conceptual premises of various perceptual traditions can only enrich our
engagement with experience in producing our own self-expressions. This
enables a culturally egalitarianfield for multiple epistemic games, each of
which brings and shares its own rules as if sharing food at a picnic.
This approach would suit al-Jahiz’s interest in preserving meaning
through reuse over mere object preservation, suggested also through the
story of the mirror of Adam. Described by Ahmad ibn al-Rashid ibn al-
Zubayr inThe Book of Gifts and Rarities, compiled in thefifteenth century
from an eleventh-century source, the story was reprised in the sixteenth
century by Dust Muhammad. It relates that God gave Adam a fragment of
a mirror to view his offspring. One version claimed that a governor under
the Umayyad caliph Mu’awiya had received it as tribute from a king. From
him, it passed to the Abbasids. A second version said that it had belonged
to Solomon, who had retrieved it from the devil, and passed to the Jews,
who had given it to an Umayyad caliph during the wars with the Abbasids.
This caliph, Marwan, would then rub it, place it on top of another mirror,
and see things that displeased him. So he threw it away and beheaded the
leader of the Jews. One of Marwan’s slave-girls took it, and thus it even-
tually entered the treasury of the Abbasid caliphs, where it was lost.^9 The
object becomes a signal not only of what it reveals at any given moment,
but of its layered inheritance through the vagaries of fate across time and
place. A trope which shifts between mirror and cup in various tellings,
associated with diversefigures including the mythological Persian hero
Jamshid, Solomon, Kay Khosrau, and Alexander the Great, the world-
viewing glass destabilizes the object both in its ontology and in its history,
leaving it to be identified only its capacity to facilitate perception.^10 Like the
flute of al-Farabi, it adjusts its form in accordance with the need it
encounters.
Multifocality offers convergent and divergent understandings of the
world. It moves along interconnected lines offlow from position to posi-
tion, like branches of a river that separate and meet, merging with other
rivulets and accumulating meaning from multiple epistemological systems.
It swims from lake to lake. We may never be able to solidify our gaze on a
truth trapped in this mobility. Yet the perennial engagement of the world
with the infinite multiplicity of discourse may give us more insight into
truth than a subjectivity that assumes an authority guaranteed by
immobility.(^9) Hoffman, 2008. (^10) Berlekamp, 2011 :91–92.
332 Out of Perspective