Trained AI Recycle Fresco. Photo credits: Stefan & Andreas Fraunberger
As this little investigation into Outviews on Sonic Eschatology is coming to an end, I would like to focus on Shaykh al-Akbar, Ibn Arabi, giving space to his views of sonic eschatology around 800 years before now:
As becomes evident in Ibn ʿArabī’s monumental work al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, an intermediate realm appears to be represented as a horn. Within this formative “instrument” of light, the entire creation is reflected in subtle mixtures of modulated states. Through the symbolic analogy of a physical instrument, corporeality is brought into spatial presence. The Arabic word ṣūr means horn in this context, but it derives from the same root as form—thus producing a wordplay between formative imagination and the apocalyptic trumpet.
It is apparent that the phenomenon of morning disturbances is more significant—and more tragic—than one might generally assume. What kind of involuntary awakening is meant here remains open. Al-Ghazālī seeks greater precision, and in the context of the apocalypse he writes the following in The Precious Pearl on Knowledge of the Hereafter:
“Then God, the Glorified and Exalted, will give life to Isrāfīl—peace be upon him. He will blow the trumpet from the Rock of the Holy House. The trumpet is a horn of light; it has fourteen coils, each one as vast as the circuit of the sun and the earth. Upon it are openings equal in number to the created spirits. Then the spirits of all creatures will emerge from it with a buzzing like that of bees and will fill everything between the two horizons”. (Ghazālī 2003)
Chittick writes that Seraphiel will blow into the barzakhī forms to bring about the resurrection. A ḥadīth states that this is a trumpet of light. “According to Ibn ʿArabī, this refers to the luminosity of the imagination, which stands in relation to corporeal reality.” It is a formal barzakh, a trumpet of light whose highest point is the all-encompassing cloud and whose lowest point is the narrowness of the earth. Within these corporeal forms, the jinn, the angels, and the unmanifest dimension of humanity will appear. (Chittick 1998)
“The form appeared, and thus confusion arose. Is this not the root? Does the form exist in the act of blowing, or does the blowing exist in the existence of the form?” (Ibn Arabi)
Horn of imagination (khayāl) as instrument and faculty. In diverse interpretations, the imaginative faculty (khayāl / al-ʿālam al-mithāl) is creative and real; the “horn” operates within that faculty to sound the forms that will be reified or transmuted at the day of resurrection. This makes eschatology experiential: the “last trumpet” is also an internal, imaginal event that can be described, analysed, and even “heard” in visionary experience.
“For this is a prodigious matter, where even the innermost hearts become bewildered. … Then the prescriber (of Revelation), who is the truthful speaker, called this thing – which is the (divine) Presence of the Barzakh to which we are brought after death and in which we directly witness our souls – a ‘Horn’ (al-sûr) and ‘Trumpet’ (al-nâqûr). Here the word al-sûr is (also) the plural of the word sûra, ‘form’. So (according to the Qur’anic accounts of the Resurrection) “it is breathed into the Horn/forms” (6:73, etc.) and “it is blown upon the Trumpet” (74:8). And the two of them (the “Horn” and “Trumpet”) are exactly the same thing, differing only in the names because of the various states and attributes (of the underlying reality).”
“You should know that God brought the Trumpet into existence in the form of a horn. It was named the ‘Trumpet’ in the way that things are named by the name of what is near to them or causes them. Since this horn is a locus for all the barzakh forms into which the spirits pass after death and in sleep, it was called sûr, the plural of ‘form’. Its shape is that of a horn: its high end is wide and its low end is narrow, like the shape of the cosmos. … The faculties pass with the spirit into that barzakh form in sleep and death. That is why the spirit perceives [in both of these states] by means of all its faculties without distinction.”
In terms of “sonic eschatology”: the trumpet/voice signals the shift from one order to another; the horn is the instrument of transition; the voice/sound (even if not overtly in these quotes) is implicit in the blowing, the “breathing into” the horn/forms (
nafakha-ṣūr).
As reality is a social construction and as the End is Society itself (arab: dīn), let's keep resonating astray symmetry within the form of the horn. Lets keep sounding on earth.
*This article is part of the project The Sonic Turn, co-financed by
AFCN. The project does not necessarily represent the position of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. AFCN is not responsible for the content of the project or the way its results may be used. These are entirely the responsibility of the funding beneficiary.
