23. Black Stone

This is not enough to make up Europe. The Greek shake-up (the invention of the philosophical), exotheism (Hebraic liberation with regard to places), and transport, and the imperial intersection of these things, come together and characterize Rome—just Rome. Now, Rome does not circumscribe Europe; what Rome carries is worldhood as such, the project of a world as the world. For shifting from Rome to Europe, a retraction or contraction is needed. It is a double retraction, and it is unequal: a retreat to the shore and a territorialization, after facing and losing the south—a complete withdrawal, and an actual break traced out. And facing the east, a westernization, a retreat that is never well outlined and always uncertain—Europe, with an in(de)finite east, becoming western and becoming a cape.

Let us say something about the south.

.   .   .

At a seminar in the early 1990s, Jean-Luc Nancy remarked on the fact that in the Kaaba at Mecca, there is a Black Stone: a stone, or object that is full and compact.¹⁶⁸ Whereas in the sanctuaries of other religions designated as “great”—pending a precise inventory—it seems that there are vacancies and voids, or relics (which refer to an absent event or a vanished person), or texts (which call for an interpretation), in short, nothing presenting itself under the aspect of fullness and compactness. A text, a relic, and a fortiori a void, act by referral, that is to say, they call for a transfer, a production of meaning by displacement, transition, and distance. The Black Stone at Mecca, on the other hand, Nancy further supposed, offers itself fully, as a compact presence, and it keeps to itself [se tient en soi].¹⁶⁹

Islam has empty recesses of its own, we might note: in each mosque, the niche of the qibla indicates the direction of Mecca and therefore of prayer.¹⁷⁰ The qibla functions as a sign and a reference; it designates an elsewhere, and one’s gaze or thought traverses it to reach beyond it, toward Mecca, which is not there. But the given direction is precisely the Kaaba’s and therefore the Black Stone’s—which refers only to itself, or rather refers to nothing, keeps to itself, and presents itself fully to the eye, to one’s thoughts, and to veneration. One can only go around the Kaaba shrine. Walking around the “house” containing the stone seven times is a devotional rite for pilgrims. The stone is central; it is fixed. It organizes and summons up the space around it. The Black Stone determines an absolute locus. It is true that, in the Aristotelian sense, the stone is not a place: it is a thing, and its compactness and fullness have to do with thingness. But the stone is set at a place that is absolutely itself: it cannot be moved away or transferred; it has been there since the beginning of the world.¹⁷¹ Consequently, the stone tells two things all at once: compactness of being and absoluteness of the locus. These may just be the two sides of the same position: the compactness of being expresses the absoluteness of the locus as much as the opposite; compactness and absoluteness are mentioned together about the being that nothing separates from its place, the place that does not differentiate itself from the being that is there; nothing can tear apart this being and this locus—being as place, or being-place. If this is how it is, then Islam displays a veneration for the absolute place, and an absolute veneration for the place—not for locus in general (or for the idea of place or the figure of place), or for some places (which would make it a kind of idol worship), but instead a veneration for this very place and no other one, this place as the absolute locality. Not a veneration for the there, but veneration-there. And there, around this place that nothing makes absent or replaces, the totality of the world organizes itself. The world is there; the world is around the stone.

The objection will be, of course, that the sanctuary of the Kaaba and its stone are pre-Islamic. Before Islam, this was one of the divine places corresponding to one of the gods of the local Arabic polytheism. The question then is to detect why this locus became integrated into the new religious culture and dissociated from others; why it is elevated to the quality of unique locus or archi-locus;¹⁷² why here as elsewhere one goes from a (polytheistic) polytopism to a monotopism—why there is a sole locus from now on, and why this very one there.

.   .   .

