dare not travelAnd a few who travel but dare not look.
Yet in poems like “Muslim Love,” whose intensity is its nostalgia, he is also deeply committed to mounting an argument for the Islamic faith whose painful contradictions these poems also recount:
You think Muslims
Are repressed, that
They berate love,
That they envy you!
Let’s just say: they
Have great love:
If only you knew!
In poems such as “Hymn,” “Recitation” and “Prayer,” Habib’s verses are religious in the Islamic tradition of figures such as Saadi and Rumi and the Western tradition of Herbert, Edward Taylor, and even, if carefully read, Shelley. These were writers who resisted the tendency of ideology to solve the world and its contradictions into a happy unity and instead sought in poetry a means of sensuously investigating those contradictions. It is as if poetry had aspired to the condition of prayer itself, or prayer had taken as its goal not an escape from human feeling but to supplement it, and not to deny belief but to represent it in terms of its varied material embodiments and see the unseen through the seen, the invisible in the visible, and whatever world there may be to come in this world.
J.T. Barbarese
November 2009
PART I RECITATION AND REVELATION
Glorious are You, in Your
Aloneness, Your
Pale eternal splendor
Beckons, in whose
Depthless light my shadow
Burns:
Hold me in Your moving stillness;
Let my night pass in
Your day.
Sublime are You, whose
Beauty burns in all Being,
Exalting all substance
Through the far corners;
Who breathed Your light
First on the face of formlessness, and last
On the forms of Human Reason.
Serene are You, in Your
Otherness, Your
Yearning depth embraces me;
Your knowing pales before itself:
Enthroned in realmlessness,
Your wisdom’s endless sea
Is adrift in my tears.
Absolute are You:
The pavilions of Night wear Your perfect Form;
From East and West Your lanterns rise:
Light upon light.
World upon world are You, Knower
Of destiny, harbinger
Of Time’s still path;
Who finds me bowed
In the rhythms of fate;
Your splendor, it is in both worlds,
Your light, it fills the far corners of Being:
Here, all is You; there, all is You.
This is the Word of God. If you recite
It before others, be sure that your voice
Is sweet and melodious: not mere noise
From an odious mouth drilled in despite.
Let the lips which shape His language of Light
Sing not just to sense, but weigh divine choice
Of syllable and word, whose divine poise
Holds the soul in its journey toward sight.
Many have fainted, hearing aloud these sounds.
Many have converted. Let me faint, too:
Let me feel His music as it resounds
In my deepest hearing, as it moves through
Sense, psyche, will and act. You who recite:
Make sound sing in my soul, till it takes flight.
A Passage from the Qur’an
(Translated by Rafey Habib)
God is the Light
Of the Heavens and of the Earth;
His Light is a parable, of
A lamp within a niche; without the lamp, a glass
Haloed as a brilliant star, lit
From an olive tree, blessed;
Whose soil is neither East nor West;
Its very oil would shine forth
Though untouched by fire:
Light upon Light.
God raises to His Light whom He will;
He engenders parables for men, He
Whose knowing is beyond horizon.
His Light abides in houses, sanctified
For the adoration of His Name. There
Is He glorified, morning and evening
By those whom trade nor profit can
Divert from remembrance of God
Or steadfastness in charity and prayer;
Whose
