NŪR MUḤAMMAD

NŪR MUḤAMMAD ("light of Muḥammad") or Nūr Muḥammadi ("Muḥammadan light") is a term central to later Ṣūfī and Shīʿī speculation. Although the Qurʾān repeatedly states that Muḥammad is only human, a messenger entrusted with the guidance of the people (see surahs 6:50, 25:8, 25:22), later currents in Islam transformed him increasingly into a spiritual, luminous being. The historical Muḥammad was thus metamorphosed into a transcendent light, like the sun, around which everything created revolves. This idea has colored later mystical Islam on both the elite and folk levels.

The basis for such speculations, however, was found in the Qurʾān, where Muḥammad is called "a shining lamp" (sirāj munīr, 33:45) and where it is said, "There came to you from God a light and a clear book" (5:15). Ḥāssan ibn Thābit, the Medinese poet who eulogized Muḥammad, reflects these ideas in his verse; he is the first in a long series of writers to compare the face of the Prophet to the full moon at night, a comparison that plays on the words badr ("full moon") and Badr, the name of the site of the Muslims' first victorious battle in 624.

Such poetical expressions, however, still lacked a theological basis. It was left to the theologian Muqātil (d. 767?) to interpret the famous "light verse" of the Qurʾān (24:35) as a reference to the Prophet:

God is the light of the heavens and the earth; the likeness of his light is as a niche wherein there is a lamp, the lamp in a glass, the glass as it were a glittering star, kindled from a blessed tree, an olive tree neither of the East nor of the West, whose oil wellnigh would shine, even if no fire touched it. Light upon light. God guides to his light whom he will. And God strikes similitudes for man, and God has knowledge of everything.

It is the lamp, miṣbāh, that Muqatil sees as a fitting symbol for Muḥammad; through him the divine light shines upon the world, and through him humanity is guided to the origin of this light. The formula "neither of the East nor of the West" could then be taken as a reference to Muḥammad's comprehensive nature, which is not restricted to one specific people or race and which transcends the boundaries of time and space.

Up to the present day one of the most common epithets used for the Prophet is nūr al-hudā ("the light of right guidance"), and allusions to his luminous nature are found even in the titles of ḥadīth collections, such as Mashāriq al-anwār (The Rising Points of Lights), Ma-ṣābīḥ al-sunnah (The Lamps of the Sunnah ), or Mishkāt al-maṣābīḥ (The Niche for Lamps). Likewise, through the centuries one of the most famous prayers attributed to Muḥammad is the prayer for light:

O God, place light in my heart, light in my soul, light upon my tongue, light in my eyes, and light in my ears; place light at my right, light at my left, light behind me, and light before me, light above me, and light beneath me. Place light in my nerves, and light in my flesh, light in my blood, light in my hair and light in my skin. Give me light, increase my light, make me light.

Theories about Muḥammad's luminous nature began to develop, on the basis of Muqātil's exegesis, in the second half of the ninth century. The Iraqi Ṣūfī Sahl al-Tustarī (d. 896) was the first to express the whole Heilsgeschichte in the terminology of the light of Muḥammad as suggested in the light verse. The inaccessible divine mystery of light articulates itself in the pre-eternal manifestation of "the likeness of his light." The origin of the nūr Muḥammad in pre-eternity is depicted as "a luminous mass of primordial adoration in the presence of God, which takes the shape of a transparent column of divine light and constitutes Muḥammad as the primal creation of God" (Böwering, 1980). When this light reached "the veil of majesty," it prostrated itself before God, and from its prostration God formed a mighty column, one both outwardly and inwardly translucent. Sahl even interpreted surah 53:13, "And he saw [God] still another time," as pertaining to the beginning of time, when this luminous column was standing before God in worship "with the disposition of faith, and [to him] was unveiled the mystery of the mystery itself 'at the Lote-tree of the Boundary.'" Then, when the actual creation began, God created Adam, and finally all else that exists, from the light of Muḥammad. The light is thus seen as the primordial material out of which everything is formed; it becomes the ultimate source of existence, and through Muḥammad, the historical form of this light, beings become illuminated, thus participating in the divine light as embodied in the actual Prophet.

Sahl's high-soaring speculations were elaborated more poetically by his disciple al-Ḥallāj (d. 922), who devoted the first chapter of his Kitāb al-ṭawāsīn to Muḥammad, calling it Ṭāsīn al-sirāj (The Ṭāsīn of the Lamp, alluding to the Arabic letters ṭā and sīn found at the head of surah 27):

He was a lamp from the light of the invisible … a moon radiating among the moons, whose mansion is in the sphere of mysteries.… The lights of prophethood—from his light did they spring forth, and their lights appeared from his light, and there is no light among the lights more luminous and more visible and previous to preexistence than the light of this noble one.