When Muhammad undertook his religious renovation, he started (like many other great religious reformers and possibly all of them) by producing a critique of idols, which is to say, of the local gods.¹⁷³ What brought on this critique, or called for it, seems to have been what has been termed a “vague monotheism.”¹⁷⁴ The break from this polytopic polytheism was no doubt clear-cut but it did not occur all at once, nor without some fluctuation—attested by the “Satanic verses” affair.¹⁷⁵ One thing is plain, however: to launch this critique of idols and local gods, the Prophet soon began to refer to the existing complex of Judeo-Christian themes and stories. As far as this relationship is concerned, it is pointless here to deal with the respective importance of “influence,” “encounters,” or “borrowings.” The meaningful fact is that the Muhammedan critique of idols was carried out clearly and unequivocally with reference to Judeo-Christian deism.

The Prophet had been in contact with these themes precociously and no doubt profoundly—this comes to light from biographical elements,¹⁷⁶ as well as, and more deeply, from the observation of the “world into which the Arabs came.”¹⁷⁷ The “objective” or effective reason, at that time, that led to the criticism and deposition of idols in this region, as well as in others, cannot be discussed here.¹⁷⁸ However, the situation in the Meccan region cannot be abstracted from the history of that time and those places. “Arabia” is neither isolated nor solitary, but geographically and politically circumscribed. Moreover, this region is all the less isolated in that the Muhammedan renovation occurred there. The (political and religious) renovation that Muhammad launched sought precisely to inscribe the region of “Arabia” into what was happening at the outer limits of its territory as the production of a world. Indeed, Muhammad sought to make the Arabs “come into the world.”¹⁷⁹ What Islamism did, first of all, was to resort to the world and invoke it against idolatrous locality.

What was this world that Muhammad sought to enter? It was, of course, Romanity, the very production of the world, as world. But from Muhammad’s perspective, Romanity confronted at least three abrupt limitations:

(1) First, it was fallen Romanity—collapsed and obsolete. What the Prophet calls “Rome” is Byzantium:¹⁸⁰ Rome outside of Rome, Rome after the fall. For the Prophet it is a matter of summoning up a world whose mode of appearing from the start has to do with defeat and vanishing. In his eyes, this defeat can be reversed. It is provisional, resulting from an internal defect, a failure. Victory (Rome’s victory) will come back—once Romanity and therefore the world have been renovated.¹⁸¹ What this failure contains is ignorance about the divine as such, though it has been announced, shown, and presented. The gesture of the new revelation will be this re-showing.¹⁸²

(2) The Roman world’s second limitation is its territorial boundary, with the other empire facing it in the east, Persia. Now, this limitation undermines its very status of world: the world has no boundaries; the world is all that is. The geography where Islam is going to insert itself is structured around a fault line in the duality of empires: a partition between the Orient and the West, an essentially impossible scission that is going to mark the inscription of the Islamic project lastingly and deeply; not only because it will reappear quite soon after the Prophet’s death, in the schism between Shiite and Sunni (that is, the divide between east and west, the Persian and Mediterranean sides), reproducing within Islam the division that preceded it; but also, more radically, because acknowledging this limit and these eastern bounds will probably prevent the Muhammedan dream from construing itself as being purely assimilated or integrated into Romanity. Remaking Rome (remaking the world) will be at stake, but starting exactly from the point of its oriental limit, that is to say, from the exact point where the east-west difference remains problematic. Islam enters the world through its eastern border—it will thus never be able to credit the world for its pure Occidentality.¹⁸³

(3) Third, and doubling this uncertainty, Rome's Byzantine successor was unstable. Shaken by the Persian war, the (first) invasions from the north, and political uncertainties and theological quarrels, the Byzantine Empire was “debilitated.”¹⁸⁴ Byzantium, Emmanuel Berl writes,

was distinctly anxious and melancholy. It had not been able to sustain itself either in the west or in the east. Heresy and war had led to decline in the Christian Orient barely less than the invasions had in the West. Everything, in truth, was falling to pieces. . . . The restoration of Romania [i.e., the Roman empire] having definitely failed, it seemed that humankind was condemned to shrink back toward a more barbarous and difficult age. For two hundred years the same vicious circle had gone on: it was impossible either to reestablish or to replace the Roman order.¹⁸⁵

These lines serve to characterize the aporia of the “world into which the Arabs came”: the Roman order could neither be abolished nor reestablished—a kind of double bind, which created a deep ambivalence in Islam.

