Ramadan
(From Blue Mountain Arts)

13 November 2001:

Islam has never played much of a role in my life, yet it has long haunted the fringes of my consciousness.  When I visited Israel in the 1960's and 1970's, I always stayed with the Sisters of Zion in the Old City of Jerusalem where I awakened each dawn to the call to prayer from a nearby minaret.  I loved that call to prayer, the markets of the Old Quarter, the Arab men, the mint tea they offered me, the rich laughter we shared.  But I knew little of their faith.

Today, with the pressure of world events, I have been looking more closely at Islam.  Like many people, I thought of Ramadan as a kind of Moslem "Lent" when everyone fasts.  Recently, however, in reading portions of Islamic scholar Michael Sells' Approaching the Qur'an: the Early Revelations (White Cloud Press, 1999), I discovered how profoundly rich this period is.

It prepares the way for the "Night of Destiny" in which the Qur'an was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad.  What I found especially engrossing is that the fluid Arabic used to speak of the Night into which Spirit breathes its seeds of Qur'anic revelations is redolent with the same sounds and imagery found in Qur'anic passages in which Spirit breathes the seed of Jesus into the womb of Maryam (Mary).  Sells writes:

Gender is a vital aspect of Qur'anic sound figures and the Qur'anic passages on spirit.  Like all sacred texts of the classical period of religious revelations, the Qur'an was revealed in a society in which the public voice of leadership was largely male; thus, the social context of the revelation, as in the Bible or the Vedas, was largely a male domain.  Yet the gender dynamic within the Qur'an contains an extraordinary balance that is constructed and modulated through sound figures.  These patterns create partial personifications -- of a woman giving birth, conceiving, suffering, experiencing peace, or grieving at the loss of her only child.... These sound visions occur at theologically critical moments in the Qur'an and are vital to its suppleness and beauty in the original Arabic.  It may be no coincidence that spirit (ruh) is one of the few words in Arabic that can be both masculine and feminine.... The loss of such sound visions in translation is particularly damaging because of the way Islam has been perceived in stereotypes about gender and the role of women in society [Sells:186].

In discussing "the intricate and beautiful gender dynamic that is a fundamental part of Qur'anic language" [Sells:202], Sells writes of the feminine pronoun, ha, a sound that "anchors the Sura," in these terms:

...it creates a sense of a feminine-gendered presence within a set of sliding or shifting referents (the sun, the sky and the earth and/or the sun, and then the soul).  The objects evoked are marks of wonder and signs of their underlying source [Sells:195].

Finally, about the Night of Destiny itself, Sells writes:

...The implicit metaphor in the Sura of Destiny is night, personified as a woman, conceiving the prophetic message through the spirit.  This conception by the night of destiny is almost identical, in the language used to depict it, to the conception by Maryam of Jesus through the spirit.  The personification of the night is never direct or blatant, but is heard and constructed through sound figures and undertones that make the Sura of Destiny one of the world's most beloved passages on prophecy [Sells:192-3].

I hope this brief introduction will give you some sense of the "spirit" within Islam (I highly recommend Sells' book for its surprising insights and stark beauty -- it comes with a fabulous CD of Qur'anic reciters chanting some of the early suras).

__________________________________________________________