
<div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!MDFr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd7868f5e-b016-4864-81b7-2505644dd287_2150x3274.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!MDFr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd7868f5e-b016-4864-81b7-2505644dd287_2150x3274.jpeg"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!MDFr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd7868f5e-b016-4864-81b7-2505644dd287_2150x3274.jpeg"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!MDFr!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd7868f5e-b016-4864-81b7-2505644dd287_2150x3274.jpeg" width="1456" height="2217" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!MDFr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd7868f5e-b016-4864-81b7-2505644dd287_2150x3274.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!MDFr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd7868f5e-b016-4864-81b7-2505644dd287_2150x3274.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!MDFr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd7868f5e-b016-4864-81b7-2505644dd287_2150x3274.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!MDFr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd7868f5e-b016-4864-81b7-2505644dd287_2150x3274.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!MDFr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd7868f5e-b016-4864-81b7-2505644dd287_2150x3274.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!MDFr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd7868f5e-b016-4864-81b7-2505644dd287_2150x3274.jpeg"></a></figure></div><p><em>Tombs of the Khalifs, Cairo. Lithograph by Louis Haghe after David Roberts, 1848. The tombs are Mamluk; the name is a nineteenth-century mistake. Wellcome Collection.</em></p><p>We open with two Europeans who went looking for the border between the living and the dead. The first, an Englishman in Cairo, wrote down what was said to the dead at the graveside and watched a boy find a dead admiral in a drop of ink. The second, a Frenchman, gave the country on the far side of that border a Latin name. Then we follow the mystics and madmen of our new film, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zopVkLQ6s8">Why Sufis Sat With the Dead</a>, into the graveyards of Basra, Baghdad, Bukhara and Cairo. Lastly, we trace one sentence from a lost Greek play to a monastery wall on Mount Athos: die before you die.</p><div><hr></div><h3>Edward William Lane</h3><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!xIn-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5643ac68-9266-4683-8263-0689ff543051_2056x3088.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!xIn-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5643ac68-9266-4683-8263-0689ff543051_2056x3088.jpeg"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!xIn-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5643ac68-9266-4683-8263-0689ff543051_2056x3088.jpeg"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xIn-!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5643ac68-9266-4683-8263-0689ff543051_2056x3088.jpeg" width="1456" height="2187" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!xIn-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5643ac68-9266-4683-8263-0689ff543051_2056x3088.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!xIn-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5643ac68-9266-4683-8263-0689ff543051_2056x3088.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!xIn-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5643ac68-9266-4683-8263-0689ff543051_2056x3088.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!xIn-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5643ac68-9266-4683-8263-0689ff543051_2056x3088.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!xIn-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5643ac68-9266-4683-8263-0689ff543051_2056x3088.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!xIn-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5643ac68-9266-4683-8263-0689ff543051_2056x3088.jpeg"></a></figure></div><p><em>Edward William Lane in Egyptian dress. Plaster by his brother, Richard James Lane, 1829. National Portrait Gallery, London.</em></p><p>Edward William Lane was born in Hereford, the son of a clergyman. His mother was a niece of the painter Thomas Gainsborough. He was meant for Cambridge and the Church, and gave both up after a short visit to Cambridge. Soon afterwards he found he could solve every problem on that year’s Cambridge mathematics examination but one. The answer to the last came to him in his sleep. He woke in the night and wrote it down.</p><p>In 1825 he sailed for Alexandria. Off Tunis the brig nearly went down in a gale. The master was useless, so Lane, who knew some navigation, took the helm lashed to the wheel and brought her into Malta. In Egypt he dressed as an Egyptian, spoke Arabic all day, and was known to his friends in Cairo as Mansur. At the Pyramids he lived in a tomb for two weeks, “with bones, rags, and mummies for his companions.” He drew what he saw with a camera lucida, a prism on a stand that throws the view onto the page so it can be traced.</p><p>His <em>Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians</em> came out in 1836, illustrated with woodcuts he drew himself. The last chapter is on death. Lane explains that a Cairo tomb is built hollow, a small vaulted room under the ground, so that the dead can sit up when the two angels Munkar and Nakir come to question them. When the body has been laid inside and the entrance closed, a <em>fiqi</em>, a reciter of the Quran, sits down in front of the tomb and speaks to the dead man. This is the <em>talqin</em>, the prompting. Lane took down the words:</p><blockquote><p>O servant of God! O son of a handmaid of God! know that, at this time, there will come down to thee two angels commissioned respecting thee and the like of thee: when they say to thee, ‘Who is thy Lord,’ answer them, ‘God is my Lord,’ in truth; and when they ask thee concerning thy Prophet, or the man who hath been sent unto you, say to them, ‘Mohammad is the Apostle of God,’ with veracity; and when they ask thee concerning thy religion, say to them, ‘El-Islám is my religion;’ and when they ask thee concerning thy book of direction, say to them, ‘The Kurán is my book of direction, and the Muslims are my brothers;’ and when they ask thee concerning thy Kibleh, say to them, ‘The Kaabeh is my Kibleh; and I have lived and died in the assertion, that there is no deity but God, and Mohammad is God’s Apostle:’ and they will say, ‘Sleep, O servant of God, in the protection of God.’</p></blockquote><p><em>Edward William Lane, Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, chapter XXVIII</em></p><p>A young child is not prompted, Lane adds, because a child is not held responsible for what it did. The soul was believed to stay with the body through the first night after burial, and the angels came on that night. In Cairo it was called <em>Laylat al-Wahsha</em>, the Night of Desolation, because the dead man’s place at home now stood empty. It was also called <em>Laylat al-Wahda</em>, the Night of Solitude.</p><p>The chapter has stranger things in it. A traveller who falls sick in the desert, when his companions cannot wait for him, digs a trench in the sand, lies down in it wrapped in his grave-clothes, covers himself up to the face, and waits, “trusting to the wind to complete his burial.” A friend told Lane about the funeral of a <em>wali</em>, a saint, whose bearers found they could not carry him through the Bab al-Nasr, the northern gate that leads out to the great cemetery. The dead man would not go. So the bearers walked off to where he could not hear them and agreed on a plan. They came back, picked up the bier, and spun it round and round until, as the friend put it, the sheikh was giddy. Then they carried him through the gate and buried him in the place he had refused.