.   .   .

We can thus understand the constitution of Islam as being produced by two contrary motions, which were closely implicated in it and pulled it in opposite directions.

First, Islam aimed to break up with the locality that supported it—with religious and political life in Mecca. Islam claims to have set itself free from the idolatrous topism that dominated it, summoning the sponsorship (the truth) of biblical texts or stories. Surah 87, “generally held to be one of the first,”¹⁸⁶ ends with two verses: “Most surely this is in the earlier scriptures, / The scriptures of Ibrahim [Abraham—Trans.] and Musa [Moses—Trans.].”¹⁸⁷ It is not surprising that this will to be free expresses itself through Judaic references. As Muhammad knew, these are common to Judaism and Christianity, and although aware of their differences, he always regarded them as a single body of religion, in which Islam too was meant to participate. Resorting to Judaism here is inseparable from resorting to Romanity,¹⁸⁸ impossible to dissociate from the appeal to Christianity and its Judaic genealogy, which, for Muhammad, is a founding element.¹⁸⁹

Thus this first Islamic movement simultaneously aims to break with Meccan society and to seek a rapprochement with the Judaic and Christian religions. It is the movement of the Hegira: break, separation, and transfer. Transport toward the north. The Hegira and the time at Medina are the time period of projects to connect or join (and why not say to merge) with northern Judeo-Christian Roman space, which Muhammad knows as the north.¹⁹⁰ What these projects encompass exactly is difficult to disentangle. But their existence does not seem challengeable: negotiations with Jewish communities, appeals to convert, Muslim migration to Abyssinia, with messages to the Christian sovereign, envoys sent to other powerful figures in the world,¹⁹¹ delving more deeply into Abrahamic kinship,¹⁹² and so forth. It is as if Muhammad had hoped for a kind of Muhammedan reunification of “monotheisms,” and his admonishing of the world’s sovereigns does not seem unlikely. This drive to break up [pulsion de rupture] associates Islam with what I have suggested be termed “exotheism” in the Jewish and Christian religions: tearing away from one’s soil, transferring outside of the native land: transportation, carrying away, de-parting.¹⁹³ Whereas in the initial Greek constitution of the “Occident” this movement was directed toward the west (transfer from Asia, moving across the straits), here I am inclined to read a northwestern direction; and our world, for quite some time, persisted in this: the northwest of the world, north and west together, little by little in this period constituted the place of the strongest polarity proceeding from Rome and from its fall—the pole of Europe, then (North) America. But one fact testifies more than anything to the very strong (political, religious, geotopical) meaning of this project and this projection, and it is the Muhammedan prescription, at this point, that one’s prayers be directed toward Jerusalem.¹⁹⁴ The direction, the “orientation” (an improper term, here), of prayer plays a noticeable part in Muhammad’s thought. Prayer reaches toward a defined direction; prayer has a directional sense. Here the direction is Judeo-Christianity’s primordial teleological focus, the Byzantine and Roman city of Jerusalem, for which Persia was then vying. What Muhammad sets his sights on, in the northwest, is Christianized Romanity; this is then the sense and the range of his thrust.¹⁹⁵

.   .   .

Now, in the middle of the Medina era, Muhammad changed the strategic orientation of his project. The prevailing direction no longer reached toward the Judeo-Romano-Christian north, but reinvested in the south—a new “orientation” that the return to Mecca ultimately manifests. It is true that war with the Meccans had not stopped since the Hegira, showing that, in his projects and thoughts, the Prophet had never relinquished the city. But in this new phase, war intensified, was marked by victories, and above all by intense renewed negotiations, aiming to make the return possible. It is thus not only a question of his return (building up to Muhammad reentering the city triumphantly as a conqueror),¹⁹⁶ but of a deeper phenomenon, preceding his victory and return: it is a reversal that precedes the return, calls for it, demands it, and ultimately constitutes it in its structure. Re-legitimization of the “sacred” value of the Meccan site: the city, and within it the Kaaba; and within the Kaaba, the stone. The clearest symptom of this is the reversal of prayer.

