Paimana

Sixth of Muharram, 1448 AH

In the first of these essays I was concerned with the one who acts, and in the second with the one who suffers and dies; I want now to consider a third figure, who is neither, and whom the tradition treats, I think wrongly, as a kind of appendix to the other two. This is the witness, the one who is kept alive at Karbalāʾ precisely in order to see. The second half of the day, the half that begins when the killing is over, is the half in which the women and children of the house, Zaynab foremost among them, are taken captive, stripped of their dead, marched to Kūfa and then to Damascus, and made, at every stage, to look at what has been done. The devotional literature tends to fold this into the aftermath, the long coda of grief that follows the event. I want to argue that it is not a coda at all but a distinct problem, and that the problem is, of all things, epistemological: it concerns a particular kind of knowing, for which the tradition I was raised in has a precise name, and for which the philosophy I work in has, quite independently, another.

Let me begin with the name the tradition supplies, because it is the more exact, and because almost no one outside a narrow circle of readers of Suhrawardī knows what to do with it. The Illuminationist philosophy distinguishes two kinds of knowledge, and the distinction is structural rather than a matter of degree. There is al-ʿilm al-ḥuṣūlī, knowledge by acquisition or representation, which is the ordinary case: I know the tree by having in my mind a form, a ṣūra, of the tree, a representation that stands in for the thing, so that what is present to me is strictly speaking not the tree but its likeness.[^1] And there is al-ʿilm al-ḥuḍūrī, knowledge by presence, which Suhrawardī, against the whole Peripatetic apparatus he inherited from Avicenna, takes to be the deeper and in fact the only fully secure kind. Its paradigm is the soul’s knowledge of itself. When I know myself, I do not know myself by means of a representation, a little image of me lodged somewhere that I then inspect; for one thing, the inspector would need its own representation, and we would be off to the races. I know myself because I am present to myself, immediately, with nothing in between, and the knowing and the known are, in this single case, the same.[^2] The mark of knowledge by presence is exactly this absence of the gap. Where there is a representation there is a space in which error can open, the space between the likeness and the thing; where the thing itself is present, that space is closed, and the knowledge is indubitable, because there is nothing for a check to get between.

Now I want to set beside this a point from much closer to home, from analytic philosophy of mind, which arrives at the same structure by a completely different route, and whose author would, I suspect, have been startled to find himself in this company. Kripke, in the course of arguing against the mind-brain identity theory, makes an observation about pain that is, I think, the exact analytic cousin of ʿilm ḥuḍūrī.[^3] For most things, he points out, we can drive a wedge between the appearance and the reality. Heat is molecular motion; but the sensation of heat is one thing and the molecular motion is another, and we can imagine the sensation occurring without the motion, or the motion without anyone to feel it, and it is this wedge, this gap between how it feels and what it is, that lets the identity be a contingent discovery rather than a necessary truth. With pain the wedge cannot be driven. There is no distinction between pain and the feeling of pain; a state that feels exactly like pain is pain; to be in such a state is already, and without remainder, to be in pain. Being felt is not an accident of a pain that might have been otherwise; it is essential to it, and Kripke asks, reasonably, whether any case of essence could be plainer.[^4] But notice what this comes to. To say that pain has no gap between its appearance and its reality is to say that pain is known by presence and not by representation; my pain is not re-presented to me, it is present, and that is why I cannot be mistaken about it. Kripke and Suhrawardī, eight centuries and a civilization apart, are pointing at one structure: there is a mode of knowing in which the thing is present rather than pictured, and the closing of the gap is at once its certainty and, though Kripke does not pause on this, its inescapability. I cannot doubt my pain; I also cannot get away from it; these are the same fact about presence.

