh, I made the Si-Morgh totally dark, to symbolize the annihilating process that the birds have gone through–that “dark night of the soul” of sorts.  I also have the shadow of the Si-Morgh superimposed over the flames of al-Hallaj’s funeral pyre, to indicate how that act corresponds to the birds’ own self-sacrifice.  Fire and darkness both seem to intertwine in a rather interesting way in these annihilating instances.  It seems to me to be a phenomenon I’ve also recognized in descriptions of Christian mysticism or of certain yogic practices and experiences.

This picture—colored marker and pencil on a white poster-board background, though I tried to make it look as much like a painting as possible—was inspired by some of the Persian paintings of the stories from the lives of the Prophets that we looked at in Week 3.  I tried to make the landscape, in particular, bear enough similarities to those depictions to claim a relation.  I chose a specifically Qur’anic story—that of Moses’ encounter with al-Khidr (Surah 18: 65-82) —for a theme.  To summarize: Moses goes out in quest of knowledge and comes to the place where “the two seas conjoin”—which certain authorities assert symbolizes the conjunction of rational knowledge and higher, mystical and intuitive knowledge. (1)  Moses only possesses the first of these, whereas Khidr possesses both.  In the story, Khidr offers Moses guidance, if only Moses will refrain from questioning his actions.  Khidr performs a number of apparently terrifying and inscrutable acts—including murder—and Moses questions him every time.  In the end, Khidr departs from Moses, but first explains the secret purpose behind everything he did.

Since the name Khidr is related to the word for “green” in Arabic (the color of prophetic inspiration), (2) I decided to draw Khidr as a figure with green flesh and without actual human features to signify his transcendent status as figure both within and totally beyond human boundaries. A little fish is hidden in one corner of the converging waters behind the figures, as the fish is a symbol of the wisdom that Khidr is said to demonstrate (I would imagine that this is because the fish of wisdom is a slippery elusive being who hides in the vast ocean of knowledge). (3) The painting is also meant to show Moses being lessoned by a source of knowledge even higher than his own considerable authority.  Moses represents critical, rational intelligence, whereas Khidr is meant to manifest that greater intelligence, beyond the limits of our everyday senses and faculties.

1. Samuel Zinner, Christianity and Islam: Essays on Ontology and Archetype (London: The Matheson Trust, 2010) 269.

2. Elwell Sutton, “The Islamic World: The Two Horned One,” Legends of the World, ed. Richard Cavendish (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1994) 116.

3. Abdullah Yusuf Ali, Holy Qur’ān (Lahore: Muhammad Ashraf Publishers, 1938) 747.

(I’ll try to scan a copy of my picture in or get a better quality photo, but I hope this will work for now)

No bloodless myth will hold.

-Geoffrey Hill

 

(Scene: A living room in modern day Persia, decorated accordingly.  Two men, Hussein and Qasem, are seated on chairs, positioned around a central coffee table, with a few magazines and other typical household items scattered on it.  Characters exit and enter through a door positioned on the wall behind the actors, which the audience is facing.  It leads into pure darkness.  A window lets in a little light at first from the right—grows gradually brighter as the scene progresses.  A ceiling fan spins above.)

 

Hussein:

The wheel comes round and we are here again,

Finding ourselves always the same—the stage adjusted,

The curtains fixed, the fan spinning or standing still,

But always the same reality,

Regardless of the scenery…

 

Qasem:

Always the same turf scanned and rescanned

By the still blood-hungry sun.

 

Hussein:

Again and again the cycle brings us back

To where we are and where we were

And where we will continue to be, until, perhaps,

Some long longed for event opens up

Into a new knowledge of reality.

 

Qasem:

Again the old myth of blood

Again the old and ever new torment—

The purgation and penance seem endless

Performed not for any deed of our own

But to testify to and against

The human heart’s willful perversity—

For this the starry cycles

And the command of God

Have brought us around again.

 

Hussein:

Yet the starry dome can only rebound

The acts man tosses up in his arrogance

As he rages and ravages in his own desolation.

 

Qasem:

Yet for those who have schemed a scheme,

God too has schemed a scheme,

And we shall see who will prosper

In the end result.

