Allah is composed of many colors. Not only the natural ones—nipple brown, clit pink, semen white, puss green—and the unnatural ones—jejune hope, turgid justice, risible peace, odiferous faith, malefic love—but the ones forbidden to humanity, sealed forever in mirrors and eyes.
How did I learn the colors of Allah, their 99 billion names? I was taught, long ago, before numbers had filled the bucket of time, by Ali bin bon Dar al-Tawhid, the great chromatic theologian. The story was told of his journey to the palette that rests on the outer turrets of Jannah, occasionally tipping and spilling bright pigments on the earth; when that happens, there’s famine, pandemics, incest, nuclear mishaps, some common disaster—or a messiah’s born. Whatever falls falls, as the Sunnis say. Spilt crimson in Jannah, war in Tehran, as the Shiites say.
It has long been considered a critical debate in Islamic theology as to what conditions lend themselves to palette tipping and, more particularly, whether these conditions can be manipulated by humans to spill certain colors on certain parts of the earth—whether the holiest of men could even behave in such a way as to blend colors on the palette, producing new phenomena in history, thus seeing more of The Sovereign, All Compelling Seducer, and Protecting Friend. The more heretical among the speculators have mused whether the most extreme of ascetic lives might be able to produce new colors in Allah, thus enlarging possibilities for troubled mankind; these heretics, however, have frequently been subjected to gruesome and untimely ends.
The debate reached a fevered pitch in Fes in 941 when two scholarly camps at the University of Al-Karaouine feuded one night over how many shades of grey co-existed in Allah—the Purists staunchly defending 0 (The Merciful, after all, could know no grey), the Minimalists defending 99 (The Compassionate, after all, must contain all colors, though the grey within Him was overwhelmed by an infinity of light). All 66 scholars would have perished at the hands of each other if Ali bin bon Dar al-Tawhid himself hadn’t appeared above the carnage and said,
Alchemists, we, in our dark
night, labour to paint the world.
Ali bin bon Dar al-Tawhid! cried one of the few remaining academics who had not had his tongue hacked away. Ali bin bon Dar al-Tawhid! Tell us the story of your journey to the palette of Allah.
Ah, friends. Ah, grey
scholars. Ah, pale
pedants of twilit
moors. Ah, sad shades
of sunlight. Ah,
bleached and
cadaverous horrors of a
most wretched and
unreflective
moon. Ah, wan and
waning philosillies. Ah,
drab and doughy
…
This is the way Ali bin bon Dar al-Tawhid spoke, long and ponderously, in the manner of chromatic theologians, with a sentence’s last word frequently flung onto the next line. And he paused after his noble salutations and told them of his great journey … a story so drawn out, so convoluted and tangential, that the last scholar expired long before Ali bin bon Dar al-Tawhid was finished.
Some time later, weeks after he had described his perilous escape from earth—his emancipation from the Sartorial Angels, who stitch souls to bodies, his horrors with the fiery Archangels who incarcerated his soul in burning mud, his horrible combat with the voracious Principalities who guard the portals of our world; days after he had described his impossible flight from the sky—his mortal debates with the Powers who pace the clouds, his savage labors with the Virtues who roam the firmament, his chthonic humiliations at the wings of the Dominions who ceaselessly mock and abuse; but days before he described his cunning bolt from Allah’s mansions—his tortures by the Thrones who delight in the subjugation of man, his apoplectic miseries with the Cherubim whose food is swords, his energetic annihilations under the Seraphim who fly upward faster than ten thousand speeds of light; weeks before he described his destitution on the eternal plains, his desolation in the everlasting canyons, his devastation on the infinite mountains, and his final hopeless hapless approach to Allah’s holy palette, Ali bin bon Dar al-Tawhid noticed that the 66 scholars were dead and he was bereft of an audience. Yet, as he longed for students and more for a witness, he summoned me across the sad meadows of time—not because I was known or worthy, but because I wasn’t; not because I was talented or wealthy, but because I wasn’t; not because I was kind—and I came (who wouldn’t?) and sat listening below the great one’s many feet.
When Ali bin bon Dar al-Tawhid was done and had described the solitary palette and the 99 billion colors of Allah and under what conditions the palette tips and the glorious hues hidden from humanity forever, he wept from the sheer exhaustion of the retelling and I wept too, for no reason other than that weeping seemed appropriate.
And we parted ways, I back to the twenty-first century with its concrete and iPhones, he back to his sojourns in the elusive spectra of Allah, The Eternally Colorful, The Polychromatic, The Light.
