Idris

The patterns bordering each page are turned into a solid black frame so that the book becomes - as is often said of photography - a window on to the world. Inside this frame - rigid, unalterable, definitive - all is in flux. Fixed meaning dissolves in a blazing grey drizzle. Words, as one of Don DeLillo's narrators says when confronted by a swirl of Arabic script, are "design, not meant to be read, as though part of some unbearable revelation".

---G. Dyer on Idris Khan's image of the Qur'an.

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Reading between the lines, reading into.

It is only when you listen to the Qur'an do you realize-and of course, this is not coming from someone with any sustained engagement with it-that the surahs have their own rhythm and cadences and that what seems repetitive in the written script is unique in another dimension. And it is the gravity and beauty of the word that catches you.

(All of this might seem odd or even shallow to the modern reader, but from within the tradition it has been recognized that there is a kind of blessing from looking or reading even when there isn't an attendant understanding-which is to say nothing of the relative merits of the two).

[And, of course, the word as a talisman, a protection against evil...]

In the beginning was the word, 'the Pen'-as every Muslim knows. But the word was recite! As if to say. As if to say: one must respond to a command, a calling. The commandments. 

Martin Lings on the beautiful Kufic script:

Beautiful is, perhaps, the wrong word: 'Jalal' and 'Jamal'. The reticence, the weight of the word (a 'burden to be taken up', by choice) but also a blessing ('a sending down'). There is always a 'darkness' to the word that cannot simply be explained by the rational mind. The conceit that without 'grace' and character there can be understanding. Again: the inexhaustibly of meaning: the ink, the unfathomable sea...

What you read into Dyer/Idris:

A fixed form without; an endless, infinite and interior 'text'. The Revelation occurs at a particular moment in time and is 'completed'. In another sense -after Levinas and 'his Jewish Revelation'-each new human being brings with them a unique possibility of understanding of Revelation: natality.

{this mirrors the well-known lines about how creation, from a certain perspective, takes place in the "blinking of an eye". Creation, life. But the Allama could also say: I hear kun faya kun now!}

A window into the world! The text is a bridge, a ladder. There is only return, time and again; the heart, a mirror, polished by remembrance.