Nay! do you say that Ibrahim and Ismail and Yaqoub [Jacob—Trans.] and the tribes were Jews or Christians? . . . / This is a people that have passed away; they shall have what they earned and you shall have what you earn, and you shall not be called upon to answer for what they did. / The fools among the people will say: What has turned them from their qiblah which they had? Say: The East and the West belong only to Allah; He guides whom He likes to the right path. / And thus We have made you a medium [an intermediary] (just) nation that you may be the bearers of witness to the people and (that) the Apostle may be a bearer of witness to you; and We did not make that which you would have to be the qiblah but that We might distinguish him who follows the Apostle from him who turns back upon his heels . . . / . . . so We shall surely turn you to a qiblah which you shall like; turn then your face towards the Sacred Mosque, and wherever you are, turn your face towards it.¹⁹⁷

The reversal is thus justified in the following way:

(1) The initial orientation of prayer had the goal of distinguishing Muslims with respect to dominant worship cults and marking their difference by detaching them from their practices (“We did not make that which you would have to be the qiblah but that We might distinguish him who follows the Apostle [i.e., the Prophet—Trans.] from him who turns back upon his heels”), and this difference was in common among practitioners of the new religion, Jews, and Christians.

(2) The moment has come to change the direction, and therefore to turn the prayer toward Mecca, toward the qibla of the sacred shrine.

(3) This reversal institutes the community as an intermediary nation.¹⁹⁸ What mediation is involved? The context gives an indication: “The East and the West belong only to Allah; He guides whom He likes to the right path. / And thus We have made you a medium (just) nation.” The new community introduces a mediation or middle between the East and the West. In the terminology that I am proposing, the median intermediary between East and West is the south—between Byzantium and Persia, for example; between Judeo-Christianity and idolatrous cults; between Romanity and its outside: the reversal of prayer constitutes Islam as the south of the world. The “orientation” has changed: no longer is there any pretension to (re)join the north or the west (to achieve a kind of merger with Judaism and Christianity—and Romanity). Nor is there any return to a previous state, any retreat or simple restoration (Muhammad enters Mecca as a conqueror and not as a penitent). From now on, between the Orient and the Occident something like a renovated south positions itself.¹⁹⁹

In returning toward Mecca, where does prayer turn? Let us go back to Jean-Luc Nancy’s thought, mentioned at the start of this passage, and propose that prayer (re)turns toward something that is the Kaaba, and therefore the Black Stone, and therefore the locus as locus, the absolute of place or absolute locality, compactness, homogeneity, self-contained presence of the locus as such, being of the place, being-place in its absoluteness. This is now my hypothesis,

Islam (re)turns toward the place. (h18) ²⁰⁰

Numerous signs help us to detect that this is not simply a retrogradation: Muhammad, who came back to Mecca, did not settle there but continued to live at Medina. It is the Hegira (departure, tearing away) and not the return that will lend its dating to the constitution of Islam as such—to the opening of an era. Finally, thanks to this extraction followed by this return, the place has gained something that had not been given to it earlier, namely, its uniqueness. After the arrival at Mecca, the other sanctuaries are emptied, their idols destroyed. In the Kaaba itself, which contained some, idols are destroyed²⁰¹—the Kaaba loses its local sanctuaries, all of them except for one, the Black Stone. What is kept is the presence and the compactness of the being-of-the-place. Islam comes back to the place, but to a place uplifted, in its absolute uniqueness, in its monotopism. Why so?

.   .   .

