words that possess the quality of presence in the lap of things” (Ibid. 165).
He even draws on a saying by Khalll >mwlon language and connotation:
“language is the daughter of reality, and passions are connected to this realistic
source as the base of life. It expresses efficiently what it emerges from, but
cannot express what is too supreme in beauty and goodness. Hence, whatever
grand relates to humanity, the earth and reality, with all their contradictions,
for any expression of the supreme vision involves language in distortion”
(Ibid. 165).
This reading draws on Sufi registers. Obviously not in the “staying beyond
stayings” state, or mawqif, the speaker is in the buffer state, between the
maqmmand .ml, a pause in the phrasing of al-Niffarl(d. 965) in his book
Mawmqif.^38 The Iraqi poet cannot sustain this vision, and hence is unable to
transcend the real world; for he can be drawn away from God by any phe-
nomenal being or thing, and the bond with God is thus severed (Ibid. 19).
The poet is aware of these registers and practices, as he is in the state of striv-
ing to reach “the veritable ignorance of all things through Me,” as al-Niffarl
says in describing this state (Ibid. 39): “Thou shouldst notice in the vision
of thy soul every world and heaven, and every sky and earth, and land and sea,
and night and day, and prophet and angel, and knowledge and gnosis, and
words and names, and all that is in that, and all that is between that, saying:
‘There is naught like unto Him;’ and that thou shouldst see this its saying: ‘There
is naught like unto Him’, to be the extremity of its knowledge, and the
end of its gnosis” (Ibid.). As noticed by the Iraqi critic, however, Yuhmmzl
is engaged only in the present, hence the existence of the veil that resists
obliteration. Al-Niffarldescribes the stage as revealed: “I look upon thee, and
I desire that thou shouldst look upon Me; while all manifestation veils thee
from Me. Thy soul is thy veil, and thy knowledge is thy veil, and thy gnosis
is thy veil, and thy names are thy veil, and my Self-revelation to thee is thy
veil...Void thy heart for Me” (49). The poet’s engagement with the present
redirects him into the oblique and wayward. The Iraqi poet speaks, to cite
Foucault again, in the language of the madman. This waywardness also
entrenches Sufism in the discourse of dissent, revitalizing language thereby
through this cross-fertilization. The effort “loads all signs with a resemblance
that ultimately erases them,” as Michel Foucault speaks of the language of
the madman in relation to poetry, for both occupy a “marginal position”
where “words unceasingly renew the power of strangeness and the strength of
their contestation.”^39
This is not the same approach as followed by the Egyptian Xalm.‘Abd al-
Xabnr who takes the Sufi Bishr al->mfl(d. 840 or 841–842) as a mask. He
achieves this masking, however, through careful parallelism, intertextualiza-
tion, and indirect reflection on the human condition. In his “Mudhakkirmt al-
Sufi Bishr al->mfl” (Memoirs of the Sufi Bishr al->mfl1964), the poet draws
a grim picture of the situation that provoked Bishr al->mflto leave human
society behind. Quotations give the poem a duplicational nature that builds
CONCLUSION: DEVIATIONAL AND REVERSAL POETICS