There is a third witness to this same structure, and bringing him in is worth the detour, both because he states one consequence of it more bluntly than either the Illuminationist or the analytic philosopher of mind, and because he leaves me a principle I shall need at the end. Russell, distinguishing knowledge by acquaintance from knowledge by description, means by acquaintance a direct cognitive relation to an object with nothing in between, no inference and no intermediary; the things we are thus acquainted with, he holds, are our own sense-data, the contents of our own introspection, our thoughts and feelings and desires, perhaps the self, and certain universals. Everything else we know by description, as the so-and-so, the unique thing answering to a set of properties, the way I know Bismarck, whom I never met, as the first chancellor of the Empire. And Russell draws, in passing and as if it were obvious, the consequence that is anything but obvious and that I want at the centre of this essay: we are not acquainted with other people’s minds. The inner life of another is not among the things directly given to me; what I know of it I know by description, by inference from behaviour and expression and the analogy of my own case.[^11] This is, in a wholly different idiom, Suhrawardī’s claim that knowledge by presence is paradigmatically of one’s own states, and Stein’s that the other is given non-primordially; three thinkers who never read one another, arriving from three directions at the single proposition that the inner life of the other is, in principle, reachable only across the distance that representation installs. And Russell adds the thing the other two leave tacit, which he names the principle of acquaintance: every proposition we are able so much as to understand must be composed entirely of constituents with which we are acquainted.[^12] I ask the reader to hold onto that, because it will turn out to govern exactly what can and cannot be done with the testimony of a witness.

Here is the step that matters, and everything turns on it. Knowledge by presence is, in its paradigm, knowledge of one’s own states. My pain is present to me; your pain is not. Your pain I know, if I know it at all, by its expression, its cause, its likeness to mine, which is to say I know it ḥuṣūlī, by representation, across the distance that representation installs. And this distance, which looks at first like a poverty, a failure to reach you, is in truth a mercy, because it is the distance that makes your suffering survivable to me. I grasp your agony, but I do not undergo it; the representation buffers me from it; were the buffer removed, were your agony present to me with the inescapable immediacy that my own pain has, I do not think I could bear it. The phenomenologists mapped this buffer with great care and did not, I think, quite see that it was a mercy. Edith Stein, in her dissertation on empathy, argued that the act by which the other’s experience is given to me, Einfühlung, gives it non-primordially: the other’s grief is genuinely there for me, I am not merely inferring it, but it is given as the other’s and not as my own, the way a remembered experience is given as past and not as now lived.[^5] Husserl had said something similar with his term appresentation: the other is co-presented, indicated, never presented in the full original way my own stream is present to me.[^6] What both are describing, in the vocabulary of presence and its absence, is precisely the buffer. The structure of ordinary fellow-feeling is built so that the other’s suffering reaches me only non-primordially, only by a kind of representation, and the non-primordiality is what lets me witness another’s pain and remain standing. The distance is the condition of compassion’s being endurable.

I can now say what I take the cruelty of the second half of Karbalāʾ to be, and why it is a distinct thing from the killing. The killing is the suffering of the slain, and I considered that in the previous essay. The captivity is something else: it is the systematic destruction of the buffer. Zaynab and the women and the children are kept alive for the express purpose of seeing, and what they are made to see, the bodies of their men, the heads raised on spears and carried before them, the camp fired, the children dead of thirst, the infant struck in the throat whose case detained me earlier, is not delivered to them at the merciful distance of representation. It is forced upon them with the immediacy that belongs to ʿilm ḥuḍūrī, present, unmediated, and inescapable, as though it were their own pain, and worse than their own pain, because for one’s own pain there is at least the boundary of one’s own body, and here the agony present to the witness is the destruction of the very persons in whom her life was invested. The proper name for this cruelty is not the infliction of pain, though there was pain, but the imposition of presence: the engineering of a situation in which the catastrophe of the beloved is made present to the witness with the inescapability that properly belongs only to one’s own sensation. On the standard account such a thing should not be possible, since knowledge by presence is of one’s own states and the other is reachable only by representation; and it is exactly because the captivity forces what the soul has no defense against, presence-grade knowledge of another’s annihilation, that it overwhelms every protection the structure of the mind ordinarily provides. The torturers of Karbalāʾ, in keeping the women alive to watch, did not merely add grief to grief. They removed the distance that makes the grief of others bearable, and made the unbearable present.