It seems that Muhammad had a peculiar relationship with the Kaaba. His family (or clan) was put in charge of guarding the place. His grandfather, Abd al-Muttalib, had lived very near to the building and seems even to have been active, in the building or very near to it (against the wishes of the religious dignitaries? or in spite of them?), as a dowser, making a watering place spring up, called the Zamzam Well, the story of which will be rewritten as a legend, as we shall see. By re-turning toward the Kaaba, Muhammad thus returns toward his ancestry, which is complex: the Prophet’s father died shortly before his birth, during his mother’s pregnancy. His mother and grandfather would die soon afterward. Notably, according to the legendary account, this father had nearly been sacrificed by his own father (like Isaac, and in a certain sense like Ishmael, by Abraham)—sacrificed, it is said, precisely because of this matter of the well. It was to his family’s or to a divine intercession that the future father of the Prophet, still a child, owed his life, and therefore Muhammad too owed his birth only to this intercession.²⁰² The grandfather making the source of water spring up (or spring up again, as we shall see) in the sanctuary had thus come close to depriving the world of its ultimate truth. But conversely the avoidance of catastrophe meant a consecration of this source.

Now, this matter of water sources had a function, namely, to establish a link, from the personal genealogy of the Prophet all the way back to another archaic and primordial genealogy of Islam as such and Arabism itself. Muhammad brings the ancestry of Arab peoples back to Ishmael,²⁰³ who was the first son of Abraham, born from the union of the patriarch with his servant Hagar when he was already old and deprived of heirs. Arabs are thus directly and eminently of Abrahamic descent, descendants of the elder branch. But Ishmael was rejected by his father: after the latter had a son (Isaac) from his wife Sarah, the eldest who was the son of a servant was cast out to the desert, deprived of migration and transportation to the promised land. This dismissal was a near murder: abandoned, deprived of water, the child is about to die before the eyes of his desperate mother when a divine intervention saves him, making a miraculous well spring up from which he can drink. Its Islamic re-constitution turns this source of water into the very same one that Muhammad’s grandfather rediscovers; it has in the meantime been covered up and plugged by desert sand.

This genealogical doubling carries multiple meanings.²⁰⁴ But it perfectly expresses the ambiguity and equivocal character of Islam’s position with regard to the other biblical religions: Islam stems from the same (Abrahamic) origin as they do. Ishmael’s descendants come from the first line of descent. This gives Islam and Arabism a kinship with Judaism and Christianity, making them their cousins and elders. But Islam is descended from the child rejected by Abraham and his relatives; he comes from the despised and excluded branch—his origin is a servant’s. We can say that Islam, the elder among the Abrahamic religions, is their repudiated daughter. The Islamic gesture amounts to claiming this double sense—of belonging to the Abrahamic family, and of superseding this repudiation, positing at the same time and indissociably its original connection with the Judeo-Christian world and its protest against rejection, exclusion, and a deviation that disinherited it.

This ambiguity is expressed in its relation to spaces. Islam comes from Abraham but not the Abraham who migrated. He is Abraham from before the departure, Abraham in the Arabian desert—the one who, according to legend, built the Kaaba or at least rebuilt it, since it was present from the time of the origin of the world, like the world itself, and had been devastated—as the world had—by the Flood. Ishmael is the child deprived of exile, doubly exiled, as it were—exiled from exile and from being chosen, sent back to the initial place. Now, according to Judaism, Abraham torn from his native land is divine transport itself, the ancestor carried away by God. As legend, this functions as a premise of exotheism. With the exodus, (before he does any land) Moses regains the gestures of tearing away and departing that were Abraham’s. In this sense, Islam is an Abrahamism turned around—re-turned toward the place, the welcoming open locus. Fethi Benslama has beautifully picked up this minute note in Genesis, when God hears Hagar crying, and saves the child from death: “What aileth thee, Hagar? fear not; for God hath heard the voice of the lad where he is.”²⁰⁵ What God hears is the child at this place, for which Benslama uses the wonderful term “place-child” [l’enfant-lieu]—we could call it the childthere [l’enfant-là]. This is the source: the opening of the place, the welcoming generosity of the place, the gift of the place. This source is primordial and regained, the ancestry is double, as is the spring, as is Muhammad’s origin, thus identified and combined, at the same place, the locus itself, locus of the locus, the Kaaba.²⁰⁶

