A Precise Terminology

He taught Adam the names of all things.

Then He arrayed them before the angels and said,

‘Tell Me the names of these if you are telling the truth.’

 

They said, ‘Glory be to You! We have no knowledge

Except what You have taught us.

You are the All-Knowing All-Wise.’

 

The above quoted lines are from uncreated Word of Allah, from His Book, of which there are copies, at first written down by scribes and in latter times, till the present, in printed editions. From these copies, which are referred to as mus’hafs, literally ‘copies’, there have been numerous renderings of its meanings into a great many languages, with the majority of scholars being exceedingly careful not to refer to them as translations, per se.  Already we are acutely aware of the essential importance of having a precise understanding of the meaning of words, thereby to say exactly what it is we mean to say.

It must be clear that I am in no manner a qualified authority on that Book, or its meanings. I have neither access to it in the original language, nor am I learned in its meanings and interpretations, except from what little I have understood through those scholars who have acquired that well defined science, passed down from generation to generation. Again, I read the line: “He taught Adam the names of all things.” It is upon the men of knowledge, both past and present, that I rely to gain a correct understanding, and in so doing, not make a mistake, or say something of which I have no knowledge. Therefore, as someone for whom the use of language and obtaining a precise terminology is of the utmost importance; finding le mot juste, whether in attempting to convey an understanding of an idea, a deep inner emotion, a command or prohibition, or an insight required to plumb the depth of a particular meaning; great care is required.

He taught Adam the names of all things. To know the name of something is to connect it to its meaning. Getting it right or getting it wrong makes all the difference. We are living in a time in which men have, to a great extent, lost that Adamic knowledge, the meanings of the names of things. We could, for example, identify the word money. What is it and what do people understand it to be: a value, a medium of exchange by which goods and services are exchanged? Yet, the whole world has had a terrible shock as it became abundantly clear that what people understood to be a value, was in fact a credit, created ex nihilo, a debt, that was traded and exchanged across the world through a mysterious medium, an Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), via computer terminals by an elite but seemingly innocuous group of people, as well as the more quotidian use of money as a medium of exchange, that has been revealed to be devoid of value. Subsequently, all those things to which we refer by their names, property quite possibly being one of the most important, and one could say most valuable, lost its value. Just like that! Truly, this is most astounding!

As a small stream, like the many I can recall from the woodlands of my native New England, that through a myriad of twists and turns finds its way to a mighty river (the Merrimack comes to mind), that is itself being pulled into the great Atlantic Ocean, I find myself drawn again to what I have understood from the study of the writings of Ezra Pound. In addition to his magnum opus, the Cantos, there are his prose essays and expositions and also his immensely important translations of the major works of Confucius: The Great Digest or Ta Hio, The Unwobbling Pivot or Chung-Yung and lastly The Analects, comparatively less orderly in their sequence, yet believed by his students to be indispensable. I have tenaciously tried to hold to the proper name of the ancient sage as Kung-futz-æ. Pound settled upon the more intimate, yet respectful, name of Kung - acknowledging that both Master and Kung are synonyms.

What follows is Pound’s translation from ancient Chinese into a down to earth colloquial vernacular that you might still hear in more rural parts of the American Midwest. It should be noted that trained sinologists have often taken exception to Pound’s translations that he made using a basic Chinese-English dictionary, along with a sheaf of notes bequeathed to him by a scholar by the name of Ernest Fenollosa, who had spent a lifetime in Japan studying the ideograms, and whom Pound had never met. Pound was ecstatic when the scholar’s widow approached him and handed over the notes with no more explanation than that her husband wanted the poet to have them. The basic complaint is that Ezra ‘made numerous mistakes’. This is, of course, entirely possible; though having read each of the books I am convinced he never got a meaning wrong, as each one is sound and rings true.

Tze Lu: The lord Wei is waiting for you to form a government, what are you going to do first?

Kung: Settle the names (determine a precise terminology).

Tze Lu: How’s this, your divagating, why fix’em?

Kung: You bumpkin! Sprout! When a proper man don’t know a thing, he shows some reserve.

If words, (terminology) are not (is not) precise, they cannot be followed out,

or completed in action according to specifications.

