The Tongue of Adam by Abdelfattah Kilito

Author:Abdelfattah Kilito
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2016-10-26T11:33:09+00:00

Poet or Prophet?

Tha‘labi’s text poses three important questions: that of the elegy’s authenticity, that of its language (which is also Adam’s), and finally that of the elegy’s transmission.

According to Ibn ‘Abbas, cited by Tha‘labi, whoever claims that Adam wrote poetry is a liar.1 The prophets — and Adam is a prophet — cannot compose verse. It would be unworthy to lower themselves in such a way.

To see why this is so, let us recall the controversy between Muhammad and the pagans on the subject of Quranic inspiration. The pagans considered Muhammad a poet inspired by a djinn. This idea was founded on a long-standing belief that each poet has a supernatural familiar — a djinn providing poetic inspiration, for which the poet is merely a passive spokesman. The poet is a receptacle for words that inhabit him, which he delivers himself by speaking. He is possessed, prey to a strange and wild form of speech. In this way, the poem has two sources: a djinn, hidden inside a human body, and the owner of that body, which has been suddenly invaded and cannot free itself except by opening, without premeditation, into speech. The Meccan pagans believed that all this applied to Muhammad: he was possessed by a djinn that made him say the words whispered in his ear.

Several Quranic verses bear witness to this fierce debate: “Are we to abandon our gods to a crazed poet?” [37:36]. “But how will remembering help them when a messenger, undeniable, had already come to them, and they had turned their backs on him, saying: ‘He is tutored and crazed’?” [44:14]. The Quran rejects the pagans’ accusation: “We did not teach him poetry, nor does this befit him” [36:69]. Prophecy and poetry are irreconcilable for they arise from antithetical sources of inspiration. In the same way, the status of prophet is incompatible with that of soothsayer (kahin), who receives his djinn-inspired vaticinations in rhymed prose (saj‘). “You are not, by grace of your Lord, a soothsayer or a madman” [52:29]. Poetry and divination have a demonic origin, while prophecy has a divine origin. The Quran “is indeed a Revelation from the Lord of the Worlds, brought down by the Trustworthy Spirit, upon your heart, so that you may be a warner” [26:192–94].

If Muhammad isn’t a poet then the other prophets, beginning with Adam, cannot be either. It follows from this that the poem attributed to Adam is a forgery.

As for the verses attributed to Eve, no one bothers to puzzle over them: Eve isn’t a prophet after all. Nor does the poem attributed to Satan provoke discussion. There’s nothing strange about Satan composing verse, since he’s the very source of poetry. Does one not say that poetry is “the breath of Satan,” nafth al-shaytan?2 Isn’t it described in al-Ma‘arri’s The Epistle of Forgiveness as “the Quran of Satan” (Qur’an Iblis)?3

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