Notes Towards a Deep History of Night and Darkness
The Premodern Night Through an Islamicate Lens, i.: Danger and Disclosure in the Dark
For the overwhelming majority of human history, the fall of night has meant the descent of deep darkness and a necessary reliance on natural sources of light—the moon and stars, unless of course the night is cloudy—or some kind of artificial illumination provided by a flame. In the absence of even starlight, and even with some sort of nocturnal illumination, other senses were crucial for navigating (or trying to navigate!) night and other types of darkness. Touch, hearing, even scent and taste are heightened in truly deep darkness, with a range of phenomenological effects. Yet even in our modern world of high energy usage and powerful electronic technologies of illumination the dark restricts our senses, much remains unseen, and we feel out of place, the possiblity of risk and danger always lingering no matter how accustomed or attuned we might be to a given darkened environment. Humans are diurnal creatures, the night is always to different degrees foreign territory.
Yet even if there are universals of human experience in night and situations of darkness, like virtually every other aspect of our lives the human experience of the night and darkness has been shaped by cultural, political, and other dynamics that are not universal across human societies and time. The most obvious structuring contingencies are sources of artificial illumination—from their beginnings with the discovery and harnessing of fire, which no doubt served to help keep Pleistocene carnivores and scavengers at bay in the deep past of humanity, to contemporary electronic forms of illumination small and great, humans have used many different devices and techniques to illumine some part of the darkness. The reasons for using artificial illumination have themselves been shaped not just by technological availability but by many other concerns, ranging from the desire to stay up past dark telling stories around the campfire to a desire to control and police night-time streets in urban areas. Ideas of what the night is for, and how the night is to be passed, long ago ceased to be universal, with both pre-modern and modern societies varying a great deal in how they socially constructed night-time, technology as often as not following in the wake of cultural norms.
As such it would be impossible in a series of short essays to try and encompass the whole of the ‘premodern night,’ or to make overly general statements about it. As is often the case, in many ways it has become easier to talk about the ‘modern night’ in global terms, or, at least, as divided up between high-energy expending societies and those at the lower end of the scale, a division that is readily apparent in photographs of the entire planet at night, revealing the often very stark energy divides, such as that between North and South Korea. And some aspects—the proliferation of the glowing little screens of smartphones, for instance—have rapidly become as close to universal as perhaps any single technology, even electrical lighting, is likely to ever come.
In order, then, to talk about aspects of the premodern night, I’ve decided to first of all divide things up into the ‘recent’ past and the Paleolithic to Neolithic past, with the emergence of urban life an especially important watershed in the human experience of the night; second, for the recent past I’ve limited myself largely to a discussion of the historical period and place I know best, namely, the early modern (roughly 1450-1820 AD) period of the Ottoman Empire and its close neighbors. I’ve divided my exploration of night and darkness in the Ottoman milieu into two parts: today’s focuses on some of the perils of the (primarily urban) night, as well as its possibilities of disclosure, while the next installment will look at the interface of night and (spatial) darkness with ritual and new forms of early modern social life. While I will be compiling an annotated bibliography at the end of this essay series, I should note here that the history of the Ottoman night has recently received excellent monograph-length treatment in Avner Wishnitzer’s As Night Falls: Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Cities after Dark. I’ll be touching on many of the same notes here, and am much indebted to Wishnitzer’s work in thinking about this topic.
As Wishnitzer and others have noted, the early modern world saw a real divergence in the experience of the urban night in terms of Western European experience and that of other parts of the world, including the Ottomans. While urbanization was an important phenomenon of the early modern Ottoman world, the urban centers of that world would not see widespread artificial illumination until well into the nineteenth century, whereas street lightning began in early modernity in various parts of Western and Central Europe (the countryside of course would remain dark for much longer). Urban dark is a rather different creature than that of the countryside: if in the countryside and wilds risks included things like falling prey to predators more suited for nighttime hunting, or getting lost in a trackless area, or perhaps falling into the hands of bandits, the city’s risks were almost entirely of human origin. The deep darkness of night, particularly after most human activity on the streets and in the markets had entirely ceased (certainly by midnight or so), made for the possibility of theft and violence and illicit activities, though who was concerned about which of course varied. In general, the early modern period saw increased attempts by Ottoman officialdom to control the night, or, at least, to try to control it. The following story, which I have selected and translated from the Riḥla (technically travel narrative, but as this story suggests, a considerably more inclusive text than its genre classification woudl suggest) of a Kurdish author of the late eighteenth century, Ṭāhā ibn Yaḥyā al-Kurdī. In addition to his extensive narrations of his travels and sojourns around the Ottoman lands, a substantial portion of his book is occupied with hagiographic accounts of holy men he had encountered either directly or in second-hand fashion.
