The lost art of story telling

“It is related - but god knows and sees best what lies hidden in the old accounts of bygone peoples and times, that long ago, there lived two kings...” Remona Aly explored the revival of Islam’s great story-telling tradition.

Page 34
Q-News, Issue 358
December 2004

Stories have always held a certain fascination with people. Realms around the ancient world and Islamic lands were scattered with storytellers whose tales attracted large audiences in the market place and at coffeehouses. Their stories evoked imaginations and were peopled with diverse characters - figures rendering insights into human nature.

We are asked repeatedly in the Quran to ‘reflect’, not only on the world around us, but also on the world within. Many beautiful stories are set forth in the Quran as lessons for mankind. In the story of Yusuf alone, we witness paternal and filial love, temptation and desire, patience and piety. The steadfastness of Yusuf, the arrogance of the tribe of ‘Ad and the repentance of Yunus within the Fish all demonstrate aspects of human nature relating to our very own selves. Our Islam is enriched by such allusions and it becomes less the practical, ritualistic religion, but further cultivates the true beauty, the philosophy and spirituality of the faith. In addition to Quranic lessons, epics and classic legends evoke the varying dimensions of each feeling. Grief or love can be experienced in a variety of ways, the word is the same, but the love of and for a mother, a husband, a friend is in each case and with each individual, unique. 

If we live without stories - stories that portray the essence of humanity, we are susceptible to emotional and spiritual bankruptcy. Director of Khayaal Theatre, Luqman Ali, a keen advocate for storytelling observes: “The tradition of storytelling is integral to Islam because it is integral to life, to who we are and to the unfoldment of creation. Stories are more important because they allow us to conceive of things spiritual and unseen. It is for this reason that Allah tells the Prophet, peace be upon him, that the stories of the prophets were related to him ‘to establish your heart’. After all storytelling was a central role of the Prophet, peace be upon him, himself in his bid to stimulate the transformation of the first Muslim community. The story of Islam is more important than the dogma.”

In order to revive the tradition of erudite learning that Muslims of this era have neglected, we must appreciate the lessons of legends and literature. We broaden our knowledge and understanding by learning about the different aspects of human nature explored in such works. Ali believes Muslims need to regain their understanding of humanity and reconnect with their hearts:

“We are a people out of balance. We are fragmented internally and externally - this state of affairs is the direct result of our having disproportionately attributed the impetus of the industrio-technological leap to modernity to the rational sciences while grossly underestimating the more crucial and central role of the humanities. This has led us to a state of cultural, artistic and creative retardation that has deprived us of originative imagination and the capacity to dream.”

Our imagination is without bounds, and capable of conceiving anything presented to it. Often, stories convey the struggles that the character has to face in order to reach his or her destiny. The manifestations of these internal struggles sometimes take the form of external forces. Epics like The Odyssey, project fantastical creatures that either aid or threaten to thwart the heroes from their quest. They can be seen as a metaphor for the internal struggles we have with our own nafs, and how we must overcome them in order to reach our destination. The scene of Circe transforming Odysseus’ crew into animals is reminiscent of the Quranic verse ‘Be like apes’ (2:65) where those who broke the Sabbath oath were punished. Some interpreters take this reading of the verse literally, others say it is metaphorical. The lesson remains the same: disobedience and following their own lower desires abased them to be more akin to animals. Odysseus is tested repeatedly by a series of extreme challenges he must overcome to reach the home he yearns for, and it is only through his perseverance and strong intention that he succeeds.

In A Thousand and One Nights, the pattern of stories within stories produces a multilayered effect of different perspectives that all direct towards one intention - the intention of Sheherazad to ensure the survival of both herself and her husband. Sheherazad weaves tales that spin different elements of human nature, and through those fantasies, Shahriyar returned to reality, escaping the mad jealousy that obscured his vision. Her stories allow him, and through him, we the audience, to ponder a world beyond one’s own existence. Through Sheherezad, Shahriyar experiences what Luqman Ali describes as ‘the vision of tawhid’: “The dream of tawhid that characterise people of sound heart and enable them to see and witness things as they are through the vision of tawhid such that they are constantly unifying, integrating, synthesising, reconciling and recognising the accord beyond apparent discord. There is only oneness though it has many guises. In order to appreciate this, one must understand oneself as derivative of the one self from which we have all emanated. To achieve this, it is necessary that we rediscover our hearts and re-orient ourselves towards the higher thereby liberating ourselves from the binary bars of the mind and the chains of lower desire.”

We feel, we fear and we yearn with the characters because of our sense of empathy. Experiencing feelings and states of mind from other perspectives is something essential in the Islamic personality and an ideal of fraternity. We are instructed to feel that closeness with other human beings to such an extent that we feel it ourselves, thus, making our Islam complete. Just as the word ummah, community, derives from umm - mother, origin, source, so we are all from the one source of origin which reinforces the idea of the vision of tawhid and of subsequent empathy.

The latest release of Troy depicts characters like Achilles and Helen of Troy who were the stuff of song nearly 3,000 years ago, yet are familiar to audiences today. Anger, revenge, grief and love are all human qualities that constitute our humanity. Shaykh Hamza Yusuf refutes the simplistic view of the world in black and white: “They do not understand the subtleties of the human soul” derived from poetry and other humanities.  He finds Homer’s unbiased portrayal of Greeks and Trojans helps us understand the ‘moral ambiguities of war’. The Greek poem heralds a Trojan hero to evoke the deepest pathos: the loss of Hektor to his wife, his country and his father is acutely felt. The saddest moment of the poem, is when Priam, the noble king of all the Trojans debases himself because of his grief for his beloved son. He rolls around in the dust and dung, with no care for his actions, feeling nothing but grief.

The Iliad is a poignant poem that reeks of suffering and grief, and the fragile vulnerability of humans. The graphic descriptions truly convey the horrors of war such as: ‘the point of the spear held on right through and came out by his navel. He screamed, and dropped on his knees…holding in his entrails with his hands’ and ‘his liver slid out and the black blood pouring from it filled his lap’. Their strength, youth and vitality are taken from them by death, and they become as fragile as a flower: ‘He dropped his head to one side like a poppy in a garden, bent by the weight of its own seed and the showers of spring’. There is a certain tragic beauty in these images that inspires our compassion and reflection on our own mortality. Allah, Most High, has endowed us with a heart that is the centre of our beings, our spirit and consciousness. The more our hearts are exercised through empathy, the more we are connected to our own existence. In his introduction to Purification of the Heart, Shaykh Hamza writes: “One of the things about being cut off from the heart is that the more cut off from the heart one becomes, the sicker the heart grows because the heart needs nourishment, and heedlessness starves the spiritual heart.”

The emotions of The Iliad and other stories nurture deeper understanding and appreciation of humanity with all its complexities. The universal language of the heart speaks to us in different tongues through stories that provide the framework for emotional revelations. If we neglect our hearts, our own humanity suffers, because there is no understanding, no empathy and no love, as the Prophet, peace be upon him, said: “In the body, there is a piece of flesh, if it is whole, the entire body is whole, and if it is diseased, the whole body is diseased. Truly it is the heart.”