</p><p>In a footnote Lane copies out, from George Sale’s eighteenth-century English Koran, the places where the dead were said to wait for the Last Day. Martyrs rest inside green birds that eat the fruit of Paradise. Some souls stay near their graves. Some say the souls of believers wait in the well of Zamzam at Mecca, and the souls of unbelievers in a well called Barahut, in the Hadramawt. Lane adds that in his own day the belief in the Barahut well “commonly prevails.”</p><p>A sinkhole called the Well of Barhout lies in the desert of al-Mahra, east of the Hadramawt, in Yemen near the border with Oman. Its mouth is thirty meters across and it is 112 meters deep. Locals called it the Well of Hell, said it was a prison for jinn, and kept away. In September 2021 eight members of the Oman Cave Exploration Team went down on ropes and made the first known descent to the bottom. They found snakes, frogs, beetles, dead birds that had fallen in, small waterfalls, and cave pearls, round stones that grow layer by layer under dripping water.</p><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!FAgQ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fad2798f4-bb90-4140-8fde-bae3a26e49d3_500x291.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!FAgQ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fad2798f4-bb90-4140-8fde-bae3a26e49d3_500x291.jpeg"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!FAgQ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fad2798f4-bb90-4140-8fde-bae3a26e49d3_500x291.jpeg"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!FAgQ!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fad2798f4-bb90-4140-8fde-bae3a26e49d3_500x291.jpeg" width="1456" height="847" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!FAgQ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fad2798f4-bb90-4140-8fde-bae3a26e49d3_500x291.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!FAgQ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fad2798f4-bb90-4140-8fde-bae3a26e49d3_500x291.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!FAgQ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fad2798f4-bb90-4140-8fde-bae3a26e49d3_500x291.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!FAgQ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fad2798f4-bb90-4140-8fde-bae3a26e49d3_500x291.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!FAgQ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fad2798f4-bb90-4140-8fde-bae3a26e49d3_500x291.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!FAgQ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fad2798f4-bb90-4140-8fde-bae3a26e49d3_500x291.jpeg"></a></figure></div><p><em>Funeral procession, Cairo. Woodcut after Lane’s own drawing, Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (plate facing p. 477 in the 1890 edition). Project Gutenberg.</em></p><p>Another chapter is on magic. Soon after his first arrival in Egypt, the British consul Henry Salt told Lane how a Maghribi magician had found a thief among Salt’s servants by having a boy look into a drop of ink in the palm of his hand. On his second stay Lane found the man, Sheikh ʿAbd al-Qadir al-Maghribi, and invited him home. Lane chose the boy himself, about eight years old, from a group of children passing in the street on their way back from a workshop, so that the two could not have arranged anything in advance.</p><p>The magician burned frankincense and coriander seed in a brazier and drew a square of numbers in the boy’s right palm: 4 9 2 in the top row, 3 5 7 in the middle, 8 1 6 at the bottom. Every row, column and diagonal adds up to fifteen. In Arabic magic this is the <em>buduh</em> square, named for the four letters that stand for its corner numbers, <em>b</em>, <em>d</em>, <em>w</em> and <em>h</em>, which count as 2, 4, 6 and 8. In the European books of magic it is the square of Saturn, the planet the old astrologers set over old age and death. Into the middle of the square he poured a little ink.</p><p>Inside the front of the boy’s cap he tucked a strip of paper with a line from the Quran: “We have removed from thee thy veil; and thy sight to-day is piercing.” In the Quran (50:22) those words are spoken to a soul that has just been brought through death and sees, for the first time, what it had ignored while alive. The magician used them to open the eyes of a living boy.</p><p>The boy saw a man sweeping, then seven flags, then a sultan’s tent with soldiers camped around it, then a bull dragged in, slaughtered, cooked and eaten. Then the magician turned to Lane and asked whether he wanted the boy to see anyone who was absent or dead. Lane named a man who had been dead for about thirty years:</p><blockquote><p>I named Lord Nelson, of whom the boy had evidently never heard; for it was with much difficulty that he pronounced the name, after several trials. The magician desired the boy to say to the Sultán—“My master salutes thee, and desires thee to bring Lord Nelson: bring him before my eyes, that I may see him, speedily.” The boy then said so; and almost immediately added, “A messenger is gone, and has returned, and brought a man, dressed in a black suit of European clothes: the man has lost his left arm.” He then paused for a moment or two; and, looking more intently, and more closely, into the ink, said, “No, he has not lost his left arm; but it is placed to his breast.” This correction made his description more striking than it had been without it: since Lord Nelson generally had his empty sleeve attached to the breast of his coat: but it was the <em>right</em> arm that he had lost. Without saying that I suspected the boy had made a mistake, I asked the magician whether the objects appeared in the ink as if actually before the eyes, or as if in a glass, which makes the right appear left. He answered, that they appeared as in a mirror. This rendered the boy’s description faultless.</p></blockquote><p><em>Edward William Lane, Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, chapter XII</em></p><p>Nelson lost his right arm at Santa Cruz de Tenerife and wore the empty sleeve pinned across his coat until he was killed at Trafalgar. On other evenings, Lane was told, the same magician’s boy described Shakespeare down to his clothes, and described an Englishman’s father with his spectacles, a hand held to his head for the headaches he suffered, and a stiff leg from a fall while hunting. A young English lady had the square drawn in her own palm, saw a broom sweeping the floor with no one holding it, and would not look any longer. Lane offered his boy a present to confess to a trick, and the boy refused it. Lane wrote that neither he nor anyone else had found the explanation.</p><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!jfj2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6eaa1b9c-2ce8-4cb8-ba88-70b08f7b066c_300x347.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!jfj2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6eaa1b9c-2ce8-4cb8-ba88-70b08f7b066c_300x347.jpeg"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!jfj2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6eaa1b9c-2ce8-4cb8-ba88-70b08f7b066c_300x347.jpeg"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!jfj2!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6eaa1b9c-2ce8-4cb8-ba88-70b08f7b066c_300x347.jpeg" width="1456" height="1684" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!jfj2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6eaa1b9c-2ce8-4cb8-ba88-70b08f7b066c_300x347.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!jfj2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6eaa1b9c-2ce8-4cb8-ba88-70b08f7b066c_300x347.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!jfj2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6eaa1b9c-2ce8-4cb8-ba88-70b08f7b066c_300x347.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!jfj2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6eaa1b9c-2ce8-4cb8-ba88-70b08f7b066c_300x347.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!jfj2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6eaa1b9c-2ce8-4cb8-ba88-70b08f7b066c_300x347.