Islamic Mystical Readings of Cheikh Hamidou Kane's Ambiguous Adventure

This text analyses the aspect of Islamic mysticism in “Ambiguous Adventure”, a novel by Senegalese author Cheikh Hamidou Kane.

Get PDF [2] Get EPUB [3] Get MOBI [4]

Islamic Mystical Readings of Cheikh Hamidou Kane's Ambiguous Adventure

Rebecca Masterson
E-mail: kaidara@hotmail.com [5]

School of Oriental and African Studies
Published online 8 August 2008
Journal of Islamic Studies 20:1 (2009) pp. 21-45
doi:10.1093/jis/etn031

*****

Cheikh Hamidou Kane was born in 1928 into a noble, scholarly family from the Futa region of Senegal, towards the north of the country. This was a time in West African history when the French administration exercised a policy of removing the eldest sons from influential families, compelling them to attend what was commonly called the 'White School', after which they would go on to become administrators in the colonial system, instead of leaders in their community.

The Tijani tariqa1was one of the most widespread in Senegal and it is likely that Cheikh Hamidou Kane would have imbibed its mystical teachings, although he never specifically mentions any particular texts which he read as child, apart from the Qur'an2. Cheikh Hamidou Kane's father was educated in the Islamic sciences, and was familiar with the theological and philosophical thought of both the Islamic and European traditions. Cheikh Hamidou Kane later left Senegal to study philosophy at the Sorbonne and the protagonist in Ambiguous Adventure, Samba Diallo, wrestles with philosophical questions throughout the narrative.

Ambiguous Adventure has often been seen as a philosophical novel that deals with the social and intellectual dilemmas of African Muslim society in its having to submit to the French secular cultural norms imported with French rule; but the story is actually about something much more fundamental. The discipline of tasawwuf, which in northern Senegal was transmitted by the Tijanis, enables the student to develop an awareness of the inner self, which is connected to an unseen transcendent reality that lies beyond the visible, material realm-that reality being the Truth3.

According to the teachings of tasawwuf, such awareness is the most precious knowledge that a person can have, as it allows him to realize the true meaning of his existence and distinguish what is real from what is false. As this article aims to demonstrate, Ambiguous Adventure is not, therefore, merely about the social, cultural and philosophical adjustments that African Muslim society was forced to make under French rule, but about the tragic loss of this precious knowledge, which occurred with the imposition of the French educational system, and the devastating effect that that has upon Samba Diallo.

Ambiguous Adventure was written by Cheikh Hamidou Kane in the early 1950s, but was not published until 1961. Literary production in France and West Africa of the 1940s and 50s was dominated by the Negritude movement, when the works of most francophone West African writers incorporated elements of both Marxism and Surrealism. Ambguous Adventure went against the tide of this literary movement, focusing upon. the human being's relationship with immaterial reality and, by extension, the transcendent, divine Reality.

On the surface, Ambiguous Adventure is about a young African Muslim boy from Senegal, who is forcibly sent to a French school, goes on to study philosophy in Paris and becomes severed from his cultural and spiritual roots, while remaining an objectivized, unassimilated being in French culture. On another level, it is about the internal journey of a soul whose attachment to the immaterial reality from which it has emerged, is slowly and subtly eroded by means of logical argument, leaving it stranded on the surface of material reality, trapped in a statically objective frame of mind, unable to reconnect with what lies beyond: 'My thought always returns upon myself, reflected by appearance.'4 He is recalled to Africa by his father, where he remains unable to reconnect to transcendent reality and in the end is assassinated, whereupon he is liberated from his body, and enters a timeless realm of wisdom.

In her monograph, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, “L'Aventure ambigue”, J. P. Little, lecturer m French at St Patrick's College, Dublin, concludes that 'Samba Diallo's 'aventure occidentale' seems to be a mirror-image of the ‘ture initiation quest’5, similar to those found in the Ishraqi school of Ibn Tufayl's Hayy ibn Yaqzan 6 and Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi's A Tale of Occidental Exile7, but while a tale of initiation traces the protagonist's attainment of ideal attributes, Ambiguous Adventure traces the effects upon the protagonist when that attainment is arrested; indeed, Samba Diallo finds himself in a landscape that does not support or even recognize the reality or necessity of an internal journey.

By examining Ambiguous Adventure in light of these tales from the Ishraqi school, it will also be demonstrated that Samba Diallo's journey is actually a tragic inversion of the classical model featured in tales of initiation8. He moves from an environment in which he is able to experience a knowledge that can only be expressed through imagery, to one in which he is only able to discuss a knowledge that can only be expressed through words. Little calls this the 'rootless intellectualism' of the materialist West.9

Samba Diallo's Experience Of Connecting To Immaterial Realities

Ambiguous Adventure is divided into two parts. Part One is devoted to Samba Diallo's childhood, from just before he is forced to attend the French 'White School' to just immediately after, where he befriends a local administrator's son, Jean. Before going to the 'White School', he lives under the tutelage of a teacher, Thiemo, who is passionate in his commitment to teaching 'the Word', the Holy Text. In this half of the story, Kane expresses in powerful imagery how Samba Diallo is connected to, and experiences, a profound knowledge of an immaterial reality that lies beyond mere appearances10.

In an early scene, Kane conveys how Samba Diallo, as an immaterial entity, relates to his body as a material entity. Being a Pular (Fulani) aristocrat, Samba Diallo becomes the subject of the envy of a fellow pupil, named Demba. On one occasion, Demba mocks him with a lewd, earthy irreverence and trips him up so that he falls flat on the ground. Samba Diallo's retaliatory attack on Demba is almost an act of meditative combat, in which he transcends any actual physical involvement: the mutiny of his body was calmed somewhat with every blow, as every blow restored a little clarity to his benumbed intelligence. Beneath him, the target continued to struggle and pant and was perhaps also striking, but he felt nothing, other than the mastery which his body was progressively imposing upon the target, the peace which the blows he was striking were bringing back to his body, the clarity which they were restoring to his mind11.

The mastery that Samba Diallo's body imposes upon Demba's is conveyed as a mastery of mind over matter: Samba Diallo's immaterial mastery over his own body. His consciousness of the effect of the fight upon his own, internal peace of mind demonstrates that, internally, he is detached from material reality, the violence of the fight merely serving the tranquillity of his inner state.

Later, when Samba Diallo is sent to the French school and befriends Jean, Kane depicts a scene in which Jean is able to witness Samba Diallo's state of being; the way in which he relates to creation, and thus to a transcendent reality. In this scene, while Samba Diallo and Jean are conversing, the sky changes, indicating not only the continual passing of time, but also acting as a reminder of a more sublime existence lying beyond the realm of creation: 'The golden rays had thinned out a little, and the purple had turned to pink. Along their lower edges the clouds had become a frozen blue.'12Just before night comes, time stands still.

As Jean converses with Samba Diallo, he witnesses the dissolution of his friend's material identity. Some scholars have observed that Samba Diallo lives in harmony with nature, but his relationship with it goes far beyond that; he actually merges with it:

The sun was setting in an immense sweep of sky. Its rays, which are golden at this time of the day, had been dyed purple in their passage through the clouds that were setting the west afire. Struck diagonally by the light, the red sand was like seething gold.

Samba Diallo's basalt countenance had purple reflections. Basalt? It was a face of basalt because, also, it was as if turned to stone. No muscle in it, now, was moving. In his eyes the sky showed red. Since he lay down on the ground had Samba Diallo become riveted to it? Had he ceased to live? Jean was frightened13.

A more literal translation seems to convey the power of this imagery still further: 'The sky, in his eyes, was red. Since he had lain down, had Samba Diallo become riveted to the earth?'