There is a harder case folded inside this one, and it is the children. An adult witness, however shattered, keeps the capacity that will turn out to be the whole point, the capacity to convert what was present to her into testimony, to speak it outward; a small child has it barely or not at all. The reports place children among the captives, made to look on the bodies and on the raised heads of their kin, and the later tradition, in an elaboration whose chain is weak and whose currency is popular rather than early, fixes on a small daughter of al-Ḥusayn said to have died in the prison at Damascus upon being shown the severed head she had been crying for.[^10] Whatever the standing of that particular report, and I will have something to say in the next essay about the standing of reports of just this kind, the structure it dramatizes is firmly enough attested, and it is the structure I have been describing carried to its limit. Presence-grade knowledge of the catastrophe is forced on a soul that can do nothing with it, that cannot act on it, cannot hold it at arm’s length, and cannot yet turn it into the speech that would carry it out of her; it is presence with no exit, the wound without even the bitter dignity of being testimony. If the imposition of presence is the name of the cruelty, the child shown the head is its purest instance, the case in which presence completes its destruction and nothing at all is salvaged. I raise it not to harrow but because it marks the exact place where the redemption I am about to describe is unavailable, and so shows, by its absence, what that redemption is.

I have been describing forced witnessing as the imposition of presence in its purest form, and I owe the reader an objection, because there is a powerful body of thought that says nearly the opposite, and the objection, once answered, deepens the analysis rather than dislodging it. It comes from the study of trauma. The most extreme horror, on that account, is precisely what is not present: it overwhelms the capacity to take it in, it is missed at the moment of its occurrence and comes back only afterward, unbidden and unmetabolised, in the flashback and the compulsion to repeat; the traumatic is a hole in experience rather than a maximum of it, the event too much to be lived and therefore, at the time, not lived at all.[^13] If that is right, the witness did not know the catastrophe by presence; she failed to know it, and the failure is the wound. I think this is half true, and the true half is what rescues the analysis. The traumatic is not the absence of presence; it is presence that could not be converted. The reason the horror returns, uninvited, in the flashback, is not that it was missed but that it arrived with an immediacy admitting of no distance and no mediation, no rendering into the manageable form of a description that could be set down and filed; it was ḥuḍūrī and could not be made ḥuṣūlī, and so it remains, undischarged, repeating, precisely because the soul has not managed to do with it the one thing that would lay it to rest. The children are the limiting case, presence with no exit; and the merely traumatised, those who saw and cannot speak it, are stranded in the same place, in possession of an acquaintance they have not been able to turn into a description, the presence undischarged and therefore endlessly returning. The escape from that place, if there is one, is the conversion of presence into testimony.

And now the reversal, which the tradition encodes in a single word, and which I want to read as a philosophical thesis rather than a pious etymology. The Arabic for the one who is martyred is shahīd; the Arabic for the one who witnesses is shāhid; they are one root, and the act of dying-for and the act of seeing-and-attesting are, in the language, one act, shahāda.[^7] The usual gloss treats this as a happy accident of vocabulary. I think it is a claim about the event. The slain is called a witness because he testifies, with his death, to that for which he died; and the survivor who saw is called a witness because she testifies, with her words, to what she saw; and the dying and the seeing are not two events with the testimony tacked on but two forms of the one act of bearing witness, both of which the event requires, since a martyrdom to which no one attests is mute, and an attestation with no presence behind it is empty. Here the cruelty turns into its own remedy. The very presence-knowledge that was the substance of the cruelty, Zaynab’s ḥuḍūrī seizure of the catastrophe, is the one thing that makes the testimony possible, for only the one to whom the event was present can testify to it. Testimony is the labor of converting the witness’s knowledge by presence back into knowledge by representation, so that those who were absent may have, ḥuṣūlī, at the buffered distance, what the witness had ḥuḍūrī and at no distance at all. Zaynab in the court of Ibn Ziyād and then of Yazīd is the witness performing this conversion, making the event present to those who were not there, founding the transmission without which there would be no Karbalāʾ to speak of. The tradition’s own astonishing judgment, that were it not for Zaynab the event would not have survived as what it is, is the recognition that the act of the first essay required the seeing of this one, and that without the witness the martyr would have gone into the ground unattested.[^8]