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!jfj2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6eaa1b9c-2ce8-4cb8-ba88-70b08f7b066c_300x347.jpeg"></a></figure></div><p><em>Magic square and mirror of ink. Woodcut after Lane’s drawing, Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians. Project Gutenberg.</em></p><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!OBru!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F63b93263-1c3d-459d-b60a-dbbd6ef8b40b_960x1157.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!OBru!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F63b93263-1c3d-459d-b60a-dbbd6ef8b40b_960x1157.jpeg"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!OBru!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F63b93263-1c3d-459d-b60a-dbbd6ef8b40b_960x1157.jpeg"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!OBru!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F63b93263-1c3d-459d-b60a-dbbd6ef8b40b_960x1157.jpeg" width="1456" height="1755" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!OBru!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F63b93263-1c3d-459d-b60a-dbbd6ef8b40b_960x1157.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!OBru!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F63b93263-1c3d-459d-b60a-dbbd6ef8b40b_960x1157.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!OBru!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F63b93263-1c3d-459d-b60a-dbbd6ef8b40b_960x1157.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!OBru!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F63b93263-1c3d-459d-b60a-dbbd6ef8b40b_960x1157.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!OBru!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F63b93263-1c3d-459d-b60a-dbbd6ef8b40b_960x1157.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!OBru!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F63b93263-1c3d-459d-b60a-dbbd6ef8b40b_960x1157.jpeg"></a></figure></div><p><em>Rear-Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson, by Lemuel Francis Abbott, 1799. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.</em></p><p>In 1840 Lane married Nafisa, a Greek woman who had come into his household as a slave at about eight years old, bought by him or given to him, and whom he had educated. Two years later he went back to Cairo with her and with his sister, Sophia Poole. Lane had noted that his book was incomplete because he could not enter the women’s quarters of a Cairo house. His sister could, and her letters home became <em>The Englishwoman in Egypt</em>.</p><p>He spent seven more years in Cairo working on a dictionary, because no useful Arabic–English lexicon existed. He had <em>Taj al-ʿArus</em>, the Arabic dictionary that gathered all the earlier ones, copied out for him by a Cairene scholar, a job that took thirteen years, and he spent the rest of his life at Worthing, on the English coast, translating and arranging it. He died with the work unfinished. His grand-nephew, Stanley Lane-Poole, saw the last volumes through the press. Lane is buried in West Norwood Cemetery in south London.</p><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!7Jc_!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F42801541-e152-4da8-8a90-f083a43ed54a_302x500.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!7Jc_!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F42801541-e152-4da8-8a90-f083a43ed54a_302x500.jpeg"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!7Jc_!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F42801541-e152-4da8-8a90-f083a43ed54a_302x500.jpeg"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!7Jc_!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F42801541-e152-4da8-8a90-f083a43ed54a_302x500.jpeg" width="1456" height="2411" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!7Jc_!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F42801541-e152-4da8-8a90-f083a43ed54a_302x500.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!7Jc_!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F42801541-e152-4da8-8a90-f083a43ed54a_302x500.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!7Jc_!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F42801541-e152-4da8-8a90-f083a43ed54a_302x500.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!7Jc_!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F42801541-e152-4da8-8a90-f083a43ed54a_302x500.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!7Jc_!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F42801541-e152-4da8-8a90-f083a43ed54a_302x500.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!7Jc_!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F42801541-e152-4da8-8a90-f083a43ed54a_302x500.jpeg"></a></figure></div><p><em>Sketch of a tomb with the entrance uncovered. Woodcut after Lane, Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (p. 484 in the 1890 edition). Project Gutenberg.</em></p><div><hr></div><h3>Henry Corbin</h3><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!ezCu!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F626550c4-3b81-4086-97cf-e73f030aac74_607x420.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!ezCu!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F626550c4-3b81-4086-97cf-e73f030aac74_607x420.png"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!ezCu!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F626550c4-3b81-4086-97cf-e73f030aac74_607x420.png"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ezCu!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F626550c4-3b81-4086-97cf-e73f030aac74_607x420.png" width="1456" height="1007" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!ezCu!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F626550c4-3b81-4086-97cf-e73f030aac74_607x420.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!ezCu!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F626550c4-3b81-4086-97cf-e73f030aac74_607x420.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!ezCu!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F626550c4-3b81-4086-97cf-e73f030aac74_607x420.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!ezCu!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F626550c4-3b81-4086-97cf-e73f030aac74_607x420.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!ezCu!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F626550c4-3b81-4086-97cf-e73f030aac74_607x420.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!ezCu!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F626550c4-3b81-4086-97cf-e73f030aac74_607x420.png"></a></figure></div><p><em>Eranos, Ascona, 1952. Gershom Scholem sits at the far right beside Henry and Stella Corbin; Mircea Eliade is at the center. The Henry Corbin Project.</em></p><p>Henry Corbin was born in Paris in 1903. He studied philosophy with the medievalist Étienne Gilson, went to Germany to meet Martin Heidegger, and made the first French translation of Heidegger’s work, <em>What Is Metaphysics?</em></p><p>In 1928 he met Louis Massignon, the scholar of Hallaj whose night on the Tigris we wrote about in Journal No. 6. Massignon had just come back from Iran with a lithographed copy of <em>The Philosophy of Illumination</em> by Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi, the Persian philosopher executed in Aleppo in 1191, and he handed it to the young man. Corbin remembered what he said: “Take it, I think there is something in this book for you.” For the rest of his life Corbin called Suhrawardi <em>mon shaykh</em>, my master.</p><p>He and Paul Kraus published Suhrawardi’s Persian tale <em>The Sound of Gabriel’s Wing</em>. In 1939 Corbin and his wife Stella went to Istanbul for three months to photograph Suhrawardi’s manuscripts in the city’s libraries. The war kept them there for six years. Corbin said that exile taught him silence and what he called the discipline of the arcane, the <em>disciplina arcani</em>, the rule by which the early Church kept its central rites hidden from outsiders. In September 1945 he reached Tehran for the first time and set up a department of Iranian studies. Its series, the Bibliothèque Iranienne, printed critical editions of Persian and Arabic texts.