Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [111]
Looking on, shaking his head, the rawi's mukawwiz mutters "Iram, khalas"...Iram, finished. The crowd sighs in relief and appreciation. The blind rawi faintly smiles as the mukawwiz's cup rings with dinars.
This climactic passage is packed with derivations, allusions, and lore. For example, our writer-rawi was no doubt familiar with the prophet Muhammad's antipathy to arrows, which in pagan Arabia were instruments of both gambling and divination. So when the 'Adites defy God's wind by shooting arrows at it, "the wind snatched their arrows and drove them into their throats." And the bizarre-seeming notion that the wind entered Khuljan's "mouth and came out his posterior" reflects an Arabian belief—still heard today—that the body is hollow. The concept of dying from a face-ful of wind goes back to the Enuma elish, the Babylonian creation myth in which a wind is driven into the goddess Tiamat's mouth; it gruesomely distends and destroys her.
Considered as a whole rather than as the sum of its parts, this passage is the payoff of a powerful myth. In the vision of mythologist Joseph Campbell, the essential function of myth is to pull individuals into accord with the universe. In warning the 'Adites, that is exactly what the prophet Hud tries to do. They could not care less; they revel in materialism, ignoring God. If anything, they consider themselves above any cosmic order. With the end clearly in sight, the 'Adites still scream, "We are mightier than you, Lord of Hud!"
The response, of course, is: God is mightier than you. And He proves it, wiping the 'Adites from the face of the earth.
But not all of them. The tale takes pains to add that Hud and a number of his followers survive, so that (as Joseph Campbell would have it) they may pursue, unhindered and anew, an accord with the universe.
In the world of early and medieval Islam, the story arc of sin, then warning, then more sin, then punishment was by no means unique to "The Prophet Hud." When it came to moral weapons, Muhammad enthusiastically chose the fear of God. In the Koran, time and time again, he tells of prophets spurned and cities and civilizations consequently destroyed by an angry God. The pattern goes back to Adam, who in Islam is not only a progenitor but a prophet. Speaking from his own recent and humbling experience, Islam's Adam instructs mankind in the correct way to live. But mankind never quite gets the message—despite the bad end that comes to Sodom and Gomorrah, despite the onset of catastrophes foretold by Noah, Joseph, Hud, Saleh, even Jesus (Isa in Islam).
Lines 178–198: "Kaab al Ahbar said: One day I was in the Prophet's Mosque..."
Though the curtain has inexorably rung down on Ubar/lram, there is more to the story. Adhering to good dramatic form, the climax of "The Prophet Hud" is followed by an anticlimax, an epilogue that eases the reader (or listener) back to the present. Moreover, the reader is assured that indeed there was such a place as Ubar, such a prophet as Hud. The evidence offered is Hud's tomb in Yemen's valley of the Hadramaut.
To this day, Hud's tomb is the most popular pilgrimage site in southern Arabia. Throngs of pilgrims offer incense at "the opening through which a thin man may pass." And they know well the story of the wicked city that denied the message of God's apostle Hud. Ubar may have been wiped from the face of the earth, but it was not—and is not—forgotten.
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Notes
Prologue
1. "When I had finished reading the book...," Rev. Mr. J. Cooper, trans., The Oriental Moralist or the Beauties of the Arabian Nights Entertainments (Dover, N.H.: Printed by Samuel Bragg, Jr. for Wm T. Clap, Boston, 1797), p. i.
2. "That God holds you over the pit of hell...," Clarence H. Faust and Thomas H. Johnson, eds., Jonathan Edwards (New York: American Book Co., 1935), p. 164.
3. "We set sail with a fair wind ...," "Exploring the town's fantastical palace ...," "It was about three