It is worth being exact about what this conversion costs and what it buys, and Russell’s two knowledges let us be exact. Testimony is the manufacture of knowledge by description out of knowledge by acquaintance. What the witness possessed by presence she renders into a description, a structure of words answering to the event, which those who were absent can grasp without having been present, the way I grasp Bismarck. On the one side this is sheer loss: the acquaintance does not travel, only the description does, and the description stands to what the witness underwent as my secondhand knowledge of Bismarck stands to the man, at the full distance of the not-present. But Russell introduced description in the first place to mark what it makes possible, and what it makes possible is everything, for description is the faculty by which we pass beyond the narrow circle of our private acquaintance to a knowledge of what we have never met and could never meet. Here is the redemption, stated without sentiment. The presence that destroyed the witness cannot be shared; it was hers, ḥuḍūrī, and it perished with the immediacy that is the very mark of presence. What can be shared is the description she makes of it, and the description is the one thing capable of carrying the event out of the tiny circle of those who stood on that ground and into the keeping of the millions who did not. The mediation that is the loss of the presence is the very thing that universalises the event. Karbalāʾ belongs to everyone who was not there precisely because the witness turned her acquaintance into a description that could go where her presence could not; and the chains of report, and the gathering each year in which they are recited aloud, are nothing but the institution of that description, the machinery by which what one woman knew by presence is held, by representation, across fourteen centuries and a hundred countries. The loss and the gain are one act.

It is worth dwelling on the sentence in which Zaynab discharges this office, because it has a precision that the devotional reading, for all its reverence, tends to blur. Brought before Ibn Ziyād in Kūfa, with the severed head of her brother in the room, taunted by him as to how she had found what God had done to her house, she answered: mā raʾaytu illā jamīlan, I saw nothing but beauty.[^9] The pious ear hears patience, fortitude, the refusal to give the tyrant the satisfaction of her collapse, and all of that is present and none of it is wrong. But there is an exact epistemological claim lodged in the verb, and it is the verb that I want to insist on. She does not say “I judge it beautiful,” nor “I have come to believe that it was for the best.” She says I saw, raʾaytu, and what she saw, she saw by presence. The beauty is not a verdict she has reached from the outside, the way the theodicist of my second essay reaches his justification by inference from premises about the greater good; it is something given in the seeing itself, available only to the witness, only to ʿilm ḥuḍūrī, and unavailable in principle to anyone who comes to Karbalāʾ by representation. This is why her sentence cannot be borrowed. I cannot say “I saw nothing but beauty,” and I should distrust myself if I tried, because I did not see; I know Karbalāʾ ḥuṣūlī, across fourteen centuries, through chains of report, and the beauty she names is precisely the thing that does not survive translation into a chain of report. The witness alone can utter the sentence, because the witness alone was present.

Russell’s principle of acquaintance, which I asked the reader to hold onto, now tells us why this is so, and tells us with some precision. A proposition is understood only if it is built of constituents the hearer is acquainted with; so when the testimony reaches me, when I read the words “I saw nothing but beauty,” I can understand them at all only by reconstituting them out of the materials of my own acquaintance, my own seeings, my own griefs, the universal beauty as it has been given to me in the particular things I have in fact found beautiful. What I cannot do is import her acquaintance, the particular presence of beauty in that particular event, for that is exactly what I lack and what no proposition can supply, a proposition being able only to point, by description, to what the hearer must already possess by acquaintance on his own account. Here Russell’s admission that we are acquainted not only with particulars but with universals earns its keep. Beauty, the universal, I do know by acquaintance, in my own small instances of it, and that is why her sentence is not noise to me, why I can follow it. But this beauty, the universal as it was instantiated in the act she watched, in the fidelity of the slain beneath the descending arrow, was given to her as a particular and by presence, and a particular given by presence is the one thing description cannot hand on. So I am left able to understand her sentence and unable to occupy it, acquainted with the universal she names and shut out forever from the particular she saw, which is the precise measure of the distance between the witness and the mourner, and the reason her words, which I can parse without the least difficulty, name a thing to which I have no access whatever.

