The Arabic triliteral root, s.j.d., has the sense of bowing
down, or prostrating oneself; the verbal noun is sujud, or sajdah.
Such prostration is very prominent in the ritual of formal Islamic
prayer. One of the commonest Arabic words for mosque, masjid,
derives from the same s.j.d. root. We may see something of the
impact of this symbolic act of prostration if we look at the way
in which s.j.d. appears in the Qur’an. First, all creation bows
down to God: ‘To God bow all who are in the heavens and the earth
. . . as do their shadows also in the mornings and the evenings’.
(Surah 13, verse 15; see also 16.48, 22.18, 55.6. Caution: verse
numbering in the Qur’an is not as consistent as it is in the Bible!
Also, although all the passages cited in this article do contain
s.j.d., some contain also other Arabic roots with roughly the
same meaning, making it difficult to be sure exactly what each
English equivalent refers to). Taking this as our starting point,
we may divide the other Quranic references into two general (and
to some extent over-lapping) categories: to whom, and by whom,
is sujud offered?
Essentially, sujud is offered to God. Two passages (27.24-5 and
41.37) specifically condemn misplaced sujud, offered to the sun
and moon; indeed, in the passages already cited for creation,
sun and moon are included among all other elements bowing down
to God. However, there are two significant exceptions. One concerns
Satan, or Iblis as he is called in the Qur’an, the rebellious
angel, who expresses his proud disobedience by refusing God’s
command to all the angels, that they should bow down before Adam.
Seven passages touch on this: 2.34, 7.11-2, 15.29-33, 17.61, 18.50,
20.116, 38.72-5. The other exception occurs in the Surah, or Chapter,
of Joseph, in two passages: one, when Joseph dreams of the sun,
moon and eleven stars offering him sujüd (12.4 — exactly as in
Genesis 37.9); and again towards the end of the story, when sujüd
is offered (it is not altogether clear in the Quranic account
exactly by whom) to Joseph as governor in Egypt (12.100; compare
Gen. 42.6). By whom is sujüd offered? It is offered by the individual
Muslim worshipper, often in the privacy of night prayer (3.112,
25.64, 76.25-6, and perhaps 50.40), or as a mark of additional
devotion whilst reading the Qur’an (there are fourteen verses,
at the recitation of which tradition requires sujud — for example
17.109, where the verb is not s.j.d., though this appears in v.107).
It is offered by those who are humble, and who do not ‘wax proud’
(16.49, and many other passages). We can see sujüd here gradually
taking on the role of a distinguishing sign, something which sets
people apart. One passage, for example, encourages the Muslim
against the mockers, telling him to be among those who bow down
(15.95-9; see also 41.37-8, 96.19). There is even mention of sujud
on the battlefield (4.102). Since sujüd is thus in a sense a badge
of the believer, to perform it may be a statement of conversion:
this is clear in the Quranic account of Moses’ confrontation with
the sorcerers of Pharaoh, which leads to the sorcerers’ repentance
(7.120-4, 20.70, 26.46; compare Exodus 7.8-13, where, however,
the repentance is not mentioned). And, just as sujud may be a
token of conversion, of accepting the alternative faith, so refusal
to perform it may be a symbolic rejection of that faith (25.60,
68.42-3, 84.21).
There is one other important category of those who offer sujüd:
Jews and Christians. This may occur in an historical context,
looking back to Moses and the Israelites (2.58, 7.161), or to
Mary and the Annunciation (3.42). But it was also a contemporary
phenomenon, in Muhammad’s day, for it was noticed that Jews and
Christians, like Muslims, bow down in worship (48.29, 3.112-3).
In the second of these passages, it is said of the Jews and Christians,
that ‘their mark is on their faces, the trace of prostration’.
I do not know exactly what this refers to: it may have something
to do with the practice today of some Roman Catholics (and other
Christians?), who put ashes on their foreheads at the beginning
of Lent; or it may more literally be the dust remaining on the
forehead which has touched the ground in sujüd. A colleague of
mine, doing research among the Muslims of Ivory Coast, told me
how her interpreter used to preserve this dusty symbol of devotion
upon his forehead, particularly after the afternoon prayer. These
various Quranic categories of sujud reveal two basic types of
ambiguity. On the one hand, there is the ambiguity existing amongst
mutually reconcilable interpretations: this has been called the
multivocality of symbols: we may compare it to the harmony of
the various parts or lines in vocal music. For example, sujud
is a universal expression, shared by all creation; yet it is,
too, the intensely individual expression of private devotion.
It is a token of man’s complete dependence upon God; and it is
as well the sign of the equality of all believers. It is the badge
which sets the believers apart; yet also a shared element amongst
diverse religious traditions.
But those very traditions are sometimes bitterly antagonistic
to one another. And it is at this point that the harmony begins
to break down, and discord threatens. The ambiguity of mutually
reconcilable interpretations begins to give way to that of potentially
irreconcilable meanings: in extreme cases, it may be as though
civil war has broken out within the symbol itself; the symbol
becomes schizophrenic. Returning to our Quranic examples, when
the Muslim sees someone performing sujüd, does this guarantee
that the worshipper is also Muslim, a member of the same household
of the faith — or might he be Jew or Christian instead? Or again,
if sujud be offered exclusively to God, why is it that in Joseph’s
dream sun. moon and stars offer it to him, and that this dream
is fulfilled when Joseph receives sujud as governor in Egypt?
(This particular ambiguity is still more dangerous since it raises
the question of the possible influence of previous Scriptures
upon the text of the Qur’an: and precisely this chapter, of Joseph,
has been a centre of controversy in this respect: in an M.A. seminar
discussion of an earlier draft of this paper. Muslim students
fastened for discussion first of all upon these Joseph passages).
