And He said to me, The mark of my gaze is in all things.
Al-Niffari (C10th)

An eye’s trace

Like an infant learning by rote who answers “Me” when told “Say: ‘You’,” al-Junaid al-Baghdadi said that “there be no love between two people until one addresses the other as, ‘My I.’” Ahmad Abul Futuh al-Ghazali deepened this image further in The Lovers’ Auspices, where he wrote that lover and beloved are two mirrors facing one another with a rose between them; exchanging glances they melt and blur until “one becomes more the other than any other thing.” With his customary tenderness, Jamal al-Din al-Rumi would touch on the same idea, dictating to his scribes that worldly love “is a wooden sword that the hero lends to his child” so it might learn the art of combat.

The sweetness in these examples is quite absent from story of the levelled mountain in the Sinai desert.

The prophet Moses is a dominant presence in the Quran’s stories. In the Tuwa Valley is a mountain, one of the mountains of the soul, passed over by historians and geographers alike. Beside it stands God’s Interlocutor: Burnt-Tongue, uncompromising in his morals, chosen among all men to speak to his Lord without intermediaries. An aging herdsman, an outcast in Sinai’s wastes, wandering without food or drink for forty days beneath a burning sun, loving his Lord until the fire of longing had burnished his skin, Moses asked God that, having already heard Him speak on Mount Tur, he might now see Him. But the euphoric bliss of that first conversation was to lead to a terrible end. Maybe the question’s error demanded a shocking response. There are conflicting interpretations of the enigmatic verse:

“And when Moses came to the place We appointed, he spake to his Lord, saying, Lord, show Thyself that I might look upon Thee. He said, You shall not see Me, but look to the mountain: if it stands then you shall see Me. Then showing Himself to the mountain, his Lord made it as dust, and Moses fell down senseless, and when he came to, he said, Glory be to Thee. To Thee I repent, and I am the first of the believers.” [The Heights; 143]

The verbal root Ain-Ba-Ra combines the meanings of a lesson learned, teardrops, and the Hebrews, much as Ba-Dal-Waw is simultaneously the desert, the Bedouin, and revelation. What was it Moses saw at the end of his long fast, when God revealed Himself to the mountain, casting a glance that reduced it to dust? Was the mountain a mirror of God’s face? What did the lover, gazing at this representation of his beloved, actually perceive? Everything and nothing. The avatar was shattered, the witness collapsed to the ground. The mark of the longed-for glance laid him down as dead, and the sound of His word revived him. He did not find God in his heart. To follow the Arab grammarians, who developed a distinction between the heart’s perception and the eye’s, he did not see God with his heart. With his own eyes he witnessed the anchors of the world come apart. This was not destruction or punishment. He “Whom sight cannot perceive”, “Who has no like”, offered a single example: the mountain. Moses did not turn away or close his eyes. He was mesmerised by the sight, stunned because the void had stared back at him. It is like the climax of love: no matter how brief it may actually be, if that infinite instant is prolonged, it casts the lover into perdition.

Father of the Blue Tent is a name of God among the Bedouin of the Eastern Mediterranean. It is a tent whose pegs are the very mountains that might vaporise in the blink of an eye:

“You see the mountains and think them immovable, yet they pass by like the clouds.”
[The Ant; 88]
“The mountains shall be driven away, for they were a mirage.”
[The Tidings; 20]
“And the face of your Lord, majestic and full of grace, shall endure.”
[The Merciful; 27]

Perhaps God was showing Moses how time annihilates all things, that its two greatest vanquishers are God and love, the pair which stay the endless succession of moments that unfold towards death or run on into the unknown, that liberate the soul from time’s heart-throttling grip. The desire to flee and to stay are twins, cupped in God’s hands, or love’s; hope is fear’s companion. God showed Moses the limits of his sight and his destiny, showed him the importance of the void when first He emptied the horizon of what distracted Moses’s eye, then emptied his heart, then took up residence in both. He nothinged Moses so that love might begin from nothing. He took him out of himself into the world, that he might see into the farthest distance. He taught him the impossibility that “I” be “We”, the impossibility that he see any truth at all, because truth is a word. As the eye sees only what is revealed to it, no one can love anyone else as they really are.

