What a Name Cannot Say

A child, holding his mother's hand, points to a tree by the roadside: "What is its name?" His mother says, "Plane tree." The child looks at the tree for a while, then asks the second question: "Who told it that it was a plane tree?"

The mother laughs and does not answer. Most of us could not have. This book walks in pursuit of that second question. The tree does not know it is a plane tree. We know. But was what we knew the tree itself, or the name we pinned on it?

We called the tree a plane tree

The tree did not withhold its shade

Even without knowing its name

Its shade was cool

This is a book about names. But it is not a dictionary. There are many books that count the divine names in order and write a meaning beside each one, and they are valuable. This book wants to walk another way: from the name itself to its meaning, from its meaning to the truth it points to. The road is not long; it passes through a single name. But passing through is harder than reading across the surface.

Why does man give names?

Man comes into the world by being given a name. Before he even opens his eyes, a name awaits him. He does not choose it, nor is he asked. One day he turns toward that name, turns his head when called by it, and until the end of his life takes that sound to be himself.

Then he too begins to give names. First to things: this is water, this is bread, this is mother. Then to feelings: this is fear, this is longing. Then to things he has never seen: this is the soul, this is time, this is death. A person's world is as wide as the names he gives. We live through a feeling whose name we do not know, but we cannot tell anyone about it. The moment we name it, that feeling separates from us a little, stands outside, becomes something that can be looked at.

So giving names is a need. Man looks for a handhold in the midst of chaos. Every name stops something flowing, for a moment. We say "water" to water, and the flow rests in a word. This is the first step of thinking. Without words, thought scatters; names are the threads that hold scattered things together.

But the thread has a problem. It squeezes a little whatever it holds. When we say "water," we lose this water flowing before us at this moment, this coolness, this light. The word is the shared name of all waters. It is not the name of this water. That is why poets quarrel with words; they are forced to say something they know with a word everyone uses.

The name stops what flows

Holds what it stops

Lessens a little what it holds

Water does not get wet in its name

Is naming a thing knowing it?

We know the name of a star. We know where it stands in the sky, too. But we have never gone to that star, never touched its light; when the light that reaches us set out, we did not exist. Is knowing its name knowing it?

Everyday language suggests so. "I know him," we say, of someone whose name we know. Yet knowing a person happens long after the day we learn his name, when we begin to see the places where he falls silent. Some people we live with for years by their names alone, without ever knowing them. One day a word, a glance surprises us, and we understand that what we knew was his name.

A name is the door of knowledge, not its room. We can stand before the door and say, "I know what is inside." We know the door, its knocker, its color. We do not go in. All the chapters of this book, in a sense, want to ask one question of the person standing before this door: Do you truly want to go in?

The distance between the name and the named

The old thinkers gave this distance two names: ism and musamma. The ism is the word we speak; the musamma is the thing that word points to. The relation between them was debated at length in books of theology and philosophy: Is the name the same as the named, or other than it?

We will enter the details of this debate in the first chapter. For now let me say something simple: The person who does not see the distance between them either turns the name into something to be worshipped or belittles it. The first takes the name for the named; he gets caught on letters, seeks a power in the sound itself. The second takes the name for an empty label; he says "what does a name matter" and cannot find the door. Both have lost the distance. One has reduced it to zero, the other has stretched it to infinity.

Yet a name is neither the named itself nor a sound cut off from it. A name is a sign. The finger is turned toward the moon. Whoever looks at the finger does not see the moon; whoever cuts off the finger also loses where the moon is.

The finger turned toward the moon

One looked at the finger

One broke the finger

The moon was above them both

What is said and what is perceived

There are words we say hundreds of times a day. The word "Allah" is foremost among them. When greeting, when surprised, when afraid, when glad. Language has grown so used to this word that most of the time we do not even hear what we say.

The Qur'an, when speaking of the divine names, always keeps one distinction alive: saying the name is one thing, remembering the Owner of the name is another.

The most beautiful names belong to Allah, so call upon Him by them, and leave those who deviate concerning His names.

— Al-A'raf 7:180

The verse gives us the names, but adds a warning: deviation concerning the names is possible.1 That is, names can be held straight in human hands, or crooked. Two people say the same word; one opens the door with it, the other shuts the door even tighter. What is said is the same. What is perceived is not the same.

