by Robert Irwin
Like full moons in the murky sky;
Faces, like those pictures fair,
To which they make their daily prayer;
And 'neath the belt of each we traced
A slender and a wasp-like waist.
We joined them, and they scorned to spare
The old wine they had treasured there.
And, oh! we passed a happy day,
One notably most bright and gay!
Just such a one as fancy paints
Without formality’s restraints.
In speaking of it do your best,
And then imagine all the rest!
E. H. Palmer, The Poetical Works of Beha-Ed-Din Zoheir
(Cambridge, 1877), pp. 27, 42, 109
Zuhayr adopted a conversational style in poems, which came close what is known as ‘Middle Arabic’. The early development and the particular qualities of Middle Arabic which distinguish it from classical Arabic in the strict sense are complex and, indeed, controversial. Briefly, by the twelfth century at least, and almost certainly earlier, the rules of classical Arabic regarding such matters as word-order and case-endings were no longer being scrupulously observed by all writers. High Arabic (fusha) was being infected by colloquial forms. There was now a general tendency to indicate subject and object by word-order – the word-order doing the work of lost case-endings. Writers who fell into the lazy habits of Middle Arabic usage put the subject in front of the verb, whereas sticklers for the old classical forms placed the subject where they wanted the emphasis to fall in the sentence. Other features which marked out Middle from classical Arabic included the frequent dropping of the dual form for nouns and the imperative form for verbs. The way the Bedouin of seventh-century Arabia spoke ceased to be the inflexible literary model. It is true that well-educated authors who took trouble over what they wrote still took pride in writing correct classical Arabic, but in general in the late medieval period written Arabic more closely reflected spoken colloquial Arabic. (It is because there are so many Middle Arabic features in The Thousand and One Nights that these stories are regarded with disdain by fastidious stylists.) The controversy about colloquial and literary Arabic continues to rage today; for example, the famous Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz has described the colloquial as ‘a disease of language’.
Diya’ al-Din Abu’l-Fath Nasr Allah IBN AL-ATHIR (1163–1239) was yet another leading writer employed by the Ayyubid dynasty to celebrate their triumphs and transact government business. (Diya’ al-Din is not to be confused with his brother, 'Izz al-Din (d. 1233), a well-known historian also in the service of the Ayyubids.) Diya’ al-Din ibn al-Athir was also a literary critic and theorist. Mathal al-Sba’ir fi-Adab al-Katib wa al-Sha’ir, ‘The Popular Model for the Discipline of Writer and Poet’, is his best-known work of literary criticism (and note the punning rhyme: sha’ir means ‘popular’, while sha’ir means ‘poetry’). As a writer of prose himself, Ibn al-Athir favoured prose over poetry. In the first passage quoted below, he commends the study of the poetry and prose of the Ancients.
Thorough familiarity with the discourse of the Ancients in poetry and in prose, is replete with benefits; because it makes known the aims of the masters, and the results of their thoughts. Through their writings we come to know the aims of each group of them, and how far their art has taken them. For these are things that sharpen the intellect and kindle the intelligence. When the practitioner of this art familiarizes himself with their writings, the ideas enclosed therein, and which he toiled to extract, become as something delivered into his hands; he takes what he wishes, and leaves out what he wishes. Also, the ideas previously invented, on becoming familiar to him, may provide the spark in his mind for a rare and unprecedented idea.
It is a known fact that the minds of men, although differing in good and bad qualities, yet some are not higher nor lower than others except to a slight extent. It thus often happens that talents and minds are equally capable of producing ideas, in such manner that one may produce that same idea in the same words, without being aware of his predecessor’s idea. This phenomenon is what practitioners of this art call ‘the falling of a hoof upon a hoof’.
He who wishes to become a secretary, and has a responsive nature, should memorize collections of poetry containing a great number of poems, and not be content with only a few. He should then begin by decomposing into prose the poems he memorized. His method should be to begin with one of the odes and put into prose each of its verses in turn. At the beginning he should not disdain using the very words of the verse, or most of them; for at this point, that is all he can do. By exercising his mind and training it, he will rise above this level, and begin to take the idea and clothe it in his own words. Then he will again rise above this level and clothe the idea with a variety of personal expressions. At this point his mind will become fecundated through direct contact with the ideas, deriving from them other ideas still. The way for him to proceed is to apply himself night and day, and to remain devoted to his work a long time until the method becomes second nature to him; so that when he writes a letter or delivers a speech the ideas pour forth as he speaks, and his words come out honey-sweet not insipid, and endowed with such lively novelty that they seem to dance for joy. This is something I have come to know through experience; and no one can advise you better than the experienced.
