Divine Intersign(s)

The Janus-faced practice of double critique targets the dialectic between “Western” and “Islamic” epistemes that lies at the heart of Khatibi's sociological Weltanschauung. Amid the internal contradictions of French imperialism and subsequent consolidation of power under the emerging forces of decolonization, one tributary of Moroccan Islam leads to a doctrinal form of political theology that venerates the past.Footnote ³ Khatibi describes this ideology, often misidentified as Salafism, as “le traditionalisme” or “la métaphysique réduite à la théologie” (“traditionalism” or “metaphysics reduced to theology”; Maghreb pluriel 24; Plural Maghreb 12).Footnote ⁴ This Heideggerian “onto-théo-logie” (“onto-theo-logy”; 120; 75) supplants divine ontology by enshrining God's qualities of being “immuable et éternel, invisible et absent” (“unchanging and eternal, invisible and absent”; 29; 15) into rigid religious dogma. Such a recursive reliance on mythic historical precedent goes against the future-oriented nature of pensée-autre—a critical ethos that Khatibi upholds across his interdisciplinary oeuvre. Contextualizing his own excavational approach to Islamic history, he notes, “Toute lecture ou relecture de notre patrimoine (tourāth), et tout regard posé sur cette gloire du passé, n'ont de poids décisif pour nous que comme levier à une double critique” (“Every reading or rereading of our heritage [turath] and every gaze at this glory of the past can have a decisive value for us only as a lever to a double critique”; 20; 8).

While the spectrum of practices and beliefs encompassed by Sufism have long been a part of the diverse social and spiritual landscape of Moroccan Islam,Footnote ⁵ Khatibi charts an alternative to ontotheology in the evolution of Islamic metaphysics into “une ontologie proprement mystique” (“a properly mystical ontology”; 27; 13, trans. amended).Footnote ⁶ Associated with transcendental philosophies of being and esoteric hermeneutics, known as تأويل (taʾwīl), this ecstatic thought and practice—championed by such figures as the jurist-theologian Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (1058–1111)—“conduit l’épistémè arabe classique jusqu’à ses limites théologiques” (“drove the classical Arab episteme to its theological limits”; 27; 13).Footnote ⁷ As this tradition “subvertit la théologie et la décentre” (“subverts theology and decenters it”), Khatibi problematically opposes it to so-called “islam orthodoxe” (“orthodox Islam”), which, he argues, “refoule … la pensée mystique” (“represses … mystical thought”; 136; 87). Although he dramatically cleaves Islam into orthodox and mystical strains—a move also at the heart of French colonial policies in the Maghreb and the neo-orientalist rhetoric of the European RightFootnote ⁸—Khatibi does so in order to demonstrate how both trajectories originate from and adapt the divine intersign.Footnote ⁹ He therefore invokes historical figures—such as al-Ghazālī and the controversial Persian mystics Manṣūr al-Ḥallāj (858–922) and Shihāb al-Dīn Suḥrawardī (1154–1191)—not in a gesture of nostalgic remembrance for the purported golden age of Islam, but rather to probe the imaginative potentiality of the mystical “expérience extatique de l’être” (“ecstatic experience of being”; 30; 15) in relation to pensée-autre.Footnote ¹⁰

Khatibi's bifurcated analysis of Islamic metaphysics highlights the centrality of semiotic visuality—and particularly the sites of reading and writing—to both ontotheology and mystical ontology. As the privileged language of revelation, Arabic undergirds a metaphysical order in which divine speech is inscribed within—but also crucially exceeds—the Qurʾan, whose miraculous nature hinges on both its revelatory origins and its fundamental aesthetic inimitability, or الإعجاز (al-iʿjaz). The Arabic language, like the holy text itself, circumscribes a cosmogonical hermeneutics of “le visible à l'invisible, le présent à l'absent, la terre au ciel” (“the visible and the invisible, the present and the absent, earth and heaven”; 21; 9). If the textualist turns to the Qurʾan as the ultimate fount of signs reflecting divine unknowability and presence-absence,Footnote ¹¹ then the mystic at once looks inward and outward: “il étoile l'homme et l'univers de signes visibles, audibles, palpables, bref, lisibles” (“he lavishes visible, audible and tactile—in short, readable—signs upon humankind and the universe”; La blessure 18; “Excerpts” 335).Footnote ¹² By extending Qurʾanic modes of reading, Khatibi redefines a mystical tradition that maps Islamic hermeneutical principles onto material signs across the corpus of divine creation.