It is toward the locus as locus that Islam re-turns the prayer: the place posited in the absoluteness and uniqueness of its being, of its being-place. Thus here, in a particularly tense fashion, the unity of place calls for and founds the unity of god—answering one another, rigorously. What the Black Stone posits (what posits itself there, as black-stone) is the dis-position around it of the local totality of beingness, the position of the totality of the world, a whole that is homogeneous, localized, and extended all around. The world is there—that is what the stone posits. The stone posits the unity and homogeneity of the world—one could say its transcendental immanence. But answering this unity, necessarily and without reservation, there is the unity of the god involved in its dis-position and guaranteeing it. Islam is strictly monotheism—monotheism, without reservation and imperviously:²⁰⁷ answering an absolute monotopism. Islam’s cosmic universalism is not one of transport (of transfer, of metaphor) but one of an extended world (around the stone), homogeneously bound to the stone and around it—literally, in extension. Not the east and not the west—median locus of the median community, and in-different with regard to the theologico-political, since the community, the umma, both transcendent and immanent (political and religious, if these words were not obviously unsuited),²⁰⁸ positions itself within the unity of place as the unity of the totality of the world, around the Kaaba.

.   .   .

What I wish to say, at bottom, is that Islam is not external to our history—or it is so in a peculiar way: from the inside. Islam has always wanted and perceived itself to be a moment, time period, or branch of the general economy of revelation—and thus of the general economy of the discovery of the world as world; it has construed itself as an alternative to the northwestern hypothesis, dominant then and now, which is why it has kept its value and its sense as an alternative to the world, or in the world, today. Islam seems external, but it is an exteriority torn away from our becoming, an exteriority that came about and is nonessential. Islam could have become “our” internal affair, in the way that the Germanic affair did so, although issuing from a space at least as foreign to Romanity (and probably more so). But a double obstacle prevented this integration: Islam did not convert, as did the Goth, Norman, and Vandal chiefs. It defined and posited itself as an alternative to Christianity—that which structures its constitution. The hypothesis, which is worth repeating, is that these two formulations are twins: if Islam did not convert, it is because it had invented itself as an alternative at the heart of our world and therefore could not convert without vanishing—whereas the Germans, although victors, could be baptized. In other words, Islam did not assimilate into this world, not because it was farther removed from it than the northern invaders, but on the contrary because it was closer. The exteriority of Islam marks its proximity. Islam, in our history, is the name of this exteriority that sprang up at the internal boundary of our world and swept into it. An internal exteriority (to make up this untenable alloy), which has produced the retraction of Romanity from which we came forth. This retraction cannot be dissociated from the appearance of Islam—from its rejection of the Judaic-Christian-Byzantine world, as well as from the previous situation, which made this choice a consequence and a symptom: the collapse of Rome, and its impossible relaunching—what Patočka termed the catastrophe. A certain constitution of a retracted Romanity is the outcome of this: self-contraction of the empire and the world, withdrawal to its land in the northwest, continentalization. All attempts to go back on this north-Occidental constitution in the face of Islam end up as failures—the Crusades, the French capture of Oran in 1830, Napoleon Bonaparte’s dreams. Whereas attempts to re-mark this retraction geographically and give it a continental circumscription all succeed—the Spanish Reconquista, the checking of the Ottoman armies at the sieges of Vienna, the liberation of Greece. It is the figure of our world that is now distributed on either side of this fracture.²⁰⁹

The name of this Romanity facing an Islam in retreat, which—in front of it, after it—will now be able to inscribe itself within our spaces and organize their constitution, is Europe.²¹⁰