Ibn al-Athir goes on to argue that poetry, rather than prose, should be memorized, because the Arabs put most of their best and most important ideas into poetry. Prose, by contrast, was rather negligible.
George Makdisi, The Rise of Humanism in Classical Islam
and the Christian West (Edinburgh, 1990), pp. 357, 361
Under the patronage of the Seljuks and their ministers, as well as of later dynasties, the Sunni Muslim religious institutions of the madrasa and the khanqa came to play an unprecedentedly important role. The madrasa was a college devoted to the teaching of religious subjects: the Qur’an and its exegesis, hadiths and Islamic law. Although this was the standard syllabus, it was quite common for other more secular subjects to be taught in the madrasas – including, for example, poetry and the correct interpretation of such literary works as Hariri’s Maqamat. A khanqa was a hospice and centre for prayer and study for the use of Sufis. The khanqa bears some resemblance to a monastery – so long as one bears in mind that a Sufi was not expected to spend all his life in it. The normal expectation was that he would earn a living and marry, in conformity with the Prophet’s saying, ‘There is no monkery in Islam.’ Khanqas were really quite similar to madrasas and it was often difficult to tell them apart. There was a good deal of movement between khanqa and madrasa.
Al-Ghazzali (also frequently spelt Ghazali), one of the most famous of all Sufis, made his reputation as an academic teaching in a madrasa before pursing a more spiritual path as a Sufi. Abu Hamid Muhammad al-GHAZZALL (1058-1111) was born the son of a poor wool-spinner in eastern Persia. The boy’s obvious intellect secured him influential patronage, which allowed him to pursue studies in theology and religious law. At the age of thirty-three he started teaching as a professor in the Nizamiyya madrasa in Baghdad (founded by Nizam al-Mulk, the famous vizier of the Seljuks). According to Ghazzali’s spiritual autobiography, it was while teaching at the Nizamiyya that he fell victim to an intellectual and spiritual crisis. He was unable to speak and hardly able to eat, and he went into seclusion. He doubted not only his religious faith, but also the reality of the world and the evidence of his senses. Ghazzali’s doubts prefigure those of Rene Descartes, though the answer ultimately discovered by the twelfth-century Sufi bears little resemblance to that worked out by the seventeenth-century French philosopher.
In 1095 Ghazzali absconded from academic life and set out to travel in the Near East. He spent time meditating as an ascetic in Mecca, Alexandria, Jerusalem and Damascus, and his meditations brought him to acknowledge the ultimate truth of Sufism and its superiority over rival spiritual philosophies that were popular at the time. Only then did he ret
urn to lecturing, this time at a madrasa in Nishapur in eastern Iran, but he soon retired and a few years later he died in his native Tus. That, at any rate, is the version of Ghazzali’s life presented for public consumption. However, the spiritual crisis leading to all-encompassing doubt, the travel to holy cities in search of enlightenment, and the ultimate resolution of the crisis through the full understanding of the truths of mysticism, all feature so frequently in Sufi biographies that one may suspect that this pattern of ‘biography’ was a cliche of devotional writing – merely a conventional way of packaging mystical and pietistical treatises. Ghazzali’s account of his spiritual journey bears a suspicious resemblance to that of an earlier Sufi writer, al-Muhasibi. Indeed there are good grounds for believing that Ghazzali was already a Sufi before he abandoned his first teaching post.
Whatever the truth of the matter, Ghazzali’s writings did a great deal to popularize Sufi doctrines and make them respectable. For example, he spent a great deal of time and ink in trying to explain how Hallaj’s vainglorious and apparently blasphemous statement ‘I am the Truth’ could be interpreted in some way that could be accepted by more conventional Muslims. Ghazzali was not a systematic thinker and his books are jackdaw collections of bits of past wisdom. Much of what he wrote is visionary; he described God moving among the 70,000 veils, as well as the ceaseless movement of prophets and saints up and down through the heavens. He drew on ancient doctrines and images of ‘light’ mysticism. However, even more of what he wrote is moralistic and world-hating; the world is ‘a prison’, ‘a fiery torment’, ‘a deceitful prostitute’.