The very next Confucian principle is: ‘The creation of a just state must be established on a just means of exchange’. The Qur’anic model is much more refined and clearly defined, as it transcends to a yet higher knowledge to which mankind can aspire; although it is agreed upon by the people of knowledge that it only arrives as a gift.

Properly speaking, there is no such thing as an Islamic politics, but rather there is an Islamic economic model. That model is called dawlat, and is directly related to the movement of wealth from the highest segment of society to reach and nourish the lowest. The primary means by which this occurs is the taking of Zakat by the authority of a leader, paid on substances or merchandise of intrinsic value, in substances of equally intrinsic value, and immediately distributed to those who qualify to receive it by the clear rulings relating to it. None of which, I might add, pertain to the maintenance of a bureaucratic system whose main objective is to pay itself. It is to the body politic what the circulatory system is to the human body. Governance and, therefore, leadership devolves on the one who undertakes to ensure that that takes place. The modern fiscal state, which by its very structure is static and consolidates and holds wealth, although as was pointed out earlier does in no way have control over it, is diametrically opposed to dawlat. Consequently, an Islamic State is inimical to Islam. The name, in its most profound Adamic sense has been separated from its meaning.

In Dante’s Paradiso he presents in a most spectacular manner a line from the Book of Wisdom spoken by Solomon, where the souls of Heaven spell it out in a pattern of lights: Diligite iustitiam qui iudicatis terram. While the Commedia as a whole was written by Dante in a new vernacular prose, he would revert to the use of Latin for such an important line. Literally it would read: “You who govern the earth, cherish justice”, while most translations into English reverse the order: “Cherish Justice, oh you who govern (or make judgements) upon the earth.” The verb cherish is in the imperative, a form of the verb that corresponds to the simple present subjunctive, that expresses a command. The thing named, which is the object of the sentence, and is of the utmost significance, is clearly Justice. Dante sided with Imperial power as the upholders of justice and therefore more closely aligned with what he understood to be the Divine command, as opposed to the Papacy, to which he took exception. Needless to say, this did not make him popular with the Pope.

The role of leadership is to establish and maintain justice alongside the imperatives of worship, without which man’s raison d’être cannot be fulfilled. Together they form a single whole. Therefore, a proper man calls things by their proper names - paraphrased from Pound but connecting back to the Original Source: He taught Adam the names of all things.

This circumnavigation from the opening ayat pertaining to ‘the names’ and then returning to it, could benefit from another source that guided Pound in his Odyssey. It was the far lesser known monetary historian, Alexander Del Mar, who wrote several books, one of which was The History of Money. In it he directed Pound to Imams Shafi’i and Ibn Hanbal who explained the means of weights and measures by which gold and silver were used as a medium of exchange. The key point is that of weight, as opposed to bits of paper with larger or smaller numbers written on them, or of electronic impulses on computer screens, that determine their value. This brings us to the opening lines of Canto XCVII:

Malik & Edward struck coins with a sword,

“Emir el Moumenin” (Systems p.134)

six and a half to one, or the sword of the Prophet,

Silver being in the hands of the people.

Referring to Carroll F. Terrell’s monumental A Companion to The Cantos we are informed that in A.D. 692 the Emir Abd-el-Malik [sic] sought to assert his independence from Rome. He struck gold dinars and silver dirhams according to the practice established by the Prophet Muhammad, may God bless him and grant him peace, which adjusted the (unjust) disparity determined by Rome between the inflated value of gold that was only in the hands of the super rich, and that of silver, commonly held by ordinary folks. This meant that immediately, by the use of Muslim currency, the money in your pocket was worth more. This not only brought Islamic coins into Eastern Europe, but also Islam itself as a religion preferred by many people of the region.

The two ‘names’, in the manner in which Adam was first taught all the names, would then be money and justice. He taught Adam the names of all things. Now look at the time in which we live, where money has no real value, justice is left in the hands of a corrupt political class, and Islam, once a balm to not only the East but also the West, has become characterised as the bane. But that is about to change, as the disgraced jihadists and islamists are receding into the holes they crawled out of, and a new era is opening.

 

 

There is a link to The Power Template – Shakespeare’s Political Plays

Dallas College Press, 2011, by Robert Luongo

Or visit www.thepowertemplate.com