The mountain was a sacrifice by which God brought Moses closer to Him. Form was annihilated and emptiness reigned, just as in the lovers’ embrace where the self vaporises and images are effaced. The paradox is twofold: the mountain’s erasure is the God’s manifestation; the lover’s annihilation means that love might endure. The enamoured sees the face of the beloved in all things, blind to all else, unable even to see them. God’s absence is what fills creation; His absence is the only possible way in which He may be present in a world that brims with injustice. Absence is hope, and without it the word would not be born. Absence is ghiyab. In the dictionary, ghiyaba is the depths of a thing, its farthest reaches, its end. Just as God is incarnate in the word, or Jesus, or love, just as He is manifest in the Quran, so too is he present in the mountain’s obliteration.

True life is in the encounter. Nothing is dearer to God than that He be loved. In this account, Moses never asked His name, as he does in the Book of Exodus when he hears God’s response issuing from the fire in the bush, the divine name taking the form of a nominal sentence that in English becomes verbal: “I am who I am” (or in the German of Buber and Rosenzweig, Ich bin da, “I am here”). The expectation was that the sight of the face might lift the name’s veil from the named; language would cease its chatter, silence bringing an end to its inescapable ambiguity.

The beloved is borne within the word they speak, and when they are absent, this word becomes their face.

He whom you love, creates you

Emanuel Swedenborg, confirmed bachelor and the greatest champion of conjugal love, believed that two lovers on earth would in heaven become a single ageless body in which each received the blessing of perpetual communion. The Swedish visionary, interlocutor of angels, rivalled Mohieddin Ibn Arabi in the sheer quantity of his output and its inaccessibility. Ibn Arabi did not envision the desires of ascetics as predatory beasts, nor did he regard the body as a sack full of impurities. “One loves only their Creator,” he wrote: spiritualising language until he was high on words. He had a dream in which he saw himself fucking all the stars in the heavens and then fucking the letters. Creation, he believed, was the offspring of a single injunction—“Be”—whose two letters are embedded in the very heart of existence; every creature on Noah’s ark is freighted with these two letters, coupled in the abyss of nothingness.

In Ibn Manzur’s great dictionary Lisan al-Arab—“the tongue of the Arabs”—muniyy and muniyyah are under the same entry: “semen” and “death” mixed together, the deadly concealed in the desirable, like a lightning bolt in cloud, the moment of desire invoking awareness of death. In Ibn Arabi’s Meccan Revelations, the curve of the short upper rib from which Eve was created out of Adam is related to maternal tenderness, for Adam is Eve’s mother, and a mother bends like a bower over her children. At the beginning of the Revelations, beneath the heading Universal Love, we read that “the process of mutual ingress is in train within all things, which is to say the processes of communion and conjugation; insertion and withdrawal, perpetual marriage,” and that this is true of living things and inanimate objects alike. Male and female are in the essence of all existence, alternating their roles unceasingly. Ibn Arabi’s exegesis is based on his reading of the verbs in the following Quranic verses:

“He inserts the night into the day and inserts the day into the night.”
[The Originator; 13]
“He rolls the night over the day and rolls the day over the night.”
[The Companies; 5]
“He covers the day with the night.”
[The Thunder; 3]

Night and day are two ascetics who observe love’s commandment in the universe, each a garment for the other, like men for women in verse 187 from The Cow—“The women are a garment unto you, and you a garment unto them”—the rituals of their love repeated through the ages until existence itself, “illusion of an illusion”, comes to an end.

To my (non-specialist) knowledge, there is no evidence of any reciprocal influence between Ibn Arabi and the kabbalists who believed that God’s name is a secret that has been dispersed or encoded, or rather—because they regarded the letter, not the word, as the foundation of existence—that it needs to be reconstituted in an order of which we are ignorant. In fact, they believed that the Pentateuch in its entirety is His name, and that although they have it revealed before their eyes they still do not know how to see it. Anyone who managed to discover this endlessly long name and then recited it correctly to a figure of clay would have attained the secret of creation. On the one occasion that a group of rabbis and sorcerers were successful in such an attempt, God’s hidden name gave birth to a tormented being who held out a knife to its creators, pleading, “Kill me lest you worship me.”

Egypt’s lovers

“God will bring a people He loves and who love Him.” Verse 54 of The Table Spread could imply that man cannot love a god who does not love him in return. The most famous love story in the Quran is one of unrequited love: the beloved is Yusuf; Zulaikha, “wife of the great man of Egypt” is the enamoured woman who “tries to seduce her slave-boy, having fallen passionately in love with him,” [Yusuf; 30] his beauty having penetrated beyond the innermost layer of her heart. (At this point, a misreading suggests itself: “having fallen passionately in love him” is one dot away from “he left her terrified with love.”)