In some way, Samba Diallo becomes transparent. He loses the dearly defined parameters of his external identity. He merges into creation as a whole. In one sense, this image says that Samba Diallo is the land and the land is Samba Diallo. In another, Samba Diallo is able to surrender his 'self' utterly. 14 'Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani says, 'the one who reaches the limits of this path has neither form nor shape nor colour.'15 When there is no strong attachment to a material, individual identity, it becomes easier to blend with, or to take on the attributes of that which is not human, but which is nevertheless an existing entity, be it nature or pure spirit (the disembodied essence of existence).

Samba Diallo then gets up to pray, and when he prays his words come from a part of him which lies beyond the Samba Diallo that Jean knows: 'it seemed to him that his voice was no longer his.' Not only that, but a connection to the transcendent reality lying beyond creation is established through Samba Diallo's stillness: 'Samba Diallo remained motionless.' The Samba Diallo that Jean knows does not exist: 'Nothing in him was alive except this voice' and Jean witnesses the effect of Samba Diallo's experience of the presence of that transcendent reality: 'Then his long white caftan [...] was swept through by a kind of shiver.'16

Jean, too, is taken out of himself by something conveyed through the dying of the day: 'He only regained consciousness of his surroundings when he heard the sound of footsteps not far away.'17 Samba Diallo himself, reflecting on this moment, acknowledges that 'he had felt himself swept by a sudden exaltation [...] such as he had formerly felt when he was near the teacher.'18 The power of a hidden force surges through him; an intense force of being that goes beyond the mundane mode of being that others later try to persuade him to adopt. This force of being comes from his connection to a more profoundly authentic mode of existence. It cuts through material reality.

In Chapter 9 of Ambiguous Adventure, there are hints that Samba Diallo experiences some kind of ‘fana', and also kashf.19 He has been reflecting upon an artificial dichotomy which has caused him great anxiety: is his culture dying because his people cling to God, and is European culture surviving because its people 'work', i.e. put material well-being before everything else?20 He reaches a resolution: 'to proceed from God, will to will, is to recognize His Law, which is a law of justice and harmony among men.

Work is not, therefore, a necessary source of conflict between them ...' Next to this comes a description of Samba Diallo's spiritual experience: 'The darkness had completely fallen by this time. The knight in the dalmatic was still crouched motionless, facing the east. Stretched out on his back beside him, Samba Diallo opened wide unseeing eyes upon the star-studded firmament.'21 Samba Diallo's eyes are wide and unseeing. Suhrawardi writes, 'When the inner eye is opened, the outer eye shall be closed. Then, it will be able to continuously observe the secrets of the spiritual world'22.

Indeed, after another philosophical passage in which Samba Diallo realises that 'The death of God is not a necessary condition to the survival of man',23 there follows a paragraph which again describes Samba Diallo's experience of realization: 'Samba Diallo was not seeing the shining firmament, for the same peace reigned in the heavens and in his heart. Samba Diallo was not existing. There were innumerable stars, there was the earth chilled anew by the coming of night, there was the shade, and there was their simultaneous presence.' 24Here is fana'. Samba Diallo experiences annihilation. He becomes submerged, not in the physicality of the stars, the earth and the shade, but in their presence, or rather, a presence which permeates them.25

This is followed by another philosophical passage, although its nature is quite different from the previous ones, rather closer to the kind of poetic or allegorical discourses employed by masters of the spiritual path when they need to explain something which goes beyond purely speculative reasoning: 'It is at the very heart of this presence that thought is born,' he reflected, 'as on the water a succession of waves is set off around a spot where something has fallen. But there are those who do not believe …'26Then Samba Diallo experiences an insight: 'Samba Diallo suddenly saw the sky. In a flash, he realized its serene beauty.' 27

This insight could be interpreted as a kashf, in which, having seen an inner vision of the presence of God, he now awakens to an outer vision of the presence of the sky. The inner and the outer are connected. He awakens to the beauty of the sky as if he had not seen it before, and its serenity contrasts with the inner perceptional conflict with which he was grappling, but which he has now resolved. As soon as he attains a state of internal serenity, he becomes aligned with the serenity of the whole of creation and is able to perceive its presence. 28

All existents are connected: they are not separate from one another.29 Kane clearly elucidates Samba Diallo's sense of realization which comes from the presence of the existence of multiple things: the stars, the earth, the shade.

The first step away from his deep connection to his inner, immaterial self is when the Most Royal Lady, head of the Diallobe clan,30 removes him from the Hearth of the teacher for one week. She tries to bring Samba Diallo back down to the material realm and to materialist values: 'making much of him in every way, as if to correct the effects of the education of the Glowing Hearth', and for a brief moment, Samba Diallo enjoys being pampered, but then he begins to sense that something is lacking: 'he did not experience that plenitude of spirit he had felt at the hearth, which would set his heart to beating, for instance, when under the teacher's formidable eye he would pronounce the Word.'31 What is lacking is 'authenticity', 32 and if a life is not authentic, it is not real and if it is not real, it is not a life.

Just before he is sent to the French school, Samba Diallo's family gather together one night to hear him recite the Qur'an. It is through the recitation of the Qur'an that he also experiences something of a reality that lies beyond its words. He loves it for its spiritual and aesthetic qualities: 'its mystery and its somber beauty'.33 It is also 'pure and limpid',34untouched by worldly corruption, but more than this, when he utters it, its inner dimensions are revealed to him: 'He contained within himself the totality of the world, the visible and the invisible, its past and future.'35 Furthermore, 'This word which he was bringing forth in pain was the architecture of the world - it was the world itself.'36

Kane describes 'the Word' as 'incandescent'. Repeating it brings Samba Diallo 'close to unconsciousness', 37 which is not an unusual physiological effect resulting from an intensity of self-effacement into ecstasy. Samba Diallo observes the effects of the Word upon his teacher: 'he would stand erect, all tense, and seem to be lifted from the earth, as if raised by some inner force'.38

The night when Samba Diallo recites the entire Qur'an to his family has been written about in a number of critiques.39 Here, Kane manifests in physical imagery the metaphysical effects of Qur'anic recitation.

The knight gets up to listen 'and it seemed now that in listening to the Word he sustained the same levitation as that which increased the teacher's stature.'40 For Samba Diallo, his recitation is important to him as a Diallobe who is enacting the tradition of his forefathers, perhaps for the last time, yet at the heart of this tradition lies a mode of being 'which today was threatened'.41

Just as the delineations of Samba Diallo's being dissolved into the landscape, so now, his porous, mutable, inner being evaporates: 'In the humming sounds of this voice there was being dissolved, bit by bit, a being who a few moments ago had still been Samba Diallo.'42 The recitation of the Word acts to open up hidden realities: 'rising from profundities which he did not suspect' and the voices of those who have recited before him emerge from his mouth.

He does not construct these 'profundities' with his imagination. He experiences an auditory vision. The immaterial owners of these voices submerge Samba Diallo's own being 'substituting themselves for him'.43This does not really seem to be a moment of fana'. Rather, his being, his identity as a person, is transformed into something so transparent that it melts into the traces of other beings whose presences resonate with love.

