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Transcript

In allusion there is meaning not contained by plain expression

The subtlety of vessels, in reality, comes from the meanings they contain

and these meanings are enhanced by their vessels' subtlety

-Ibn al-Fārịd

Whoever approaches the poetry of the saints

By grammar and prosody [alone] will suffer grave mistakes...

-Ahmadu Bamba

Whoever wants to understand the poem, must go into the land of poetry. Whoever wants to understand the poet, must go into the poet’s land.

-Goethe

Loving ṬaHa is delightful

How lovely is that Great Noble!

He’s the treasure of creation,

and to all goodness, a doorway

And he’s peace and our protection,

and he’s food and our refreshment

He’s a pearl and he’s a treasure,

He’s the kernel and quintessence

The land without love of ṬaHa

is a wasteland so forsaken

And hearts without love of ṬaHa

are ruins, wrecked and desolated

And in each and every heart is

a portion of ṬaHa’s passion

He’s the soul’s enchantment, truly and he is the answered prayer

No beloved can distract you

from him, nor hearts, nor violins

Without that, I don’t care at all

for any blessing or torment

Cut off all links to temptation

And leave off songs’ invocation

Cast aside all the fair beauties

And forget the sealed wineries

And the clubs and all the concerts

Of the singers or the mansions

All of this is but a mirage

Seek the spirit of the meanings

The quintessence, real reality

Reciting the seven cited

By Divine Qualities truly

A rank without any equal

He’s the chosen of creation

Before the being of all beings

The presence of TaHa emerged

Before even space existed

And he had a life, extended

Before time even was reckoned

And I was before creation,

My heart busy with his passion...

The crucial element in Igilango Geesi lies in the very notion of using the English language in a manner that surpasses the owners of the language themselves…. When you use language in the Igilango Geesi manner, you are transforming the English language, you are doing things with it and in it that the owners of the language themselves had not thought imaginable….

In the light of this dimension, it is not Soyinka's intention to merely wake up the "napping" English language for the edification of Englishmen and women. His intention is to take the English language to areas of being that the owners of the language had not thought imaginable; or, which is the same thing, had once thought imaginable but had irrevocably lost and can recover now only if they have the humility, the grace, and let it be said, the self-interest to make themselves receptive to a fundamental aspect of world literary and intellectual history in the twentieth century.

-Biodun Jeyifo

Ibrahim Niasse (d. 1975)

Praise Poetry in West Africa

Conclusion

"No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead."

-T.S. Eliot

“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.”

-Jorge Luis Borges

Hal ghādara'l-shu'arā'u min mutaraddami?

Have the poets left a place for a patch to be stitched?

-'Antara ibn Shaddad

walakinnahum qad ghādarū mutaraddama

But they have left a place for a patch to be stitched

-Ibrahim Niasse

  • Myth of Islam noir:
  • Arab culture+ Islam=Islam
  • African culture+Islam=Syncretism
  • Assumed lack of Arabic literary tradition, or assumed deficiencies
  • Sanad vs. Race

  • Most popular form of poetry and literature in Must West Africa and perhaps the continent as a whole

  • Part of the soundscape of Muslim African towns cities, even broadcast TV and radio, Youtube...

  • Why?

  • Hyperintertextuality-madīh poetry synthesizes several bodies of literature to depict/enshrine the Prophetic reality in poetry ("Walking Qur'ān" in sung verse);
  • Functions: invoke/evoke/provoke shawq, dhikr, hụdūr, fanā'
  • Different and demanding aesthetic, different notion of "originality," (akin to maqāms, ragas, etc.) demonstrates, depicts, embodies, and helps to realize...

  • Hyperintersubjectivity-just as the poetry is an elaboration of the source material, the poetic subject is an elaboration of the original subject, the Muhammadan Reality, which is at once its origin, end, and essence, and this is true of all subjects. "Interauthoriality" a result of this.

  • The tradition continues to grow and evolve around the world into new linguistic contexts and online

West African Praise Poetry and Music Videos

The Barzakh of Poetry

Speech

Silence

Oludamini Ogunnaike

Texas Christian University

Thursday, Sept. 10th, 2020

Prose

Music

Poetry

Thought

Feeling

awrāq

adhwāq

Eternity/Stillness

Rhythm

Motion

One sound

Rhmye

Many sounds

Being

Nothingness

Humanity

Spirit

Body

Dhikr

Hilya

"For him who sees my ḥilya after my death it is as if he had seen me myself, and he who sees it, longing for me, for him God will make hellfire prohibited, and he will not be resurrected naked at doomsday"

My writings are a joy to mankind

Whoever sees me or my writing will not be miserable, even for a day

I have not said this without permission and I

Keep a secret not divulged by other than me

And this, all of it, is from the love of the lord of the Messengers

Upon him be the blessings of God and may his affair be elevated

-Ibrahim Niasee

The Arabic Qạsīdah

nasīb-amatory prelude; separation (farq), ạtlāl->Medina (inner landscape)

rahīl-desert journey; tarīqah

madīh-praise, request; union, haqīqah

Example: "Paris"

  • Invoked present in the invocation, invoked is the invocation; invocation unites the invoker and the invoked
  • Verily God and the angels...
  • "No one invokes blessings upon me but God invokes ten upon him..."

