WORDS ABOUT WATER

It is said in the Qur’an that rain does not fall – God sends down rain from the heavens. 

From the very earliest days of Islam the fact has not escaped theosophists that the descent of rain from the clouds is described in the Qur’an in the same words that are used to describe the manner in which the Qur’anic Revelation itself is revealed.  The sending down of the rain is identical to the revelation or ‘sending down’ of the  Qur’anic words, suras and tales.  It is suggested in the Qur’an that when God bestows rainfall, He in fact presents us with a direct spectacle of the event of Revelation itself.

‘Of water We created every living thing’, says the Book. And man himself is created and ‘set, a drop, in a receptacle secure’, says the Book.  There are numerous passages in the mystical literature of Islam that speak of the human embryo as a small clot that originates in water.  The theosophists of Islam have therefore noted that in the Qur’an water is most often spoken of as a sign of the miracle of creation, or even as creation itself.

Water is mentioned in the Qur’an in almost every form: water is rain, water is rivers, water is the sea, water is dew, water is sap and ice, water is freshness, water is vapour.  The sight of spring water is referred to several times in the Book, with particular emphasis on spring water gushing forth from rock.

The seas, with their vast expanse, and the motif of the ‘seven seas’, are linked with ink and the extraordinary call to reflect: if all the seas were ink, and every tree a pen with which to write every Word of God, ‘the sea would be spent before the Words of my Lord were spent’. For this reason Ibn ‘Arabi, a mystic of the seventh Islamic century, calls the Qur’an a shoreless sea.

The waters of the sea are described in Islamic commentaries as the lower waters, of vast expanse, full of sombre depths and layers of opacity.  But with their blueness and their waves, the seas are also the yearning call for the infinite, the distant, for the Journey and the Way.  There is no more eloquent silence than the silence in the spectacle of the blue skies reposing on the blue ocean.  One Arab poet describes a calm sea as a ‘citadel of silence’.

In the Qur’an attention is drawn to the high seas as to the cycle of destiny in which creation moves, and man in particular.  However spacious our vessel, however strong and powerful, the ocean waves are more powerful, and on stormy seas God is fervently invoked to bestow a safe landing, a safe return to harbour.

The Qur’an speaks of rivers as flowing without cease.  In paradise itself rivers flow, beneath gardens. Islamic mystics see a great sign in the ceaseless movement of rivers (Hadžem Hajdarević would say ‘movement of the shores’): as everything returns to God, so water neither vanishes nor flows away.  The flow of the river is not in the river-mouth but in the Source.  Rivers, then, are the moving elements of land, and waves the moving elements of the oceans.

In the infinity of the All-encompassing, which encompasses us too, life on this earth lasts only as long as the wash of two waves when they clash against the rocks.  Thus do the poets sing plaintively of the shimmer of the ocean waves about the rocks.  Jalaluddin Rumi cited this admonition about the movement of the waters and the waves:

“O thou who sleepest in the vessel of thy body,

you have already seen the Water, now see the Water of waters.

In water there is Water that compels it onward,

in spirit there is Spirit that calls it ever onward.

Sufi literature lays much emphasis on the motif of water and cleanliness.  In the Islamic credo it is water, not wine, that flows into the fountain of ritual. 

Nature turns into culture through the mediation of water, and in man’s living and cohabiting with water, culture turns back to nature.  At this point we come to the important link in the Book between water and the mercy of God. When we bathe, it is as though our face is bathed not with water, but with the innumerable waves of God’s mercy, eternally succouring us.

In the Qur’an clouds are at least a two-fold sign: their passage across the vault of the heavens is a sign of the ephemerality and impermanence of life on this earth, and as a result, clouds are not merely a sign of water’s metamorphosis into vapour, but are in themselves the ‘upper waters’ in visible form. In the form of clouds water shows its yearning for spiritual states and ascents.

Looking at the mighty clouds and the skies is a discipline for excessive desire, says Ghazali, and looking at green, growing things ennobles the sight.  

The words of the Qur’an to a great extent strive to remind man, almost to entreat him, to be aware that the invisible winds carry the visible clouds to the four quarters of the earth, of the dead and desert places.  And then the water, colourless, tasteless and odourless, enables the desert regions to burgeon and bloom with all kinds of colourful and sweetly fragrant flowers and plants.

In classical treatises on colour in general, and the colours of flowers in particular, it is said that water likes to conceal itself, to retreat.  It is without colour itself, but makes colour possible.  It has no taste, but makes taste possible. It has no fragrance, but makes fragrance possible.

Islamic esoteric thought, like the thinking of the old Latin Church Fathers, has generally seen in material things and their diversity the multiform signs of God.

Spring waters are beyond the raw and the baked.  They do not depend on age, are not waiting to mature.  Water is seen in particular as the most amazing sign of God, colourless, tasteless, formless, odourless . . . Transcendental.  Water is therefore used in Islamic architecture as a symbol of God’s oneness, of tauhid.

It is worth saying, claim mystical commentaries and glosses, that water praised God for the fact that people cannot make statues and idols from it.  Water cannot be shaped for that purpose. Water then bound itself before God to eternal and incessant prayer in the babbling of brooks, the splash of waterfalls, the welling up of springs, the hissing of steam. And for this reason it is said in the Qur’an that people, and wood, and even stones, can burn. But water cannot burn. Water extinguishes fire.

The Qur’an reminds us that God’s Throne was upon the waters.