مثنوي" جلال ظلفنن و سهيل ظلفنن"

Many An Illumined Heart Is To Be Found In Darkness

In Mesnavi, Bk. I: 2161-2198, Mevlana relates the story of the minstrel who spent seventy years playing his harp in a graveyard:

God comes to 'Umar, Commander of the Faithful, in a dream and tells him to go to a certain graveyard and find one to whom He wished to show His favor. 'Umar dutifully goes there, but finds no one but an old minstrel. He cannot imagine that this could be the person with whom God is well-pleased but, after a diligent search, concludes that the old harper must be the man he was sent to find. He then says: "Many an illumined heart is to be found in darkness," and approaches the minstrel to tell him of his dream and to bestow upon him the gift that God had commanded him to give: 700 dinars from the Caliphal treasury for the purchase of silks.

The old man, upon hearing 'Umar's tale, reacts strangely: he is beside himself with grief and dashes his harp to the ground, smashing it to bits. "For seventy years," he exclaims, "I have been distracted from God by this instrument, and now this!"

He then prays to God to deliver him from his self-absorption, regretting the time that he was absorbed in anything other than God.

If Not Now, When?

~Hillel the Elder

Gathering

But, mean glory of the world,
misshapen memories of other seasons,
the forest remains.

~ Andrea Zanzotto

Frygian Kerygma: The Invitation To Capaciousness

As the myths and metaphors of Scripture gradually become, for us, myths and metaphors we can live by and in, that not only work for us but constantly expand our horizons, we may enter the world of proclamation and pass on to others what we have found to be true for ourselves. When we encounter a quite different vision in, say, a Buddhist, a Jew, a Confucian, an atheist, or whatever, there can still be what is called dialogue, and mutual understanding, based on a sense that there is plenty of room in the mind of God for us both.

~ Northrop Frye, The Double Vision, 18.

Ali Farka Touré

Bearing Witness

It appears that it is our lot to witness the death throes of the hegemony of North Atlantic civilization. The center of gravity is shifting back towards Central Asia. The attempt by the U.S. to control the world (and, especially, the so-called Middle East) through brute force is proving to be a dismal failure and its Gospel of Consumerism holds sway only over the pathologically shallow. As weapons suppliers to the world, the U.S. and Europe have insured that a culture of violence will continue to spread its tentacles, but that, too, will burn itself out in time—hopefully while there are still some people left who have refused that and every other zero-sum game offered by a bankrupt civilization…

Meanwhile, as Voltaire wisely advised, let us tend our gardens.

And So, The Dervish

A few lines I translated this morning from the great Iraqi Leftist mystical poet Abdul Wahab al-Bayati:

We were two lovers: outcast and censured/Suspended between two fires and two worlds/We endure the exile in Nowheresville.


[from the poem, Aisha's Majnun].

Dervish Prayer

May my eyes never open upon the day when I cease to be scandalized by the slaughter of innocents. And may the bread I eat, baked with their blood, taste always as ashes in my mouth.

A Story Told In Granada

There is a story



(but who can say whether or not it's true?)



that in the very moment when you close your eyes for the last time



you are treated to scenes of staggering beauty.



It is said that what you see in that moment



is the beauty you have always held within you



passing before your eyes.

Quick Now, Here, Now, Always—

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this
Calling



We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

~T. S. Eliot, "Little Gidding."

Eski Cami

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is Turkey and nowhere. Never and always.

~ T. S. Eliot, "Little Gidding," slightly amended.

If This Is The Answer...

What was the question?

Nacer Khemir: Wanderers Of The Desert

And an essay...

Eid Bounty Around The World

Bright colors:



Henna:



Hugs:



Selfies:



Hindus and Muslims celebrating together:



Kosovar smiles:

When The Fire And The Rose Are One

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

~ Eliot, "Little Gidding."

