I was asked to discuss how four poets, from different countries, religions and times, might be linked together spiritually and how Muslims might benefit from reading them in a conversation with a conference organiser.  The first and most obvious linkage is that I, as a declared Muslim and before, have read, pondered and been affected by Rabiyya al-Adawiyah (713-801 CE), Dante Alighieri (1265-1321 CE), William Shakespeare (1564-1616 CE), and Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889 CE).  However, I protested, that it was not my place to tell other readers what to find, be they Muslims, Christians or whatever, but that I would gladly share something of what I had, and continue, to find living in the writings of these dead poets; as all authors are when the work is done.

Literary analysis, to a great extent, is an essential skill for religious scholars.  Religious scholars, with minor variations, share the same study habits and, with a few more variations, speak the same gobbledegook to explain what they have decoded from texts. As a Muslim of that ilk I also know that the Qur’an instructs its readers to look within its verses and contemplate upon their meanings as in verse 39:27 which may be translated as 

“And we have certainly shaped all kinds of similitude that mankind might reflect upon.”

Significantly, the Arabic word translated as ‘verse’ in English is also used in the Qur’an to mean the signs seen in Creation that reveal the Divine; from atoms to galaxies and from revealed to inspired and inspiring words in all manner of texts.  Thus any text, irrespective of its apparent form, subject or genre, may contain openings to spiritual journeys and especially works written by those who are themselves journeying. With works of art we more pedestrian souls simply (simple in theory) have to find those doors; open them and step.

In the work and lives of the four poets selected a narrative of searching, alienation and conversion may be traced.  Not the conversion from one religion to another but the progression from Homo Sapiens to what some, including Joachim Wach (1898-1955), have termed Homo religiosus.  An observed process which led the late Prof Eric Sharpe (1933-2000) to declare that there was no faith without conversion.  Yet a person in the hiatus of gaining insight realises that those around them do not see as they see. They question if everyone else is wrong or if they have metamorphosed into a rejected creature.  The changes isolate the changeling from comfortable habitual ways of religion and culture as they move through the dessert of doubt and the dark caves of reflection journeying toward their faith home.  It is only upon entering this home that the traveller becomes truly aware of their fellow travellers, testifies to belief and describes the loneliness they felt on the journey.

However, before examining the four poets mention should be made to a reference point in my mind.  Someone, an eastern thinker, that Kierkegaard (1813-1855) claimed was not a Christian in life but had become one since and of whom Muslims ask if he were a prophet sent by God.  Socrates, whether Plato’s version or Xenophon’s, is great to read about but how many people would want him as a neighbour? Most Athenians decided they didn’t. Can you really blame them?  Having been a good citizen, hard worker and Hoplite, he suddenly changed and began questioning everything and everyone, even their gods. They questioned if he was truly Athenian and if he respected their gods.  He could not even take the court’s resulting death sentence seriously and suggested with masterful irony that they gave him a free lunch every day instead. To his credit and in mitigation it is difficult to apologise, especially to friends, for telling the truth, especially when was said goes against the accepted opinion of the majority.

Rabiyya had good cause to feel excluded and isolated being a woman born into a poor family, orphaned and sold into domestic slavery in a society that had adopted many of its cultural attitudes to property and gender from former Byzantine and Persian territories.  Yet this is not essentially the being a stranger of which she wrote,

“I am a stranger in your country

And lonely among your worshippers:

This is the substance of my complaint,”

She does not complain about the misfortunes of her life – what true Muslim could – but speaks directly to God and complains that in her own country of one religion worshipping one God her passionate love of God has isolated her from everyone around her.  Prayer, for most Muslims, is thought of as a public and social obligation best performed in congregation but for Rabiyya it is a private encounter with her beloved. She has stepped out on the spiritual journey into the lonely space between content fear and yearning love.  Thus her ‘complaint’ is made with the sweet irony with which she testified of her vision of the domestic and mundane. It is a complaint not against God but against herself for desiring the friendship of those she had left for the greater love.

Dante too remembers when he was neither here where he should be, nor there where he would be.

“Midway in the journey of our life

I came to myself in a dark wood

For the straight way was lost.

Ah, how hard it is to tell

The nature of that wood, savage, dense and harsh

The very thought renews my fear.”

Those who are used to the 1871 Longfellow rendition of these lines will notice that this recent translation by Robert and Jean Hollander properly translates nostra vita as ‘our life’ and not as ‘my life’.  This is an important detail because Dante was not considering a mid-point in his life-span but that dark and lonely space somewhere on the way from the world of dogma, normalcy and peer pressure to spiritual enlightenment.  If we further read “diritta via” more literally as ‘good path’ rather than “straight way” he describes something closer to the journey he remembers and universal, in greater or lesser extent, to every thinking meandering soul.  It’s also true that he was not happy to be exiled from his home city but it more important to consider that he had embraced the teachings of Francis of Assisi (d. 1226) and, like Rabiyya, felt the alienation of being a conscious faith-convert surrounded by the dark trees of the hostile straitening normality of the mono-cultures and religions they lived within. 

The Qur’an sheds some light upon this topic in verse 2:257, which reads in the Arberry (1905-1969) translation as,

 “God is the Protector of the believers; He brings them forth from the shadows into the light. And the unbelievers — their protectors are idols that bring them forth from the light into the shadows; those are the inhabitants of the Fire, therein dwelling forever.”

