Professor Elliot R.

Wolfson is the Abraham Lieberman Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University and the author/editor of more than a dozen volumes and over 100 scholarly articles. For a list of his publications, see here (http://homepages.nyu.edu/~erw1/scholarship.html). The essay below originally appeared in Elliot R. Wolfson, "Das Kleid der Ka'ba: Verhllung und Entschleierung in den Bilderwelten des Sufismus," in Almut Sh. Bruckstein oruh and Hendrik Budde, eds., Taswir Islamische Bildwelten und Moderne (Berlin: Nicolaische B. Verlagsbuchhandlung GmbH, 2009), 153-157.

The Veil of the Kaba: Concealment and Disclosure in the Visual Imagination of Sufism By Elliot R. Wolfson New York University Of the many intricate elements connected to the Kaba, one of the two most sacred sites in the Islamic faith, special attention is to be given to the kiswa, the velvet covering (predominantly black since the thirteenth century) with golden embroidery that is draped over the cubic structure. Phenomenologically, to attend properly to the matter of the kiswa, it is necessary to consider it from the perspective of the veil.1 Given the prominence of the veil (ijb) in the dress code of Arabs before and after the rise of the prophet Muammad originally, it seems, part of the attire for men as a sign of their being desert warriors and eventually transferred to Muslim women (apparently under the jurisdiction of Umar Ibn alKhattb on the basis of certain verses in the Qurn, especially sra 33) as an external mark of modesty, subservient social status, or self-effacing complicity in the renunciation of physical beauty, in order to demarcate the boundary between believers and non-believers and thereby maintain the ummat al- muminin (the community of the faithful) and its symbolic order2it should come as no surprise that the veil, and the acts of veiling (satr) and unveiling (kashf) related to it, have not only played a prominent role in Muslim devotion but they have served externally and internally as distinctive marks of Islamic culture.3 It is within this context that one must examine the kiswa, whose spiritual intent, and by extension the ritual meaning of the gesture of circumambulation (awf), can be ascertained from heeding the paradoxical nature of the veil as the site of concomitant disclosure and concealment.

Suffice it to say that from a relatively early period the image of the veil was utilized to convey mystical enlightenment or awakening, based on verses in the Qurn (50:22; 53:57-58; 82:1-6) wherein lifting the veil is associated with the vision that will be manifest on the day of judgment (yawm ad-dn). Sfs borrowed this metaphorical image and transferred it from its eschatological context to describe mystical illumination in the present,4 as in the unveiling of the beloved to his lovers at the end of the path, articulated in the eight century by Rbia alAdawiyya al-Qaysiyya of Basra, one of the most famous women in the history of Islamic mysticism.5 In the eleventh-century compendium of the principles of Sf piety, ar-Risala alQushayriya, also known as ar-Risala ilas-Sufiya, Abd al-Karm ibn Hawzin al-Qushayri cited the following in the name of one of the Sfs: Certainty is unveiling, and unveiling takes place in three ways: by means of informing, by means of disclosure of the power [of God], and by means of the truths of faith. Explaining this dictum, al-Qushayri advises the reader: Know that in their way of speaking, unveiling consists of the revelation of something to the heart when it is possessed by remembrance of Him with no doubt remaining. Sometimes by unveiling they mean something similar to what is seen between waking and sleep. Many times they designate this state as steadfastness.6 Kashf is related more specifically to the manifestation of truth in the heart (qalb), the site that is habitually delineated as the locus of spiritual vision in Sf teaching, a manifestation that is allencompassing, a point related to another technical expression in Sf practice dhikr, the remembrance of the real, that is, the singular, meditative focus on the divine occasioned by the repetition of divine epithets or qurnic phrases. Significantly, the unveiling designates a state of consciousness between wakefulness and sleep. We are not told more about this state but I would surmise that al-Qushayri chose this image to convey the idea that this mode of awareness is like a dream, whose very endurance consists of its ephemerality. Similarly, the unveiling is marked by pure mobility, the moment of wavering designated, paradoxically, as steadfastness, baq, the Sf expression that denotes persisting in the real. To grasp the identification of absolute motion and absolute stability, one must bear in mind that in the technical Sf terminology traced to Ab l-Qsim al-Junayd baq is dialectically intertwined with fan, annihilation of the individuated and differentiated ego-self.7