</p><p>After the war he was invited to the Eranos meetings at Ascona, on Lake Maggiore, as a replacement for Massignon, who would not accept the Eranos rule against talking politics. Corbin came back almost every summer until 1976. One year Carl Jung gave his lecture on synchronicity there, and Corbin spoke on cyclical time among the Ismailis.</p><p>Suhrawardi had a word for where the visionary goes. In two of his Persian tales a traveller meets a mysterious figure and asks where he comes from, and the answer is <em>Na-koja-abad</em>. Corbin noted that the word is in no Persian dictionary and believed Suhrawardi coined it. <em>Na-koja</em> means “no-where.” <em>Abad</em> means a settled, cultivated place, a town or a country with people in it. The word looks like a Persian version of “utopia,” and Corbin refused to translate it that way, because Suhrawardi meant a real country, with cities, that you cannot reach by walking. Suhrawardi also called it the eighth climate. The ancient geographers divided the inhabited earth into seven climates, bands running from south to north; the eighth is the one that is off the map. Its cities have names: Jabalqa, Jabarsa and Hurqalya.</p><p>Corbin gave that country a Latin name, <em>mundus imaginalis</em>, the imaginal world. He coined “imaginal” because in French and English “imaginary” had come to mean unreal, and he needed a word for a world of images that his authors held to be real, a level of being between the senses and pure intellect. The Arabic sources call it <em>ʿalam al-mithal</em>, the world of image-forms, and Ibn Arabi calls it the barzakh. Corbin’s book on it, <em>Terre céleste et corps de résurrection</em>, “Celestial Earth and Body of Resurrection,” gathers texts on Hurqalya and on the subtle body that lives there, from Zoroastrian Iran to the Shaykhi theologians of the nineteenth century. In English it is <em>Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth</em>.</p><p>He died in Paris in 1978. A street in Tehran is named after him.</p><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!Vjyi!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1d73641d-f9a9-49b0-a19f-b84f80fb6a98_188x320.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!Vjyi!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1d73641d-f9a9-49b0-a19f-b84f80fb6a98_188x320.jpeg"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!Vjyi!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1d73641d-f9a9-49b0-a19f-b84f80fb6a98_188x320.jpeg"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Vjyi!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1d73641d-f9a9-49b0-a19f-b84f80fb6a98_188x320.jpeg" width="1456" height="2478" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!Vjyi!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1d73641d-f9a9-49b0-a19f-b84f80fb6a98_188x320.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!Vjyi!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1d73641d-f9a9-49b0-a19f-b84f80fb6a98_188x320.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!Vjyi!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1d73641d-f9a9-49b0-a19f-b84f80fb6a98_188x320.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!Vjyi!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1d73641d-f9a9-49b0-a19f-b84f80fb6a98_188x320.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!Vjyi!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1d73641d-f9a9-49b0-a19f-b84f80fb6a98_188x320.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!Vjyi!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1d73641d-f9a9-49b0-a19f-b84f80fb6a98_188x320.jpeg"></a></figure></div><p><em>A page from a Suhrawardi manuscript given to Henry Corbin, reproduced in the Cahier de l’Herne volume on Corbin (1981). The Henry Corbin Project.</em></p><p>Watch: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIvqx5yvWfg">Henry Corbin & Ibn Arabi: Accessing the Mundus Imaginalis in Sufism</a></p><div><hr></div><h2>From the Film</h2><h3>The Barzakh</h3><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!5TGF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcb12a18c-9d59-4ac4-8761-e876666ad4b9_1168x1800.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!5TGF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcb12a18c-9d59-4ac4-8761-e876666ad4b9_1168x1800.jpeg"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!5TGF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcb12a18c-9d59-4ac4-8761-e876666ad4b9_1168x1800.jpeg"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5TGF!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcb12a18c-9d59-4ac4-8761-e876666ad4b9_1168x1800.jpeg" width="1456" height="2244" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!5TGF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcb12a18c-9d59-4ac4-8761-e876666ad4b9_1168x1800.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!5TGF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcb12a18c-9d59-4ac4-8761-e876666ad4b9_1168x1800.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!5TGF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcb12a18c-9d59-4ac4-8761-e876666ad4b9_1168x1800.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!5TGF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcb12a18c-9d59-4ac4-8761-e876666ad4b9_1168x1800.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!5TGF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcb12a18c-9d59-4ac4-8761-e876666ad4b9_1168x1800.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!5TGF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcb12a18c-9d59-4ac4-8761-e876666ad4b9_1168x1800.jpeg"></a></figure></div><p><em>A soul symbolized as an angel. From a Turkish translation of Qazwini’s Wonders of Creation, 1717. Walters Art Museum, W.659.</em></p><p>The film opens with the verse that gives the in-between its name:</p><blockquote><p>When death comes to one of them, he says, “My Lord, send me back, so that I may do good in what I left behind.” Never. It is only a word he is saying. And behind them is a barzakh until the day they are raised.</p></blockquote><p><em>Quran 23:99–100</em></p><p>A barzakh is a strip of land between two waters, touching both and belonging to neither. The Quran uses the same word for the place where salt water meets fresh: “between them is a barzakh they do not overrun.” Ibn Arabi, who wrote more about the barzakh than anyone, starts from that image in the sixty-third chapter of his <em>Meccan Openings</em>:</p><blockquote><p>Know that the barzakh is a name for something that separates two things and never goes over to either side, like the line that separates shade from sunlight, and like His words, “He let loose the two seas, meeting; between them is a barzakh they do not overrun.” “They do not overrun” means that neither mixes with the other. The senses cannot find the line between them, yet reason judges that there is a barrier between them that keeps them apart. That barrier, known by the mind, is the barzakh. If the senses could perceive it, it would be one of the two things, and not the barzakh. Any two things that lie side by side need a barzakh that is neither one of them and holds the power of each. And because the barzakh separates the known from the unknown, the nonexistent from the existent, the denied from the affirmed, the intelligible from the unintelligible, it was given the name barzakh. It is intelligible in itself, and it is nothing but imagination. When you perceive it, if you are rational, you know that you have perceived a real thing that your eye has fallen on.