In the 17th sura of the Qur’an, the Night Journey, we read of the voyage that Muhammad undertook “from the sacred mosque to the farthest mosque,” that is, from Mecca to heaven. Aerial Nekyia(0.4)1. During this trip to the higher spheres of the cosmos—later portrayed by Dante in the Divine Comedy—the prophet had a powerful vision of Paradise and Hell. Regarding the underworld, Muhammad says that upon reaching its doors, the deceased’s neck is hung with his “acts” or his “fate”, to which he will answer when, in the Day of Resurrection, he is presented an open book, the Record of Acts, where he can contemplate his sins.
The Arabic word that was translated as “fate” is ta’irahu. Ta’ir means “bird.” According to Ibn Abbas, Muhammad’s cousin and one of the first interpreters of the Qur’an, ta’irahu refers to “what flies away or leaves someone,” his or her acts. For pre-Islamic Arabs, mostly nomads, the flight of birds was the main means of predicting the future; fate was inseparable from them. Then, with Islam, the bird becomes a symbol of the acts, the destiny forged by the individual to be judged. These winged acts are a bird that goes down with its owner to the underworld and accompany him as a representative of the conscious world.
The descent into the underworld, like Muhammad’s night journey, can be of immense benefit, in its wake come the birds of divination and from it may be derived a medical science or even a entire code of conduct and coexistence. The katabasis/anabasis is a truly overwhelming experience but, in the words of Virgil, if it is possible to return to where the “stars glide through the silent sky,”2 from the center to the periphery of the labyrinth, the descent into the underworld is the most fruitful of learnings. Our problem as a culture is that we have stopped indefinitely at its threshold and have made an unlikely home of it.
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