From the perspective of laying out the mystical path sequentially, abiding must be preceded by annihilation, but from the perspective of the experience of enlightenment the two occur concurrentlythe annihilation is in the abiding and the abiding in the annihilation,8 an idea that is captured in the utterly profound claim ascribed to al-Junayd in his account of the passing away of oneself from ones ecstasies (mawjd) when one is overpowered by the real, At that moment you both pass away and abide, and are found truly existent in your passing away; through the found existence (wujd) of your other; upon the abiding of your trace in the disappearance of your name.9 True abiding, therefore, as Ab Yazd al-Bistam, al-Junayd, and other Sf masters put it, consists in the passing away of passing away (fan al-fan). As al-Qushayri expressed the matter, following the teaching of al-Junayd, the first passing away is the passing away of the self and its attributes to endure through the attributes of the real, the second passing away is the passing away from the attributes of the real through witnessing of the real; and the third and final passing away is a persons passing away from witnessing his own passing away through his perishing in the ecstatic existentiality (wujd) of the real.10 When one takes hold of this insight, then one can appreciate al-Qushayris account of the unveiling as a state between sleep and wakefulness, the place of nonduality where to subsist one must subside and to subside one must subsist. In one of the oldest and most celebrated Persian treatises on Sufism, Kashf al-Mahjb, The Unveiling of That Which is Hidden, al-Jullb al-Hijwr writes that the veils that obstruct ones knowledge of God are a result of ignorance; once the ignorance is annihilated, the veils vanish.11 The master of esoteric gnosis, accordingly, is one who manages to gaze beyond the veil of the veil-keepers in the quest for a vision of the face hid behind the veil.12 By contrast, majub, veiled, assumes the negative connotation of one that is not spiritually illumined and therefore does not perceive the divine light without the veils of sentient and rational forms. I note, parenthetically, as Fritz Meier has pointed out, that the practice of veiling the face as early as the ninth century could also symbolize the mystery of sanctity, that is, he who veiled his face was thought to be the incarnation of the hidden and impenetrable light of the divine.13 Like Moses, according to a verse in Hebrew scriptures, the holy man in Islam had to veil his face so that the radiance of his countenance would not harm others. This positive use of the veil notwithstanding, the negative connotation as that which obstructs knowledge is far more prevalent, and hence lifting the veil (mukshafa) is utilized as

the key metaphorical expression to demarcate the epiphany of the true reality that results in gnosis (marifa), illumination (ishrq), intuition (dhawq, literally, tasting), knowledge by presence (al-ilm al-hudr), the apprehension of the oneness of existence (wadat al-wujd) in which the particularity of beings is annihilated like water dissolved in water or the flame conjoined to the flame.14 One of the most elaborate accounts of the revelatory experience of unveiling (kashf) is found in Hikmat al-ishrq, the Wisdom of Illumination, by the twelfthcentury Persian mystic, Suhraward, a complex blending of eastern spirituality and Neoplatonic philosophy. Let me simply note that, in accord with the latter, Suhraward affirms the possibility of the soul separating from the body and ascending mentally to the higher realm where it contemplates by way of unveiling and intuition (al-kashf wa al-dhawq)15 the intelligible lights without veils linked to the hindrance of corporeality, culminating in a pure vision of the Light of Lights, the formless and imageless source of all being, the true King who possesses the essence of everything but whose essence is possessed by none.16 Inasmuch as rending the veil reveals that which has no image, the inaccessible and unknowable essence, the essence that cannot be essentialized, the presence that cannot be represented, it must be said that the veil conceals the face (wajh) it reveals by revealing the face it conceals. Language here is decidedly inadequate, for the concealing and revealing are one and the same activity. Epistemologically, the veil conveys both the dissimilarity of the face and the image of the face seen through the veil, for the image that is seen is not the face, and the similarity of the face and the veil, for the face can only be perceived through the veil and thus the veil is the mirror through which the face is seen. Lifting the veil, therefore, is the metaphorical depiction of discarding the shells of ignorance that blind one from seeing the light wherein God and world are identical in their opposition. The paradox can be expressed in the more conventional terms of immanence and transcendencethe transcendence of God, the unity of the One (aadiyyat al-aad), renders all theological discourse at best analogical since there is no way to speak directly about that which transcends all being, yet the divine is immanent in all thingsindeed, mystically conceived, there is nothing but the single true reality that is all things, the unity of multiplicity (aadiyyat al-kathra). The Sf, accordingly, is the master of the veil, as he knows that the light is too bright to be uncovered except through a covering. In the last chapter of Mishkt al-anwr, The Niche of Lights, which deals with the Quranic passage that is known in the tradition as the verse of light