Kane effectively depicts Samba Diallo's internal experiences of either realizing or 'seeing' immaterial realities. The difficulty for Samba Diallo comes when, internally, his connection to these realities, his ability to 'see', experience and know them, is cut off. Guy Ossito Midiohouan, taking Samba Diallo's conflict to be purely intellectual,44 rather than experiential, puts this conflict down to the fact that Samba Diallo finds himself 'without a point of anchorage' because he is busy pursuing 'an ideal': 'incapable of confronting a reality to which he objects, he effects a flight into religious mysticism' and Samba Diallo's 'suicide' (as it has often been interpreted) is nothing but the expression of 'his power lessness before the reality' (son impuissance devant la realite). 45

It is true that Samba Diallo finds himself without a point of anchorage, but not because he is pursuing an ideal, i.e., something that exists purely in the imagination. At the root of Midiohouan's interpretation lies an unquestioned assumption of what constitutes reality. The entire point of Ambiguous Adventure is that material reality is not the reality. Of course, Samba Diallo cannot accept the version of reality with which he is presented: this is because he knows that, ultimately, it is not real. Therefore, he does not flee from unreality into religious mysticism, but from unreality into actual reality.46

In Part Two, rather than depicting Samba Diallo experiencing this realization through the medium of nature, Kane has him explain it to a young French Marxist, Lucienne: 'As for me, I have not yet cut the umbilical cord which makes me one with [Nature].'47

Similar imagery can be found in Jalal al-Din Rumi' s Mathnavi. Claude Kappler notes:

The breath is a wire which joins the body to the soul, which joins Man to the divine and to the cosmos. The creature holds on to the universe by a sort of umbilical cord which can be a golden chain (it is a golden chain which, according to Homer, holds the worlds together - an image which is constantly revived and diversely interpreted by the Greeks, in a wide variety of texts: Orphic, Platonic etc.), a golden chain which can be a wire of light, the wire of his own breath or that of his prayer, as it appears in the Pseudo-Denys. (Divine Names, 3,1)48

It is through his oneness with being that Samba Diallo becomes what he is: an entity that transcends his humanity: 'thus he was taking on the appearance of some strange and enormous bird of prey, with wings spread. He seemed suddenly to be filled with profound exaltation.'49 His words, uttered while in this Hal (spiritual state), are not simply part of an intellectual argument, but come from an actual and dynamic way of being. Again, he is no longer an individual person, but an expression of a higher entity: 'I am only that end of being where thought comes to flower.'50

In other words, he is only the manifestation of the thought that exists before creation comes into being Part Two of the novel shows Samba Diallo becoming detached from his previous Hal. He begins to reflect, in a more detached manner, on what is rapidly becoming a past experience: 'I have been the sovereign who, one step away from the master, could cross the threshold of all unity, penetrate to the intimate heart of being, invade it and make one with it, without any one of us overstepping the other.'51

On closer inspection, this imagery seems akin to Ibn 'Arabi's concept of the oneness of being (wahdat al-wujud). It is in experiencing this unity that Samba Diallo perceives the unity of the transcendent reality which lies hidden behind the veils of being.52 He refers, also, to what was a state of self mastery: 'I have been the sovereign' and to his closeness to immaterial reality. It was at this 'intimate heart' that he belonged, and his experience was not a cause for any social disturbance in his clan. The secular realm of the Diallobe allowed for it.

Again, speaking in past tense, Samba Diallo reflects: 'I felt Thee to be the deep sea from which spreads out my thought and, at the same time, everything. Through Thee, I was the same wave as the whole.'53 Samba Diallo's experience is depicted in the story when he becomes one with the landscape at sunset and also when his internal being is substituted with those of his ancestors on the night that he reads the Qur'an. He no longer experiences this unity with existence. It is only after he dies that he enters the reality of what he used to feel.

In Chapter 3 of Part Two, Kane effectively conveys the horrific decay of Samba Diallo's luminous connection to a transcendent reality:

A firm-spun thread of clear thought was filtering with some difficulty through the heavy down of his sensations, as a current of cool water courses through the inert mass of a tepid sea. Samba Diallo was forcing himself to concentrate what remained of his attention on the point where that slight gleam of thought came through.54

The mention of the 'heavy down of sensations' seems to be a refutation of a mode of existence in which reality is perceived exclusively through physical phenomena. Samba Diallo struggles to maintain what was once a searing clarity of perception which went beyond the 'inert mass' of the material realm.

He observes that the streets of Paris are 'bare': 'No, they are not empty. One meets objects of flesh in them, as well as objects of metal. Apart from that, they are empty.'55 This emptiness results from a complete lack of active dhikr. Samba Diallo's observation is fascinating. Detached from himself internally, he sees a world reduced exclusively to materiality, a materiality that is purely phenomenological, without any meaning:

'One also encounters events. Their succession congests time, as the objects congest the street.'56 In a frantic, industrialized environment, there are so many things happening at once that there is no time to think, or to live: 'One does not perceive the background of time, and its slow current.' Perception becomes myopic. The awareness of the coming of the end of time is obscured by a 'mechanical jumble'. The presence of the absolute transcendent reality is buried by absolute materiality: 'There is nothing, nothing but me, nothing but my body, I mean to say.'57

In Sartre's phenomenological novel, Nausea, Antoine Roquentin makes a similar observation: 'Never have I felt as strongly as today that I was devoid of secret dimensions, limited to my body, to airy thoughts which float up from it like bubbles. I build my memories with my present. I am rejected, abandoned in the present. I try in vain to rejoin the past.'58

Later, Samba Diallo reiterates his detachment in conversation with Lucienne. Having described a beautiful scene of nature, he says to her: 'that scene, it is a sham! Behind it there is something a thousand times more beautiful, a thousand times more true! But I can no longer find that world's pathway.'59 Beyond the material reality of nature there exists another reality that is even more real and more authentic, but Samba Diallo no longer lives in a state of being which enables him to perceive it and experience it. While his Islamic way of life was the pathway to that perception, his current life in Paris provides him no such means. Thus, he is exiled on the outer surface of material reality.

As mentioned above, Samba Diallo's exile is not cultural or geographical. As he himself says to Marc, a Parisian of African descent: 'I don't think that it is the material environment of my country that I miss.' 'It might be said that I see less fully here than in the country of the Diallobe. I no longer feel anything directly.' 60Samba Diallo is talking about an obscurity of perception. He also appears to refer to a loss of 'ilm huduri’- direct intuitional knowledge.

There is a hadith that recommends a Muslim to remember death often,61 as the Most Royal Lady acknowledges earlier on: 'the thought of death keeps the believer on guard.'62Samba Diallo refers again to an authentic quality of life, acquired, in the country of the Diallobe, from an intimate relationship with death. In Paris, he loses his sense of the reality of death ('death has become a stranger to me'), and with it, the reality of life: 'I have lost a privileged mode of acquaintance.' With this mode of acquaintance came a mode of existence, and from that, a mode of perception of reality: 'everything took me into the very essence of itself, as if nothing could exist except through me.'63 No such thing as observing a passive world objectively. Samba Diallo reflects that, before he came to Europe, 'The world was not silent and neuter. It was alive. It was aggressive', but 'Here, now, the world is silent'.64In words that echo al-Jilani, Samba Diallo says: 'No scholar ever had such knowledge of anything as I had, then, of being.'65Catastrophically, he has lost the most fundamental and valuable knowledge: not of philosophy, or politics, or literature, but of being. His internal paralysis does not come from being an African in a European environment, or a rigid traditionalist unable to adapt to modernity, but from the death of a mode of being. Samba Diallo is already dead: 'there is no longer any resonance from myself. I am like a broken balafong. '66

Samba Diallo used to have complete self-mastery and mastery over the way that he related to reality. It was this which made him fully conscious, or perhaps it was his consciousness which lent to him his self-mastery. Now he is faced with a situation that is almost irrelevant to the most fundamental task of gaining knowledge of being: that of being perceived as an object by the colonizing powers, and he says: 'Ifwe do not awake the West to the difference which separates us from the object, we shall be worth no more than it is, and we shall never master it.'67

Of his French teachers he says: 'Progressively, they brought me out from the heart of things, and accustomed me to live at a distance from the world.68 Seeing a vision of the face of his teacher in a crowded train he says in his mind: 'Master, what is left for me?' Internally he is dead. There is nothing left in front of him but a life of artifice, of living 'on the solid shell of appearance.' 69

His assassination occurs almost as a response to his contemplation of the state of his connection to the transcendent entity: 'To give Him the choice, between His return within your heart and your death, in the name of His glory.'70 Before the fool shoots him, he is already contemplating becoming a shahid (a martyr), hoping that this might be a way of regaining proximity to the transcendent entity, but this is not the same as desiring suicide.