 

Hussein:

The smoking shell of Ali Akbar’s automobile

Crouches in the driveway.  With one son

Murdered, and my nephew soon to be killed,

I wait for the fate that I know must find me.

 

Qasem:

The betrothal sung, the wedding ended,

With no true celebration, nor bounding in the heart,

But universal lamentation—which still reverberates.

I, a polite, well-educated, wholly modern young man, wait to be put to sleep

For but a moment—and who knows how many dreams

Will crowd that slight and vacant space?

Then, I wake eternally.  Dear girl—on that day,

You will feel your heart leap up again, like a savage drum,

And know that it but keeps my pace, as I step nearer to thee.

 

(Enter Zainab, Hussein’s sister—a contemporary Persian woman.)

 

Zainab:

How many rags will grow wet with blood,

And with the sweat that leaks from a dying man’s brow?

The preparations, the agonies, are endless.  Again, I,

A patient housewife—loyal, meticulous, ever ready to arrange

The kettle over the hearth—feel numbness creep

From my fingers and toes to my brow, my eyes, and ears.

Again I come to weep, full slaked with that sorrow of which my eyes

May never grow tired, nor exhaust their store, but seem to draw, as it were,

From an infinite reservoir of pain.  Divorce us from Time, at last,

O God.  How long, these chains?  How long, these scalding tears?

 

(Exit Zainab.)

 

Qasem:

My exit follows.  Farewell, Uncle.

I will see you again, wherever the tide of time

Next bears the bloody-minded world of men.

This martyrdom will persist as a check and a rebuke,

Until the stain spreads worldwide.

Then, all thought is cleansed, all are humbled,

And all is prepared for the feast.

 

(Exit Qasem.)

 

Hussein:

I alone remain.

Consummation nears, and my throat will find

Its pledged commitment fulfilled

Ere the vultures gather in the dim.

 

(Enter Shimar, also a normal, contemporary individual.)

 

Shimar:

I come—sole emissary of the arrogant power.

The space where my heart yet would be

Fills with blood…

But I too act an appointed role,

Slave that I am.

Is there anything else, any word that might yet be said?

Does your soul find repose, being content with what it was

And will be?

 

Hussein:

God would not refuse a lion that deigned, for His sake,

To be sheared like a sheep, and then lead to slaughter.

Here’s my rest: the journey is a farewell

And a wandering for home.

 

(The spirits of the prophet Muhammad and Fatimah become visible in the background—as a harsh, metallic dawn-light grows in the window, they gesture beckoningly, expressionless.  As Shimar unsheathes a long knife, the lights go out.)

 

Description:

In this dramatic fragment—written, rather clumsily, as a stab at archaic verse-play form, inspired by the King-James-ish rhetoric of the martyrdom play translation we read for class—I attempted, basically, to convey the Shii vision of life on earth as being one of perpetual persecution and martyrdom, by recounting the martyrdom of the Imam Hussein and his nephew, Qasem. (1) The pious of this world suffer in order to expiate the sins of humankind as a whole.  For this reason, I imagined Hussein and Qasem as contemporary Persians living out this same narrative over and over again throughout time—this was partially inspired by Mircea Eliade’s idea of the eternal return, in which communities constantly return to certain timeless narratives to restore a sense of connection with eternal truths to the world of time. (2)

The narrative, as my short play transcribes it, doesn’t follow the historical form of the story very closely, since I just wanted to show the basic idea of martyrdom and the Imam’s sufferings being transferred intact through time.  But I did do a few things—instead of having Ali Akbar’s empty horse galloping into camp, as it does in the Taziyeh play, (3) I had Hussein reference Ali Akbar’s burnt-out automobile sitting in the driveway—intimating some sort of modern day (possibly revolutionary) strife.  And the historical personalities, Zainab (Hussein’s sister) and Shimar (Hussein’s assassin), also turn up. (4) The bit about God “scheme[ing] a scheme” comes from the Qur’an (3:52-55), and there are plenty of oblique allusions to other resources that are left to the diligent reader to uncover—T.S. Eliot, The Exchequy of Bishop Henry King, Geoffrey Hill, John Webster—and other poets who may have been simmering at the back of my mind without my knowing it.  But I tried to put that primarily Christian mode of rhetoric at the service of the substance of the Shii subject matter—particularly using the rich English tradition of bloody-tragedies and Eliotic religiosity to illustrate the idea that any guiding myth needs to deal honestly with suffering and sacrifice, as it seems the primary Shii martyrdom narrative does.