(24:25), the eleventh-century Iranian mystic, al-Ghazl, reflects on the following adth of the prophet: God has seventy veils of light and darkness; were he to lift them, the august glories of his face would burn up everyone whose eyesight perceived him. Al- Ghazl comments: God discloses himself to his essence in his essence. Without doubt, the veil is understood in relation to the thing that is veiled. The veiled among the creatures are of three kinds: those who are veiled by darkness alone, those who are veiled by sheer light, and those who are veiled by light along with darkness.17 At the conclusion of these classifications there is a further specification of several sub-groups of the ones veiled by sheer lights, the highest being those who have arrived. To them it has been disclosed that the one who is obeyed is described by an attribute that contradicts sheer oneness and utmost perfection and utmost perfection. This belongs to the mystery which is beyond the capacity of this book to unveil. the relationship of this one who is obeyed is that of the sun among the lights. Therefore, they have turned their faces from the one who moves the heavens They have arrived at an existent thing that is incomparable with everything their sight has perceived. Hence, the august glories of his facethe first, the highest burn up everything perceived by the sights and insights of the observers.18 Even at this level where vision is blindness and blindness vision, there are different stages of attainment. For some the objects of vision alone are effaced, but for the elect of the elect the perceived and the perceiver are effaced. This is the supreme mystical state of fan, passingaway, the annihilation of the self as a discrete entity that is ontically separate from the One. They become extinct from themselves, so that they cease observing themselves. Nothing remains save the One, the Real This is the ultimate end of those who have arrived.19 For alGhazl the removal of the veil, the symbolic deed that signifies the true declaration of unity (tawd), is the inner meaning of the qurnic verse There is no god but he. Everything will perish except his own face (28:88). In the end, when the veils are removed, there is naught but pure light , the face that has no form and is thus visible only as the invisible.

The self-revelation of God (tajall), therefore, must be through the multitude of veils that make up the world; disclosure, on this score, is occlusion, since what is disclosed can only be disclosed by being occluded. To unveil the veil would be to obscure the light because the light can only be seen through the veil. From that perspective all that we consider real is in truth a veil, and truth ultimately would be unveiling the veil as that which prevents one from seeing the face and makes the face visible as the face, since the truth cannot be seen as it is in itself but only from behind the veil. Al-Niffari, a tenth-century Sufi, thus wrote that throwing off of the veil is itself a form of veiling: One you have seen Me, unveiling and the veil will be equal. You will not stand in vision until you see My veil as vision and My vision as veil. There is a veil that is not unveiled, and an unveiling that is not veiled. The veil that is not unveiled is knowledge through me, and the unveiling that is not veiled is knowledge through me. No veil remains: Then I saw all the eyes gazing at his face, staring. They see him in everything through which he veils himself. He said to me: They see me, and I veil them through their vision of me from me.20 Several centuries later Ibn al-Arab elaborated the paradoxical nuances of the mystery of the veil and its unveiling. There is nothing in existence but veils hung down, he wrote. Acts of perception attach themselves only to veils, which leave traces in the owner of the eye that perceives them.21 All that exists is but a veil hiding the one true being, the necessary of existence, but it is precisely through this concealment that the invisible is rendered visible. Thus the Real becomes manifest by being veiled, so He is the Manifest the Veiled. He is the Nonmanifest because of the veil, not because of you, and He is the Manifest because of you and the veil.22 In another passage, Ibn Arab expresses the matter as a commentary on the aforementioned adth that God possesses seventy veils of light and darkness: The dark and luminous veils through which the Real is veiled from the cosmos are only the light and the darkness by which the possible thing becomes qualified in its reality because it is a middle. Were the veils to be lifted from the possible thing, possibility would be lifted, and the Necessary and the impossible would be lifted through the lifting of

