Women, Perfume and Prayer (1992)

National Mosque, Kuala Lumpur

I’m writing this on the morning of Wednesday, September 9, 1992. By the Muslim calendar, it’s 12 Rabiulawal 1413. 

It’s a public holiday; right now thousands of Muslims are gathering on Merdeka Square after a procession from the National Mosque. Yes, it’s the birthday of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). While I’m typing these keys, on the telly the Prime Minister is addressing the crowd on Merdeka Square. Banners among the crowd proclaim all kinds of pious aspirations. One of them announces the theme of this year’s celebration: Berjihad ke Arah Kecemerlangan (Struggle Towards Excellence), though the word jihad, which in another context can mean holy war, may make ‘infidels’ feel a bit uneasy.

The words of the Prime Minister, specifying the four qualities of the Prophet that Malaysians (including non-Muslims, I take it) must endeavour to emulate, are ringing in my ears as I tap the keys — keys to some understanding of the true significance of the Prophet to modern man. The four qualities are sidiq (truthfulness), amanah (trustworthiness), tabligh (responsibility of conveying the truth) and fatanah (wisdom). Marvellous qualities, all; and necessary if our society is to achieve excellence in the moral and spiritual spheres, as well as those of politics and economic development.

To the skeptic and the cynic, such words of idealism proclaimed on such an auspicious occasion smack of well-meaning birthday resolutions; ritualistically affirmed but not rigorously observed, much like those ubiquitous slogans that we are constantly bombarded with — you know, Bersih Cekap Amanah (Clean, Efficient, Trustworthy) and all that jazz.

The Prophet as a revered model of being and behaviour is constantly affirmed, at least verbally, by all pious Muslims. Such an affirmation constitutes a conspicuous part of Muslim piety. Equally conspicuous but more deeply rooted in the heart is the extraordinary, if not unique, love for the Prophet universally felt by Muslims. 

Muhammad Iqbal

As Muhammad Iqbal, the poet-philosopher of Pakistan, strikingly puts it in one of his poems: “Love of the Prophet runs like blood in the veins of his community.” Like blood, yes. Note that, and remember The Satanic Verses.

This unusually profound love for the Prophet is, it seems, stronger among the Muslims of the Indian sub-continent than anywhere else. It has been said that to Pakistani and Indian Muslims, the figure of the Prophet is more sacred than even God Himself. With them, apparently, you might get away with insulting God but not the Beloved Prophet. 

Iqbal, in whose works the Prophet figures prominently as a model of the heroic self or ‘superman’ has a line in his poem "Javidnama" which most people would consider amazing in its assertion, but is apparently quite acceptable to a Pakistani or Indian Muslim. “You can deny God,” says the line, “but you cannot deny the Prophet.”

This truly extraordinary regard for the person of the Prophet is something that Salman Rushdie, who hails from that part of the Muslim world himself, should have realised when he chose to display his satanic genius in the reckless way he did. If God has 99 beautiful names or attributes (the al-asma al-husna), the Prophet has even more. Each Muslim, depending on his imaginative capacity (or peculiarity), may treasure one particular name representing one aspect of the Beloved Prophet more than others, just as he may treasure one particular hadith more than any other. 

The name or attribute of the Prophet that I myself feel I have a special something for is Kamil (Perfect), and pretty close to it Munir (Radiant). To the Sufis, especially those influenced by the theology of the great 12th century Spanish-Arab mystic Ibn ’Arabi, the Prophet Muhammad is the archetype of the Perfect Man (al-Insan al-Kamil). This is a difficult concept to truly understand, and if understood, to explain. Briefly and crudely put, the Perfect Man in Ibn ’Arabi’s sense of the phrase is that man in whom the purposiveness of creation is consummated, who is the isthmus (barzakh) between the two poles of Reality: the link between Heaven and Earth, the invisible and visible. 

Talking of the visible/invisible immediately reminds me of the strikingly suggestive ambiguity of the Arabic word for invisible — ghaib. The word, according to Malise Ruthven (Islam in the World), can, depending on the context, “apply to a reality outside human sense-perception, or to the private parts of a woman — ‘that which is (i.e. ought to be) concealed’.” (I’ll have to come back to this later.)