Let me be careful here, because it would be easy to hear this as a retraction of the previous essay, and it is not one. I argued there that the death of the infant cannot be justified, that the honest response to it is lament and not theodicy, and I hold to that without qualification. Zaynab is not theodicizing. She is not telling Ibn Ziyād that the slaughter was justified, that the books balance, that a sufficient good was served; her sentence makes no such claim, and the rest of her speech, which promises him the judgment of God, makes the opposite of such a claim. What she reports is not a justification of the suffering but the presence, in what she saw, of the act, the fidelity of the slain, the willing of the necessary that was the subject of my first essay; and the act, unlike the suffering, can be seen as beautiful without anything being justified, because its beauty is not the redemption of the horror by a greater good but a quality of the willing itself, present in the event to the one who was present to the event. The theodicist tries to make the suffering acceptable and fails, as he must. The witness sees, in the same event, something the theodicist’s method cannot reach, the act under the suffering, and she names it, and the name is the truth of what was present to her, not a defense of what was done.

So we are left, at the end, with the doubled fact of the witness, and I do not think the tradition has anywhere stated it plainly, though it everywhere feels it. To have been present at the death of the beloved, to have known it ḥuḍūrī, with the inescapable immediacy that belongs by right only to one’s own pain, is the deepest cruelty the tradition is able to imagine, the cruelty it reserved for the women and children of that house, the deliberate removal of the one distance that makes the suffering of others survivable. And the very same presence is the condition of the testimony, the sole access to the beauty, the thing without which the event would have died unwitnessed with the men who died in it. The witness is at once the one whom presence destroys and the one whom presence makes a witness; the seeing that wounds beyond bearing is the seeing that saves the event for everyone who will only ever know it at a distance. Perhaps this is why the tradition, which weeps without restraint for the slain, keeps for the one who saw a different and graver reverence, as though it half-knew that to have been the witness was the harder portion, the martyr being at least spared the seeing, and that she bore the harder thing so that the rest of us, who have only the chains of report, would have the event at all. When we mourn, we mourn ḥuṣūlī, by representation, at exactly the merciful distance that was taken from her. The least that this should teach us is that her sentence is not ours to repeat, that “I saw nothing but beauty” was the speech of presence and not a maxim of consolation, and that it cost her, to be able to say it, the very thing it would cost a soul to see.

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[^1]: For the distinction between al-ʿilm al-ḥuṣūlī (knowledge by acquisition or representation, by means of a form, ṣūra, of the known in the knower) and al-ʿilm al-ḥuḍūrī (knowledge by presence), and Suhrawardī’s rejection of the Avicennan representational model for the foundational cases, see Suhrawardī, Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq (The Philosophy of Illumination), §§114–117, and the Stanford Encyclopedia entry “Suhrawardi.” The indispensable study in English is Mehdi Ḥāʾirī Yazdī, The Principles of Epistemology in Islamic Philosophy: Knowledge by Presence (SUNY Press, 1992), which reads the doctrine through a broadly Wittgensteinian lens; see also Jari Kaukua, Self-Awareness in Islamic Philosophy: Avicenna and Beyond (Cambridge, 2015).

[^2]: That self-knowledge is the paradigm of knowledge by presence, and that a representational account of it generates a regress (the representation would itself require a knower present to it, and so on), is the core of Suhrawardī’s argument; Mullā Ṣadrā (d. 1045/1635) later extends ḥuḍūrī knowledge well beyond self-knowledge and makes it the hinge between epistemology and ontology. For Ṣadrā’s development, see the comparative literature on Suhrawardī and Ṣadrā on knowledge by presence.

[^3]: Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (1980), Lecture III, in the argument against the type-identity theory of mind and the contingent-identity reading of “pain = C-fiber stimulation.” The general strategy, that an apparent contingency in an identity statement involving rigid designators must be explained away as a confusion of the thing with a contingent mode of its presentation, is shown to fail in the case of pain, where the thing and its mode of presentation cannot be prised apart.

[^4]: I paraphrase Kripke’s question whether any case of essence could be more obvious than that being a pain is a necessary property of each pain. His point is that the identity theorist, to treat “pain = C-fiber stimulation” on the model of a contingent identity such as “Franklin = the inventor of bifocals,” must hold that some contingent property makes a given brain state into a pain, and so must hold that being a pain, even being a sensation at all, is contingent to it, which he takes to be plainly false.