Her love came to me before I knew love

so it struck an empty heart and become lodged in it

His love came to me before I knew love

And I am burning in the fires of my longing for Ahmad

The Arabic panegyric genre potentially contains both a literary portrait of the patron and a poet’s self-portrait in one and the same ode: a double portrait. Portraiture is representation or description of a human subject, and it can be visual, verbal, or musical…. Portraits express an intended relationship between the portrait image and the human original. The portraitist plays an intermediary role between the human subject and his image. Although the professed purpose of the Arabic panegyric is to praise a patron—an Arab poet portrays the praised individual in the madīḥ section (and portrays himself in the nasīb, the raḥīl, and the madīḥ sections)—the qaṣidah …[is] a verbal portrait or self-portrait

“…the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature…within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional.”

-T.S. Eliot

“at the same time, the best Sufi authors draw near to each other, even merging, textually and authorially, due both to their joint proximity to a common Origin, and to their influence on each other, via the spiritual-social network linking them together.”

-Michael Frishkopf

'Alqama ibn 'Abada (~6th C)

Upon every quarter, you have bestowed blessings

and Shas is deserving of a share of your bounty

And so on every quarter, you have freely bestowed blessings

verily I am like Shas having desired a gift

Du'ā

If they were to depict me in reality, they would not see

Anyone, save that beloved in whom we take delight

-Ibrahim Niasse

Hyperintertexuality

Living Sources

  • Iqtibās/taḍmīn

  • Takhmīs, Tarbī', etc.

  • Acrostics

  • "A-Z" collections ('Ishriniyyāt, Mu'asharāt, etc.)
  • "Anyone who composes praise of me, even if it is just one verse, I will intercede for him."

  • Hadiths about Intercession, Du'a

  • "What generous love his wisdom here displays, his part is mercy, ours is endless praise"

Hyperintersubjectivity in Sufi Anthropology and Literature

Tirmidhī’s Shamā’il al-Muṣtafā:

“He was not too tall nor too short. He was of middle height. His hair was not short and tightly curled, nor was it lank, but in between. His face was not narrow, nor fully round, but there was a roundness to it. His skin was white with a reddish tint. His eyes were black, and he had long eyelashes. He was big-boned and had wide shoulders. He had no body hair except in the middle of his chest running down to his navel. The palms of his hands and soles of his feet were thick. When he walked, he walked as if he was descending a slope. When he looked at someone, he looked at them full in the face. Between his shoulders was the seal of prophecy, the sign that he was the last of the prophets. He was the most generous-hearted of people, the most truthful of them in speech, the gentlest of them in temperament, and the noblest of them in lineage. Whoever saw him unexpectedly was in awe of him. And whoever came to know him, loved him. Anyone who would describe him would say, ‘I never saw, before him or after him, the like of him.’ Peace be upon him.”

dreams within dreams,

ink, letters, words, sentences...

Microcosm

Macrocosm

Qasṭallānī’s Mawāhib al-Ladūniyya:

When God made the divine decree to bring creation into existence, He brought forth the Muhammadan reality from His Lights. He then drew from this reality all the worlds, upper and lower. God then informed our lord Muhammad of his Prophethood, while Adam was nothing but soul and body. Then from him gushed forth the springs of the souls, making him superior to all created things, and the greater father to all things in existence.

al-Hajj Mālik Sy, Khilās al-Dhahab:

How thunderous is the thunder and how the dove laments

In its cooing and a tear flows from the pen

For when God wished to create us

He took from His own light, the light of the distinguished prophet

The worlds, this highest of them and the lowest

Are rays shining forth from the best soul

God informed our guide of his prophecy

While Adam was between soul and breath

The springs of the spirits overflow from the light of guidance

for he is the highest archetype, the origin of humanity

The creation of the creatures and sending of the prophets were but a prelude

to his appearance so know this and do not sleep!

In the world of the senses (mulk), the spirits follow

the spirit and body of this ultimate nobility [the Prophet]

Before, he was hidden in veils

in which he was glorifying God ceaselessly

The full moon stood for eons in each veil

in order to worship our Lord tirelessly...

  • pre-Islamic and early Islamic poetry: Mu'allaqāt, Hassān b. Thābit, Ka'b b. Zuhair

  • Qur'an and Ḥadīth

  • Prose on the Prophet's Virtues (faḍā'il): Shifā' Qāḍi 'Iyād, Shamā'il of Tirmidhī, etc.

