ephemeral current lives, it becomes the permanent postmortem world. As
al-Ghazali explains in hisAlchemy of Happiness:
[The human]five senses are likefive doors opening on the external world; but,
more wonderful than this, his heart has a window which opens on the unseen
world of spirits. In the state of sleep, when the avenues of the senses are closed, this
window is opened and man receives impressions from the unseen world and
sometimes foreshadowings of the future. His heart is then like a mirror which
reflects what is pictured in the Tablet of Fate. But, even in sleep, thoughts of
worldly things dull this mirror, so that the impressions it receives are not clear.
After death, however, such thoughts vanish and things are seen in their naked
reality, and the saying in the Koran is fulfilled:“We have stripped the veil from off
thee and thy sight today is keen.”^39
In hisBezels of Wisdom (Fuhus al-Hikam), meditations on the sacred
qualities of each prophet in a divine lineage, ibn Arabi expresses the relation-
ship between sleep and death by quoting the Prophet Muhammad as having
said,“Men sleep and when they died they shall awake.”^40 Thus earthly
existence is merely a dream, and dreams are breaches into wakefulness.
Although early Sufis recognized dreams as penetrating the unseen,
Suhrawardi, who also dreamt of Aristotle, was thefirst to describe dreams
comprehensively in spatial and Quranic terms. For him, visions and lesser
dreams take place in the intermediate world of suspended images (‘alam al-
mithal al-mu’allaqa), located between that of concrete phenomenal reality
and the realm of pure intellect, the world of likenesses (‘alam al-mithal)
which possess form, but not substance–the same realm as that behind the
looking glass. The ambiguity of the wordmithalas a similitude, parable, or
allegory also suggests that this intermediary world relates instructive stor-
ies, a means of reading through the physicality of words toward their
teachings.^41
Suhrawardi describes this dream world as a physical space through the
adoption of the termbarzakhfrom the Quran to indicate a boundary or
veil between levels of light which structure being and awareness, dividing
the realm of suspended images and that of likenesses.^42 Originally meaning
isthmus or interface,barzakhrepresents the barrier between the physical
and spiritual worlds in which the soul waits after death and before resur-
rection on Judgment Day (Q23:100). Yet it is also more symbolically the
barrier between salt and fresh water, juxtaposedfirst with the necessary
order of divine creation and of kinship (Q25:53) and later with the(^39) al-Ghazali, 1993 : 22. (^40) Austin, 1980 : 121. (^41) Bier, 2008 : 507.
(^42) Khismatulin, 2017 : 689; Karbassian, 2017 : 92.
194 The Transcendent Image