[^5]: Edith Stein, Zum Problem der Einfühlung (On the Problem of Empathy, 1917), her dissertation under Husserl, defines empathy as the experience of foreign consciousness, a sui generis intentional act in which the other’s experience is given to me but non-primordially, as the other’s and not as originally lived by me, on the analogy of the way a remembered experience is given as past rather than as present. Stein, a Jewish convert to Catholicism, was herself murdered at Auschwitz; the resonance with the previous essay’s invocation of that catastrophe is not one I have engineered.

[^6]: Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, Fifth Meditation, on the constitution of the other ego through appresentation and “analogical apperception”: the other is co-presented or indicated, never given in the original, “primordial” manner in which my own conscious life is given to me. Husserl regarded his own treatment as no more than a first opening of the problem.

[^7]: On shahīd (martyr) and shāhid (witness) as one root (sh-h-d), and shahāda as at once the act of bearing witness and the act of martyrdom, see the standard lexica; the same doubling is present in the Greek martys, witness, from which “martyr” descends. I am treating the philological fact as a theological claim, that the event requires both the testimony of the one who dies and the testimony of the one who sees.

[^8]: The judgment that the survival and meaning of Karbalāʾ depend on Zaynab’s witnessing and her sermons is a commonplace of the tradition (“were it not for Zaynab, Karbalāʾ would not be what it is”). For her standing as a transmitter and teacher in her own right, note the praise ascribed to Imam ʿAlī b. al-Ḥusayn (Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn), that she was learned without instruction and possessed of understanding without having been taught (ʿālimatun ghayr muʿallama, fahimatun ghayr mufahhama).

[^9]: For the exchange in the court of Ibn Ziyād in Kūfa, the severed head present, and Zaynab’s reply mā raʾaytu illā jamīlan (“I saw nothing but beauty”), followed by her warning of the divine reckoning, see Ibn Ṭāwūs (d. 664/1266), al-Luhūf, and al-Majlisī, Biḥār al-anwār, vol. xlv. Some narrations situate the line in the court of Yazīd in Damascus; the verb, raʾaytu, “I saw,” is constant across them, and it is the verb on which my reading turns.

[^10]: The story of the small daughter of al-Ḥusayn (named, in the later sources, Ruqayya) who is said to have died in the Damascus prison on being shown her father’s head is a late and weakly attested element of the maqtal tradition, more popular than early. I cite it as the tradition’s chosen emblem of something that is itself firmly attested, the presence of children among the captives made to witness the aftermath, and not as a report I am leaning on. The standing of reports of this kind is the subject of the next essay.

[^11]: Bertrand Russell, “Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 11 (1910–11), and The Problems of Philosophy (1912), ch. 5. Acquaintance is for Russell a direct, non-inferential relation to an object; its objects include sense-data, the data of introspection, certain universals, and (he is uncertain) the self. He states explicitly that we are not acquainted with the minds of others and know them only by description, and that “the chief importance of knowledge by description is that it enables us to pass beyond the limits of our private experience.” The acquaintance with universals (with whiteness, with the relation before) is argued in the same work.

[^12]: Russell’s principle of acquaintance: “Every proposition which we can understand must be composed wholly of constituents with which we are acquainted” (The Problems of Philosophy, ch. 5). I use it to specify why the witness’s sentence can be understood by the absent and yet not occupied by them: understanding requires only that the hearer supply the constituents from his own acquaintance, which leaves the witness’s particular acquaintance, and with it the beauty she saw, strictly untransferable.

[^13]: The account of trauma as a missed or belated experience, “unclaimed,” returning in repetition and the flashback rather than being present and integrated when it occurs, derives from Freud’s notion of Nachträglichkeit (deferred action) and is developed in Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996). My claim is that this belatedness counts not against the presence-model but for it: it is what becomes of a ḥuḍūrī knowledge that cannot be converted into a ḥuṣūlī one, presence that, lacking an exit into description, has no choice but to repeat.