‘La perla bianca’. L’acqua come sostanza e come metafora nel culto del Profeta

Samuela Pagani, “The White Pearl”. Water as a substance and as a metaphor in the cult of the Prophet According to a well-attested strand of early qur’anic exegesis, water is the primal matter from which everything else has been created. From the 9th century, this idea lost ground to the dogma of creation from nothingness. Nevertheless, water cosmogonies had a place in pietistic and mystical collections of cosmological traditions, where they were linked to the notion that everything is alive and sings the praise of God. In Sufi works from the 9th-10th centuries, water cosmogonies merged with the idea that the “Light of Muḥammad” is the first created thing. A tradition indicates the relationship between light and water relating that water comes from the fusion of a pearl that God shaped from the luminous substance of the Prophet. Ibn ‘Arabī incorporated this narrative into his cosmology, reinterpreting it through the lens of Neoplatonic and Hermetic natural philosophy. After the institutionalization of the cult of the Prophet in the 13th century, the image of the pearl and the identification of the substance of Muḥammad with water became standard topoi of devotional literature. A number of theologians, while encouraging the poetic exaltation of the Prophet, warned that references to his cosmic role should only be understood as literary tropes. On the other side, up to modern times, Sufi thinkers continued to understand the water imagery in poems and prayers in honor of the Prophet as the expression of theological and cosmological truths and as a source of inspiration for transformative interpretations of Islamic law and politics.