</p></blockquote><p><em>Ibn Arabi, al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya, chapter 63, translated by SpiritualRelief</em></p><p>“Imagination” here is <em>khayal</em>. In Ibn Arabi it names both the power in us that makes images and a level of the world where meanings take on shape and bodies grow subtle. His favorite example is a face in a mirror: you see it, you could describe it, and you know it is not in the glass. Lane’s magician said the same of the figures in the ink: they appeared as in a mirror, with right and left reversed.</p><p>The Quran puts sleep beside death:</p><blockquote><p>God takes the souls at the moment of their death, and the souls of those who have not died, in their sleep. He keeps those for whom He has decreed death and sends the others back until a named term. In that are signs for people who reflect.</p></blockquote><p><em>Quran 39:42</em></p><p>For Ibn Arabi, dreams come from the barzakh. Every sleeper goes a little way out onto the isthmus and is sent back. The dead go out and stay.</p><p>Watch: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GYOZtMniY0">What Ibn Arabi Really Taught About the Barzakh</a></p><div><hr></div><h3>Hasan of Basra</h3><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!00bm!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1d7df589-b23c-423e-aa32-8e5698c9864e_500x289.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!00bm!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1d7df589-b23c-423e-aa32-8e5698c9864e_500x289.jpeg"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!00bm!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1d7df589-b23c-423e-aa32-8e5698c9864e_500x289.jpeg"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!00bm!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1d7df589-b23c-423e-aa32-8e5698c9864e_500x289.jpeg" width="1456" height="842" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!00bm!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1d7df589-b23c-423e-aa32-8e5698c9864e_500x289.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!00bm!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1d7df589-b23c-423e-aa32-8e5698c9864e_500x289.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!00bm!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1d7df589-b23c-423e-aa32-8e5698c9864e_500x289.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!00bm!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1d7df589-b23c-423e-aa32-8e5698c9864e_500x289.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!00bm!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1d7df589-b23c-423e-aa32-8e5698c9864e_500x289.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!00bm!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1d7df589-b23c-423e-aa32-8e5698c9864e_500x289.jpeg"></a></figure></div><p><em>The shrine of Hasan of Basra at al-Zubayr, outside Basra, in 1950. Ibn Sirin is buried with him.</em></p><p>Hasan was born in Medina, the son of two freed captives. His mother was a servant in the household of Umm Salama, one of the Prophet’s wives, and it is said that when his mother was out on errands and the baby cried, Umm Salama nursed him herself. He moved to Basra as a young man and preached there for the rest of his life. Most Sufi chains of teachers pass through him. Qushayri, writing three centuries later, says that anyone who saw Hasan assumed some fresh disaster had just struck him. He is buried at al-Zubayr, outside Basra, in the same shrine as Ibn Sirin, the Basran to whom the best-known Arabic book on interpreting dreams is attributed.</p><p>Nearly five hundred years after Hasan’s death, Attar of Nishapur put him at the edge of an open grave in the fourth discourse of his <em>Musibat-nama</em>, the <em>Book of Affliction</em>:</p><blockquote><p>They were burying a man in the earth. In Basra, Hasan went up to the edge of the pit.</p><p>He looked down into the grave, into the niche cut for the body, and standing over that grave he wept for himself.</p><p>Then he said: This is a hard thing. For this world, the grave is the last station,</p><p>and for the next world, this same place is the first. The first and the last are both under the ground.</p><p>Why tie your heart to a world that is all color when its end is this, the narrow grave?</p><p>How are you not afraid of that hard world when its beginning is this, under the dust?</p><p>Enough of this one, since this is how it ends. And pity that one, since this is how it begins.</p><p>There is no one behind this curtain who has not lost someone to weep for.</p><p>If you want to strike up a tune in some mode, play it for someone who has no dead.</p><p>Any lamp with the wind in front of it, how can it go freely down the road?</p><p>You carry a head full of madness. You are carrying a lamp down a road in a gale.</p><p>Aren’t you afraid? This lamp goes out quickly. You go out quickly. If you can, move quickly.</p><p>If this lamp of yours dies all at once, you will fall into a pit with the road unfinished.</p><p>Finish the road before that, you fool, before a wind like that puts out your lamp.</p><p>When your lamp has died, you who know nothing, no sign of it is left, and no trace.</p><p>Search as long as you like for a dead lamp; no one in the whole world can show you where it went.</p><p>Any lamp the wind has snatched, beat your head over it all you want, what good is that?</p><p>No one knows anything about a dead lamp. Once it is out, call it there or call it gone.</p><p>The lamp came here from the place of no-place. When it went back there, it disappeared.</p><p>For those who see, the road from this world to that is no more than one breath, with the soul in between.</p><p>When that one breath leaves your chest, this world of yours becomes that world.</p><p>It is not far from this world to that. There is no wall between them but a breath.</p><p>When that breath rises out of the pure soul, it throws you headfirst into the dust.</p><p>Death has made up its mind about every creature. Every one of them has to lie down in the dust.</p></blockquote><p><em>Attar, Musibat-nama, Discourse Four, translated by SpiritualRelief</em></p><p>The niche is the <em>lahd</em>, the hollow cut into the side of the pit where the body is laid. The Persian runs two puns through the passage. <em>Parda</em> means a curtain, and it is also the word for a mode in Persian music, the scale a musician plays in, so the curtain that hides the dead and the mode of the song are the same word in consecutive couplets. <em>Dam</em> means a breath, and <em>dam zadan</em>, literally “to strike a breath,” means to play a tune; the song nobody can play without mourners is made of the same breath that later turns out to be the whole width between the worlds. The lamp comes from <em>jay-i bi-ja’i</em>, the place of no-place, a close cousin of Suhrawardi’s <em>Na-koja-abad</em>, the country of no-where.</p><p>Some of the early ascetics kept a grave ready. Rabiʿ ibn Khuthaym of Kufa, a student of Ibn Masʿud who was palsied for much of his life, had his grave dug while he was alive, and so did the caliph ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAziz. A thousand years later the jurist Ibn ʿAbidin still cited the two of them on whether this was allowed. A story is told about Rabiʿ: when he felt his heart harden, he went down into his grave, lay in it, and called out the verse that opens the film, “My Lord, send me back, so that I may do good in what I left behind.” Then he answered himself: “Rabiʿ, you have been sent back. So do good.” Ahmad ibn Hanbal recorded a third man, Mutarrif, who dug a grave inside his own house and went down into it to recite the Quran. When he died, they buried him there.</p><p>Watch: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwSweaPj1zA">The Secret Path: Attar’s Conference of the Birds Explained</a></p><div><hr></div><h3>Ibn Abi al-Dunya</h3><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!qT70!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3b5bb2c8-f1f5-40c9-9fcc-3df8aa8c0ac2_1195x1800.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!qT70!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3b5bb2c8-f1f5-40c9-9fcc-3df8aa8c0ac2_1195x1800.jpeg"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!qT70!