What Makes a Muslim Poet? 1 comments

By Peggy Rosenthal

When the current issue of Image came in the mail, what first caught my eye in the table of contents was the name Khaled Mattawa. The name and his contributor’s bio (mentioning translations of Arabic poetry) made me think he might be Muslim. This piqued my interest, since my husband and I are writing a book drawing on contemporary Muslim and Christian artists.

From an online search I quickly found that, yes, my hunch was right: there on the website The American Muslim were several of Mattawa’s poems. This info returned me to his Image poems with the question: How does Mattawa’s faith influence these works?

My first response was: It doesn’t at all. The two Image poems—a set—seem to have nothing explicitly to do with Islam. In fact, their titles are notable for their universality: “Bedtime Reading for the Unborn Child” and “Lullaby for the Aborted Child.” Both poems imagine a young girl slipping out (of the womb?) for an airy walk through the woods and the cosmos. What fascinates me is that the sense of loss is greater, more explicit, in the first of the poems (where the word “lost” or “lose” beats like a refrain, twenty-one times).

What’s mostly “lost” in the world of the “Unborn” poem is a cosmos that can give the child “meaning.” Several stanzas end with a lament over the loss of a meaning that we might expect, hope for, from some element of the cosmos: stars, crescent moons, the dawn. The poem ends with the plea to “let the day give you meaning.”

“Lullaby for the Aborted Child” actually has (surprisingly, given that an aborted child is literally lost to the world) less sense of loss. It reprieves some images from the first poem, but they are tentatively positive images, beginning with “Night girl, / your book is full.” This poem’s final line plays with the end of the other poem: “let the day / give us meaning.”

Yet despite the fact that Islam isn’t explicitly mentioned in these poems, the imagery stands out as Qur’anic. I’m talking about the emphatic way meaning is shaped in the Qur’an by God’s cosmic “nesting” of humanity at the center of creation. The following lines from the Qur’an’s Sura “The Sun” (95:1-9) are typical:

Consider the sun and its morning radiance
And the moon reflecting it
Consider the day as it reveals the world
And the night covering it
Consider the heavens and what builds it
And the earth and what outspreads it
Consider the human soul and what shapes it
Inspiring both its moral failing and its God-consciousness
They shall prosper when they purify it
They shall be frustrated when they bury it…

My sense from the first of Mattawa’s Image poems is not that he has lost faith in the Qur’an’s assertion of cosmic meaning, but that he feels confident enough in his faith to question that assertion. Mattawa envisions a world that has failed its potential children. What is “meaning”?—this is the implicit question of that first poem. He gropes towards a tentative and positive answer in the second, using the Qur’anic imagery he questioned in the first.

For all of his reliance on Qur’anic imagery, though, I’m guessing that Mattawa does not consider himself in the Sufi tradition, as many contemporary Muslim-American poets do. I hope he (or someone) will correct me if I’m wrong. But here’s my reasoning. The contemporary Sufi poetry that I know—like the famous classic Sufi poetry of Rumi and Hafez—is bubbling over with a certainty of meaning, and that meaning is God’s love.

Take one of the leading Sufi-American poets, Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore, also featured on the website “The American Muslim.” Abdal-Hayy’s poem called “If I Count the Roses” moves into the lines:

if we could count the worlds within worlds
within worlds in a spinning chain out the other side of
dimension itself into God’s own antechamber bathed in
the light of absolute intelligence whose
color bathes everything that exists and
sits it in continual cascades of
consciousness we can’t make a
move without moving among, each bright

something existing by that light alone…

Not that all of Abdal-Hayy’s poetry throws itself joyously into “God’s own antechamber.” On this website are some extremely sober poems, poems set in the midst of unnamed wars, where bombs burst everything to bits. Yet Abdal-Hayy sees even the cruelest sights in the light of a transfiguring divine love.

And Khaled Mattawa? He clearly lacks Abdal-Hayy’s ebullient spirit. Yet his tentativeness, for me, doesn’t diminish him as a poet, or as a Muslim believer. Though in the Image poems Mattawa doesn’t mention God’s name, I sense God hovering above the search for “meaning” that these poems dramatize so movingly. Evidently God allows his Muslim poets to take a variety of approaches, the same freedom he grants to his Christian ones.