possibility. So the veils will remain forever hung down and nothing else is possible . The veils will not be lifted when there is vision of God. Hence vision is through the veil, and inescapably so.23 The veil thus came to signify the hermeneutic of secrecy basic to the esoteric gnosis of Sufism, envisioning the hidden secret revealed in the concealment of its revelation and concealed in the revelation of its concealment. It is possible to view the kiswa in precisely these terms. The covering of the Kaba whose structure signifies the cubic form of the Throne or Temple as well as the four limits or cardinal points of the physical cosmos24functions in a fashion analogous to the veil and hence it is the concealment that discloses the disclosure that it conceals. Moreover, just as the veil is intimately linked to the feminine in Islamic culture,25 so, too, through time the kiswa (and, by extension, the Kaba as a whole) has been treated by many pilgrims as the bride vis--vis the community of the faithful, who represent the groom.26 Here it is also important to recall that a central aspect of the religious obligation of the Hajj pilgrimage is the requirement to walk several times around the Kaba, which is cast symbolically as the external correlate to the heart, the intermediary that bridges heavenly and earthly, suprasensible and sensible, absent and present, the vehicle that transposes the cube into a circle, the mundane into the divine.27 It is not unreasonable to ascribe to the circumambulation implicit sexual connotationsencircling the square ritualistically enacts the union of male and female. It is also of interest to note that, traditionally, on the kiswa there is a gold-embroidered calligraphy of the qurnic text and the Shahadah, the first pillar of Muslim faith, the declaration that there is no god but Allah and that Muammad is the Messenger of Allah (L ilaha illa alLh, Muhammedum raslu l-Lh). A fundamental tenet of classical Muslim belief is the view that each letter of the Qurn is a signat once aurally and visually manifestthat comprises an infinity of meaning, inasmuch as the text is the embodiment of the divine form; hermeneutically, the matter of infinity is manifest in the potentially endless explications of the text elicited by countless readers, links in the cumulative chain of interpreters that stretches across the divide of time. The words of the Qurn, the inscripted text of revelation, the rolled-out parchment, are considered to be signs of divine intention, linked especially to the eschatological day of judgment, comparable to entities in nature such as the mountain and the sea (512:1-8). The