But here we turn back to Moses, beloved of God since birth and raised among His foes. “And I cast upon you love from Me, that you be fashioned under My eye.” [Taha; 39] said the Lord, as though to say, “May all love you who see you and were raised under my tender gaze.”

To the ancient Egyptians, each person had two names: a “little name” by which they were known to others, and a “great name”, which is to say their secret name. In The Book of the Dead the greatest peril the dead could face in the afterlife was to forget their name. Before God’s name entered the realm of the taboo, Syrian and Egyptian gnostics had coined numerous names for nous, which were summarised by Basilides into a single word, caulacau, the key to all the heavens. The humanization of God was absolutely forbidden under any pretext whatsoever. All hypothesising was error. His hand was not a hand, His eye was not an eye: He is a presence occluded, yearning to encounter those who yearn to encounter Him. Those who discovered the secret names might lose their minds. Those who revealed them to others were imprisoned and executed. Martyrs to the truth and lovers have always been witnesses, long before al-Hallaj was crucified for love—having cried out “I am God”—and after him. This is why, perhaps, a lover might not speak the name of their beloved, careful not to reveal it, fearful that it might lead them into perdition or be turned against them.

The efforts made by jurists and theologians to reach God have been more extravagant still than the poets’ attempts to describe love. No one has ever been allowed to see Him; our knowledge of Him is confined almost entirely to His name. Between man and God, language is by its nature secret and intimate, full of subtleties and idiosyncrasies, even though the words grow as rickety and threadbare as a gaudy stage prop surrounded on all sides by emptiness. In the Lisan al-Arab, the root of the word for “secret”, Sin-Ra-Ra, is a contronym, one that simultaneously permits the sense of keeping something hidden and vouchsafing it to others. Al-Wajid—The Existing or The Being—is one of the ninety-nine names of Allah. Perhaps it is an old misreading of another of His names: Al-Wahid, The One and Only. Al-Faqid—“the loser”—is a name we might give to man. Perhaps in sympathy with our great loss, the word for “being”, wujoud, was derived from wajd, which is intense love, contentment, rage, and grief all taken together. Al-Bariha, “the departing”, is the word for “yesterday”: it is also one of the painful names for sorrow, the closest night to now, a thrust to the heart.

Bibliography:

1. The Meccan Revelations of Ibn Arabi (d. 1240), edited and indexed by Ahmed Shamseddin, Dar al-Kutub al-Ilmiyya (Beirut, 1999)
2. The Gleam of Abu Nasr al-Sarraj al-Tusi (d. 988), edited by Abdel Halim Mahoud and Taha Abdel Baqi Surur, Dar al-Kutub al-Haditha/Maktabat al-Mutanabbi (Cairo/Baghdad, 1960)
3. The Diwan of al-Hallaj with Reports of His Life and The Book of the Ta-Sins, annotated with a commentary by Mohammed Basil Ayoun al-Soud, Dar al-Kutub al-Ilmiyya (Beirut, 2002)
4. On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism by Gershom Scholem, translated by Abdel Qadir Marzouq, Dar al-Jamal (Beirut, 2021)

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Golan Haji is a Syrian-Kurdish poet, essayist and translator with a postgraduate degree in pathology. He lives in Saint Denis, France. He has published five books of poems in Arabic: He Called Out Within The Darknesses (2004), Someone Sees You as a Monster (2008), Autumn, Here, is Magical and Vast (2013), Scale of Injury (2016), The Word Rejected (2023). His translations include (among others) books by Robert Louis Stevenson and Alberto Manguel. He also published Until The War (2016), a book of prose based on interviews with Syrian women. Last spring, his French-Arabic Avant Ce Silence, with French translations by Marilyn Hacker and Nathalie Bontemps, was published by APIC editions in Algeria. 

Robin Moger is a translator of Arabic to English who lives in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Catalunya. His translations of prose and poetry have appeared widely. His most recent publications include a curated selection of poems by Wadih Saadeh, entitled A Horse at the Door (Tenement Press, 2024), Strangers in Light Coats (Seagull Press, 2023), which is a collection of the poems by Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan, Traces of Enayat by Iman Mersal (And Other Stories Press, 2023), which was a joint winner of the 2024 James Tait Black Prize for Biography, and Agitated Air: Poems After Ibn Arabi (Tenement Press, 2022), with Yasmine Seale.