Pulchra Ut Luna: Some Reflections On The Marian Theme In Muslim-Catholic Dialogue

Journal of Ecumenical Studies, Summer-Fall, 1999 by Tim Winter

This "feminine" attribute of the personalized nocturnal heaven can become the register of devotional reflection on the divine waywardness, of the coy but proud Beloved. [96] This again finds a Christian equivalent, not in bridal mysticism, but in the medieval images of the Queen of Heaven, who may appear temperamental and capricious toward her votaries but is unfailingly tender. "In this way," as Ruether remarked, "Mary becomes a humanizing element in an otherwise intolerable opposition of ... divine majesty to human sin." [97] Perhaps still another comparison can be drawn, this time with midrashic tradition, in which the Hebrew word "Layla," again signifying "night," was sometimes coupled with that of Lilith, the apocryphal "First Eve" who was created of earth, as was Adam, and whose refusal of his authority resulted in her banishment as a she-devil. [98]

In the Muslim universe, the thirteenth-century Cairene Ibn al-Farid, that most celebrated of Arab Sufi poets, composed a number of amorous odes to Layla in the formulaic, archaizing bedouin style, in which the lost wayfarer describes his single-minded errancy in the desert, as he quests for the encampment of his beloved. He asks, typically:

Was it Layla's fire that appeared at night at Dhu Salam?

Or a lightning-flash which shone at al-Zawra and al-'Alam? ...

Alas for our days at al-Khayf ... [99]

In Ibn al-Farid's hands the lightning-flash became a manifestation of the divine essence, dramatically defined against the nocturnal backdrop of nonbeing, which served to remind the poet of his former union in the primordial daytime before separation from the Beloved, a theme that was further emphasized by comparing the lightning to the flash of the beloved's teeth as she smiled. [100]

Drawing again on the rich repertory of ancient Arab images, Ibn al-Farid and Ibn 'Arabi longed to meet their sweetheart at the Ka'ba, whose primordial blackness clearly resonated with Layla's nocturnal identity; for instance: "When I embark upon the Hajj, I cry labbayk in her name." [101] She may even be conflated with the Ancient House itself, as her suitors circle it seven times as though revolving with the seven spheres of heaven: "O Ka'ba of Comeliness, to whose beauty the hearts of the discerning make pilgrimage and cry lab-bayk!" [102]

Even more characteristic of this symbolic language is the imaging of the divine Essence as a woman's face:

Is that Layla of the 'Amiriyya [clan] who has unveiled herself,

By night, transforming evening into dawn? [103]

The commentator Nabulsi explained that the "night" here referred to the darkness in which latent beings were shrouded, before Layla -- who is God as compassionately turned toward the world of emanation -- actualized Her preexistent creative command, thus giving the eternally "known" phenomena of existence a contingent reality as shadows cast by the light that shines from "within" Her. [104]

No less suggestive is a hymn to Sufism's Queen of Heaven in which Ibn al-Farid declaimed:

I pray, singing as I recite a recollection of her.