esoteric reading elevates the book itself to a supreme position, embellishing the tradition that assigned the qurnic expression umm al-kitb, literally, mother of the book (3:7, 13:39, 43:4), to the Qurn itself, also depicted as the well-preserved tablet, al-law al-mahfz (85:21-22), the Urschrift, as it were, the fore/script that comprises the forms of all that exists. According to a tradition transmitted in the name of the Prophet, The superiority of the Quran to other forms of speech is comparable to Gods superiority over His creatures, for the Quran proceeded from Him (minhu kharaja) and will return to Him.28 The Qurn, consequently, is not only the record of the divine words revealed to Muammad by the angel Jibrl (Gabriel), but it is itself akin to the hypostatic word (kalm) that is separate from and yet emanates out of the essence.29 Even though the Qurn is not identified with the essence, it is distinguished inasmuch as it proceeds from and will return to God. It is thus reasonable to presume that the letters of the matrix text, semiotic ciphers at once visible and audibleseen as heard, heard as seen, are signs that point to the unseen and thereby reveal the light by concealing it. As Annemarie Schimmel put it: Learning the Arabic letters is incumbent upon everybody who embraces Islam, for they are the vessels of revelation; the divine names and attributes can be expressed only by means of these lettersand yet, the letters constitute something different from God; they are a veil of otherness that the mystic must penetrate.30 The metaphor of the veil is instructive, as the function of the veil is to disclose but at the same time to hide, indeed to disclose by hiding, to hide by disclosing. In a similar vein, the letters of the qurnic body reveal and conceal the divine essencethe face beyond all veils, the pre/face, devoid of form, the pre/text, devoid of letternot through an equational model of symbolic logic, but through an implicational model of poetic allusion. The inscriptions on the kiswa, accordingly, endow it with the potency of the supreme textual artifact, transforming it thereby into a semiotic veil through which the unfathomable essence is revealed and concealed. The sacred covering of the Kaba has the potential to remind the pilgrim that truth exceeds the letters and yet it is only by way of the letters that one access truth. The goal of the path, as Sfs have continually emphasized for centuries, is to lift the veil to see the face but it is only through the veil that one can see the face. To see with no veil, therefore, is to see that there is no seeing without a veil, a seeing that liberates the mind of the fanciful urge to posit a face beyond the veil.

Maurice Gaudefroy-Demombynes, Le Voile de la Kaba, Studia Islamica 2 (1954): 5-21.

In the Qurn 33:53, ijb denotes a curtain rather than a piece of clothing, which separated the wives of Muammad and other men when they sought to converse with them, and in 33:59 there is the recommendation that the wives and daughters of the Prophet as well as other believing women should cover their faces. See Fatima Mernissi, The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Womens Rights in Islam (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1991), pp. 85-101; Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 14-15, 55-56; Wiebke Walther, Women in Islam: From Medieval to Modern Times (Princeton and New York: Markus Wiener, 1993), pp. 69-72; Barbara Freyer Stowasser, Women in the Quran, Traditions, and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 9094, 98-99. 3 Mernissi, The Veil and the Male Elite; Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, pp. 144-168. 4 Early Islamic Mysticism: Sufi, Quran, Miraj, Poetic and Theological Writings, translated, edited and with an introduction by Michael A. Sells, preface by Carl W. Ernst (New York: Paulist Press, 1996), pp. 43-45; Alexander Knysh, Islamic Mysticism: A Short History (Leiden: Brill, 2000), pp. 311-314.
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Margaret Smith, Rbia the Mystic and Her Fellow-Saints in Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928), p. 121; Binyamin Abrahamov, Divine Love in Islamic Mysticism: The Teachings of Al-Ghazli and Al-Dabbgh (New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), p. 27. 6 Principles of Sufism by al-Qushayri, translated by Barbara R. Von Schlegell with an introduction by Hamid Algar (Berkeley: Mizan Press, 1990), p. 143. 7 Knysh, Islamic Mysticism, pp. 71-72. 8 The paradox is poetically captured by al-Junayd, as cited in Sells, Early Islamic Mysticism, pp. 254-255: My annihilation is my abiding. From the reality of my annihilation, he annihilated me from both my abiding and my annihilation. I was, upon the reality of annihilation, without being or annihilation, through my abiding and annihilation, for the existence (wujd) of annihilation in abiding, for the existence of my other is my annihilation. . He abides in your abiding, that is, the unity of the affirmer of unity abides through the abiding of the one who is one, even as the affirmer of unity passes away. Then you are you. You lacked yourself, and then you came to abide insofar as you passed away. See ibid., p. 260: He annihilated my construction just as he constructed me originally in the condition of my annihilation. 9 Ibid., p. 255. See the formulation of al-Qushayri translated by Sells, ibid., p. 120: Whoever is seized by the sovereign power of reality, to the point that he no longer witnesses any vision, vestige, trace, or ruin of the others, is said to have passed away from creatures and to endure through the real. 10 Ibid., p. 121. 11 The Kashf al-Mahjb: The Oldest Persian Treatise on Sufism, translated by Reynold A. Nicholson, new edition (London: E. J. W. Gibb Memorial, 1976), p. 274. 12 William C. Chittick, The Self-Disclosure of God: Principles of Ibn al-Arabis Cosmology (Albany: State University of New York Press), pp. 106-108. 13 Fritz Meier, Essays on Islamic Piety and Mysticism, translated by John OKane with editorial assistance of Bernd Radtke (Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp. 400-420, especially 408-409. 14 Toshihiko Izutsu, Creation and the Timeless Order of Things: Essays in Islamic Mystical Philosophy, with a Foreword by William C. Chittick (Ashland: White Cloud Press, 1994), pp. 13, 76-77; Early Islamic Mysticism, pp. 43-45; Abrahamov, Divine Love, pp. 27 and 61.