In the story below, the saintly shaykh—who was also something of an entreupeneur in addition to being an aspirant to sainthood—‘Abd al-Raḥman is helped out by another, better known saint, Shaykh ‘Alī al-Nabakī, resident in what was then a village north of Damascus. Shaykh ‘Alī was a majdhūb saint, somewhat akin to the ‘holy fools’ of Orthodox Christian traditions. The majdhūb was often an unpredictable saint, frequently casting off normal, sharī’a-compliant behavior due to his (or her—there were female majdhūbas) immersion in God.1 Perhaps unsurprisingly, stories of majdhūb saints often take place at night, as this one does.
Here is the story, discussion following; I’ve footnoted terms likely to be unfamiliar:
Among [Shaykh ‘Alī al-Nabakī’s] miraculous deeds was that Shaykh ‘Abd al-Raḥman had a khalwa2 in the Sumaysāṭiyya Khānqāh3 in which he would sleep on account of the ḥammām [he helped manage], as he oversaw the Ḥammām al-Silsila al-Kabīra in that neighborhood. One time he arose and left the Sumaysāṭiyya Khānqāh and walked to the ḥammām in order to open it up at the ‘time of the exchange.’4 It was at this point in the night, as he was walking towards the ḥammām but before he got there, it being about fifty paces between the aforementioned khānqāh and the ḥammām, unexpectedly men of the night patrol were passing by, and when they saw him they said to him, ‘Who are you O shaykh?’ He replied, ‘I am ‘Abd al-Raḥman, master of this ḥammām, I’m going to open it, my room is in this khānqāh.’ But they did not leave him alone, but instead said, ‘We have been commanded by the governor of this city that if we see anyone at this time or at any point in the night without a lantern to seize him and convey him with us to the governor’s house. Then if he gives permission in the morning we’ll free you.’
He replied to them, ‘O brothers, the people all know me, praise me to God, I am not a thief nor engaged in anything illicit, and secondly my place is so close I have no need of a lantern. If I come to the governor’s house with you then certainly the pasha will know of it, and I fear that he will harm you or that it will be a cause of insult for you, so just release me and let me go about my business!’
But they did not remove themselves from his path, so he cried out, ‘O God take account of us! There is no power and no might save in God the exalted and mighty!’ The had not walked more than seven paces than there came suddenly a loud voice saying, ‘Hey so-and-so,’ using shocking utterances, ‘release ‘Abd al-Raḥman and go on your way, you such-and-such!’ I knew it was the voice of Shaykh ‘Alī al-Nabakī. I turned and there was Shaykh ‘Alī next to me. He took me by the hand and walked with me returning to the khānqāh, saying to me, ‘Those who did this, they wouldn’t leave you alone and let you go on?’ I said, ‘Yes,’ and looked back towards them as we reached the door of the khānqāh, and I saw that they had been brought to heel, struck mute, laid out transfixed on the ground. The shaykh spoke words of reprimand to them but they do not reply or move, and I knew that the shaykh had in that moment laid them out flat and struck them mute, so I kissed his hand and said to him, ‘O sayyidī, free them and release them to go on their way,’ so he cried out, ‘Hey such-and-such, go now without a word!’ Shaykh ‘Alī and I were at the door of the khānqāh, so I said to him, ‘If you please O sayyidī let us go sit down so you can be refreshed in my khalwa,’ so I assumed that he had just come from Nabak, but he said to me, ‘You go on in, you’re under no obligation to me to say “Go into the khānqāh before me.”’ So I opened the door then turned back to Shaykh ‘Alī but I did not see him. I returned running to the ḥammām but encountered no one, and I knew that he had gone back to Nabak just as he came in one step on account of me!5
Several salient features of the early modern Ottoman night are visible in this story: one, that the night, even the very deep and dark of the night, was not totally empty of human activity. Then as now some people had to wake in the deep dark of night and get to work. Shaykh ‘Abd al-Raḥman was not unique in needing to be out and about in the dark. And it was truly dark—there are hints in the story of the people in it using other senses besides sight; we get the sense that ‘Abd al-Raḥman could make his way to his place of work because the distance was not at all great, it could be navigated based on memory, touch, and hearing, with minimal contribution from sight.
