receiving space

my rumination tonight with the al hikmah speaker series (“this earth was made for us a masjid?: an exercise in metaphor”) is about space and place. zainab asked for my notes. these instead some extended thoughts.

the title gains its first impulse from a fairly well-known tradition (cited in the sahihayn and various other collections of ahadith) in which the prophet recounts one of the bounties granted his ummah:

ju’ilat liy’l-ardu masjidan wa tahura. “the earth has been made for me a masjid and tahur”, a ‘place of prayer’ and a ‘means of purification’.

the hadith continues on to enjoin the ritual prayer upon the faithful wherever they are, in whatever circumstance. but it is that first segment of the tradition to which i’d like to return today, and not merely for its ramifications for the sacred law. the earth in its entirety is made a masjid. what does that mean? further, why is the word masjid and not musalla? if the meaning of this hadith were simply that it is legally permissible to perform salah anywhere in the world, one might reasonably expect the word used to denote the generic spatial occasion for the ritual prayer (musalla) and not the far more specific ‘place of sujud’ (masjid). the title for this reflexion, then, can be read in two ways: this earth was made for us a masjid? and, secondly, this earth was made for us a masjid? it also calls for at least brief thought on the symbolic architecture of the mosque proper.

this earth was made for us a masjid? i’m curious about the use of this word. musalla, as noted, would seem – from the legal, fiqhi perspective – to be a more immediate choice. musalla appears in the qur’an only once (2:125), and denotes simply a place in which prayers are performed. masjid, on the other hand, is the place of sujud, which is a part of the prayer. sujud names a movement in the prayer: dropping gently upon the knees, placing the palms of one’s hands on the ground, and putting nose and forehead on the ground. it is the stage in prayer when, the hadith tell us, we are closest to God; martin lings writes that it is when the body “pours itself out” and the self is humbled. indeed, sujud also means to humble oneself, with humility. sujud is an emblem, a sign, a metonymic icon for salah – commentators read ‘those constant in their sujud’ (9:112) as signifying those perseverent in their prayer – but involves other valences as well. that the earth is figured as a masjid does not simply mean that it is a place one might pray. sujud is not limited to human beings, but is performed by the rest of creation. wa’n-najmu wa’sh-shajaru yasjudan, [before the Divine] prostrate themselves the stars and the trees (55:6). the earth as masjid, i am suggesting, enters us – and the earth – into a different semantic domain than that invoked by musalla. all the earth is a place for prostration, as dawud wharnsby sings, which means too that all the earth is place for turning in humility. by bowing in prostration anywhere and everywhere we join the stars and the trees, the heavens and the earth.

masjid as ‘mosque’ proper (and not the more general ’site of sujud’) has been understood as any structure dedicated to regular, congregational worship. martin lings, again: “to enter the mosque is to be immediately and profoundly impressed by its emptiness, both as antidote to the ‘plenitude of the world’ and as symbol of the inner void of purity.” as the one constant architectural feature among variant domes, minarets, pulpits, calligraphies, and engravings, the niche is in a sense the defining element of the masjid, the limit of the mosque. the prayer-niche itself is open, empty; it “demands [worshippers] that they turn towards the All-Merciful, and it shows them how to turn. orientation always implies an activity for the sake of a passivity, a turning towards Heaven in order to be attracted by Heaven.” “the chief orison uttered in the islamic ritual prayer is guide us upon the straight path (1:6) and the arabic word for ’straight’, mustaqim, suggests not only directness but also vertical ascent. [orientation thus] points not simply from place to place on the same level but from periphery to center.” it is this center to which the niche points: “it must be remembered that primarily the niche is not an end in itself; it serves to indicate the direction towards something which is at a certain distance; and though that object, the ka’bah, is often named ‘the House of God’, this must not be understood as a localisation of the Divinity. wheresoever ye turn, there is the Face of God. verily God is Vast, All-Knowing (11:115). the mosque’s emptiness, then, is a receptacle for the Divine Omnipresence.”

the earth in its entirety is figured as a masjid: a site to prostrate, an occasion to turn in humility. the earth as masjid, however, also forces us to rethink the indexicals. space and time we understand as purely formal concepts, as framing the moment, the here-now; but also, and most eggregiously in the empiricist tradition, as empty, neutral, homogeneous, and uniform. conceptualizing space as formally empty doesn’t account for its ‘consecration’ or the theophany potent at every point. its emptiness is an emptiness-in-waiting, an emptiness-approaching, an emptiness-reaching. spatial relations are undergirded by the originary relation described in the hadith. an emptiness awaiting and respondent to the Divine.

this earth was made for us a masjid? under this inflection, the question gains a personal and indeed political dimension. seriously? this earth? to understand the earth in this way demands more than mere affirmation. in this i am taking seriously jonathan boyarin, as he writes

and i am one who be/comes there

- “death and the minyan”, cultural anthropology 9 (1994): 3-22, 4.

boyarin, if i remember correctly, is speaking of the shul he attended while young and not about a masjid, but something of the relation to place remains. something of that sense is carried over – through metaphor, the trope of tropes, a transfer of qualities between one abrahamic temple and its semitic affine. boyarin comes, he arrives: and through that he becomes. alternately, he becomes – and through that he arrives. the two gestures are distinct and inextricable. to become as you arrive / to arrive as you become: both involve a passage-from (both spatially, “coming”, and discursively or ontologically, “becoming”), but do not describe the destination. i am not, as i arrive, the self i was when i left, but i cannot describe this self except in terms of my location: i am, here, what i was not, there. i am newly here; i am, here; i am, here. my self has arrived in this space that is a site of sujud and, having arrived, has melted. i am, before the niche: and be/come, elsewhere. the niche is only a marker.

what would it mean to move through the world – to walk on the earth – and understand that motion itself as a turning? the turning as a humbling, in humility – the turning as sujud, on the earth-as-masjid – and too as a turning in expectation: because every spatial point is the site of sujud, and every niche is open, and every prostration is a melting of the self toward the Center, and every empty space is a receptacle of the Divine, a site of Omnipresence.

that this earth is a masjid levels a demand on us. an onus: we are accountable not only for the things that we do and the narratives we author but the very earth we walk upon. by how they walk ye shall know them, the psalm might well have sung. and the qur’an: the faithful servants of the Beneficent are they who tread gently upon the earth (25:63). to walk lightly (hawnan) is to respect this essential nature of space as named in the hadith, as the prophet called poet spoke in language learned from the god. another hadith tells us that everywhere one has bowed in prostration – each site of sujud – rejoices in the remembrance of God and will testify for us. that this earth is a masjid requires us to walk in such a way that our walking testifies for us, that it witnesses us turning, humbled and in humility.