Khatibi's study on Arabic calligraphy, written in collaboration with Mohamed Sijelmassi, demonstrates the capaciousness of Islamic modes of reading by accentuating the intertwining of orality and textuality within Qurʾanic revelation and scripture. It opens with the assertion that “[a]vant de croire, tu est d'abord un lecteur” (“[y]ou are first and foremost a reader, then a believer”; L'art calligraphique 6; Splendor 6). Khatibi notes not only that the name Qurʾan itself references literacy but also that the first word of the holy text revealed to the Prophet Muhammad through the angel Gabriel was the command إقرأ (iqra’)—signaling both to read and to recite—from the sura al-ʿAlaq (96.1).Footnote ¹³ A kind of intersemiotic urtext, the Qurʾan explicitly “se conçoit comme une théorie radicale du signe, de la Parole et de l’Écriture; al-qur’ân: lecture, déchiffrement et récitation du signe révélé” (“defines itself as a radical theory of the sign, of the Word and of Writing; al-qurʾân—the reading, parsing and recitation of the revealed sign”; La blessure 17; “Excerpts” 334–35). It does so through its presentation as a divine speech act that is (re)mediated through writing, reading, and recitation across the semiotic terrains of mind, body, and spirit.

Qurʾanic intersemiotics are exemplified in the figure of the قلم (qalam)—a writing implement signifying divine knowledge in the sura al-ʿAlaq, which declares:

Referred to as the “langue de la main” (“tongue of the hand”) and “l’âme de la parole” (“soul of the spoken word”; La blessure 178, 181; “Excerpts” 339, 40), Khatibi's writing instrument sacralizes and inscribes divine logos. His repeated intertextuality with this specific sura stresses the intersemiotic nature of Qurʾanic knowledge practices across the acts of reading, reciting, and writing, while upholding “the will and ability to acquire knowledge” as a somatic and ethical imperative of human existence within a Qurʾanic episteme (Asad 1099).

The importance of embodiment across Qurʾanic modes of knowledge production is most explicitly figured in the Prophet Muhammad as the bodily vessel of divine revelation. Khatibi clarifies how the moment of revelation itself speaks to embodiment's crucial role in Islamic ontotheology:

Quoting from the sura al-Israʾ, or “The Night Journey” (17.36), about the mystical evening voyage of the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Jerusalem, Khatibi bridges ontotheology and mystical ontology by demonstrating how the Qurʾan celebrates the corporeality of ecstatic experience.Footnote ¹⁵

Khatibi's reading of divine logos as infused into prophetic breath (La blessure 178; “Excerpts” 339) and woven within the very fibers of the body underscores the materiality of the “intersigne prophétique” (“prophetic intersign”; 17; 335), as well as how the Qurʾan more broadly indexes the body as the primary site for the cultivation of spiritual knowledge. The body serves as a repository for the Qurʾan to be veiled and unveiled as an epistemic object. This pertains to the miracle of prophetic revelation, in addition to how that experience is conjured in the bodies and spirits of believers—hence the veneration of the prophet Muhammad as the archetypal Muslim mystic. Bridging the interiority of mind and spirit with the exteriority of the practicing body, the mystic taps into the wellspring of divine ipseity encapsulated by the principle of oneness, or توحيد (tawḥīd). Crucially, for Khatibi the “désir d'anéantissement dans le visage inaccessible d'Allah” (“desire for annihilation in the inaccessible face of Allah”; Khatibi and Sijelmassi, L'art 129; Khatibi and Sijelmassi, Splendor 129; trans. amended) exposes the ways in which transcendental mysticism delimits the generative possibilities of existence. His double critique of Islamic metaphysics subsequently reveals the critical and imaginative limitations of both ontotheology and mystical ontology in relation to pensée-autre. It is in popular and material art forms, such as calligraphy, textiles, and tattoos, that he directs us to practices that differentially mobilize the Qurʾanic dialectic of the visible and invisible. While rooted in Islamic traditions, these intersemiotic sites lend themselves to a hermeneutics of suspicion aligned with an ethics of the unthought and unnameable.