In his article on Ambiguous Adventure in Nouvelles du Sud, Kenneth Harrow says of Kane that, 'the Sufi author concludes on the same note, with an image of f ana as the limit of the power of expression of the world.' 71 However, I argue that Samba Diallo's death is not fana'. It is an instant and actual transference from exile on the surface of material reality, to the home of immaterial reality.

He passes from a state of pure speculation to a state of pure experience. This chapter confounds all previous intellectual discourse, especially that of Lucienne. Samba Diallo dies and finds himself in the immaterial realm of the shadow, where he has been liberated from the prison of time: 'At the heart of the moment, behold man as immortal, for the moment is infinite, when it is. The purity of the moment is made from the absence of time.'72 Compare with the Qur'an:

'[And it is said:] That is that which ye were promised. [It is for every penitent and heedful one, who feareth the Beneficent in secret and cometh with a [devoted] heart. Enter it in peace. This is the day of immortality.' (50:32-34). 73

In this realm, the apparent absolute nature of external reality loses substance. The voice which addresses Samba Diallo says: 'See how appearance cracks and yields.' 74 Material reality, which seemed so dominant, can already be seen for what it really is: 'Light and sound, form and light, all that is opposed and aggressive, blinding suns of exile, you are all forgotten dreams.'75The voice informs Samba Diallo that he is 'reborn into being'. He is no longer mentally trapped: 'Feel how thought no longer returns to you like a wounded bird, but is unfurled infinitely.' Thought, being immaterial, is liberated in the immaterial realm. Samba Diallo responds: 'Wisdom, I sense your approach! Singular light of the depths, you are not circumventing, you are penetrating.' 76In other words, wisdom is no longer merely discursive; with concentrated power it permeates existence.77 Samba Diallo is no longer stranded on the surface of external reality: 'Announcer of the end of exile, I salute you.'78

He is not in a state of unconsciousness or intoxication and, while he is no longer confined by physical limits, he nevertheless observes an 'other', the glittering sea of wisdom: 'I fix my eyes upon you, and you harden into Being.' 79He says of himself, 'I am without limit' and: 'I fix my eyes upon you, and you glitter, without limit. I wish for you, through all eternity.'80

It is said of the shahid, that he witnesses God, or the presence of God before going to Paradise. Furthermore, Samba Diallo expresses longing: 'I wish for you', which is known in taswwuf as shawq, or 'longing', 'yearning'. Yearning for the Beloved is what draws the murid81 closer to the Beloved. Schimmel says that, according to Iqbal, '[l]onging is the highest state the soul can reach, for it results in creativity, whereas union brings about silence and annihilation.' 82The greater the longing, the more the thirst is quenched. Thus, Samba Diallo's relationship with the transcendent reality is one of eternal longing, and 'the great reconciliation' 83 happens in a realm of 'darkness', or 'shadow': 'You know that I am the darkness.'84 This is an eternal ocean which was still perceived by him and his father in the material world, a barzakh where the soul resides before beginning its journey to Paradise.85

It is not, as some critics have said, death which resolves Samba Diallo's internal conflict.86 It is not that, in death, the ambiguity of perceptions of reality within the material realm disappears;87 rather, as Thierno says, it is the immaterial realm which is 'the place where there is no ambiguity'. 88 In other words, the immaterial realm is certain and real. It cannot be argued away. It does not resolve, but rather renders unreal, in a dramatic form, the speculative dialogues of Part Two of the story.

Samba Diallo's 'Journey To The West

That Samba Diallo is severed from his connection to an internal reality is in some ways acknowledged by scholars, but this is usually done in a purely intellectual fashion and is still often linked to the cumbersome notion of his 'Africanness'.89 The lightness with which this severance is mentioned indicates that, as with Lucienne, Samba Diallo's internal catastrophe is not completely comprehended; certainly, it is not really felt. Ironically, just as Samba Diallo's internal death is not completely acknowledged by the characters in the story-apart from his father-so critics of francophone literature who write about this issue do not really demonstrate a full acknowledgement of its horror.

Islam is called the din al-fitra, which could be translated as 'the primordial way of life' and Amadou Makhtar Samb, a Tijani, writes that 'In our time, the restoration of the possibilities of the primordial state is the most important of the goals that initiation has in mind.'90 Thus, Islam returns us to our original and true state of being. The process of initiation aids this return. When Samba Diallo is taken out of the process, he is also removed from any access to his true state of being, a state which is intimately connected to an immaterial reality. Little mentions one particular element that Ambiguous Adventure has in common with tales such as Hayy ibn Yazqaan and A Tale of Occidental.

Exile: that of the symbolism of 'the West' 91. This can be seen in the way that 'the West' is symbolized in the nomadic Fulbe tradition:

The people of the Futa Toro have always migrated, mainly for economic reasons. There is in fact a Pular saying, So mi mayani, mi yahate hirnangue, 'If I don't die, I will go to the West', since the West is inevitably the direction in which all the big cities lie in relation to the Futa [...] The West is therefore associated with economic prosperity and individual adventure, but cultural exile as far as the Hal-pulaar'en are concerned. 92

This might parallel the symbolism of 'the West' from elsewhere in the Islamic mystical tradition. Little writes that '[t]he association of exile with the West, and with the East as spiritual home, is a constant in the mystical and Sufi tradition.'93Since she refers only to Henry Corbin and Martin Lings for an understanding of Sufism, perhaps it is easy to make such an assumption. However, this concept of 'the West' actually belongs to a specific strain of tasawuf which is linked to the Ishraqi tradition, developed by Ibn Sina and Suhrawardi.94

Ibn Sina' s Hayy ibn Yaqzan describes 'the Occident' as being 'on the left side of the universe' ,95 the Orient therefore being on the right. Each of these realms contains many kingdoms and in fact lies 'beyond' both directions.96 Suhrawardi does give specific place names to these locations, Yemen symbolizing the realm in the East and Kairouan symbolizing the realm in the West.97 Kairouan, in Suhrawardi' s case, represents 'the bonds of matter' in which the soul is imprisoned and which it longs to transcend.98Samba Diallo's decaying connection to immaterial reality as he becomes overwhelmed by the phenomena of mterial reality in Paris can be seen as a depiction of the soul falling into the prison of matter99. Paris is a hideous inversion of the mundus imaginalis. Rather than gaining beneficial knowledge, going on a journey into himself, he experiences the reverse: he journeys away from himself100. Ambiguous Adventure is not a 'mirror image' of the tale of knowledge, he cannot regain it, except in death.

To embark on a mystical journey is by no means free of dangers. In his treatise Journey to the Lord of Power, Ibn 'Arabi details the spiritual stages through which the aspirant passes when he engages in khalwa, a method of retreat practiced by some turuq, including Tijanis.101As Ra hia Terri Harris says in her introduction to his treatise: 'Khalwa is by no means a technique for everyone [...] [Ibn 'Arabi] further points out that to pursue the experiences of khalwa without being thoroughly accomplished in the duties and practices of Islam is to invite spiritual destruction.' 102 Samb warns: 'It is dangerous to practice it without the guidance of a master.'103 In fact, to practice any methods of initiation without being part of a tariqa and under the guidance of a master 'can cause psychic disorders'.104

Samba Diallo's stay at the Glowing Hearth, while not exactly a khalwa, nevertheless is a form of retreat from the world and his education is meant to develop in stages, which likewise are not without their dangers: 'So closely would he live with God, this child, and the man he would become, that he could aspire - the teacher was convinced of this - to the most exalted levels of human grandeur. Yet, conversely, the least eclipse - but God forbid!' 105 It can be seen from this, then, that the slightest disturbance or disruption on the path of the initiate can be enough to bring about internal sickness and destruction, yet even the Most Royal Lady fails to recognize this.