The real matter of this book is the difference between these two things: what is said and what is perceived. Language carries what is said. What carries what is perceived is the heart. That is why the book begins with the name, but ends in the heart, and finally in namelessness.

Where names begin, where words fall silent

The moments when a person speaks the most are the moments when he understands the least. When someone loses a loved one, no one speaks at length. So too before a great beauty. A person looking at the sun rising behind a mountain says "how beautiful" and falls silent. Not because he cannot find anything else to say; because he knows that everything that could be said would make the thing there smaller.

The divine names begin in such a place. Allah makes Himself known to us through His names: Rahman, Rahim, Wadud, Alim, Hakim. Each name opens a window. But whoever looks through the window knows the view is larger than the window. Mercy does not fit into the word "Rahman." Love does not end in the three syllables of the word "Wadud."

The place where names begin is the place where words fall silent. This seems a contradiction. But it is not. Names show us the place where we must fall silent. The more truly a name is understood, the fuller the silence that follows it. In the Qur'an, names often come together with a command to glorify:

Glorify the name of your Lord, the Most High.

— Al-A'la 87:1

To glorify, tasbih, is to hold far above every deficiency. Even while remembering the name, to hold the Owner of the name higher than the name. This is the reason I named the last chapter of this book "Namelessness." Names lead us to the Nameless; but to arrive there one must pass through all the names.

I remembered the name

I thought I remembered the Owner of the name

Tasbih said

The two are not one

Nor are they apart

The path of this book

The book is made of four parts. The first part asks about the name itself: What does a name tell, what does it hide? What is a name, who is the "He" beyond the name, what do the beautiful names make known? The second part descends from the name to existence: How did existence come to be, how do the names appear in the world, what does it mean that the names were taught to Adam? The third part turns from the name to the heart: Where is meaning perceived, which door does the name Wadud open, what does dhikr (remembrance) bring to mind? The fourth part reaches beyond the names: the Greatest Name (al-Ism al-A'zam), the Muhammadan Reality (al-Haqiqa al-Muhammadiyya), and finally namelessness.

The path can be drawn like this: from name to attribute, from attribute to manifestation, from manifestation to the human being, from the human being to the heart, from the heart to the truth. This is not a ladder. It is more like passing through a ring. We will return to where we began, but not with the same eye.

The aim of this book: not to memorize the name, but to reflect on the meaning

Most of us have tried to memorize the ninety-nine names from a sheet of paper, from a framed plaque. The day we can read them all in one breath, we think we have accomplished something great. Yet what we know that day is the sound of the names.

Then one day, in a hospital corridor, at midnight, a person says "Ya Shafi" (O Healer) and realizes he is saying that name for the first time. The letters are the same. The one saying them is not the same. That night the name ceases to be a sound and becomes a refuge.

Memorizing is not bad. Memorizing is knowing where the door is. But one who knows where the door is has not thereby passed through it. This book does not stand against memorizing; it wants to stand beside it. It wants to look once more at each of the names we know, as if seeing it for the first time.

At the end of each chapter you will find a few questions. These are not exam questions. Nor are they questions whose answers I hold. They were written to keep you company when you close the chapter and are left alone with your own perception. The answer to some will not be a sentence; it will be a lifetime.

I memorized the ninety-nine names

The memorizing ended

The names did not

One night I said a name

I heard it for the first time

At the end of this whole journey a sentence awaits me, and perhaps you too: While trying to understand existence through names, a person also comes face to face with the meaning of his own existence. Looking at a name, we are in fact looking at ourselves in the mirror of that name. The mirror shows us a face. To ask whose face it is, is not the work of this book; it is the reader's.

We do not know who named the plane tree. But today this answer could be given to that child's question: No one told the tree it was a plane tree. The tree already was that. The name was so that we could look at it.

mim

Notes

1. "To deviate" renders, in the Diyanet translation, the verb derived from the Arabic root of ilhad (yulhiduna). The word means to swerve from the middle to one side, and shares its root with the side niche of a grave (lahd). The commentators explained this deviation as giving Allah names unbefitting Him, giving His names to other beings, or distorting the meaning of the names.

PART ONE