Calligrams of the Soul

Khatibi and Sijelmassi's groundbreaking study on Arabic calligraphy builds on “l’écriture divine” (“divine modes of writing”; L'art 18; Splendor 18; trans. amended). embedded within Islamic metaphysics to examine the complex intersemiotics of the art form.Footnote ¹⁶ Disavowing the orientalist assumption that calligraphic arts developed to combat Islamic interdictions against human and divine representation, Khatibi instead notes how early calligraphers described their practice as “une géométrie de l’âme énoncée par le corps” (“a geometry of the soul expressed through the body”; 14; 14; trans. amended). When approached through the decentering lens of double critique, calligraphy reveals itself as an exemplary form of Khatibian pensée-autre.

The dialectic of the ظاهر (ẓāhir ([exoteric or manifest]) and the باطن (bāṭin [esoteric or hidden])—both being أسماء الحسنى (asmāʾ Allah al-ḥusnā), or among god's ninety-nine holy names—underlies “la grande mystique islamique en tant qu'unité extatique de Dieu, du Texte et de l'islam” (“the great Islamic mysticism as the ecstatic unity of God, the Text and Islam”; Khatibi, Maghreb pluriel 23; Khatibi, Plural Maghreb 10). This symbiotic interplay is also essential to Khatibi's analysis of calligraphy as an art form dwelling at the threshold between text and image, saying and unsaying, visible and invisible, knowable and unknowable. An homage to divine utterance and creation, calligraphy's ornamental obfuscation mirrors the ways in which the Qurʾan itself “est présenté à la fois comme une origine donnée et dérobée, absente et présente, voilée par une main céleste” (“is presented as simultaneously revealed and concealed, absent and present, veiled—but by a celestial hand”; 42; 42). In this sense, calligraphy is “une peinture secrète de l’âme” (“a secret painting of the soul”) and act of worship that “faire venir infiniment ce qui est déjà là” (“bring[s] out in infinite variety what is already there”; 169; 169; trans. amended). The art form not only illuminates the sacred text but crucially embodies the “géométrie à parabole divine” (“parabolic geometry of the divine”) as “une expérience mystique” (“a mystical experience”; 169, 170; 169, 170).

Khatibi describes the calligraphic trace as a form of “polygraphie” (“polygraphy”) whose oversignificatory nature, or sursignifiance, “conjugue avec/au-delà de la langue” (“links and exceeds language”) across multiple semiotic systems and registers of meaning: phonetic, semantic, geometric (La blessure 186 ; “Excerpts” 343). This excess of meaning is perhaps most visible in the case of the حروف مقطعات (ḥurūf muqaṭṭaʿāt)—shortened or abbreviated letters opening twenty-eight Qurʾanic suras, whose significance remains a subject of debate among exegetes and scholars.Footnote ¹⁷ The Khatibian mystical constellation features scholars at the juncture of philosophy, theology, and jurisprudence (فقه [fiqh])—such as al-Ghazālī and the Andalusian philosopher Muḥy al-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī (1165–1240)—concerned with the ethics and poetics of the imagination (Moosa).Footnote ¹⁸ Ibn ʿArabī was among numerous Sufi seers and thinkers who speculated on the symbolism of the ḥurūf muqaṭṭaʿāt, believing that the disjointed letters offered “comme des clins d’œil extatiques, pointes de l'intuition divine déchirant le chant de l’être … ces lettres cristallines où s'annule le sens” (“a kind of ecstatic wink, points of divine intuition rending the song of being … these crystalline letters where meaning is annihilated”; Khatibi and Sijelmassi, L'art 139; Khatibi and Sijelmassi, Splendor 139; trans. amended). This meditative practice recalls the primacy of reading as a spiritual heuristic in the sura al-ʿAlaq, to which Khatibi repeatedly returns across his writings.

