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Encounters with Ra’uf
I, too, was lost in a sea of sand
And at night I could not see the path above
Connected by the eternal stars.
When the power cut, the lamps seemed few
With a million winding footsteps between them.
I had forgotten, of all things, forgotten all things:
Up and down, sky and land, dawn and dusk.
Those who came before were far from my thoughts;
In forgetting all things I had forgotten myself
And all things greater to the East.
But every day I heard a name.
Voices spoke of a teacher, a leader, a guide.
From their lips came songs of devotion and solace.
A rhythm of life pulsed at the heart of creation,
A way of being, of being good, of being true.
I heard a name of one who remembered all things.
Not a man, they said, yet a man, truly.
He was and is and forever shall be
The vessel of blessings, the radiant lamp,
The witness and the judge,
The authority and the obedient.
And every day I heard his name.
I came to know him then, through them,
For he was their guide and their mirror
And they became the mirror, too,
Reflecting his virtue in every breath and word.
I came to know him then.
First I remembered the traditions of old—candlelight
—Then I remembered the moon and the sand’s infinitude.
I knew him, and I understood
How he visited each home, each room, each day
And guided, reminding of all greater things.
Every day I hear his name.
Week 4: The Prophet Muhammad (صلى الله عليه وسلم)
“Encounters with Ra’uf” (medium: poetry) relates my personal experience coming to “know” the Prophet Muhammad through the lives of Senegalese Muslims and their relationship to him, as well as its implication for my time living abroad in West Africa. Philosophically and emotionally, the narrative is expressed through the lens of theological concepts central to Islam.
Before analyzing the poem itself, it is first important to note that poetry has long been an expressive form central to Islamic culture. Indeed, poetry was a primary art form of pre-Islamic Arabia, and the Qur’an’s complex poetic nature is considered by Muslims to be perfect, and hence evidence of its divine origin (Asani, Lecture 2/11). The Qur’an cannot be considered poetry per se by Muslims because that would imply a human or earthly element, however poetry as a genre has been widely utilized by Muslim cultures around the world to express devotion to the Prophet Muhammad. However, rather than directly address the Prophet through praise poetry, as in the famous Turkish poem Mevlidi Sherif by Suleyman Celebi (with lines such as “That night the Prophet’s thundr’ous drums resounded,/Satan that night from heaven was ejected” [Chelebi, p. 27]) or the romantic, longing allegories of the Sindhi and Urdu traditions catalogued by Ali Asani, I have chosen to ruminate on the implications of the Prophet’s legacy and teachings in the lives of everyday people living in non-Muslim societies.
Why “ra’uf?” In the Islamic tradition, there are 99 names of God, with linked attributes reflected by the Prophet Muhammad (Asani, Lecture 2/18). While God is al-Ra’uf (The Kind), Muhammad is ra’uf (Qur’an 9:128), and the kindness of his followers, in this case Senegalese Muslims, helps in part to ameliorate the spiritual confusion of the narrator in the initial stanzas.
Indeed, the first two stanzas present a narrator who is emotionally and philosophically adrift, “too,” hinting that there have been or are at present others in similar circumstances; in many Islamic worldviews, people are forgetful of God and therefore ungrateful. Although “creative orderliness” (Asani, Lecture 1/30) in the natural world is a sign of God’s omnipresent work, the narrator expresses ignorance even of this phenomenon. Furthermore, the first stanza expresses alienation from light—alluding to Islamic notions of divine and prophetic light, such as those found in the Verse of Light (Qur’an 24:35)—to posit a broader spiritual confusion.
However, in the following stanzas personal revelation, in other words the realignment of the narrators spiritual world, arrives via acquaintance with the impact of the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad on the lives of Muslims. The place of the Prophet as a “divinely endorsed role model who exemplified how to lead a life according to God’s will” (Asani, p. 117) becomes understood in the fourth stanza. Furthermore, the central “devotion” to the Prophet and “rhythm of life” dictated by his influence express the encounter with the “intimate nature” (Asani, p. 106) of many Muslims’ relationship with the Prophet Muhammad.
While the fifth stanza alludes to some of the many attributes of the Prophet Muhammad expressed in the Qur’an, the seventh stanza relates that his model virtue is reflected in the actions and behaviors of many Muslims, and this phenomenon forms the basis of the “encounter” between the narrator and the Prophet. The eighth stanza signals the final transformation, the return of the remembrance in the narrator’s own spiritual context, but due to the pervasiveness of Muhammad, his attributes, and his teachings in every element of Muslim society, and their reflection in the lives of Muslims themselves. Finally the third, sixth, and ninth stanzas signify a broader transformation in the very structure of the poem: the development of the narrator’s relationship with Muhammad as one of hearing and understanding, part of an ongoing engagement with Islamic culture and values.