On The Film "Bab 'Aziz"

Keeping to the narrative style of The Wanderers and The Dove's Lost Necklace, Nacer Khemir makes a staggeringly beautiful film, as fascinating as it is disorienting. We are easily lost in this maze as narratives intertwine and the story takes on the meaning we want it to have, but we accept so readily because it takes us to a world where poetry transcends realism. It would be a shame to only see in it a drug made to satisfy the latent orientalists within us all: this appeal to dreams restores the relevance of imagination in thoughts, that of opening the doors of possibility to go beyond reason and law, which limit destiny.

The storm that opens the film is familiar: it represents the loss of our points of reference in a world where "even dunes have moved", as Ishtar, who accompanies the old blind dervish Bab' Aziz (= grandfather), points out. They cross the desert to attend the great reunion of dervishes that only takes place every thirty years. Ishtar offers the vital viewpoint of childhood; Bab 'Aziz that of a man at death's door, this "wedding to eternity". Their exchange is initiatory: "When you talk, it's not so cold", Ishtar says to prompt him to tell a story. For they communicate with this language that teaches you to "look with your heart's eyes". In the desert, there are no maps, no predefined paths: one finds one's way by walking and singing, perhaps because searching matters more than finding. The great reunion of dervishes is not an end in itself: instead of a dramatic climax, it is the place where Bab 'Aziz passes to a new level in the great movement of life. The one who covers his remains with sand recalls that the unborn child does not know the beauty of the world and that this is still true when facing death.

While walking, Ishtar and Bab 'Aziz meet people. All are looking for something: meaning, a beloved, justice…Each tell their story, like in One Thousand and One Nights, the story that saved Scheherazade's life because, at dawn, it is never finished. The film also embeds narratives: a character they meet tells a new story with new characters, etc. Thus, it is more a poetic canvas than a succession of events; the film spins like the whirling dervish of its opening scenes in a spiral where everything is linked by a unique theme: love. A man on a motorbike follows a prince on a horse, an oasis city springs up from the desert sands, the young lad and the old man make one, and the invisible overrides the visible… Everything is muddled up and put back in place according to another logic where hallucinations and reality intertwine. Time is mixed like the narratives, in such a way that the continuity evoked is more a reference to man's perpetual renewal than to a linear or predefined destiny. Doesn't the Sufi vision play on the illusion of senses to define the unity of existence?

If one had to remember but one line, the film highlights it: "There are as many paths that lead to God as men on Earth". Why, then, imprison Islam and Arabs in a simplistic and ossified image? The discrepancy is permanent. Even clothes are stylized. You cannot grasp reality without changing your state of mind; you cannot understand a people without listening to it. "The one we think is mad is not necessarily the mad one": this age-old culture, says the film, is the opposite of a fundamentalist bent. Its contemplative tradition is centered on the sensitive experience of love. Instead of a closed identity, it offers a thousand facets. Shot in Tunisia and Iran, the film mixes Persian, Arab and other languages, but the characters understand each other because they speak the same spiritual language and communicate with body language. In the same way that intellectuals from opposed people communicate without translation in Godard's Notre musique.

Osman throws himself down the well to find his beloved and the prince cuts himself off from the world by contemplating his soul in the spring that the gazelle leads him to: doesn't this culture also carry the burden of its difficult position in a modern world where everything is dictated by Western utilitarian and consumerist universalism? It is thanks to the continuity and complexity of a spiritual quest that has always been centered on love, and not to a reactionary withdrawal into a set identity, that it will resist the steamroller of globalization, find its dignity again and guide the world, Nacer Khemir seems to say through the multiplication of symbols, references and visions. The film's puzzle is put together thanks to the character of Bab 'Aziz. A vision is thus imposed: the essential quest for all, from the North to the South, for a meaning of life that draws from love and the great movement of the world's order.

Critique originally published at www.africacultures.com

Translated by Céline Dewaele.

What Is Transgressive Transcendentalism?

Tough-minded, tender-hearted Sufism for the 21st century.

Food For The Soul

Geographies Of The Heart

Let us speak no more of "sacred" and "secular" as if they are discrete territories, their boundaries inscribed in nature; let us speak, instead, of geographies of the heart.