Thus, the awakening believer is for a time in a dark place until their path is revealed to them by Allah.  It is the moment of becoming a stranger who must find or recognise a doorway to a truer path. As for the dark trees, their former friends, relatives and leaders the Qur’an assigns them to punishment while Dante describes in detail how retribution closely fits each crime.  The politicians, popes, priests and nobility are manifestly tortured by their own deeds in a vision of Hell that, as confirmed by Prof Miguel Asin (1871-1944), draws upon an Islamic prototype for its overall structure. However, being still true to the offensive opinion of his religion and a man of his time, Dante includes the Prophet Muhammad and Imam ‘Ali amongst the ‘heretics’ being tormented.

The question that hangs over Shakespeare is whether or not he was a Recusant.  In Tudor England it was rather difficult to be other than a convert to Anglicanism or, secretly, a Recusant.  However, behind the facade of the public acceptance of one pole of practice or another spiritual, theological and philosophical difference quietly thrived.  Thrived, at least until the enforcement of the Book of Common Prayer and the Great Ejection of 1662 forced Dissenting ministers out of their livings to look for proper jobs.  Yet, from this age of religious extremism, English poetry and drama bloomed although, it must be admitted, often with lashings of gratuitous violence. Perhaps they had read those eventually ignored magisterial words of Sir Thomas More (1478-1535),

“If they [the heretics] will not … be heretics alone themself and hold their tongues and be still, but will needs be babbling and corrupt whom they can, let them yet at the leastwise be reasonable heretics, and honest, and write reason and leave railing, and then let the brethren find the fault with me, if I use them not after that in words as fair and as mild as the matter may suffer and bear.” (Cited in “Thomas More” by R. W. Chambers)

It was the life of a spiritual inquirer in such a milieu that Shakespeare quietly and obscurely described in this unusual sonnet, number 60:

“Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end; 
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend. 
Nativity, once in the main of light, 
Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crown’d,
Crooked eclipses ‘gainst his glory fight, 
And Time, that gave, doth now his gift confound.
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth, 
And delves the parallels in beauty’s brow, 
Feeds on the rarities of nature’s truth, 
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow.
   And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,
   Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand. “

Twelve lines of unremitting melancholy and resignation to the daily grind, that starts with timeless waves metrically breaking on a stony beach and then birth, youth, age, and death; the seasons of man with agricultural images ending each cycle with mowing.  Images that many poets would wax upon or that many people would find comforting made dark by his awareness of the bright spirit within. A spirit that bursts free, emphasised by the rare coincidence of the caesura with the epigram, in line thirteen. There the poet testifies to his faith that the human spirit can break free from the rustic dogma and fateful cycles of earthly measures to live on.

Although, not without experiencing genuine difficulty and rejection by his family because of his conversion to Catholicism, Gerard Manley Hopkins could eventually express himself more openly than the other poets selected for examination.  His vision of the Divine in the ordinary is not the gentle stream of Rabiyya; his verse is a torrent of carefully punctuated images. Fortunately, he was posthumously published at a time when printers had learned to respect and preserve an author’s thorning and pointing.  Unfortunately he destroyed his earlier poetry that would have surely revealed something of the isolation he found when setting out on his new path. Surely, for how can such vision and joy exist except after deep meditation and lonely labour? However, just as Shakespeare, Hopkin’s curtal moves from agriculture, differentiated substance, strangeness, and time to a simple, joyful awareness of the infinite being and cause of existence.

Glory be to God for dappled things – 

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; 

      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; 

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; 

   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough; 

      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. 

 

All things counter, original, spare, strange; 

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) 

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; 

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: 

                                Praise him.

 

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), in ‘The Rise of Totalitarianism’, discusses in some detail the life of Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881).  Although a practicing Christian, born in England and the British Prime Minister, he was still referred to by political rivals as the ‘Jew’; the religion of his parents and childhood.  Or Gustave Mahler (1860-1911) who, despite the ‘Resurrection’ symphony and its deeply passionate setting of Klopstock’s (1724-1803) ‘Die Auferstehung’, which I am listening to again as I write, still faces accusations of being a clever Jew who became a Christian only for social advancement.  Like Othello, they were converts to Christianity who, despite high office, could not be trusted and were therefore despised strangers to those of their chosen religion and to those of their former faith. Like an Iraqi Sufi saint in Iraq. Like a wealthy Italian nobleman wishing for poverty. Like an Elizabethan country boy liberating his geist.  Like an Anglican becoming a Jesuit. It is something dark that all travellers must witness and edge past, like the four poets, as they journey virtuously through nowhere to their mansions.

Although I have only looked at a few lines of each poets work to share one common lesson that I have learned from each unique life they could not possibly be critiqued justly in so few words.  There are many volumes written on them that attempt to connect a social or political cause to every line or analyse their technique within the historical development of poetry but I prefer to let the words of poets speak for themselves or rather that I speak of what their words cause to appear in my mind and soul.  It seems fitting to end this meditation with a few words from another lonely soul who burned with love for mankind, nature and God that explains the reason for many what many have written. A famous few words Beethoven (1770-1827) scribed onto the signature score of his ‘Missa Solemnis’, “Von Herzen – möge es wieder zu Herzen gehen”.  Thank you, Luigi, you and they have.