As preceding preexistence, Muḥammad is seen as absolutely eternal, mentioned "before the Before and after the After."

Al-Ḥallāj's rhyming prose was written less than three centuries after Muḥammad's death. During those years there appeared several ḥadīth pointing to the mystery of the nūr Muḥammad: "The first thing God created was my light," says the Prophet, and his remark, "My companions are like stars," fits well with his role as the central sun or the full moon of the world.

The Ṣūfīs lovingly interpreted this idea. Al-Thaʿlabī (d. 1038), in his ʿAraʾis al-bayan, written shortly after the year 1000, cites a colorful myth in which the light appears as a radiant pearl. Najm Dāyā Rāzī, in the early thirteenth century, offers an elaborate story of creation using similar imagery; the pearling drops of sweat that emerge from the primordial Nūr Muḥammad are the substance out of which the 124,000 prophets sent before Muḥammad were created. ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Jīlī (d. 1408?) elaborates on this idea by comparing the nūr Muḥammad —also interpreted as the ḥaqīqah muḥammadīyah, the archetypal "Muḥammadan reality"—to a luminous pearl, or a white chrysolith, which grows embarrassed when God looks at it lovingly and thus begins to perspire, finally dissolving into waves and other watery substances out of which the created world emerges.

This image has inspired hundreds of poets in the Islamic world. In the sixteenth century, for example, a Turkish poet, Khaqani, speaks in his ḥilyah (the poetical description of the Prophet's noble features and qualities) of this event: "God loved this light and said 'My beloved friend!' and became enamored of this light." Overwhelmed by this divine love, the primordial Muḥammadan light produced drops of perspiration from bashfulness, and from them the world emerged in descending degrees. The same idea is found in Bengali mystical folk poetry of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, especially in the work of Shaykh Chānd.

Sahl's ideas of the column of light seem to have been quite well known in mystical circles even before their systematization by Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 1240) in the first half of the thirteenth century. Few passages in medieval Persian poetry prior to Ibn al-ʿArabī reflect this idea more eloquently than those of Farid al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār (d. 1220). In the introduction of his epic Manṭiq al-ṭayr (The Conversation of the Birds), ʿAṭṭār speaks of how, from this Muḥammadan light, the divine Throne, Footstool, Pen, and Tablet appeared, and how the great light then prostrated itself before the Lord and remained for ages in prostration, genuflection, and standing, thus prefiguring the movements of Muslim ritual prayer. The Turkish mystical poet Yunus Emre (d. 1321) puts in God's mouth the words

I created him from my own light
And I love him yesterday and today.
What would I do with the world without him?
My Muḥammad, my Ahmad of light!

In the same period, a Ṣūfī in India claimed that the light of Muḥammad became embodied in the Prophet's person "just as the light of the moon is taken from the sun." For the faithful, the participation in the light of Muḥammad is the goal of life, for whosoever is surrounded by this uncreated light will not be touched by the created fire of Hell.

That the idea of the Muhammadan light was popular even before Ibn al-ʿArabī is clear from the very title of al-Ghazālī's (d. 1111) booklet Mishkāt al-anwār (The Niche for Lights), which contains his prophetology, in which Muḥammad appears as the muṭāʿ ("one who is obeyed"). This attribution also occurs quite frequently in poetry at later periods; there, however, it does not assume the mysterious role as a kind of demiurge, a being between the undifferentiated One and the phenomenal world, as described by al-Ghazālī. For him, this primordial "light of lights" illuminates the darkness, and, even more, it brings all things into manifestation out of "not-being."

These theories on the nūr Muḥammad were, like so many early trends in Sufism, elaborated and systematized by Ibn al-ʿArabī, who states in his probably spurious profession of faith that "the first light appears out of the veil of the Unseen and from knowledge to concrete existence and is the light of our prophet Muḥammad." He then goes on to compare Muḥammad, the sirāj munīr, to the sun and infers that the heavenly intelligences, the spirits, the intuitions, and the essences are nourished by the luminous essence of (Muḥammad) Muṣṭafā the Elect, "who is the sun of existence." In philosophical terms, with Muḥammad, the first self-determination of the Absolute, the Divine begins to manifest itself gradually to the world, and the primordial light, which has permeated all prophets from the beginning, reaches its full development in the Perfect Man, the historical prophet Muḥammad.

