Typological figuration and the meaning of "spiritual": the Qur'anic story of Joseph.

• Author: Lawson, Todd
• Position: Critical essay

INTRODUCTION

The Quran is not without a center of narrative gravity despite its notoriously challenging narrative flow. This becomes especially apparent when we are being told about the experience of particular prophets or messengers with their proper community. History and the rise and fall of civilizations and cultures are punctuated by the appearance of these special envoys, according to the Qur'an--thus their epic struggles in the divinely inspired effort to guide humans from ignorance to enlightenment and from savagery to civilization in whatever community they have existed (prophets have been sent to all of them, according to Q 16:36). However, such narrative continuity is frequently difficult to detect "on the page." In these instances, certain characteristic Qur'anic literary features maintain the integrity and coherence of the whole in the absence of explicit and continuous, unbroken narrative dramatic movement.

The following is an attempt to discuss, in sequence, (1) typological figuration as it pertains to (2) the story of Joseph, concluding with a focus on one of the main "characters" in the story, namely, the famous shirt (qamis), which functions as a touchstone of narrative continuity and as a symbol of Joseph's spiritual journey and travails. This exploration starts from a premise that the Qur'an and tafsir are both literature. Typological figuration, a venerable and powerful literary device, is in both instances one of the central keys to an otherwise sometimes opaque Qur'anic narrative continuity. In this article it will be seen that typological figuration functions beyond the confines of "mere" literature to inform Islamic piety and religious thought. (1)

1. TYPOLOGICAL FIGURATION

   While typological figuration has long been recognized as an important and persuasive literary feature of the Bible and even its exegesis, the Qur'an and the vast literary web that it generated have not yet been subject to the same kind of thorough examination we find, for example, in Leonhard Goppelt's classic study. There it was demonstrated beyond any possible doubt that the authors of the New Testament saw in the life and teachings of Jesus a typological fulfillment (cum repetition) of a variety of distinctive themes and motifs and "promises" of the Old Testament. The New Testament is, through typological exegesis, a tafsir of the Hebrew Bible and the mission of Jesus is perfectly and seamlessly identified (at least for the authors and their readers) with what has come before. As a result, there is no doubt about the identity of such Old Testament types as "the Lamb of God" or "the Suffering Servant." Even the experience of Jonah in the belly of the whale is seen as a prefigurement of the mission and role of Jesus, especially his period in the tomb before the resurrection. (2)

   Typological figuration is, of course, found frequently in many other contexts outside the strictly religious. Since Goppelt's foundational work on the power and prevalence of typological figuration at work in the New Testament, we have grown accustomed to recognizing this literary figure and its persuasive rhetorical and poetic efficacy in various settings. It represents history in a series of conceptual, as distinct from verbal, rhymes. Often we see it at work in studies of history and historiography, ancient, modern, and contemporary. In the "logic" (which transcends logic) of typology, Augustus can be both Aeneas and Romulus redivivus at the same time. It has been suggested that our own confidence in the process of--and one might add the structure we give to--history is probably derived, whether wittingly or unwittingly, from the compelling symmetry and meaning that typological figuration delivers. (3)

   Typology says that the old world has ended, a new one is about to be born. Those who perceive this shift and are sympathetic to it, such as the early followers of the Prophet Muhammad, will be persecuted and ostracized for merely "understanding." The understanding is that Muhammad represents the new return of the life-giving, divine, ancient and eternal, prophetic spirit. Therefore, this new and numerically insignificant community depends upon the revelation for encouragement, solace, and promise that "it will all work out" despite the serious hardships and obstacles it will undoubtedly be its fate to encounter and suffer. (Paradise, for example, is typically described in the Quran when the Hour or the Last Day is mentioned. (4)) Typology is a figure that unites time, harmonizes it, and gathers it together: "the type exists in the past and the antitype in the present, or the type exists in the present and the antitype in the future." (5) This reflects a basic attitude toward the world and one's place in it with regard to the passing of time. What was formally mere time past is now, as a result of the prophetic imagination, History. So it assumes heretofore-unimagined importance and, at the same time, the mystery of this great secret/importance is revealed. (6) The past is now seen as part of a process through which "meaning" may be identified with human experience. Interpreting Shi'i theological philosophy on the problem of time and history, Henry Corbin's well-known observation is impossible to ignore: "Our thinkers perceive the world not as 'evolving' in a horizontal and rectilinear direction, but as ascending: the past is not behind us but 'beneath our fee." (7) Such a statement actually may go to the heart of a general Islamic view of time and history, and thus has implications far beyond an understanding of Corbin's basic sources, as in this statement from the Encyclopaedia of the Qur'an:

   The entire world in all its variety was created by the one creator at one particular moment. It follows that oneness was the ideal state for it at all times and that to which it should always aspire. As the beginning was one, so the expected end of the world is one for everyone and everything. Whatever is and takes place in between these two definite points of created time, no matter how varied in detail, follows a set overall pattern. Thus the history of the past and of the future, including that of the present, is fundamentally uniform. No distinction between the three modes of time need be made by the observer of human history. (8) This may be akin to what al-Qurtubi was referring to when he characterized the Night of Power as the point where all time meets, jami al-dahr. Michael Sells has spoken eloquently in this same connection about what one might call a "sacrament of time and history" or perhaps better an "icon of time and history" and its centrality for Islamic religion in his classic article on the Night of Power: (9)

   The Christian mystics, John the Scot Erigena and Meister Eckhart, both emphasized the combination of perfect and imperfect tenses as essential to an intimation of the "eternal moment," the moment that for Eckhart always has occurred and always is occurring, and which in his Christian interpretation corresponds to the eternal birth of the son of God in the soul. ... (p. 249 n. 27) Through such aural, syntactic, and thematic inter-twining among the ruh passages involving creation, revelation, and yawm ad-din, of which the above example is only one of many that could be cited, the spirit takes on a temporal multivalence. The occurrence of the term ruh within these three distinct moments engenders an intertextual acoustical-semantic dynamic that plays against the separation of the three moments and transforms normal understandings of time. (p. 254) The connection between ruh and qadr in surat al-qadr suggests that this transformation of time into a primordial unity is an aspect of qadr. ... Translators of the Qur'an have tended to choose terms like "power" for qadr, terms that express only one side of the semantic field. It is my view that "destiny" might come closer to expressing the mutivalence of the term, though no single English term would seem sufficient. (p. 255) The classical interpreters emphasize the storing up of future events in the lay/at al-qadr, a phenomenon that represents the containment of a span of time (whether one year or all time) within a single moment. (p. 256) Even if all of the details of this new "meaning" are not completely clear now, they will be made clear in due course. When this happens, the present magically becomes the antitype or repetition of previous history but with the added luminosity of truth revealed, and fulfilled: the code cracked. (10) We now understand, and a mystery we may not even have recognized as existing previously is now solved. Such understanding may also acquire the features of revolution, as when the past is simply obliterated and rendered no longer pertinent. Northrup Frye uses the image of waking from sleep:

   When we wake up from sleep, one world is simply abolished and replaced by another. This suggests a clue to the origin of typology: it is essentially a revolutionary form of thought and rhetoric. We have revolutionary thought whenever the feeling "life is a dream" becomes geared to an impulse to waken from it. (11) The prominence of typology in the Qur'an and tafsir as a hermeneutic presupposition or strategy suggests an association of this literary conceit with what has so aptly been described as the "apocalyptic imagination." (12) It is important to observe that not only does typology move through time and transcend time (Frye's words), but, in fact, typology frequently erases or collapses time. It does this by insisting that in the presence of God all things are somehow happening at once. (13) Time is that which "sorts them out" for human consumption. It is the obliteration of time--perhaps centripetally analogous with the splitting of the atom--that would seem to summon up the powerful literary energies and concerns of bona fide revelation and focus them into an apocalypse.

   The constant occurrence of the pervasive figure of typology throughout the...