And yet again, and most strangely, Iblis, the rebellious angel,
proclaims his rebellion by refusing to obey God; but the very
thing he refuses to do is the same thing which is otherwise almost
universally condemned, that is, to offer sujud to a man. Precisely
such an element of potential danger, conflict, irreconcilability,
schizophrenia, within a symbol, is part of its impact: the piquancy
of the symbol is enhanced when we know that, in using it, we take
a risk.
Turning now to the West African historical record, we can see
another, and very clear, instance of the schizophrenic symbol:
for, in many local West African traditions, to bow down, to prostrate
oneself, to pour dust on one’s head, is a token of courtesy to
a family elder, or obedience to a duly appointed chief. Perhaps
because Muslims were already acutely aware of the importance,
within their own tradition, of just such symbolic action (though
meaning for them something quite different), this action is one
of the first things Muslim observers noticed in West Africa. Al-Bakri,
a Spanish Muslim geographer writing about ancient Ghana at almost
exactly the time of the Norman conquest of England. says this:
‘When the people who profess the same religion as the king approach
him they fall on their knees and sprinkle dust on their heads,
for this is their way of greeting him. As for the Muslims, they
greet him only by clapping their hands.’
In the fourteenth century, when the celebrated world-traveller
Ibn Battutah visited Mali, and left us the first full eye-witness
account of West African Islam, he too dwelt in detail upon such
behaviour. His editor, indeed, added a mention of the Malian ambassador
to Morocco, who had a basket of earth brought with him, so that
he might sprinkle dust on his head whenever the Sultan of Morocco
spoke to him. In the Mali of Ibn Battutah’s day, even Islamic
lawyers, judges and pilgrims removed their turbans and ‘dusted’
before the king. In listing his dislikes in Mali (he had also
a list of things he appreciated), Ibn Battutah included ‘their
sprinkling dust and ashes on their heads out of good manners’.
Just before 1500. some questions, about the religious rights
and wrongs of various actions and beliefs, arrived in Cairo from
West Africa. One question was about the propriety of Muslims who
‘bow and prostrate to their rulers’. And the answer from Cairo
was that this is kufr, unbelief — that is, among the most serious
religious offences of all, offences which lead to damnation. And
early in the nineteenth century. a very celebrated Muslim reformer,
Shehu Usuman dan Fodio, in what is today northern Nigeria, proclaimed
that anyone bowing down in this way would surely go to hell.
Such evidence, from West African history, might easily be multiplied,
though I must confess that for the earlier centuries it is scattered
and sporadic. We can. I think, trace a pattern. At first, the
symbol is noticed, but it is clearly and unambiguously located
in the ‘other’ tradition, the local West African tradition: al-Bakri
says that this is the way in which non-Muslims greet their king.
In Ibn Battutah’s time, the two traditions, the local West African
and the incoming Islamic, have begun to intertwine: Ibn Battutah
is still aware that prostration before a human is done ‘out of
good manners’, but he dislikes the practice, for now Muslims are
doing it too: the ambiguity of the symbol is now becoming dangerous.
By 1500, and later, the danger is so acute that the Islamic religious
authorities condemn prostration before a human as deadly sin.
(‘Dusting’, which is often mentioned, is a kind of sub-symbol,
within the larger symbol of sujüd: we have already seen how it
may be discerned in the Qur’an, ‘the trace of prostration’: perhaps
the fact that even there it is somewhat ambiguous (does it signify
a fellow-Muslim, or just a Jew or Christian?) helps to explain
why later Muslims were so sensitive to just this sub-symbol when
they confronted it in West Africa and, I suppose, elsewhere.)
Generalising from the Islamic/West African interaction, we may
say that the same (or roughly, but recognisably, the same) symbol
in two adjacent traditions excites remark, but does not arouse
grave anxiety: but when the two traditions begin to mix, then
this particular ambiguity of the symbol, derived from its source
in two distinct traditions, becomes more and more intolerable,
more and more schizophrenic. And in this transition, from two
adjacent, similar symbols, to one internal, schizophrenic symbol,
we may perhaps see part of the reason why heretics, within a religious
tradition, are sometimes treated more harshly than aliens outside
it. Finally, we might interpret sujud itself, and all the ramifications
of its meaning, both Islamic and West African, as a symbol also
of inter-faith meeting. The more intimate such meeting becomes,
the more two sets of alarm bells are set ringing: one at the actual
place of meeting — in our study, in Muslim West Africa — where
apparently shared beliefs or practices may turn out to have diametrically
opposed implications; and the other far away, in the heartlands
of one or another party to the meeting — in our study, in the
manifest concern of modern-day students (and modern-day Quranic
commentators and translators) to rule out the possibility of any
ambiguity within the faith. All religious dialogue arouses this
double strain: the tension of adjustment and understanding at
the point of meeting — and the repercussions of that tension on
the frontier, for faith and practice at the heart of each of the
participating traditions.
Bibliography
- West Africa: Alhaji Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa,
Shaihu Umar, a short Hausa novel translated by M. Hiskett, London,
1967.
- Ibn Battutah in Black Africa, ed. & tr. Said
Hamdun and Noel King, 1975.
- Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Ambiguous Adventure,
New York, 1963; a novel, originally in French, with an excellent
account of a traditional Senegalese Quran school.
- Mary F. Smith, Baba of Karo, the autobiography
of a Muslim Hausa woman of northern Nigeria, London, 1963, reprinted
1981.
- Symbolism: Raymond Firth, Symbols: public
and private, 1973.
- Paul Tillich, ‘Symbols of faith’, chapter
3 in his Dynamics of Faith, New York, 1958.
- Victor W. Turner, The Forest of Symbols,
Ithaca, N.Y., 1967.
- E.M. Zuesse, Ritual Cosmos, Ohio University
Press, 1979.
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