The Perfect Man, according to Ibn ’Arabi, is at once “the eye by which the divine subject sees Himself and the perfectly polished mirror that perfectly reflects the divine light” (Fusus al-Hikam or The Bezels of Wisdom, translated by RWG Austin).

Mystical crap, did you say?

Meditate on the word ghaib and you’ll, insya-Allah (God-willing), be granted a glimpse of the seductive heart of the mystery. Thinking of the Prophet as al-Insan al-Kamil leads me naturally to recalling my favourite hadith: “Women and perfume have been made dear to me, and coolness hath been brought to mine eyes in the prayer.” [This is the best translation of the hadith that I know; it’s by Martin Lings, the author of the best modern biography of the Prophet, who informs us that “the coolness of the eyes” is a proverbial Arabic expression signifying intense pleasure.) This beautiful hadith also happens to be the one which Ibn ’Arabi chose to meditate on in his chapter on Muhammad in Fusus al-Hikam.

On the birthday of the Beloved Prophet, while my fellow Muslims on Merdeka Square are entranced by the Prime Minister’s speech on the theme of Berjihad ke Arah Kecemerlangan, I’m mysteriously moved to quietly meditate on that most poetic of hadiths. 

Women, perfume, prayer… Ibn ’Arabi’s interpretation of this hadith is not exactly easy reading, or easy to explain in the limited space given to me. So I’ll simply quote parts of the suggestive summary by the English translator of Fusus al-Hikam. The ‘perfume hadith’, says Austin, illustrates ‘the underlying theme of triplicity in singularity… This triplicity in singularity is… the two fundamental poles of the God-Cosmos polarity, the third factor of the relationship between the two, all three elements [i.e. women, perfume and prayer) being united in the Oneness of Being.” 

The first element of the triplicity, women, “represents the various aspects and nature of the cosmic pole, suggesting as it does: multiplicity, nature, form, body, receptivity, fecundity, becoming, beauty, fascination…” The Perfect Man may have “total involvement in the complex and multiple demands of cosmic life, symbolised by absorption in sexual union,” but he’ll take care to “correct” that total involvement “by the purification of remembering and reintegration into the world of the Spirit, symbolised by the major ablution after such union.” 

This should explain what Ibn ’Arabi means when he says that a man “may most perfectly contemplate God in woman.” (Some feminists would probably dismiss all this as patriarchal claptrap; others might like the privileged status of women it implies.) Austin’s summary goes on to say that, according to Ibn ’Arabi’s view of things, “the attracting beauty of woman, far from being a snare to delude man, should rather become for him that perfect reflection… of his own spiritual truth, being, as she is, that quintessential sign or clue… from which he might best learn to know his own true self, which is, in turn, to know his Lord.” (Sorry for the convoluted sentence, but there you are.) 

It seems, if I may hazard an obvious gloss, the Sufis’ claim that to know yourself is to know God can best be realised through a woman. In other words, union with the Ghaib can best be realised through the ghaib.

The second element of the triplicity, perfume, is a sort of connecting factor, “not entirely physical nor yet entirely spiritual.” It “symbolises at once both the current of the creative Mercy and also the spiritual nostalgia that draws the human spirit back to its source in God.” 

The last element, prayer, “symbolises the spirit and its reflection in man”; its purpose is to make man fully aware of God. As with women, prayer has its own “perfume.”

Malise Ruthven

On the birthday of the Beloved Prophet, it is customary for Muslims to chant prayers and sing panegyric verses (selawat, marhaban and qasidas) in his honour, as well as listen to sermons. I prefer to express my reverence for and love of our ‘Perfumed Prophet’ by remembering in the very flow of my blood the perfection of his being; a perfection that embraces the human (very human) and the superhuman, the earthly and the transcendent, the creaturely sensual and the divinely spiritual, the visible and the invisible.

And with that remembrance also to recall that the essential thrust of Islam, “the least ‘other-worldly’ of the great religious systems” (Malise Ruthven), is, peace be upon the cheerless mullahs and puritanical fundamentalists, truly and marvellously life-affirming.

16 September 1992