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3b5bb2c8-f1f5-40c9-9fcc-3df8aa8c0ac2_1195x1800.jpeg"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!qT70!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3b5bb2c8-f1f5-40c9-9fcc-3df8aa8c0ac2_1195x1800.jpeg" width="1456" height="2193" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!qT70!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3b5bb2c8-f1f5-40c9-9fcc-3df8aa8c0ac2_1195x1800.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!qT70!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3b5bb2c8-f1f5-40c9-9fcc-3df8aa8c0ac2_1195x1800.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!qT70!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3b5bb2c8-f1f5-40c9-9fcc-3df8aa8c0ac2_1195x1800.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!qT70!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3b5bb2c8-f1f5-40c9-9fcc-3df8aa8c0ac2_1195x1800.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!qT70!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3b5bb2c8-f1f5-40c9-9fcc-3df8aa8c0ac2_1195x1800.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!qT70!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3b5bb2c8-f1f5-40c9-9fcc-3df8aa8c0ac2_1195x1800.jpeg"></a></figure></div><p><em>The angels Munkar and Nakir. From a Turkish translation of Qazwini’s Wonders of Creation, 1717. Walters Art Museum, W.659.51B.</em></p><p>Bukhari’s collection describes the first night plainly. When a man is laid in his grave and his companions turn to go, he hears their footsteps. Two angels come, sit him up and question him. If he fails, he is struck between the ears with an iron hammer and cries out, and everything near the grave hears the cry except human beings and jinn. A hadith in Tirmidhi’s collection gives the angels their names, Munkar and Nakir, and says they are black, with blue eyes.</p><p>Ibn Abi al-Dunya, who died in Baghdad in 894, was tutor to the caliph al-Muʿtadid, and it was said that he could make whoever sat with him laugh or weep, as he chose. He wrote books called <em>The Voices</em>, <em>Dreams</em> and <em>Graves</em>. In <em>Dreams</em>, the dead come to the living in sleep and tell them how they are faring. He also compiled <em>Those Who Lived After Death</em>, fifty-six reports of people who spoke, appeared or came back after dying. Report forty-three is about a man who did not leave with the others:</p><blockquote><p>A man died. His brother, whose eyes were weak, said: When we had buried him and the people had gone, I laid my head on the grave. I heard a voice from inside it asking: Who is your Lord? Who is your prophet? I knew my brother’s voice and the way he spoke. He answered: God is my Lord, and Muhammad is my prophet. Then something sharp, like the point of an arrow, rose out of the grave to my ear. My skin crawled, and I walked away.</p></blockquote><p><em>Ibn Abi al-Dunya, Man ʿasha baʿd al-mawt, report 43, translated by SpiritualRelief</em></p><p>The hadith says human beings cannot hear the cry from the grave. The brother put his ear to the soil anyway, heard his brother answer the angels correctly, and then something came up through the earth toward the ear that was listening. The questions he overheard are the ones Lane’s reciter was still rehearsing over Cairo tombs nearly a thousand years later.</p><div><hr></div><h3>Baha al-Din Naqshband</h3><div><figure><div><div><source type="image/webp"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xdJD!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdc6e2de6-4ba9-46d2-821d-34b5de346e4a_175x175.jpeg" width="1456" height="1456" alt=""></source><div></div></div></div></figure></div><p><em>Tilework over a gate in the Baha al-Din complex outside Bukhara, which Russian sources spelled Bogoeddin. Color photograph by Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky, between 1905 and 1915. Presidential Library, St Petersburg.</em></p><p>Baha al-Din was born in a village outside Bukhara called Qasr-i Hinduvan. It was later renamed Qasr-i ʿArifan, the Castle of the Knowers. Three days after his birth his grandfather carried him to Muhammad Baba Sammasi, one of the <em>Khwajagan</em>, the Masters, the line of Central Asian teachers he would inherit. <em>Naqshband</em> in Persian is a maker of patterns, an embroiderer or a weaver of figured cloth, and he is said to have helped his father weave patterned cloaks. His order later read the name as the one who binds the pattern, the Name of God pressed into the heart until it holds its shape.</p><p>His first living teacher was Amir Kulal. <em>Kulal</em> means potter, and that was his trade before he became a master. Amir Kulal’s circle practised <em>dhikr</em>, the remembrance of God’s names, out loud and together. Naqshband wanted the silent kind, done in the heart without a sound. He got it from ʿAbd al-Khaliq Ghujduvani, the founder of the Khwajagan, who had died more than a century before Naqshband was born. Ghujduvani, the tradition says, had learned the silent <em>dhikr</em> from Khidr, the Green One, who never died. So the practice reached Naqshband from a dead man who had it from a man who cannot die.</p><p>The Naqshbandi biographies place the meeting at night, at the tomb of one of the old masters outside Bukhara. Naqshband sat there with his heart turned toward the dead man and saw a throne with a vast figure on it, and was told it was Ghujduvani. Among the instructions he received was to trim the wick of his own lamp so the light of the unseen could show.</p><p>The order calls this kind of teaching <em>ruhaniyya</em>, initiation through the spirit of a master who has died. The older name for a disciple who never met his teacher is <em>Uwaysi</em>, after Uways al-Qarani, a camel-herder in Yemen who lived in the Prophet’s time and never travelled to see him because he had a mother to care for. The Prophet told ʿUmar that if he ever met this Uways, he should ask him to pray for his forgiveness. Tradition says Uways was killed fighting for ʿAli at Siffin, on the Euphrates. The shrine at Raqqa said to hold his tomb was blown up by the Islamic State in 2014.</p><p>Ghujduvani left his students a set of rules in Persian, a few words each. Among them: <em>hosh dar dam</em>, awareness in the breath, never breathing in or out forgetful of God; <em>nazar bar qadam</em>, watching your step; <em>safar dar watan</em>, travelling in your homeland, which means the journey inside; and <em>khalwat dar anjuman</em>, solitude in the crowd. Naqshband added three more of his own. Hasan put the whole distance between the worlds at a single breath. Ghujduvani’s school told its students to watch every one.</p><p>Bukhara made Naqshband its patron saint and calls him <em>khwaja-yi bala-gardan</em>, the averter of disaster. Pilgrims still come to his tomb at Qasr-i ʿArifan, and people in Bukhara say three visits there equal one pilgrimage to Mecca. The student of a dead man became the dead man people come to see.</p><p>Watch: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-R_KbQSbLk">Alone in a Crowd? The Sufis Had a Name for It</a></p><div><hr></div><h3>The Qarafa</h3><div><figure><div><div><source type="image/webp"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!nxbZ!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0ca28f03-5539-4970-ad0d-508852c246fb_250x162.jpeg" width="1456" height="943" alt=""></source><div></div></div></div></figure></div><p><em>The dome of Imam al-Shafiʿi’s mausoleum in the Southern Cemetery of Cairo, built by Sultan al-Kamil in 1211. The boat on top was filled with grain for the birds.</em></p><p>Cairo’s oldest Muslim cemetery, the Qarafa, is as old as Fustat, the first Muslim city in Egypt. The jurist al-Shafiʿi, founder of one of the four Sunni schools of law, was buried there. The Ayyubid sultan al-Kamil buried his mother beside him and raised the wooden dome that still stands over both, the largest wooden dome in Cairo. On its peak sits a copper boat that used to be kept full of grain for birds. One explanation is that it refers to al-Shafiʿi’s title, the sea of knowledge.