Dihliz

Islam started out as a stranger and an exile and will end up that way.
---Prophetic saying.

Knowledge is three things: an awe-inspiring book, an abiding tradition, and the ability to say I do not know.
-----Ghazali

Dihliz is a threshold space, a place that approximates to a no-place, a no place like home. But this liminal space is also a welcoming space and not an abyss. It is in-between, an isthmus. The dihliz is is a limit and a passage way that distinguishes and at the same time connects the inward and the outward, the higher and the lower. Would one be exceeding the boundaries of sense to say that Man himself is this limit, a barzakh who stands at the centre of all the worlds? Just as an image can be continuous and discontinuous with its object.

The Dihliz reminds one of a pilgrimage, a disruption of the familiar, the Same. It is the place, therefore, where we can listen to an event, something that restructures the past and the future. For a shaman the whole of history is a series of 'events'; Nature herself is continuous Revelation. For us, those with a modern mind, there can be no such things as miracles. For them, a flower or a star is no less miraculous than a shining apparition. For us, the closest we can conceive of such a thing is the entry of wild luck into our ordered lives. But it is invariably from 'outside' and very rarely does it elicit an appropriate response. Whereas, on reflection, every thought and action is the irruption of freedom, anarchy and open possibilities into the closed world.

Dihliz: outward sobriety, inward drunkenness, necessity and freedom. The dihliz is not a place that can be 'pictured', re-presented; it is a path, a corridor, a place of transition and transmission. In itself it is nothing. It is only a place that is made up of the trafficking of internal and external 'events'. It is the place where the life of the city outside impinges on all that is inwardly felt and lived: the private world of memories and shared recollections, of easy-going familiarity, contests with the political and public worlds. More than anything else, it is where the past and the future intermingle, a nunc stans that can never exists on its own, independent of other realities.