1. Sadeq Humayuni, “An Analysis of the Ta’ziyeh of Qasem,” Ta’ziyeh: Ritual and Drama in Iran, ed. Peter J. Chelkowski (New York: New York University Press, 1979) 12-15.

2. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971) 6.

3. Humayuni, 13-14.

4. The Miracle Play of Hasan and Husain: Vol. 2, ed. and trans. Lewis Pelly and Arthur N. Wollaston (London: W.H. Allen, 1879) 90, 100.

(Inspired by Sindhi and Urdu poems we read in week 4.)

 

When the stars fall from the sky like dead fireflies

And rot where they lie

Into burnt-out husks and shells

Still, you will shine, hidden behind a deeper night,

The last star, left wandering,

A mariner on black seas of infinity—you,

Pilgrim, pilot, perfected man.

 

A fixed star—

Polaris of the Prophets,

Axis Mundi—yet a wanderer,

Ceaselessly a wanderer through time,

Journeying from age to age,

Still, calm, and collected within yourself,

Yet elusive—sailing from one heaven to the next

Across oceans of space and stars and years.

 

When you arrive—as you perpetually arrive—

At the court of God

Ask Him to break my heart, my, mind, my ego in two

Just as you broke the moon into two washed-out shells.

Ask Him to resolve all to the eternal negation

That preceded Time.

 

Melt my heart in His burning crucible, O Prophet—

Already, it rests red and bloody in your hands!

Bring me back to the start, to the day of Alastu,

Or to the day before that,

When only you and He lived together in secrecy,

Like milk in a coconut.

 

Only then, Prophetic Soul, will I find my True Face

Reflected in the dark waters, hovering above,

Where the dove-like spirit broods.

 

Description:

The idea of the “Light of Muhammad” (1) lies at the center of the poem.  Other stars—which one could see as being the flashing distractions of worldly existence—apocalyptically fall from the sky and rot like dead bugs, but the prophet remains a steady light, always providing guidance.  The traditional notion that the Qutb—the central man, spiritual pole, of the age—is somewhat like the Northern Star, a stable axis that never changes and which can always guide the believer, is crucial here. (2) But I intentionally created a disjunction by juxtaposing the Polaris-like nature of the Prophet with an image of the Prophet as journeyer, pilgrim, or pilot.  I intended to relate this to the Miraj, to the idea of the Prophet as a mariner completing the ultimate voyage—by himself, during the Night Journey, and by guiding the souls of the faithful along with him.  The poem appropriates both stillness and movement as tropes for the Prophet’s state of being.  The reference to the prophet as a pilot is, in fact, an Urdu image. (3)

The last two verses hail the Prophet as an intercessor, pleading for the soul at the court of God. (4) The speaker pleads with the prophet to destroy his false, lower self—the nafs (5)—through an act of creative destruction, just as the Prophet famously cut the moon in two. (I remembered reading that same story referenced in one of the Urdu poems, so I thought that I would use it here.) (6) The speaker wishes for this false self to be annihilated into the state the Sufis call fana or annihilation, (7) with the Prophet’s aid as an intercessor and spiritual preceptor.  The final verse sees the speaker, through the agency of the Prophet, returning back to the primal unity that existed before the multifarious world of created things came into existence, even before the day of Alastu, when the souls of the yet to be born made their pledge to remember God. (8) Finding one’s true face in the waters is both a reference to the beginning of the Bible, when the Spirit of God broods over the face of the ocean of non-being,  and an image of the culmination of the Sufi’s quest, or baqa—the rebirth of the aspiring soul as a new, purified self. (9) One remembers the True God hidden in the self, Who had been neglected in the course of the earthly sojourn.

 

1. Ali Asani, “In Praise of Muhammad: Sindhi and Urdu Poems,” Religions of India in Practice, ed. Donald S. Lopez Jr. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995) 175.

2. Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975) 200.

3. Asani, 174

4. Ibid, 175.

5. Schimmel, 112-114.

6. Asani, 184.

7. Schimmel, 44 and Asani, 185.

8. Schimmel, 24.

9. Ibid, 44

 

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