  • Prayers on the Prophet (ṣalawāt): Dalā'il-Khayrāt, Ṣalāt ibn Mashīsh, Ṣalāt al-Fātiḥ, Jawharat al-Kamāl, etc. and Sufi cosmological/metaphysical commentaries

  • Classics: al-Buṣīrī (Burda and Hamziyya), ibn al-Fāriḍ, al-Badamāṣī (self-takhmīs), al-Fazāzī's Ishriniyyāt (takhmīs by ibn Mahīb), al-Baghdādī's al-Witrīyyāt (takhmīs by ibn Sha'aban al-Lakhmī), al-Yūsī's Dāliyya

  • Non-Arabic influences: Djeli, gawlo, iggawen, oríkì traditions

al-Haqq

Intersubjectivity and

Intertextuality in Sufi Cosmo-poetics

descent/unfolding

/elaboration/faỵd

ascent/return

/integration/fanā'

al-khalq

My praise of him is in silently bowing down my head

Not in what I can write down on paper

For what can I say, in praise of someone


Whom the Lord of the world has described as “the most exalted in character”!

Say whatever you want in praise of him, provided

That you describe him as a servant of the Creator

Say: His servant, His friend, His beloved

His pure one, the opener of all locks

The master of all noble messengers and the best from among them

He is the origin of all creatures, without exception

He is the handful of Divine light which
from

the time before Adam has been distributing (God’s) sustenance

Everything, without exception, was brought into being from his light

The origin of all origins, the seal of those who have come before

He is the essence of the essence of the Truth, His talisman

And a succour for us, with his/His subtle assistance

He is His oil, His niche, His lamp


His glass, hidden from people’s eyes

He is His magnetic lodestone


Who attracts the hearts to the Presence of the Creator

The secret of theophany; the secret of the secret of his God

He is the secret of His Lord, the Uncreated, the Everlasting

He is the straight path, Muhammad


Who obliterates error through his radiant light.

-Abu Bakr 'Atīqu

O God, Blessings and peace be upon

our lord Muhammad the Opener

of what was locked and the Seal

of what came before, the Helper of

the Truth by the Truth and the Guide

to your straight path and upon

His family in accordance with right of his rank and tremendous degree

All of the affairs of creation are from that mighty affair

So my eye and my chest and my paper and my tongue

And my pens and my ink, all of me is in service of his remembrance

By the remembrance of the Messenger of God, I am exalted and elevated

-Ibrahim Niasse

The Burda

  • Widely-imitated: Mu'ārạda
  • Takhmīs, Tashtīr
  • "Re-Mix"/Riddim

My two friends halt and alight at al-Muḥaṣṣab

And do not seek to turn away from its valley (khayf)

What a great honor to be chosen as a campsite by

The most deserving of God’s servants of glory and exaltation

A Prophet for whom the highest paradise was prepared

Amir Sulaiman

"Truth Is"

al-Fazāzī's 'Ishriniyyāt

Pre-Islamic/Non-Arabic Praise Traditions:

  • Oríkì-nominative, evocative epithets

“Singer stop , do not waste your time

In singing the prasies of men

Sing the praises of the Prophet and be content"

-'Uthman dan Fodio

  • Fulfuude features of Dan Fodio's Arabic poetry

al-Yadālī's inspiration for his famous poem, Ko Yaro in Djenné

al-hājj 'Umar Tāl's ta'shīr : 3,000 line, Safīnat al-sa'āda li ahl ḍ̣u‘uf wa’l-najāda

(“The Vessel of Felicity for the Weak and Needy”)

Highest praise be to the Creator of the best of creation,


For sending him to us from amongst us while he had been

Elevated upon the throne, how great is the one who dwells so lofty

The most deserving of God’s servants of glory and exaltation

The beloved, by whom God gives and withholds

Blessings and peace of the Exalted upon the exalted,

The guardian of creation, the hero, since he is the most generous of protectors

Is he not the full moon, since the affair has become great beyond reckoning

The most perfect of creation in rank and a most dazzling torch.


A Prophet for whom the highest paradise was prepared

Sa'adī

Ibn al-Fārịd

Géwél (griot) genres of praise poetry

Black Atlantic Musical Genres:

Hip-Hop, Funk, Cuban, zouk, Brazilian, etc.

He attained eminence by his perfection

The darkness was lifted by his beauty

Lovely are all of his qualities

Blessings upon him and his family

Arabic and 'Ajami genres

of madīḥ poetry

I begin by mentioning God, praising him first

And I eulogize through the praise of God out of gratitude and exaltation

And I end my discourse with blessings for

I bless a blessing that fills the earth and sky

Upon he for whom the highest of heights is prepared

A prophet who has a home in the Holy Presence

Whose veils are the angels, while he is venerated

He came last in his mission, while he was yet first

He stands in a station not occupied by any messenger

The veils of glory were rent for him

We drank a wine, remembering the beloved

Which had made us drunk before the vine’s creation

Selected Lyrics

Chorus:

We’re praying to God, to be crazy for Baye

Niasse Coumba Abdallah.