The first ominous sign that Samba Diallo is about to be forced 'in the wrong direction,106 is his reaction to being separated from the teacher. His joy at being told that he is to return 107 to see his parents dramatically switches to grief when the chief of the Diallobe says: 'But before you leave, you are going to say goodbye to the teacher [...] At this word, Samba Diallo had felt his heart rising in his throat and choking him.'108 This is the beginning of his severance from the path to immaterial reality, to what is really real, and to what he himself really is. When he goes to bid farewell to his teacher he is 'overwhelmed' and '[t]ears choked him anew'.109Seeing the sadness in his father's face, he 'had melted into tears, and a thousand times regretted his departure from the Glowing Hearth'.110Here, Samba Diallo seems to be gripped by an instinctive sense of foreboding. There is also an underlying mood of terror, of panic.

Samba Diallo's initiation is aborted. Later in Paris he says: 'I had interrupted my studies with the teacher of the Diallobe at the very moment when he was about to initiate me at last into the rational understanding of what up to then I had done no more than recite - with wonder, to be sure.'111Seen from the Neoplatonic perspective which had Influenced Suhrawardi,112 the teacher has followed the correct philosophical path in his education of Samba Diallo. The soul of the child is to 'discover its true vocation as an immaterial substance'.

Through the pursuit of wisdom, and the practice of asceticism and devotion, 'the cleansing of the Soul from the material accretions that may attach to it during its confinement in the body will be achieved', but '[s]o long as it is weighed down by the body' it will be unable 'to ascend' in order to 'contemplate directly' immaterial realities.113The teacher exhibits a similarly Neoplatonic Islam: 'Substance, weight ...When his thought abutted on these words, the teacher shuddered.

Weight! Everywhere he encountered weight. When he wanted to pray, weight opposed him, the heavy load of his daily cares over the upward sweep of his thought toward God.'114 For his murids, he fears 'those essential properties of weight that were desperately eager to hold them to the earth, to keep them far from the truth'.115When Samba Diallo goes to the West, the properties of weight, of matter, gradually prevent him from contemplat ing directly any immaterial reality. 116

Little says, optimistically, that, in Paris, 'a learning process takes place' for Samba Diallo.117 Yet what he learns is that he has lost forever the means to perceive and experience immaterial reality. In some ways he does not learn, but 'unlearns'. He does not gain knowledge, but loses it. He does not develop, but remains stunted. He is not initiated into higher levels of refined perception, but instead 'de-initiated' into the lower reality of the material realm. Just as the Word brought him closer to perceiving a transcendent reality, so the words of existentialist philosophy and dialectical materialism push him away from it.

If one cannot journey towards the infinite, then there is nowhere else to go. Earlier, the Most Royal Lady had inferred that he was 'paralysed by the sense of what is sacred';118yet in the West he becomes paralysed by the senselessness of the profane.

In the epic of Sunjata, Sunjata learns the art of survival while in exile, and returns to take what is rightfully his. In A Tale of Occidental Exile, the narrator and his brother Aim are called back from the Western lands in a letter by their father and journey to the mundus imaginalis, where they are reassured that, while they must return to exile, they will be able to visit the immaterial realm easily and that, one day, they will escape the Western lands completely.

Samba Diallo's exile endows him only with discursive forms of knowledge, none of which even acknowledge an immaterial reality towards which it is possible to ascend. This discursive knowledge remains confined to the material realm, with no ultimate destination. There is nobody to provide Samba Diallo with the road back to 'the East'. By the time his father recalls him it is too late. He does not return triumphant to become the leader of his people. He is found 'reclining on a rattan couch',119in a symbolic state of passivity.

Samba Diallo's return as a mutilated, disempowered soul contrasts dramatically with the protagonists of the narratives mentioned above, where, in spite of their exile, they return to a felicitous state, either through having maintained contact with a divine reality, or else through having been rescued and restored to that connection.

The conclusion of Ambiguous Adventure demonstrates that Samba Diallo's prayer is answered. He gives himself a choice: 'between His return within your heart and your death, in the name of His glory'.120 His death has been frequently called a 'failure' by various scholars, yet it is not completely clear in which way it is such, except that he does not become a fully integrated, Afro-Frenchman. 121 It is not his failure that the culture to which he must assimilate is, in effect, a culture with a dead reality, a facade with nothing beyond it, the same intolerably constricted world that Heidegger chooses to posit as the only existent, but which is ultimately meaningless.

Many of Cheikh Hamidou Kane's contemporaries advocated literature that provided practical social and economic solutions for a post Independence society, based upon Marxist concepts of society, religion, and ultimately, reality. Kane was actually criticized for not providing such 'solutions', but what seems to have been missed, in this argument, is tha t a significant part of Ambiguous Adventure is spent in refuting the Marxist perception of reality and in positing another perception, which is even more fundamental.122

If the only option given to Samba Diallo is to live in a realm devoid of meaning, then perhaps it is better to find meaning in death; as his father says: 'man's slavery amid a forest of solutions - is that worth anything more?' 123

1. Often translated as 'brotherhood', tariqa literally means 'way', or 'path'. The founder of the Tijani tariqa was Ahmad Tijani (d. 1815), who established it in the late eighteenth century. The tariqa spread to sub-Saharan Africa in the mid-nineteenth century.

2. J. P. Little, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, L'Aventure ambigue (London: Grant & Cutler Ltd., 2000; hereafter abbreviated to CHK, L'Aventure ambigue), 17. He was mainly influenced by the 'ambiance' created in the family by his paternal grandfather, Cheikh Hamidou, the qadi of Matam, and 'a noted Sufi mystic'. Matam was an important political centre on the border of Mauritania.

3. In other words, God, also known in the Islamic tradition as 'the Reality' (al-Haqq).

4. Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Ambiguous Adventure, transl. Katherine Woods (NH: Heinemann African Writers Series, 1972), 175. Hereafter cited as Ambiguous Adventure.

5. Little, CHK, L'Aventure ambigue, 41.

6. Abu Bakr ibn Tufayl (d. 1185). See Ibn Tufayl, Hayy ibn Yaqzan, transl. Lenn Evan Goodman (New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1972).

7. Shihab al-Din Yahya ibn Habash Suhrawardi (d. 1191) was born in northwestern Iran and was of East African descent. He tried to harmonize the Neoplatonic philosophy of scholars such as Ibn Sina and Ibn Tufayl. See The Mystical & Visionary Treatises of Suhrawardi, transl. W. M. Thackston, Jr. (London: The Octagon Press, 1982).

8. ‘Kane' is another name for 'Diallo'. At least some Diallos were Tijani. http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Housing/8584/HAJ.html; [6] accessed June 2005.

9. Little, CHK, L'Aventure ambigue, 83. Heidegger writes that 'the rootedness of the sciences in their essential ground has atrophied': David Farrell Krell (ed.), Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings (London: Routledge, 1993), 94.

10. In Le Troupeau des Songes by Diawne Diamanka, Alain le Pichon writes, 'Samba est le nom que les Peul donnent au fils cadet, doue par son rang de naissance de pouvoirs de voyance.' [Samba is the name that the Fulbe give to a young boy, blessed by the rank of his birth, with powers of clairvoyance.] Diawne Diamanka, Le Troupeau des Sanges (eds. Alain le Pichon and Souleymane Balde, Paris: Fondation de la Maison des sciences de l'homme, 1990), 3. By his name, then, Samba Diallo is already recognized as a boy who is able to see beyond material reality.