He wrote copiously in both Persian and Arabic. Mishkat al-Anwar, ‘The Niche of Lights’, is an esoteric treatise with Platonic elements; ‘this visible world is a trace of the invisible one and the former follows the latter like a shadow’. Tahafut al-Falasifa, ‘The Incoherence of Philosophers’, as its title suggests is a denunciation of philosophy, particularly philosophizing developed under the influence of the ancient Greeks. The philosophers’ alleged denial of the reality of the resurrection of the body was particularly impious. Ghazzali insisted that there must be limits to the authority of reason and that reason could not direct faith. Ihya al-'Ulum al-Din, ‘The Revival of Religious Sciences’, is a kind of spiritual encyclopedia, a reference work on dogma which is still consulted today. (Kimiya-yi Sa'dat, ‘The Alchemy of Happiness’, is an abridgement in Persian.) In the stylishly written Al-Munqidh min al-Dalal, ‘The Deliverance from Error’, Ghazzali describes how he investigated the competing claims of philosophers, conventional theologians and Shi'i illuminationists before he decided to become a Sufi. In the following passage he describes a crisis of doubt:
Thereupon I investigated the various kinds of knowledge I had, and found myself destitute of all knowledge with this characteristic of infallibility except in the case of sense-perception and necessary truths. So I said: ‘Now that despair has come over me, there is no point in studying any problems except on the basis of what is self-evident, namely, necessary truths and the affirmations of the senses. I must first verify these in order that I may be certain on this matter. Is my reliance on sense-perception and my trust in the soundness of necessary truths of the same kind as my previous trust in the beliefs I had merely taken over from others and as the trust most men have in the results of thinking? Or is it a justified trust that is in no danger of being betrayed or destroyed?’
I proceeded therefore with extreme earnestness to reflect on sense-perception and on necessary truths, to see whether I could make myself doubt them. The outcome of this protracted effort to induce doubt was that I could no longer trust sense-perception either. Doubt began to spread here and say: ‘From where does this reliance on sense-perception come? The most powerful sense is that of sight. Yet when it looks at the shadow [of a stick or the gnomon of a sundial], it sees it standing still, and judges that there is no motion. Then by experiment and observation after an hour it knows that the shadow is moving and, moreover, that it is moving not by fits and starts but gradually and steadily by infinitely small distances in such a way that it is never in a state of rest. Again, it looks at the heavenly body [the sun] and sees it small, the size of a shilling, yet geometrical computations show that it is greater than the earth in size.’
In this and similar cases of sense-perception the sense as judge forms his judgements, but another judge, the intellect, shows him repeatedly to be wrong; and the charge of falsity cannot be rebutted.
To this I said: ‘My reliance on sense-perception also has been destroyed. Perhaps only those intellectual truths which are first principles (or derived from first principles) are to be relied upon, such as the assertion that ten are more than three, that the same thing cannot be both affirmed and denied at one time, that one thing is not both generated in time and eternal, nor both existent and non-existent, nor both necessary and impossible.’
Sense-perception replied: ‘Do you not expect that your reliance on intellectual truths will fare like your reliance on sense-perception? You used to trust in me; then along came the intellect-judge and proved me wrong; if it were not for the intellect-judge you would have continued to regard me as true. Perhaps behind intellectual apprehension there is another judge who, if he manifests himself, will show the falsity of intellect in its judging, just as, when intellect manifested itself, it showed the falsity of sense in its judging. The fact that such a supra-intellectual apprehension has not manifested itself is no proof that it is impossible.’
