Prophet’s vision of the miraculous night journey from Mecca to the
“farthest place of worship”(isra), and the subsequentmi’raj, the Quran
calls upon the heart to bear witness for the eyes, pointing out that the
Prophet’s“own heart did not distort what he saw”(Q53: 11).^36 This
perception does not go against either the law of Islam or against the
order of the senses, but supplements them in transcending the apparent
rules of the material world.
The primacy of the heart is clearly expressed in one of the earliest
treatises to describe the Sufistations. Based on Quranic interpretation,
theTreatise on the Heart(Bayan al-Farq) by the ascetic al-Hakim al-
Tirmidi (d.c.932) describes the self (nafs) through a cosmology of the
heart, described as concentric spheres of: the breast (sadr), the abode of the
light of Islam and repository of the knowledge required for religious
practice and law; the heart (qalb), abode of faith and inner knowledge of
reality granted by God; the inner heart (fu’ad), abode of the light of gnosis;
and intellect (lubb), abode of the light of unification (tawhid) with God.
Each sphere also serves as a station on the Sufipath. He begins by defining
this comprehensive heart as an eye:
The word‘heart’is similar to the word‘eye’since‘eye’includes [in its meaning]
that which lies between the two eyelashes, such as the white and black [parts] of the
eye, the pupil, and the light within the pupil. Each of these entities has a separate
nature and a meaning different from that of the others. Nevertheless, some of them
assist some of the others...The heart proper (qalb)...is like the black of the eye
within the eye, whereas the breast is like the white. The heart is also like the city of
Mecca inside the sacred area...like the place of the wick of the lamp, or the house
within the homestead or the almond inside the outer covering.^37
For him, the Quran shows that blindness and sight“are attributes of the
heart and not of the breast.”^38 Defining these sensory organs through
analogy with place, object, and seed, he suggests a worldview in which
the human merges with creation, categorized not through physicality but
through function. Like Jorge Luis Borges’so-called Chinese Encyclopedia
referenced by Foucault, his description breaks“up all the ordered surfaces
and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion
of existing things...to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old
distinction between the Same and the Other.”^39 Applied to this worldview,
the categories with which we moderns observe the world fall into disarray.(^36) Abdel-Haleem, 2004 : 347. (^37) Honerkamp, 2009 :11–13. (^38) Honerkamp, 2009 : 20.
(^39) Foucault, 1994 : xv.
114 Seeing with the Heart