11. Ambiguous Adventure, 19-20.

12. Ambiguous Adventure, 59.

13. Ambiguous Adventure, 58.

14. It is about submitting to the Other-God, and, in taawwuf, the aspirant aims for complete surrender to God: 'Spiritual ecstasy, however, is a totally different state, a state caused by the overflow of spiritual energy. Ordinarily, exterior influences [...] may cause this spiritual elevation. This happens because at such moments the physical resistance of the being is obliterated' ('Abd al Qadir al-Jilani. The Secret of Secrets, transl. Shaykh Tosun Bayrak al-Jerrahi al Halveti, Kuala Lumpur: S. Abdul Majeed & Co., 1995, 90).

15. Ambiguous Adventure, 69. In Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the Mariner's appearance is compared, by the Wedding Guest, to 'the ribbed sea sand' (The Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 1994, 196). Just as Jean is fearful of Samba Diallo, the Wedding Guest is fearful of the Mariner. Coleridge too felt a distinct detachment from the material world (Coleridge: The Ancient Mariner and Other Poems, London: Casebook Series, MacMillan, 1973, 93 and passim).

16. Ambiguous Adventure, 60

17. Ambiguous Adventure, 60.

18. Ambiguous Adventure, 63.

19. fana means literally: to die, to disappear; extinction, annihilation; in Islamic mysticism it means 'to die to oneself', or be annihilated in Allah. Theterm kashf means 'the unveiling of spiritual realities'. It is like a flash of insight. (See 'Ali b. 'Uthman al-Jullabi al-Hujwiri, Kashf al-Mahjub, An Early Persian Treatise on Sufism, transl. Reynold A. Nicholson, Wiltshire: Gibb Memorial Trust, 2000, for more details).

20. Blair notes that this is 'a Socratic dialogue' (Dorothy S. Blair, Senegalese Literature: A Critical History, Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984) 79.

21. Ambiguous Adventure, 104.

22. Seyed G. Safavi (ed.), Transcendent Philosophy 311 (London: Institute of Islamic Studies, March 2002), 22.

23. Ambiguous Adventure, 104.

24. Ambiguous Adventure, 104.

25. In Ibn Tufayl, Hayy ibn Yazqaan (transl. Goodman, 139), Hayy 'asked himself then why he of all living beings should be singled out to possess an identity that made him very like the stars. He had seen how the elements changed into one another. Nothing on the face of the earth kept the same form.'

26. Ambiguous Adventure, 105.

27. Ambiguous Adventure. Suhrawardi, explaining 'flashes' which increase insight, says 'the more ascetic exercise is increased, the more the flashes come until one reaches the stage wherein one recalls something of other-worldly conditions in everything one sees' ('The Simurgh's Shrill Cry' in Mystical & Visionary Treatises of Suhrawardi (transl. Thackston), 91.

28. In Islamic metaphysics, this realization through the presence of an existent is called 'ilm Huduri, 'knowledge by presence'. Tabataba'i writes: 'the Exalted Essence is absolute existence not bounded by any limit, nor is it devoid of existence or any existential perfection. Hence all the details of creation, of existence and existential perfections, with their existential order, exist in it in their highest and noblest form without being separate from one another. Hence, he knows them with an undifferentiated knowledge, which at the same time discloses details ('ilman ijmaliyyan fi'ayn al-kashf al-tafsili': Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Tabataba'i, The Elements of Islamic Metaphysics, Bidayat al-Hikmah, transl. and annotated by Sayyid 'Ali Quli Qara'i (London: Islamic College for Advanced Studies Press, 2003), 140.

29. 'Individuality is a property of existence; hence our knowledge of our selves is by virtue of [the multiple things'] presence for us with their very external existence [...] This is another kind of knowledge, called 'immediate' knowledge (ilm huduri, lit., 'knowledge by presence')' (Bidayat al-Hikmah 116).

30. In the French original, the Most Royal Lady is called 'La Grande Royale'. This term designates her noble status.

31. Ambiguous Adventure, 39.

32. Ambiguous Adventure. This is not the supposed 'African authenticity' of Negritude, but an internal, human authenticity acknowledged and nurtured by the ethics and practices of an Islamic way of life.

33. Ambiguous Adventure, 4.

34. Ambiguous Adventure, 5.

35. Ambiguous Adventure. This is a direct reference to the Qur'an: “God is 'Knower of the invisible and the visible'” (64:18). The Qur'an also recounts mankind's past, going back to the time before he existed, then his early history and the future of world, its destruction and the rising of the souls into an immaterial reality, the barzakh, where: “man is told the tale of that which he hath sent before and left behind” (75:13). In mastering the Word, Samba Diallo also absorbs what it reveals.

36. Ambiguous Adventure, 5. Harrow wrongly attributes these words to the teacher: 'Camara Laye, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, and Tayeb Salih' in Kenneth W. Harrow (ed.), Faces of Islam in African Literature (NH: Heinemann Educational Books, Inc., 1991), 292. Samb, in his work on the practices of the Tijani tariqa, explains that 'La parole divine, par exemple, remplit deux functions: elle crée et elle transmit la Vérité. Le monde a été crée par la Parole OU Logos et route la Révélation vient de la Parole. La parole humaine est capable d'exprimer la Verité et de transformer l'homme. Autrement dit, la parole, dont les fins sont différentes de la parole divine, à l'instar de celle-ci, a deux functions: exposer un aspect de la verité et prier.' ['For example, the divine word fulfils two functions: it creates and it transmits the Truth. The world has been created by the Word, or Logos, and all Revelation comes from the Word. The human word is capable of expressing the Truth and of transforming the person. In other words, the human word, whose aims are different from the divine word, in imitation of this, has two functions: to expound an aspect of the truth and to pray']: Amadou Makhtar Samb, Introduction à la Tariqah Tidjaniyya: ou, Voie Spirituelle de Cheikh Ahmad Tidjani (Dakar: lmprimerie Saint-Paul, 1994), 17.

37. Ambiguous Adventure, 6.

38. Ambiguous Adventure, 7.

39. 'Camara Laye, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, and Tayeb Salih' in Harrow (ed.), Faces of Islam, 293; Little, CHK, L’Aventure ambigue, 49, 50, 56. Harrow says that Samba Diallo 'experiences a moment of fana which is the goal of the Sufi mystic' without specifying to which Sufi mystic he is referring (since baqa' is the goal of some) and without effectively conveying Samba Diallo's own personal experience of this possible fana’'. It is Kane's effective means of conveying Samba Diallo's experience that lends the story its meaning. Little focuses on the power of Kane's imagery, rather than, again, Samba Diallo's internal experience.

40. Ambiguous Adventure, 71.

41. Ambiguous Adventure, 72.

42. Ambiguous Adventure, 72.

43. Ambiguous Adventure, 72.

44. Guy Ossito Midiohouan, L'Jdeologie dans la litterature negro-africaine (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1986), 200

45. 'Celui-ci, incapable d'affronter une réalité qu'il récuse, opère une fuite clans la mystique religieuse'. Ambiguous Adventure, 199

46. Joppa brusquely accuses Samba Diallo of being 'trop absolutiste pour pouvoir trouver une solution à une situation qui demande, comme il sait bien, un compromis' ['too absolutist to find a solution to a situation that he knows full well demands compromise']: Francis Anani Joppa, L'Engagement des écrivains africains noirs de langue française, (Quebec: Editions Naaman de Sherbrooke, 1982), 216. In other words, Samba Diallo is just being perverse.

47. Ambiguous Adventure, 140. This is in contrast to Lucienne, to whom he says: 'You have not only raised yourself above Nature. You have even turned the sword of your thought against her: you are fighting for her subjection - that is your combat, isn't it?' (Ambiguous Adventure, 140-1). His statement is supported by Sartre's comment on the white proletariat: 'la Nature c'est pour Jui la Matiere, cette resistance passive, cette adversite sournoise et inerte qu'il laboure de ses outils.' ['Nature is for him a material, this passive resistance, this crafty and inert adversity which he labours with his tools']: Jean-Paul Sartre, 'Orphee Noir', in Leopold Sedar Senghor, Anthologie de la nouvelle poesie negre et malgache (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948), xa. The Marxist attitude to nature may be derived from the Cartesian attitude: 'we can and should achieve knowledge that is "useful in life" and that will one day make us "masters and possessors of nature".' Robert Audi (ed.), The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (Cambridge: CUP, 1999), 225.