</p><p>People in Egypt still write to al-Shafiʿi. They drop letters into boxes at his tomb, or post them, asking him to stop an injustice or see them through a crisis. In 1965 the Egyptian sociologist Sayyid ʿUways, who grew up in al-Khalifa, the old quarter of mausoleums below the Citadel, published a 387-page study of the letters people send to a man who died more than eleven centuries earlier.</p><p>In 1320 a Mamluk sultan gave up a military parade ground beside the cemetery, and Sufi orders looking for room outside the crowded city moved in. Egypt’s rulers began building their tombs with a Sufi lodge, a <em>khanqah</em>, attached: the dead in one room, the dervishes in the next. Gravediggers, tomb keepers, scholars and Sufis lived there for centuries. Lane noticed that Cairo’s Copts kept houses in the cemeteries too, and spent the night before their great feasts beside their dead, the women upstairs and the men below.</p><p>At the time of Egypt’s 1986 census nearly 180,000 people lived in Cairo’s City of the Dead, and about 6,000 of them lived inside the tombs. Since 2020 the government has bulldozed parts of it for roads and flyovers.</p><div><hr></div><h3>The Madmen</h3><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!9OXw!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F15b8bf2e-4dd6-4fb5-b9fe-cbbb03ac3f6b_400x515.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!9OXw!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F15b8bf2e-4dd6-4fb5-b9fe-cbbb03ac3f6b_400x515.jpeg"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!9OXw!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F15b8bf2e-4dd6-4fb5-b9fe-cbbb03ac3f6b_400x515.jpeg"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!9OXw!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F15b8bf2e-4dd6-4fb5-b9fe-cbbb03ac3f6b_400x515.jpeg" width="1456" height="1875" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!9OXw!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F15b8bf2e-4dd6-4fb5-b9fe-cbbb03ac3f6b_400x515.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!9OXw!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F15b8bf2e-4dd6-4fb5-b9fe-cbbb03ac3f6b_400x515.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!9OXw!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F15b8bf2e-4dd6-4fb5-b9fe-cbbb03ac3f6b_400x515.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!9OXw!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F15b8bf2e-4dd6-4fb5-b9fe-cbbb03ac3f6b_400x515.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!9OXw!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F15b8bf2e-4dd6-4fb5-b9fe-cbbb03ac3f6b_400x515.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!9OXw!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F15b8bf2e-4dd6-4fb5-b9fe-cbbb03ac3f6b_400x515.jpeg"></a></figure></div><p><em>Majnun throws himself onto Layla’s grave. Folio from a Khamsa of Amir Khusraw Dihlavi.</em></p><p>The Arabic word <em>majnun</em> means one taken by the jinn. The law did not hold the mad responsible for what they said, so they could say anything, to a caliph or to God, and Attar fills his books with them. The most famous was Bahlul, the wise fool of Harun al-Rashid’s Baghdad. In <em>The Wise Madmen</em>, a book of such figures compiled in Nishapur around the year 1000, Harun passes Bahlul on the road and asks for advice. Bahlul tells him to look at the palaces of the kings before him, and then at their graves.</p><p>In Attar’s <em>Book of Affliction</em>, in the same discourse as Hasan at the grave, the madmen live in the cemetery:</p><blockquote><p>A madman slept on a grave and would not leave it for a moment.</p><p>Someone asked him: “You are out of your mind. Why have you slept here your whole life?</p><p>Get up, restless one, come to the city, and see a world of people past counting.”</p><p>He said: “This dead man won’t let me take the road. He keeps saying: Don’t leave this place.</p><p>If you go, your road only gets longer, and in the end you have to come back here.</p><p>Since every road the city people take runs to the graveyard, what would I do with a city full of sin?</p><p>I go weeping like a rain cloud for having come. Ah, for the going. And alas, for the coming.”</p></blockquote><p><em>Attar, Musibat-nama, Discourse Four, translated by SpiritualRelief</em></p><p>The dead man’s argument is about distance. Every street in the city ends at the cemetery gate, so anyone who leaves is only taking the long way back. The madman weeps at both ends of the road, for being born and for having to die.</p><p>Attar gives Bahlul a winter night:</p><blockquote><p>One winter night Bahlul, drunk, went along with his feet in the mud and a shoe in his hand.</p><p>Someone asked him: “You have set out on the road. Where are you going from here?”</p><p>He said: “I am hurrying to the graveyard. There is a tyrant there, in torment.</p><p>I am going because his grave is full of fire. I will get warm. The cold is bitter.”</p><p>For one man, death is like this. For another, that same death is provision for the road.</p><p>Injustice throws a fire inside you, and throws you down in dust and blood.</p><p>The road of injustice may look like the way ahead. Whoever walks it walks lost.</p></blockquote><p><em>Attar, Musibat-nama, Discourse Four, translated by SpiritualRelief</em></p><p>“Drunk” in Attar is the Sufi word for one overcome by the divine, and the grave full of fire is the punishment of the grave from Bukhari’s hadith. Bahlul goes to warm his hands at a tyrant’s punishment.</p><p>And the last grave in the discourse:</p><blockquote><p>A woman was weeping hard over a grave. A madman asked her: “What is this weeping for?”</p><p>She said: “My eyes are wet and my heart is grieving for my young one, left under the dust.”</p><p>He said: “You are in the dust. He is not. He is nothing now but the light of a pure soul.</p><p>While he was in the body, his place was dust. When he died, he got free of the dust, and was clean.</p><p>The body is worth nothing to the Friend, but the soul, beautiful as Joseph, is kept in His private rooms.”</p></blockquote><p><em>Attar, Musibat-nama, Discourse Four, translated by SpiritualRelief</em></p><p>The Friend is the divine. Joseph is the byword for beauty in Persian poetry, the youth whose face made the women of Egypt cut their hands with their fruit knives. The madman turns the cemetery inside out: the boy is free, and the woman standing over him in a body is the one still buried.</p><p>The most famous <em>majnun</em> of all is Qays, whom the Arabs called Majnun Layla, mad for Layla. When Nizami put the story into Persian verse in 1188, he ended it at a grave. Layla dies, and Majnun goes to her tomb and dies on it. In Amir Khusraw’s later version of the story, he throws himself into it.</p><p>Watch: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rrMEsUq9r0">The Sufi Majdhub: When Divine Attraction Overwhelms Spiritual Effort</a></p><div><hr></div><h3>Die Before You Die</h3><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!5T4v!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F69f3adfa-24c3-42e6-823f-b2b9f7ff84ec_4000x2663.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!5T4v!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F69f3adfa-24c3-42e6-823f-b2b9f7ff84ec_4000x2663.jpeg"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!5T4v!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F69f3adfa-24c3-42e6-823f-b2b9f7ff84ec_4000x2663.jpeg"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5T4v!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F69f3adfa-24c3-42e6-823f-b2b9f7ff84ec_4000x2663.jpeg" width="1456" height="969" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!5T4v!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F69f3adfa-24c3-42e6-823f-b2b9f7ff84ec_4000x2663.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!5T4v!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F69f3adfa-24c3-42e6-823f-b2b9f7ff84ec_4000x2663.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!5T4v!