knowledge inhabit the emerging texts. Although Sufism has its own registers,
its innate resistance to formality and limits, along with its ultimate rift with
orthodoxy are appealing to modern poets. Adnnls wrote poetry in a neo-Sufi
vein, as did others from the old generation and the new. He also devotes a
book on the conflation of surrealism and Sufism,^49 whereas other poets prac-
tice the convergence with a Qur’mnic stylization that enables them to speak
for a poetics that carves its creativity through its roots in tradition.
Amalgamating traditions, the Prophet’s record, and the implications of
modernity, poets like the Egyptian Mu.ammad ‘Aflfl Mayar (b. 1935),
brought into poetry a Sufi strain of great resonance and richness. In a num-
ber of preludes that make up his poem “Fara.un bi-al-turmb” (“Earth Joy”
1975), Mu.ammad ‘AflflMayar uses the symbolic value of forty as the time
for poetic creativity. Relying on the number as the age of the Prophet when
receiving the Revelation, the persona looks upon his life in spatial metaphors
of forty doors that interchange with symbolic time to coalesce channels of cre-
ativity and maturation. Acting on imagination and experience, the spatial
and the temporal bring forth the moment of creation as a transfiguration,
a poetic creation.
Is it the hour of lengthening shadows,
Or the date of water springs inner nature,
bursting out,
so my body may find completion
and break into rhymed fasilas
and rhythm-beads?
I say, I who am born of forty women:
this is the valor of waiting
and the stumblings of slow greenness.^50Although the single-voiced poem is an unfolding intimation, its merging
into other revelations and significations relocates the singular into a tradi-
tion, an amalgam of the Prophetic and the Sufi. The case becomes markedly
entangled in both in the “Second Prelude,” as these intimations flow through
the forty doors as channels of reception and response. The mention of
al-Niffarl(d. 965), with his Sufi stay, arresting contemplation and entrance-
ment, signifies participation in the vision of God, a reaching into the divine
beyond the stage of Sufi knowledge. In keeping with the awakening to forms
of knowledge in reading, as in the revelatory “Read” that is prepared for in
the young girl’s initiation into reading, the poetic impulse derives accumula-
tion and growth in time and space to reach the stayor the entrancement
beyond. Exchanging “Read” in this instance with the Godly direction to the
Prophet to “read,” the poet lets the poem soar into the revelatory. Because of
this, the words assume different meanings and layering, and poetry partakes of
the visionary and the luminary. The addressee is in the position of reception,
POETIC DIALOGIZATION