دار بيبليون
Preface by Prof. Pierre LORY to the book Isharat of Dr. Lwiis Saliba, 2005
Dr. Lwiis Saliba presents us with a work that is limited in size, but innovative in its content in several respects. In particular, he has delved into the world of the shatahat uttered by certain Muslim mystics, which few authors have done until now. What is shath? It is a locution that aims to convey, in human language, a spiritual experience that is incomprehensible to the ordinary understanding. Language was created to give an account of the concrete situations of the human animal, and to enable it to think about absent things, in other words to reason. Language is dualistic in its essence, necessarily implying a subject facing objects. Yet mystics come precisely to bear witness that the world is one, unified in the one reality, that duality is ultimately an illusion. How can such an experience be expressed through ordinary language, if not by “shaking it up” (the etymological meaning of the root SHTH) and subverting it?” The expression of the inexpressible, that is the paradox par excellence” wrote Henry Corbin in a decisive text (Commentary on the Paradoxes of the Sufis, Tehran, 1981, p. 14).
How, for example, is it to be understood that the divine Presence can manifest itself through a human form, if not by a paradox? When abû Yazîd al-Bistâmî replies to a man who has come to visit him and knocks on his door: “Woe to you! there is no one in this house but God”, he is not making any blasphemy or megalomaniacal statement. He is merely giving an account of the most essential mystical experience: the “I” is nothing, God alone is. When the mystic has understood that his little person is real only because of the action and presence of the only Real, his illusory nature appears and fades away. In saying “anâ al-haqq”, Hallâj did not profess anything else – with a few nuances. For Abû Yazid was, if not illiterate, at least a man of little learning; he never wrote a single line. He never wrote a single line. He pronounced his shatahât unexpectedly, on the occasion of a particular circumstance, letting the word flow from the experience of the moment. Hallâj, on the other hand, proposed a much more constructed doctrine. He also put his paradoxes into composition in the form of verses, so strong that collective memory has preserved them-like the famous Anâ man ahwâ wa-man ahwâ anâ.
and this in spite of the pressure of the censorship seeking to erase any memory of the great Sufi martyr. Let us pause for a moment to consider the function of poetic expression. The texts of mystics and those of poetry have several features in common. The most obvious is the significance of the words and phrases used, which in both cases do not aim at a simple exchange of information, but carry a charge, a power that goes beyond their oblique meaning. Not that the experience of the poet and that of the mystic are identical, except perhaps in the case of certain geniuses of the word (Rûmî, Tagore or Goethe). The poet translates a state of the moment, a vibration of the psyche, through the emergence of the body of his poem: it is the awareness of a supernature, a transcendence, most often marked by explicit or implicit rhythm. The mystic, for his part, returns from unspeakable and unnameable states, which he nevertheless attempts to express and name: hence, in particular, the use of paradox, of those shatahats whose importance in the order of mystical expression in general we have just emphasized. There is nothing to prevent these discourses from meeting, quite the contrary. Mystical poetry developed gradually in the atmosphere of Islamic civilization, on an already fertile ground: biblical poetry (Song of Songs), Syriac poetry (St Ephrem)…
Since then, the Arabic language has not ceased to lend its wings to the flight of these spiritual poems, from Hallâj. Ibn al-Fârid and so many others, right up to the present day – let us think in particular of the richness of Lebanese poetry of this trend.
And indeed, the shath and poetry do not in any way take us back to the Middle Ages. On the contrary, Saliba suggests how the shath accompanies the search and the struggle of modern man. The poem around some of Nietzsche’s words is a new form of paradox, directly addressed to our contemporaries: God is dead, thanks to God! Contemporary man is thus freed from the weight of oppressive morality, exclusionary dogmas, and political manipulations of religion leading to sordid wars. He can at last envisage access to a new form of spirituality, respectful of the Divine Innominate, and of the very diverse human beings he has engendered.
These pages of Lwiis Saliba also take us to other climates. The testimony of the devotion to Mary in particular makes present one of the most profound constants of the
Christian sensitivity . Through her divine and human motherhood, Mary manifests the historical link connecting men with the universal presence of the Divine on earth. The devotion addressed to her is similar in some respects to the ancient cults of the Mother Goddess so widespread in the Mediterranean region: not in the vows of fertility and agricultural rhythms, of course, but in the spiritual impulse that accompanies meditation on the feminine. If Christ is the new Temple where believers come to find the divine Presence, Mary becomes by this very fact the new Holy Land, the place of the promise (cf. Louis Massignon, Les trois prières d’Abraham, Paris, 1997, p. 145).
India is also visited in this volume, in the form of references to the words of Buddha and a tribute to Gandhi and the idea of non-violence. India too represents the place of a promise: the promise of a spiritual search based on the oldest traditions, but also of a more just and humane society, based on the strength of the spirit, illuminated by culture in the noblest sense of the word, to which the poem “Iftah kitaban…” refers.)
The poems dedicated to Mona are more directly personal testimonies, reminding us that the experience of mysticism does not imply forgetting the human world around us. Greatness and suffering, happiness and uprooting are the very ground on which the spiritual life
is built and takes its meaning. The privileged meeting with certain beings of predilection in particular are a mark of the destiny: undoubtedly they make it possible to seize, with the higher octave, the agreement binding the human ones with a higher level of the being.
Writer and editor, Lwiis Saliba strives to bring together the worlds he knows and loves: that of the classical and modern East, Christian and Muslim, that of the Hindu and Buddhist Far East, and the contemporary Western culture that is spreading throughout the planet. Like so many other Lebanese intellectuals, he is a ferryman, seeking to help his fellow human beings to cross the barzakh that limits our worlds. These modest lines are an opportunity to pay tribute to what he has accomplished so far, to express my esteem for the scholar, my friendship for the man, and to recall all the pleasure I have taken in reading the following pages.
Pierre LORY