lovely wild hair

Your memory, sweet, is the source of my joy.

Your fire, oh moon, is a storehouse of warmth.

Whenever happiness bolts from my mind

You snare it back, tame, with your lovely wild hair.

#1573: From Rumi's Kolliyaat-e Shams-e Tabrizi

After today, only three quatrains remain of this series. Time is running out fast for this blog. A vision is shaping up for where I'll go from here but this will be clear only at the end.

Two days ago I was researching Quranic and hadithic backing for the Islamist view that no lands once occupied by Islam can ever be ceded. This is why Israel's very existence is unacceptable to the radical Muslim world. When Muslims talk of "the occupied territories" they are not referring merely to territory that Israel gained after the Arab-Israel wars but to the whole of Israel. It is acceptable that Jews live there but they must do so under Islamic sovereignty and under Islamic law. They can live as dhimmis but not as modern citizens running a secular state.

My researches have been advanced somewhat by obtaining a link to a TV video recording with a partial transcript. Sheik Muhammad Ali, deputy head of the Palestinian Clerics Association, had this to say on Al-Manar TV on August 19, 2005:

Any land, any piece of land, over which flies the banner of "There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is His Messenger," and which at a certain point belonged to the Muslims - as far as we are concerned, plundering and occupying such land is forbidden, and it is the duty of all Muslims to do what they can to liberate this land, wherever it may be. True, many precious Muslim lands are under occupation today. They have been forgotten, and Andalusia is one example. Nevertheless, it is the duty of the Muslims to liberate them. But since we are discussing Palestine, Gaza, and so on, let us focus on this precious piece of Muslim land, especially since Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa Mosque belong to all Muslims, and have become a part of the Muslim faith.

[...]

According to the hadith of the Prophet Muhammad, not only when an entire homeland is occupied, but when "even an inch of Muslim land is occupied, Jihad is a personal duty, a religious obligation incumbent upon everyone. A wife must go, even without her husband's permission, and a slave must go - if there are slaves, without his master's permission." They must liberate this land - and this is when only an inch is occupied, let alone when it is Palestine, Jerusalem, and Al-Aqsa that are occupied.

[...]

Allah willing, we will enter (Palestine) as conquerors and liberators, not through negotiations, but through Jihad and resistance, because the hadith goes: "and the Muslims would kill the Jews" – there is killing involved.

The interviewer (or "moderator") then sums up:

This divine prophecy, which appears in the hadith and in Koranic verses, denies the legitimacy of normalization or any agreement, because it is only a matter of time, and the Muslims will eventually liberate Jerusalem and regain Palestine.

As far as I could make out from the clip provided the Sheik did not refer to the Quran and no specific Quranic passage was mentioned. I did use "inch" (and later also "Muslim and land") as a keyword to search the MSA-USC Hadith Database but I found no passage resembling the one in the interview about "even an inch of Muslim land" being occupied. So I still have no precise hadith reference, only the Sheik's vague report. Still, this is a start.

Sudan refugee girl @ smh.com.au

This Sudanese girl-child is so beautiful I couldn't help but "capture" her for this blog. She could easily be the face of the goddess that Rumi often addresses as he does today. Her hair, however, is not wild. It is tightly coifed and a little loosely covered (which could get her into big trouble in Teheran).

To me, Rumi is saying that happiness can always be rediscovered if we remain open to wild impulses and ideas coming from outside orthodoxy. This is obvious when we view and criticize others' orthodoxy. It is much harder when we allow ourselves to be contrained by our own often unarticulated and therefore unconscious orthodoxies, our own prejudices and biases. Shams seems to have provided Rumi with this surprise element in his life. Jungians, I think, hope that dreams can help but if the dream is then analyzed in orthodox ways, it loses its wildness and power to catch hold of happiness, tame it, and bring it back to stay permanently in the heart.

One must simply love the wild and the beautiful. There is no formula for happiness more precise than that.