62

To our minds there's something unsettling about our love of repetition, rituals, set phrases, and cliches. It is a variation on the horror we feel towards what we initially think of as random events but that gradually start to appear with a diconcerting regularity. It is as if inanimate matter pre-figured or mirrored our own state of soul, and the pattern of events said something about the meaning of our lives: a remnant of primitive thinking, animism, that must be expunged if we are to have 'clear and distinct' ideas. 62.

This world of ours, a Parmenedian block universe, has exhausted all possibilities but yet still somehow manages to point to something other than itself.

But it is not just the poets who suffer from this excess of meaning; the medieval imagination was saturated with a vast array of interconnecting, interlacing and overlapping systems of thought, feeling and sense. We, too, are haunted by the uncanny, and a half-formed thought that an invisible thread links 'habitat' with 'habitus' lingers on. In addition to the vague intuition that we're only saying and thinking what other people have already thought and said, there's an eerie sense of deja vu, a dark anxiety that in a world that is governed by a strict mechanism-where even chance follows statsitical laws-the wildest of co-incidences are something to be expected. If the universe has no beginning then we have been through an infinity of similar moments.

I think back to my English Literature teacher, the highly respected Usmaani saahib, who with his balding grey head and thick black square glasses had something of a slightly comical look about him. A person whose soul was ill at ease with the modern era, but who nevertheless was able to remain blissfully unaware of the flow of time by immersing himself in his books. He had an odd sense pride in his deep affinities with an England that only existed in the mind: Morris Minor's, cricket whites, and an idealized 1950's view of a profoundly moral and static society. "The greatest evil of our times," he once lectured the whole school , " is boiled sweets". But I also remember his keen insights when it came to Hardy.

"Isn't it weird, slightly unbelievable even, that so many things should slot into place just at the right moment?" asked on student. "It is," he continued , "as if divine Providence, and not the character of Gabriel Oak, is the main spring of action. "

"Yes, " came the reply, "it certainly looks like that at first glance. If one takes a slice of life, any life, then any event appears to be truly random, a pure co-incidence. If one were to look at the event and see it as but one of many in a whole series of occurrences then it would lose all of its strangeness and uniqueness; either that or each one would come to take on a magical, special, significance. But more than this, any life is nothing but the interweaving of the predictable with the unpredicatable. Over the span of a 'whole life' one should learn to expect the unexpected. "

I don't know how many of us understood this at the time. It was a lazy summer's day and his voice had tapered off towards the end, floating like a cloud into the empty sky.

My thoughts turn back to something else someone said but that I only now feel the urge to recall. It was an old shaykh from the deserts of Mauritannia. The lecture itself was rather dry and bland, and he spoke in a matter-of-fact, monotnous tone. I think that he himself realised that his time was running out; in a world of soundbytes and instant knowledge, there seemed to be little point to the patient, slow truth of a classically trained scholar. The painstaking examination of evidence, the analysis of ancient, dusty parchments and obscure legal rulings were hardly things that were likely to catch the imagination of a modern-day audience.

On the whole it was an uneventful talk. The Shaykh was mindful of the centuries that stood between him and us. His words on pluralism, the necessity of diversity-at a political and metaphysical level-were greeted with a shuffling of feet. This reminded me of what another shaykh had once said:

There was once a great shaykh who started to address a huge gathering by asking who knew what he was going to talk about today. Everyone raised their hands.

"Then there's no need for me to say anything more."

The following week he asked the same question and this time, aware of what had happened the previous occassion, everyone kept their hands down.

"How can I talk to you if you don't even know what I'm talking about?!"

A week later and the same question.

The crowd had now swelled, since he was one of the most reputable scholars in the whole land. This time, they thought, they would get the better of him. Half of the vast crowd raised their hands.

"Well, then I suggest the half that knows tells the half that doesn't. What need is there for me!"

Anyway, our Shaykh, the Shaykh of the desert and the flowing black robes, drew the discussion to a conclusion and looked unsatisfied with the whole experience. Then someone from the audience asked a question regarding who could legitimately interpret the Holy text. The Shaykh's eyes lit up and his whole being became animated.

"This is an obscure and technical point so I'll only give you a short answer "...and one could see his mind sifting through a library of thoughts and accumulated knowledge. although he was talking about texts quite a few of us came away with the impression that he could just as well have been talking about a chapter in our lives:

"Only someone who has an understanding of the particular text , its specific meaning- the literal as well as the allegorical , the general spirit of the whole book and how the specific is related to the universal import of the verse, how the verse is related to other verses and general spirit of the whole book; someone who has a profound knowledge of the language and of the circumstances-political, social, economic-in which each verse was revealed. somone who knew which verse was revealed when and someone who understands the times we now live in; someone who is at one with the land from which he comes...only such a person is qualified to speak. But this is the short answer...."