I’ll be Baye your side.

Barham,

O perfect in lights and mysteries,

take me by the hand tomorrow

The sun of guidance rose over us,

the darkness was lifted by the one who was guided

Namely, the gallant, the exile, goal

He has attained the utmost

His is perfection, his is beauty

and the example to be followed

al-Baghdādī's Witriyyāt

Verse 2

You’re the souls and the places.

You’re skies and the earth and the seas.

You’re the spaces and the times.

You’re the master of the skies who brings the light

In the universe.

So Baye, be my love.

though I have followed you from beginningless eternity (Azal)

And the light, that lightning in the heaven, when the angels were glorifying Adam,

...

Your light was the one that was put with the father of all Muslims, and then the fire became cooolnes and peace to Ibrahim, and the light passed by Yunus to Yussuf, Idrissa, Harun, Musa, Nuh, Ayyub, Mariama the virgin to Isa, now that light moved to Makkatul Mukarrama and called itself Muhammad ibn Abdallah,

So the Muhammadan Reality is continued to soar over to Medina Baye and called itself Ibrahim ibn ‘Abdallah.

I got drunk on a wine whenever I began to sip it

I got drunk gleefully from you in the excess of its goodness

But this intoxication was before the vine or cosmos were

Nor was there even any wine, so woe to you if you drink it!

I died passionately in that wine, and they were amazed

By Barham, the servant of God, due to the excess of his love

I found my beloved after my death by his love

He is the beloved lover due to the excess of his intimacy

I sent my soul ahead as a petitioner, and it did not petition

Save that the Messenger and his party responded

So I become the pupil of the eyes and its essence

And I become a support for the non-Arab and his Arabs

My flood floods the sea and land alike

And I am the same as the Amir and his companion

My sanctity supreme I realized

For verily from me to me was what I traded to drink it

I am the soul and the horizons wherever you see them

You see me, for I am all from the presence of his Lord

-Ibrahim Niasse

Give me an excess of love for you and wonder

And have mercy on a heart scorched by a glance of your love

And if I ask to see you truly

Then allow me, graciously

And let not your answer be, “Thou shalt not see"

O heart, you have promised me to be patient in loving them

So be sure to bear it do not dismay

Passion is life, so die in it lovingly.

Your duty is to die and be absolved…

'Uthmān Dan Fodio's "'Ishriniyya"/Takhmīs al-hija'iyya:

O you for whom the highest of heights is prepared

O you for whom the veils of glory are rent

O you with a face brighter than the sun

I bring to you my problems, you are my refuge

Help me! Save me! Of that [deliverance], you are the source

The blessings of my Lord with His peace

upon my beloved, the best of creation

Clear and translucent, close by at hand

kind, affectionate, the lion of the gallant

Thus is the Hashimi prophet

Thus is the Exalted, the Guide, the Tihami*

Thus is the Elevated, saviour of the Invincible

Thus is the intercessor on the Day of Resurrection

The essence of Perfection, the essence of Beauty

The axis of Majesty, the axis of Nobility

The negator of error, the dispeller of shadows

The purity of water, for each who thirsts

Abundant in fine qualities, and in distinctions

Abundant in favors, his generosity is overflowing

the finest of qualities, the finest of men

the finest of deeds, the finest of names

the exalted light, exalted in honour

of exalted origin, of exalted station

The full moon of happiness, the fulfiller of promises

The fulfiller of covenants, the fulfiller of rights

The Axis of existence, the sufficiency of the travelers

who brings together the black and the doves

The guide of the servants, guide of the hands

Victor over enemies, victor over oppression/darkness

The tree trunks bend, the rain gushes forth

when he points to the clouds

The signs/verses of ṬaHa are unsurpassed in beauty

and never, ever come to an end

O how time has become fragrant and overflowing with perfume

and the loft of pigeons coo

My heart is in his hands, my longing is for him

Give as alms unto him, the purest salutations of peace

Upon the Imam, the highest of mankind

increase the blessings of peace from The Peace

I, in order to praise the best of servants

can only hope for help from his greatness

O you who granted to him what you granted to him

then purified him, grant me my wishes:

Lord, efface from me, all my evil

For I take refuge in Thee

Diminsh my sin and revive my heart

for you are my Lord, who brings to life dead bones

Cover my sins and veil my faults

Remove my troubles and forgive my sins

Fulfill our hopes in you graciously

Forgive tenderly, by this Imam

He takes on our trials, O abundant of gifts,

open for us, the ways of peace

Provide for us, O creator of the creatures

at the moment of death, a beautiful end.

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