But the night was perilous. Crime could take place with relative impunity at night given the difficulty of identifying assailants, with individuals and neighborhoods investing in gates, walls, locks, and bars on windows, individual quarters locking up at night (a long tradition in Islamicate cities which continued into the early modern Ottoman period). The night could in cities as much as the countryside also invite the activity of jinn, sometimes beneficial but usually malicious. The risk in this story, however, does not come from thieves or malign spirits, but from a source quite familiar to modern audiences: agents of the state roaming the night looking for violators of the law to arrest or at least extract a fine. Shaykh ‘Abd al-Raḥman’s initial strategy will also be familiar to anyone who has tried to talk his or her way out of a ticket. For even if the technology for controlling—or at least imagining to control—the night did not yet exist, we might say that early modern states, including the Ottomans, increasingly aspired to such control, and it is one such measure—the lantern-carrying night patrol, a fixture of Ottoman cities from the seventeenth century forward—of which ‘Abd al-Raḥman ran afoul. His reaction suggests that these night patrols were not necessarily seen as manifestations of officialdom’s concern with public safety, but as a sort of shake-down scheme. Fortunately for ‘Abd al-Raḥman the night did not belong to the emergent state, as the second half of the story reveals.
For if crime (the implicit target of Ottoman night patrols) operated in the night, the night also belonged to the holy man, to the saint, and it is through a saint’s miraculous intervention that ‘Abd al-Raḥman’s prayer is answered. The association of saint with dark and night is indeed a long and deep one, reaching back, arguably, into the distant pre-urban, pre-agricultural past, though that is a speculative theme we will explore further in future weeks. Here the saint appears in the middle of the darkness, having miraculously crossed the geographic space between Nabak and Damascus, rescuing the supplicant from the perils of the night. Shaykh ‘Alī the majdhūb owns the night, we might say: like other majdhūbs he is rather socially deviant, such that our author does not describe the specific words he uses to disparage the night patrol, but we know from other sources that majdhūbs were known for their salty vivid language and unusual gestures and bodily deportment, their practices often indistinguishable from that of the ‘deviant dervishes’ with whom they sometimes rubbed shoulders. They owned the night because they already inhabited a sort of divine darkness, their reason overwhelmed by divine presence, their senses and bodily actions changed and heightened by this experience. Much like the night itself, the majdhūb was a figure of ambiguity, potentially dangerous through his actions, imprecations, or socially unsettling presence, but also a potent source of blessing and divine power.
The saint, and especially the majdhūb saint, unbound by social convention or fear of state power, is especially well suited for the night, for darkness, be it the darkness of the cave-like khalwa, the luminous darkness of the nocturnal dream (more on that below), or the literal darkness of the late-night street or countryside. Not only is night often associated, even in the modern world to some degree, with the performance of especially pious devotion (it’s not easy staying awake for prayers!), an aspect we’ll explore in the next installment, it is an ideal space for the saint to display his or her powers. The night summons extra-sensory abilities, and it contains dangers that in the premodern world had few other potential solutions. In the above story, the deep night of Damascus becomes a site of Shaykh ‘Alī’s self-disclosure.