As such, Muḥammad is praised in ever new images. It is no accident that the literature dealing with his miraculous birth always points to the light that shone from his father's forehead and was carried in Amīnah's womb; following the Prophet's birth, this light illuminated the world to the castles of Bostra in Syria. Muḥammad is the shamʿ-i maḥfil, the "candle of the assembly," which illuminates the night of this world as medieval Persian poets wrote; and it is "the light of his name" by which the Muslims should bring light into the darkness of this time, as Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938), the Indo-Pakistani modernist poet, says in his Urdu poem Answer to [Man's] Complaint (1912). The mystics and poets were happy to interpret the beginning of surah 93 ("By the morning light!") as pertaining to Muḥammad's radiant face, which represents at the same time the radiance of faith—an image probably coined by Sanāʾī of Ghaznah (d. 1131?) and lovingly repeated through the centuries by poets in all parts of the Muslim world.

One can say without exaggeration that, in eulogies composed for Muḥammad, his luminous character is among those features most frequently noted. One finds, for example, mention of the Prophet as "the light of all lights" and the beliefs that he did not cast a shadow and that his light was visible in the dark night. Following these ideas, calligraphers writing in Arabic found it logical that none of the Prophet's original names—Muḥammad, Aḥmad, Hāmīd, and Maḥmūd—nor his epithet—rasūl Allāh ("messenger of God")—was written with diacritical marks. One even finds attempts to write eulogies for him in which all diacritical marks are left out as a way of stressing his luminous purity.

The origin and early development of the theory of the light of Muḥammad are difficult to trace. One source of this mysticism of light might have been Hellenistic gnostic speculations. Shīʿī theories about the light of the imams also may have strongly contributed to the development of these ideas. Ibn al-ʿArabī associated this concept with the tradition (ḥadīth qudsī ) in which God says, "I was a hidden treasure and wanted to be known; therefore I created the world." Following Ibn al-ʿArabi's lead, Jami (d. 1492) addressed the Prophet in this manner:

From "I was a treasure" your true nature has become clear: Your person is the mirror of the unqualified light.

According to Ibn al-ʿArabī and his followers, the nūr Muḥammad appears in all prophets, each of them bearing a certain particle of this light, as well as those mystics who tried to reach union with the ḥaqīqah muḥammadīyah. These individuals sometimes claimed that they were in the heights with the light of Muḥammad long before Adam was created. The historical Muḥammad is thus endowed with the "totalizing nature" comprising all the divine names and forming the principle in which the divine light can reflect its glory in order to be known and loved. His relation to the inaccessible essence of light is like that of the sunlight in relation to the sun.

On the basis of these ideas later writers compared Muḥammad to the dawn that appears at the border between night and day, between human contingent existence and divine reality. The nūr Muḥammad thus becomes a central concept that appears in varied expressions in the Islamic world, and although the emphasis in prophetology has tended to shift from the mythical Muḥammad to the historical man Muḥammad, the "light of guidance" is still admired and praised in the verses of mystically minded poets.

Bibliography

For more on the Nūr Muḥammad, see William H. T. Gairdner's translation, Al-Ghazzālī's Mishkāt al-anwār (The Niche for Lights ) (1924; reprint, Lahore, 1952). A better translation of the Mishkāt is Roger Deladrière's Le tabernacle des Lumières (Paris, 1981). Indispensable for the study of the nūr Muḥammad is Tor Andrae's important work Die person Muhammeds in lehre und glauben seiner gemeinde (Stockholm, 1918). Andrae deals especially with the transformation of the image of Muḥammad as reflected in Islamic mysticism and theology. My own And Muhammad Is His Messenger (Chapel Hill, 1985) is a survey of the veneration of Muḥammad in mystical and popular traditions. See also Louis Massignon's classic study The Passion of al-Hallaj: Mystic and Martyr of Islam, 4 vols., translated by Herbert Mason (Princeton, 1982), and Gerhard Böwering's The Mystical Vision of Existence in Classical Islam: The Qurʾanic Hermeneutics of the Ṣūfī Sahl al-Tustarī (d. 283/896) (Berlin and New York, 1980). Robert C. Zaehner's Hindu and Muslim Mysticism (New York, 1969) is an original work that compares Sufism and Hindu mysticism and contains some interesting observations on the nūr Muḥammad.

Annemarie Schimmel (1987)