48. Claude Kappler, Le Dialogue d'Iblis et de M o'awiye dans le Daftar A du M asnavi de M owlavi, Beyts 2604-2792: Une Alchimie du Coeur (Paris: Association pour l'Avancement des Etudes Iraniennes, Studia Iranica 16,1987), 71.

49. Ambiguous Adventure, 139.

50. Ambiguous Adventure, 140.

51. Ambiguous Adventure, 123. The master in Suhrawardi's 'On the State of Childhood' says to the aspirant: 'one with unlimited reach can penetrate the world of the unseen and be convivial with the hidden ones of that realm from behind the veil of mysteries': Mystical and Visionary Treatises (transl. Thackston), 59.

52. 'Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani mentions the ability to perceive such unity: 'The heart has two eyes, one lesser, the other greater. With the lesser eye one may be able to see the manifestation of Allah's attributes and Names. This vision continues all through one's spiritual evolution. The greater eye sees only that which is rendered visible by the light of unity and oneness' (The Secret of Secrets, 56).

53. Ambiguous Adventure, 127.

54. Ambiguous Adventure, 128.

55. Ambiguous Adventure. He mentions this later to Pierre-Louis, a young man of African decent: 'I don't know whether you have at times had that poignant impression of vacuity which the streets of this city may give - streets nevertheless so noisy in other respects. There is, as it were, a great absence, one does not know of what.' (Ambiguous Adventure, 148).

56. Ambiguous Adventure, 128.

57. Ambiguous Adventure, 128-9.

58. Sartre, Nausea, 53.

59. Ambiguous Adventure, 144.

60. Ambiguous Adventure, 148 (my italics).

61. 'The heart becomes rusted like iron in water.' When asked how to banish this corrosion, the Prophet replied, 'Remember death frequently and recite the Qur'an' (Sunan Ahmad ibn Shu'ayb al-Nisa'i, on the authority of 'Abdullah ibn 'Umar. See Shama'il al-Nabi, Stuttgart: Tradigital, 2004).

62. Ambiguous Adventure, 24.

63. Ambiguous Adventure, 149.

64. Ambiguous Adventure, 150-1. Heidegger writes (seemingly quite cheerfully): 'Because beings as a whole slip away, so that just the nothing crowds around, in the face of anxiety all utterance of the 'is' falls silent' (Heidegger, 'What is Metaphysics?', in Krell (ed.), Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, 101). In The journey to the East, the protagonist laments: 'Oh, which of us ever thought that the magic circle would break up so soon! That almost all of us - and also I, even I - should again be lost in the soundless deserts of mapped-out reality.' (Hermann Hesse, The Journey to the East, transl. Hilda Rosner, London: Granada Publishing, 1979, 53).

65. Ambiguous Adventure, 150. 'One who cannot find this knowledge in his being will not become wise even if he reads a million books' (al-Jilani, The Secret of Secrets, 28-9).

66. Ambiguous Adventure, 150 (The balafong is a traditional African instrument like a xylophone.) Little makes a poignant observation: 'this is a death a l'europeenne, death from which the spirit is absent, a 'dead' death which cannot nourish, unlike the value-charged concept of death in the pays des Dia/lobe' (CHK, L'Aventure ambigue, 78).

67. Ambiguous Adventure, 154. Fanon protested against this objectification: 'On that day [while in France] completely dislocated, unable to be abroad with the other, the white man, who unmercifully imprisoned me, I took myself far off from my own presence, far indeed, and made myself an object.' (Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, transl. Charles Lam Markmann, London: Pluto Press, [1952] 1986, 112.) Fanon's experience goes beyond the political: the internal connection which he has with his own being, his own consciousness, is utterly aevered, effecting, as with Samba Diallo, a profound internal death.

68. Ambiguous Adventure, 160. This is a powerful argument against the claim that objectivity is required for understanding the reality of anything.

69. Ambiguous Adventure, 83. These are the teacher's words, which he follows with a plea: 'Lord, preserve us from exile behind appearance.'

70. Ambiguous Adventure, 174.

71. Kenneth Harrow, 'The Power and the World: Aspects of Islam in Cheikh Hamidou Kane and Tayeb Salih', Nouvelles du Sud (Ivry: Editions Silex, 1984), 157.

72. Ambiguous Adventure, 177.

73. Al-Jilani writes (The Secret of Secrets, 30), 'When they see the beauty and the grace of their Lord there is nothing of their temporal being left in them.'

74. Ambiguous Adventure, 176.

75. Ambiguous Adventure, 176. 'He will say: How long tarried ye in the earth, counting the years? They will say: We tarried but a day or part of a day' (Qur'an, 23:112-113). The Prophet was also known to have said: 'This life is a dream and when you die you wake up.'

76. Ambiguous Adventure, 176.

77. Al-Jilani says (The Secret of Secrets, 16) that 'the hidden spiritual essence itself […] is called wisdom'.

78. Ambiguous Adventure, 177.

79. Schimmel says (Mystical Dimensions of Islam, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1975, 284), that it is likely that 'Abd al-Jabbar al-Niffari (d. 965) first used the symbolism of the divine ocean although it could be argued that this ocean exists at a certain level of reality. Al-Jilani says (The Secret of Secrets, 30): 'When meaning becomes manifest in being, it becomes easy to pass through the shallows into the sea of creation and to immerse oneself in the depth of Allah's commandments. All of the material universes are but a drop in comparison to the sea of the spiritual world.' Rumi writes that 'When waves of thought arise from the Ocean of Wisdom, They assume the forms of sound and speech. These forms of speech are born and die again, these waves cast themselves back into the Ocean' (Mawlana Jalal al-Din Rumi, Masnavi-i Masnavi, transl. E. H. Whinfield, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd, 1898, Book 1,24). In 'The Simurgh's Shrill Cry' (in Thackston, The Mystical and Visionary Treatises of Suhrawardi, 95), Suhrawardi writes: 'The most masterly of all say that, 'you-ness,' 'I-ness' and 'he-ness' are all terms superfluous to the Self-subsistent Essence. They have submerged all three locutions in the sea of obliteration'.

80. No Ambiguous Adventure, 178. Ibn 'Arabi writes (journey to the Lord of Power, tansl. Ra bia Terri Harris [New York: Inner Traditions International, 1981, 1989, 64). 'Still the knower is thirsty continually forever, and desire and awe cleave to Him continually forever.' Approximately eighty years before Kane wrote this Verlaine was writing about an 'inner sense of exile' (Jennifer Birkett and James Kearns (eds.), A Guide to French Literature, London: MacMillan Press Ltd, 1997, 166).

81. The term murid literally means 'one who desires' and refers to the aspirant who undertakes the journey of the soul. One of the ideal qualities of an aspirant is intense desire for knowledge of the Beloved

82. Schimmel, M ystical Dimensions, 307. In his explanation of Suhrawardi's 'map' of the five states of those who witness tawhid, Thackston writes (Treatises of Suhrawardi, 15): 'The remaining state, the fifth and the highest of all, is the ineffable mute state wherein all connections with humanity have been severed and all traces of temporal existence in the soul have been obliterated. To reach this state renders words meaningless and explanations useless.' Suhrawardi says, '(Those who reach this state] have destroyed expressions and eradicated references' ('The Simurgh's Shrill Cry' in Ambiguous Adventure, 95).