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F69f3adfa-24c3-42e6-823f-b2b9f7ff84ec_4000x2663.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!5T4v!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F69f3adfa-24c3-42e6-823f-b2b9f7ff84ec_4000x2663.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!5T4v!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F69f3adfa-24c3-42e6-823f-b2b9f7ff84ec_4000x2663.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!5T4v!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F69f3adfa-24c3-42e6-823f-b2b9f7ff84ec_4000x2663.jpeg"></a></figure></div><p><em>The Death of Socrates. Jacques-Louis David, 1787. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.</em></p><p>The film ends on a Sufi saying, <em>mutu qabla an tamutu</em>, die before you die. It has no chain of narrators. Ibn Hajar al-ʿAsqalani, the leading hadith critic of Mamluk Cairo, said it was not established as a saying of the Prophet. A century and a half later the Meccan scholar Mulla ʿAli al-Qari agreed, and said where it came from:</p><blockquote><p>It is from the words of the Sufis. The meaning is: die by choice before you die by compulsion. Voluntary death means leaving desires and amusements, and the slips and the forgetting that follow from them.</p></blockquote><p><em>Mulla ʿAli al-Qari, al-Asrar al-marfuʿa, no. 539, translated by SpiritualRelief</em></p><p>The idea is older than the Sufis. In Plato’s <em>Gorgias</em>, Callicles tells Socrates that a man without appetites lives like a stone or a corpse. Socrates answers with a line from a lost play of Euripides:</p><blockquote><p>But surely life according to your view is an awful thing; and indeed I think that Euripides may have been right in saying,—“Who knows if life be not death and death life;”—and that we are very likely dead; I have heard a philosopher say that at this moment we are actually dead, and that the body (soma) is our tomb (sema), and that the part of the soul which is the seat of the desires is liable to be tossed about by words and blown up and down.</p></blockquote><p><em>Plato, Gorgias 492e–493a, translated by Benjamin Jowett</em></p><p>In the <em>Cratylus</em>, Socrates traces the same pun to the Orphic poets, who taught that the soul is shut in the body as a punishment, the body its prison, until the debt is paid. Attar’s woman at the grave is the Greek pun turned into a scene.</p><p>In the <em>Phaedo</em>, set on the day Socrates drank the hemlock, he makes the idea a discipline:</p><blockquote><p>And the true philosophers, Simmias, are always occupied in the practice of dying, wherefore also to them least of all men is death terrible.</p></blockquote><p><em>Plato, Phaedo 67e, translated by Benjamin Jowett</em></p><p>A little later he calls philosophy itself <em>melete thanatou</em>, the practice of death.</p><p>Rumi put the saying in the mouth of a fish. In the fourth book of the <em>Masnavi</em> he retells a fable from <em>Kalila and Dimna</em>, which came into Persian from the Sanskrit <em>Panchatantra</em>: three fish in a pond, and fishermen coming with a net. The wise fish leaves for the sea at once. The second fish, half-wise, is left behind:</p><blockquote><p>The second fish, in the hour of trouble, left without the shade of the wise one, said:</p><p>“He has gone to the sea and is free of grief. I have lost so good a companion.</p><p>But I won’t think of that. I’ll look to myself. I’ll make myself dead, right now.</p><p>I’ll turn my belly up and my back down and go along on top of the water,</p><p>drifting the way a weed drifts, not swimming the way a living thing swims.</p><p>I’ll be dead, and give myself to the water. Death before death is safety from torment.”</p><p>Death before death is safety, young man. That is what Mustafa told us.</p><p>He said: Die, all of you, before death comes, or you will die in trials.</p><p>So he died, and threw his belly up. The water carried him, now down, now up.</p><p>Each of the fishermen was sorry: “Too bad, the best fish has died.”</p><p>Their “too bad” made him glad: “My trick has worked. I’ve escaped the knife.”</p><p>Then one fisherman picked him up, spat on him, and threw him on the ground.</p><p>Rolling over and over, he slipped unseen into the water. The fool was left behind, thrashing.</p></blockquote><p><em>Rumi, Masnavi, Book IV, translated by SpiritualRelief</em></p><p><em>Mustafa</em>, the Chosen, is a name of the Prophet; Rumi passes the saying on as his. The third fish, the fool, thrashes until the net takes him, and Rumi leaves him in a frying pan. Last issue’s fish asked for water from inside the sea. This one plays dead in it and lives.</p><p>In seventeenth-century Silesia a Lutheran physician named Johannes Scheffler turned Catholic, took the name Angelus, and became court physician to the Holy Roman Emperor. He wrote more than sixteen hundred short epigrams, most of them couplets, collected as <em>The Cherubinic Wanderer</em>. The sixth book, added in the edition printed at Glatz in 1675, has this one, titled <em>The Wise Man Does Not Die</em>:</p><blockquote><p>The wise man dies no more; he is already dead: dead to all vanity, dead to all that is not God.</p></blockquote><p><em>Angelus Silesius, The Cherubinic Wanderer, VI.241, translated by SpiritualRelief</em></p><p>On Mount Athos, the Orthodox monks’ peninsula in northern Greece, where no child has been born for more than a thousand years, the sentence hangs on monastery walls: <em>If you die before you die, you will not die when you die.</em> The monks call their daily remembrance of death <em>meleti thanatou</em>, Plato’s phrase from the <em>Phaedo</em>. In the ossuary of the Romanian skete of Prodromos, where the monks’ skulls are kept, one skull carries an inscription in Romanian: <em>What I am, you will be too. What you are, I was too.</em></p><p>Euripides asked it as a question. Socrates heard it from a sage and made a practice of it. The Sufis passed it on as the Prophet’s words, and the hadith critics handed it back to the Sufis. Rumi gave it to a fish, Angelus Silesius to the wise man, and on Athos a skull says the rest.</p><div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!YzzM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fefbb9718-3f2a-4dbc-b4a9-5ffb46105d1f_307x585.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!YzzM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fefbb9718-3f2a-4dbc-b4a9-5ffb46105d1f_307x585.png"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!YzzM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fefbb9718-3f2a-4dbc-b4a9-5ffb46105d1f_307x585.png"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!YzzM!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fefbb9718-3f2a-4dbc-b4a9-5ffb46105d1f_307x585.png" width="1456" height="2774" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!YzzM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fefbb9718-3f2a-4dbc-b4a9-5ffb46105d1f_307x585.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!YzzM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fefbb9718-3f2a-4dbc-b4a9-5ffb46105d1f_307x585.png"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!YzzM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fefbb9718-3f2a-4dbc-b4a9-5ffb46105d1f_307x585.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!YzzM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fefbb9718-3f2a-4dbc-b4a9-5ffb46105d1f_307x585.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!YzzM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fefbb9718-3f2a-4dbc-b4a9-5ffb46105d1f_307x585.png"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!YzzM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fefbb9718-3f2a-4dbc-b4a9-5ffb46105d1f_307x585.png"></a></figure></div><p><em>Cherubinischer Wandersmann, second edition, Glatz, 1675, the first to include the sixth book. projekt-gutenberg.org</em></p><p>Watch: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zopVkLQ6s8">Why Sufis Sat With the Dead</a></p>
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