Edward Said & the Zahirites

 A lover more in love with Love than any actual fair one found, as all such lovers must, that love was in the words of Love, its gestures, its language but those words, those gestures, that language were as a veil on both sides of which stood vanity and feigning.

   But what if that veil was the Koran? God might feign from behind that veil but God's feigning yet is Man's Law. Thus was born in this lover, now out of love with Love, a zeal for the Zahiri School of Jurisprudence which, from love-of-the-Veil, postulated that God might lie and, to keep open that possibility, permitted no imperative avenue of closer approach, thus banishing both analogical qiyas reasoning and esoteric batini  hermeneutics as a blasphemous availing against that Veil.

   In an incoherent chapter of an incoherent book, Edward Said abruptly declares a fascination with Ibn Hamz, this Zahirite. Why? Violence appeared suddenly as that Veil truer than Literature's Love for one whose motherland was- like Ibn Hamz's Andalus at the time of the Arab Berber wars- now ruled by the wrong bunch of Semites.

   In the end the great Professor ended up throwing stones like a barefoot gamin.

 Better, the Batini say, the street urchins throw stones at us, for it is Majnun's nakedness alone which veils Lailah from him and ever of such weaving is the tapestry of true Zahiriyat- an Emergence which never Emerges- such that tears are but tears and that tearing up of what is inward, all Violence as aught avails.