83. Ambiguous Adventure, 176.

84. Ambiguous Adventure, 175. Ibn Sina.'s Hayy ibn Yaqzaan also describes this darkness, which is the Spring of Life: 'Thou hast heard of the Darkness that forever reigns about the pole. Each year the rising sun shines upon it at a fixed time. He who confronts that Darkness and does not hesitate to plunge into it for fear of difficulties will come to a vast space, boundless and filled with light. The first thing he sees is a living spring whose waters spread like a river over the barzakh. Whoever bathes in that spring becomes so light that he can walk on water' (Henry Corbin, 'Translation of the Recital of Hayy ibn Yaqaaan', in Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, transl. Willard R. Trask, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960, 142). Suhrawardl also writes in'The Red Intellect' (Treaties of Suhrawardi, 42): "'Where is the Spring of Life?" I asked. "In the Darkness," he said. "If you would seek it, lace your shoes like Khidr and take the road of trust that you may reach the Darkness.'"

85. The Prophet talks about death as being a journey, the grave being its first stage: 'The grave is the first stage to die journey into eternity' (al-Khaib al Tibrizi, Mishkat al-Masabih).

86. Little, CHK, L'Aventure ambigue, 75.

87. Ambiguous Adventure, 82.

88. Ambiguous Adventure, 177.

89. In an essay published as late as 2001, Anne V. Adams is still talking about 'the African Self' and links an '(Islamic) metaphysical approach to what it means to be an African'. Note that 'Islamic' is in brackets, being relegated to a mere accident and remaining subordinate to the issue of race (Adams, 'The Gender of Ambiguity', in Ute Fendler and Christoph Vatter, eds., Litteratures et Societes Africaines, Tubingen: Gunter Narr Verlag Tubingen, 2001, 560 and 562).

90. 'de nos jours, la restauration des possibilités de l'état primordial est le premier des buts que se propose l'initiation': Samb, Introduction a la Tariqah Tijaniyya, 239.

91. See the adaptation of Shaykh Erzinjani's 'Cities of the Soul', published at the back of Shihab al-Din YaQ.ya al-Suhrawardi's, The Shape of Light [or] Hayakil al-Nur, interpreted by Shaykh Tosun Bayrak al-Jerrahi al-Halveti (Louisville: Fons Vitae, 1998).

92. Little, CHK , L'Aventure ambigue, 40-41.

93. Ambiguous Adventure, 41. In Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, (London: Vintage, 1987, 87), Bernal writes: 'in both Egyptian and Greek cosmology the western islands of the sunset were associated with the Underworld and astral realms of the dead.'

94. Majid Fakhry, A History of Islamic Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2nd edn., 1983), 132, 164.

95. Corbin, 'Translation of the Recital of Hayy ibn Yaqzaan', 145. See Chapter 3. 'For each of them, there is a barrier preventing access from this world […] for no one can reach there or force a passage save the Elect' (A History of Islamic Philosophy, 141).

96. A History of Islamic Philosophy, 141.

97. Suhrawardi, 'A Tale of Occidental Exile', in Treatises of Suhrawardi.

98. 'A Tale of Occidental Exile', 107.

99. Corbin outlines the 'Hymn of the Soul' in the Acts of Thomas, which tells of a young prince whose parents send him from the East to Egypt in the West to obtain a special pearl. He takes off the robes of light which his parents made him, and puts on the robes of Egyptians, so that he will not be noticed, but 'he is divined to be the Stranger, he who is not of this world'. Significantly, 'he is given food that blots out his memory, he forgets that he is the 'son of a king'. Then his father sends him a message and he remembers who he is. He obtains the pearl, is auided back to the East and resumes his robes of light (Corbin, 'Orientation', in Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, 157-8).

100. Little says that Samba Diallo's journey is 'none the less a journey into the self' (CHK, L'Aventure ambigue, 42). I argue that this statement is made much too libly and is based upon the deceptiveness of the narrative structure.

101. The practice of khalwa was in fact relatively rare in West Africa as a whole: 'en dehors de certains foyers privilegies, comme le Senegal or le Nord NiKeria, cette implantation est loin d'avoir ce caractere d'universalite qu'on Jui J'lrte pa rfois' ['besides some privileged hearths, in Senegal or Northern Nigeria, the implantation [of the khalwah] was far from universal as one sometimes takes It to be'] (Triaud, 'L'Afrique occidental et centrale', in Jean-Louis Triaud and David Robinson (eds.), La Tijainiyya, Une confrérie musulmane a la conqucte de l'Afrique, (Paris: Editions Karthala, 2000), 418), although, notably, Sidi Mahmad al-Baghdad!, with his 'connexions suhrawardis' made it 'le sommet de la pratique' ['the pinnacle of the practice'] (Ambiguous Adventure).

102. Rabia Terri Harris, 'Translator's Preface', in Ibn 'Arabi, Journey to the Lord of Power, 2.

103. Il est dangereux de la pratiquer sans la direction d'un maitre'. Samb, Introduction a la Tarlqah Tidjaniyya, 230.

104. 'peuvent provoquer des desequilibres psychiques'. Ambiguous Adventure, 259.

105. Ambiguous Adventure, 5.

106. Little, CHK, L'Aventure ambigue, 40.

107. Cheikh Hamidou Kane seems to adopt the nineteenth century Russian trend of referring to locations just by an initial, although in this case, L. is thought to refer to the town of Louga, where he himself attended Qur'an school and his father worked as an administrator (Little, CHK, L'Aventure ambigue, 18).

108. Ambiguous Adventure, 64.

109. Ambiguous Adventure, 66.

110. Ambiguous Adventure, 70.

111. Ambiguous Adventure 160.

112. According to Fakhry (A History of Islamic Philosophy, 19-20), the two main Neoplatonic works that provided the foundation for a Neoplatonic interpretation of Islam were the Theologia Aristotelis, which propounded the theory of emanation, and the Liber de Causis, a work by Proclus known as elements of Theology.

113. The Ikhwan al-Safa', an Isma'ili movement within Islam influenced by Neoplatonic texts such as the Theologia, mapped out the ideal journey of the soul from the time of its infancy. This meant that the soul must transcend the weight of the body and its desires in order to be reunited with the immaterial realm from where it originated. See Fakhry, A History of Islamic Philosophy, 176.

114. Ambiguous Adventure, 148.

115. Ambiguous Adventure, 33.

116. Ambiguous Adventure, 148.

117. Little, CHK, L'A111nture ambigue, 42

118. Ambiguous Adventure, 121.

119. Ambiguous Adventure, 169.

120. Ambiguous Adventure, 174.

121. Joppa (L'Engagement des écrivains africains noirs, 214-15) writes: 'Tout effort de la part de Samba Diallo pour retrouver la paix intérieure est voué à l'échec' ['All effort on Samba Diallo's part to rediscover internal peace is destined for failure']. Midiohouan (L'Idéologie dans la litterature negro-africaine, 199) talks about 'L'échec du héros qui ne parvient pas à faire la synthèse des valeurs de l'Islam et des valeurs de l'Occident matérialiste' ['The failure of the hero who does not succeed in making a synthesis between Islamic values and the values of the materialist West'].

122. 'Man has never been so unhappy as at this moment when he is accumulating so much' (Ambiguous Adventure, 101).

123. Ambiguous Adventure, 69.

Author(s):

Rebecca Masterton [1]

Source URL: https://www.al-islam.org/islamic-mystical-readings-cheikh-hamidou-kanes-ambiguous-adventure-rebecca-masterton

Links
[1] https://www.al-islam.org/person/rebecca-masterton
[2] https://www.al-islam.org/printpdf/book/export/html/128394
[3] https://www.al-islam.org/printepub/book/export/html/128394
[4] https://www.al-islam.org/printmobi/book/export/html/128394
[5] mailto:kaidara@hotmail.com
[6] http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Housing/8584/HAJ.html;