If nighttime could often serve a space of disclosure for the saint within the ambit of the physical, ordinary sensory world it was also the time in which another means of exceptional disclosure tended to operate, the meaningful dream given by God to slumbering believers. While not limited to the night-time, the meaningful inspired dream was for premodern inhabitants of Islamicate lands principally a matter of the dark of night. Others have written extensively on this subject so I will not attempt a thorough discussion, but suffice to say for premodern (and many modern) Muslims in particular (though Islamicate Christians and Jews were also participants in this cultural complex) the world of the dream was as potentially real and powerful as that of waking life, and perhaps even more real and significant, in a way that I think is hard for those of us who inhabit cultural worlds in which dreams are much reduced in meaning.
The dream was both powerful and problematic, and in this it much resembled the danger and the potency of darkness and night. One needed to know whether a dream was genuinely given by God, whether the figures one met therein were truly holy people or not, and then what precisely the dream meant, since dreams tended not to be very literal but rather symbolic and demanding of interpretation. Premodern—as well as many contemporary—Muslims often actively trained themselves to have better recall of dreams, and I suspect that while the many dream accounts (including quite expansive dream diaries of a sort, published for public consumption) received some modification of a literary nature we ought not discount their basic veracity and the ability of people to actively recall such things thanks to years of self-training and participation in a cultural milieu that privileged the dream. Even with such self-training the dream could be frightening and destabilizing; there are many stories in autobiographical works and hagiographies and other sources of dreamers awakening and immediately hastening to a guiding shaykh for interpretation, including in the dead of night.
As such we might well think of the ‘landscape of sleep’ for many a premodern Islamicate dreamer in the night as being, ironically, better ‘illuminated’ than our own, or, at least, illuminated in a different way. If some moderns still try to recall their dreams, they usually do so in order to have them interpreted in a psychological manner, not as portents of or messages from the world beyond the temporal world. One’s dream experiences are ‘real’ in only the barest sense of anything perceived by the human brain being real in terms of being produced by a material organ, they do not directly connect to reality otherwise. For the dreamer in the Ottoman night however the world of the dream was indeed real, the symbolic depictions of people and things indeed participating in those realities in some fashion, and giving true information about one’s self, the world, and God.
It is worth returning, before we conclude, to the underlying material reality of the Ottoman early modern night: it was lit only by the natural illumination of heavenly bodies or by candles, lanterns, and fires, with only the very wealthy able to splurge on abundant illumination deep into the night. The night was not the proper habitat of ordinary humans: it might give some humans cover, and it could provide, as we’ll discuss next time, a potent means of creating specialized ritual and social space thanks to what artificial illumination was available plus, from the mid-sixteenth century on, the sleep-defeating powers of coffee. Within an urban context at least, it was really only those on the edges who truly inhabited the night: the criminal, the agent of the state (with the two often close enough in many people’s experiences!), the holy person. Darkness gave rise to danger, but also to disclosures—of structures of power, their violation, and of powers beyond the temporal, holy and unholy. It was the space of the dream, of an inner landscape overlapping with and activated by the night. The night could destroy, and it could reveal, and it could do both at the same time.
For more on the majdhūb, see the following essay of mine: The Hermit of Ya’bad and His Marvelous Coffee.
That is, a cell or room; khalwa often has a ritual meaning, as a small built space in which a sufi can spend a forty-day retreat, but here the khalwa is primarily of a functional utilitarian nature.
A type of sufi lodge or housing; here it’s pretty clearly functioning as the equivalent of a dormitory or rental housing.
A time marking apparently specific to Damascus, falling in the pre-dawn hours of the night—so, very dark!
Ṭāhā ibn Yaḥyá al-Kurdī, Riḥlat al-shaykh Ṭāhā ibn Yaḥyá al-Kurdī al-tarbīya wa-al-sulūk fī tarājim mashāyikh al-taṣawwuf alladhīn iltaqāhum al-muʿallif fī riḥlatihi al-ʿilmīya wa- al-rūḥīya, ed. by ʿAlī Najm ʻĪsá (Beirut: Dār al-Kitāb al-ʻIlmīyah, 2007).