15

This is the language used by Shams al-Dn Shahrazr to the describe the illuminationist philosophy of Suhraward. See The Philosophy of Illumination: A New Critical Edition of the Text of ikmat al-ishrq with English Translation, Notes, Commentary, and Introduction by John Walbridge and Hossein Ziai (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1999), p. xvii. 16 Ibid., p. 96. 17 The Niche of Lights: A Parallel English-Arabic Text, translated, introduced, and annotated by David Buchman (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1998), p. 44. 18 Ibid., p. 51. 19 Ibid., p. 52. 20 Cited in William C. Chittick, The Paradox of the Veil in Sufism, in Rending the Veil: Concealment and Secrecy in the History of Religions, edited by Elliot R. Wolfson (New York and London: Seven Bridges Press, 1999), p. 83. 21 Chittick, Self-Disclosure, p. 110; idem, Paradox of the Veil, p. 74. 22 Chittick, Self-Disclosure, p. 129; idem, Paradox of the Veil, pp. 81-82. 23 Chittick, Self-Disclosure, p. 156; idem, Paradox of the Veil, pp. 74-75. 24 Henry Corbin, Temple and Contemplation, translated by Philip Sherrard with the assistance of Liadain Sherrard (London: Islamic Publications, 1986), pp. 198-232. 25 For a representative list of relevant sources, see above n. 2. 26 A. L. F. A. Beelaert, The Kaba as a Woman: A Topos in Classical Persian Literature, Persica 13 (1988/89): 107-123; William C. Young, The Kaba, Gender, and the Rites of Pilgrimage, International Journal of Middle East Studies 25 (1993): 285-300, esp. 287-296; Annermarie Schimmel, Deciphering the Signs of God: A Phenomenological Approach to Islam (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 57. 27 On the symbolic configuration of the Kaba as the Throne or Temple, see Fritz Meier, Das Mysterium der Kaaba: Symbol und Wirklichkeit in der islamischen Mystik, Eranos Jahrbuch 11 (1944): 187-214, English translation in The Mysteries: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, edited by Joseph Campbell (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955), pp. 149-168; Corbin, Temple and Contemplation, pp. 183-262. 28 A Medieval Critique of Anthropomorphism: Ibn al-Jawzs Kitb Akhbr a-ift, a critical edition of the Arabic text with translation, introduction, and notes by Merlin Swartz (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 170, p. 239. 29 Stefan Wild, We Have Sent Down To Thee the Book With the Truth: Spatial and Temporal Implications of the Quranic Concepts of Nuzl, Tanzl, and Inzl, in The Quran as Text, edited by Stefan Wild (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996), pp. 137-153. 30 Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), p. 411. For the introduction of gender, and specifically the feminine character, to depict the nature of the sign and the spirit, see Approaching the Qurn: The Early Revelations, introduced and translated by Michael Sells (Ashland: White Cloud Press, 1999), pp. 201-204.

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