My ego hesitated a little about the reply to that, and sense-perception heightened the difficulty by referring to dreams. ‘Do you not see,’ it said, ‘how, when you are asleep, you believe things and imagine circumstances, holding them to be stable and enduring, and, so long as you are in that dream-condition, have no doubts about them? And is it not the case that when you awake you know that all you have imagined and believed is unfounded and ineffectual? Why then are you confident that all your waking beliefs, whether from sense or intellect, are genuine? They are true in respect of your present state, but it is possible that a state will come upon you whose relation to your waking consciousness is analogous to the relation of the latter to dreaming. In comparison with this state your waking consciousness would be like dreaming! When you have entered into this state, you will be certain that all the suppositions of your intellect are empty imaginings. It may be that state is what the Sufis claim as their special hal [i.e. mystic union or ecstasy], for they consider that in their ‘states’ (or ecstasies), which occur when they have withdrawn into themselves and are absent from their senses, they witness states (or circumstances) which do not tally with these principles of the intellect. Perhaps that ‘state’ is death; for the Messenger of God (God bless and preserve him) says: ‘The people are dreaming; when they die, they become awake.’ So perhaps life in this world is a dream by comparison with the world to come; and when a man dies, things come to appear differently to him from what he now beholds, and at the same time the words are addressed to him: ‘We have taken off thee thy covering, and thy sight today is sharp’ (Qur’an 50:21).
When these thoughts had occurred to me and penetrated my being, I tried to find some way of treating my unhealthy condition; but it was not easy. Such ideas can only be repelled by demonstration; but a demonstration requires a combining of first principles; since this is not admitted, however, it is impossible to make the demonstration. The disease was baffling, and lasted almost two months, during which I was a sceptic in fact though not in theory nor in outward expression. At length God cured me of the malady; my being was restored to health and an even balance; the necessary truths of the intellect became once more accepted, as I regained confidence in their certain and trustworthy character.
This did not come about by systematic demonstration or marshalled argument, but by a light which God most high cast into my breast. That light is the key to the greater part of knowledge. Whoever thinks that the understanding of things Divine rests upon strict proofs has i
n his thought narrowed down the wideness of God’s mercy. When the Messenger of God (peace be upon him) was asked about ‘enlarging’ and its meaning in the verse, ‘Whenever God wills to guide a man, He enlarges his breast for islam [i.e. surrender to God]’ (Qur’an 6:125), he said, ‘It is a light which God most high casts into the heart.’ When asked, ‘What is the sign of it?’, he said, ‘Withdrawal from the mansion of deception and return to the mansion of eternity.’ It was about this light that Muhammad (peace be upon him) said, ‘God created the creatures in darkness, and then sprinkled upon them some of His light.’ From that light must be sought an intuitive understanding of things Divine.
W. Montgomery Watt, The Faith and Practice of
al-Ghazali (new edn., Oxford, 1990), pp. 21–4
COMMENTARY
Hal in everyday parlance means ‘state’, ‘situation’, ‘position’. However, in the vocabulary of the Sufis it refers to a mystical state, usually ecstasy. A hal is a state which has been temporarily reached by the mystic, as opposed to a maqam, which is a permanent station.
Sharaf al-Din 'Umar ibn 'Ali IBN AL-FARID (1181-1235), ‘the Sultan of the Lovers’, was an older contemporary of the Andalusian Sufi, Ibn al-'Arabi. Ibn al-Farid was born in Egypt. His father was a professional allocator of shares in inheritances. (That is what farid means.) Ibn al-Farid seems to have led a quiet and solitary life, much of it as an ascetic hermit living on the rubbish tips of Mount Muqattam on the edge of Cairo. However, he also spent some years in Arabia and underwent a particularly intense mystical experience in Mecca. His poetry was reported to have been composed in trances that often lasted several days. His Nazm al-Suluk (‘Poem of the Way’) is 761 verses long and instructs his disciples about a series of mystical experiences. His other poems are much shorter and his Diwan is small, though highly esteemed. Ibn al-Farid, like Ibn al-'Arabi, redirected the conventional imagery of the deserted campsite and of the ‘wine poem’ to divine ends. Not only did he imitate old poems, he stole directly from them. Thus his poems recycled snatches of Mutanabbi, Buhturi and others, though of course the old verses acquired new meanings in a mystical context. (The practice of stealing or quoting from earlier poems, tadmin, was widely accepted and practised in the medieval Arab literary world.) Ibn al-Farid may have composed his verses in a state of mystical ecstasy, but those verses are ornate, highly intellectual and make great play with conventional courtly forms.