Beyond the belief that calligraphy at once embodies and exalts the divine word, for many mystics—such as those belonging to the cabalistic Ḥurūfi Sufi sect and the esoteric tenth-century underground organization Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ (the Brethren of Purity)—reading is a site of “speculation spiritualiste ou mystique” (“spiritualist or mystical speculation”; 128–32; 128–32; trans. amended) rooted in the symbolism of letters and scripts.Footnote ¹⁹ These groups practiced the occult science of letters, or علم الحروف (ʿilm al-ḥurūf), in which meditation on letters and their various combinations cultivates spiritual communion by revealing hidden realities of creation and existence (132; 132). By indexing these figures in his study on calligraphy, Khatibi joins his sociological interest in popular and material art forms with his theorization of Qurʾanic intersemiotics. Inflected by the principle of a veiled and invisible god, which is foundational to Khatibi's understanding of Islamic metaphysics, calligraphy promulgates the divine intersign (La blessure 17; “Excerpts” 334). Its paralinguistic qualities speak to an extradiscursivity that is central to pensée-autre as a praxis that speaks in tongues.

Exalting the Void

The mystical and esoteric philosophies explored by Khatibi also populate the Tunisian literary critic and author Abdelwahab Meddeb's experimental 1979 novel Talismano, which Khatibi has extensively analyzed.Footnote ²⁰ While both writers find inspiration in the writings of al-Ḥallāj, Ibn ʿArabī, al-Ghazālī, and Suḥrawardī, Khatibi parts ways with Meddeb in terms of how he instrumentalizes these thinkers “marqués par une histoire extrêmement complexe du lien de la lettre à l'expérience mystique” (“marked by an extremely complex history of the link between the letter and mystical experience”; Maghreb pluriel 204; Plural Maghreb 137). Khatibi explores mysticism not as a solution to the fraught dialectic between “Western” and “Islamic” epistemes to which double critique orients itself. Rather, it is through and against Islamic intellectual traditions that Khatibi articulates the contours of his broader philosophical endeavor—from Qurʾanic intersemiotics and the divine intersign, to the intermedial and polygraphic nature of calligraphy, to his critique of Western metaphysics and theological logocentrism through “l'adoration du texte et de sons sens infini (prophètes, mystiques, poètes)” (“the text's infinite meaning adored by prophets, mystics and poets”; La blessure 19–20; “Excerpts” 336).

Meddeb's avant-garde novel Talismano follows a spontaneous rebellion of social outcasts and occultists—prophets, artisans, guildsmen, musicians, sorceresses, alchemists, magicians, tattoo artists, calligraphers, and sex workers—moving through the old city of Tunis in a carnivalesque overthrowing of religious and political power. Occupying al-Zaytūna mosque and university, the group revives various occult practices—such as alchemy, sorcery, mummification, and effigy burning—as they organize themselves into craft guilds that each convene around a respective symbol. Meddeb dwells on the calligraphers, whose craft exemplifies a Sufi poethics of the ineffable that upends theological logocentrism (El Shakry, “Abdelwahab Meddeb”). This poethics signals aesthetic practices that mobilize conceptual and poetic modes of symbolization to represent both divine truth and the epistemic sensibilities that nourish spiritual cultivation of the self.

Calligraphic excess at once bridges the distance between “mots et images” (“word and image”; Meddeb, Talismano [1987] 111; Meddeb, Talismano [2011] 114) and proliferates sites of meaning across multiple semiotic registers as Khatibi reminds us. Meddeb's characters re/unwrite Mansūr al-Ḥallāj's Kitāb al-Ṭawāsīn, which relies on diagrams, symbols, geometry, and the science of numbers and letters—as in the titular reference to the broken letters ط (ṭāʾ) and س (sīn) from the ḥurūf muqaṭṭaʿāt that open various suras—to illustrate divine oneness and mystical experience. The calligraphers in Talismano weave a revised rendition of the text into the weft of a red tapestry in al-Zaytūna mosque, replacing every enunciation of the word Allah with a literal void in honor of the group's new convention of “la suppression du Nom” (“suppression of the Name”; 109; 112). The amended text reads:

Like Khatibi, Meddeb is interested in graphic modes of inscription, such as calligraphy and the arabesque, that generate aesthetic and ethical openings. Talismano's calligraphers invite speculative meditation by overwriting the name “Allah” with the literal space of a void. In his commentary on this scene, Khatibi notes how Meddeb “tire la calligraphie islamique vers la (lettre) mystique, et celle-ci vers la notion du ‘vide’” (“draws Islamic calligraphy toward mysticism (the mystic letter), and the latter toward the notion of the ‘void’”; Maghreb pluriel 205–06; Plural Maghreb 138).

Meddeb crafts a hermeneutical praxis that valorizes the capaciousness of semiotic ambiguity over the modes of interpretive rigidity and exegetical codification that he associates with Sunni orthodoxy. Talismano's heresiological reprisal of prominent and often persecuted mystics recalls Meddeb's proclamation that “all that's great in Islamic culture, all that's beautiful, came about not by the application of the Islamic letter of the law but rather through transgression or at least the skirting of that letter, in a will to forget and ignore it”—an ethos he associates with “the Sufis and the theosophists who dared to think freely” (Meddeb, “Islam” 8). The novel echoes this in what Khatibi describes as “Hermétisme de Talismano, dont la face explicite et de commentaire (la redondance, l'enflure, la surcharge) plie le texte sous un ébranlement baroque” (“The hermeticism of Talismano, whose explicit and explanatory side (the redundancy, the bombast, the overload) folds the text under a baroque shock”; Maghreb pluriel 197; Plural Maghreb 131). Meddeb's nostalgic revelry in Islam's past seeks to uphold “la survie symbolique du Coran en tant que signifiant” (“the symbolic survival of the Koran as a signifying object”; Pari 26; Islam 10) against the drive to privilege the signifier over the signified. The void, like the poethical mode of symbolization it indexes, enacts a narrative ethics that cultivates interpretive possibility.

Through a critical engagement with “la métaphysique du signe” (“the metaphysics of the sign” (trans. amended) both within and beyond the Qurʾan (Khatibi and Sijelmassi, L'art 22; Khatibi and Sijelmassi, Splendor 22), Khatibi models an ethics of being through a practice of doubled critical reading. His flirtation with Sufi literature upholds a skeptical distance that speaks to the imaginative limitations of mysticism in ways that differ from Meddeb's stylized approach. Although this leads some scholars to interpret Khatibi's engagement as “philosophical and poetic rather than religious” (McNeece 262), I maintain that Sufism as a spiritual praxis cannot be uncoupled from its poetic and philosophical articulations. While Khatibi's theories of pensée-autre and double critique are in conversation with Sufism, it is actually in challenging what the theorist Nasrin Qader refers to as the “transcendental turn in Islamic mysticism” that his ontology of becoming shifts into focus (186).

Detranscendentalizing Mystical Ontology

Khatibi's highly experimental 1979 narrative text, Le livre du sang (The Book of Blood), helps illuminate the work of mysticism within his broader philosophical writings. Modeled after the mystical epic, the story melds Greek mythology with pedagogically oriented Sufi literature (Bensmaïa, Experimental Nations 143). The cryptic plot takes up Khatibi's preoccupation with doubles and doubling (double critique, double writing, bi-langue) as a site of generative difference. The narrative centers on “la Figure de l'Androgyne” (“the Figure of the Androgyne”) embodied in a pair of androgynous twins: MuthnaFootnote ²¹ (a sex worker gendered female) and L’Échanson (literally “the cupbearer,” gendered male) who deconstruct the unified sexed body in their similarity-difference (Le livre 21).Footnote ²² The face of L’Échanson, who serves a Sufi brotherhood, is the focal point for the brothers’ meditation on divine beauty as they pursue the spiritual goal of eternal oneness: “La pensée du visage est tournée vers la beauté du visible. … La beauté est un reflet du paradis, el le paradis une nostalgie de ton être perdue” (“The contemplation of the face orients itself toward the beauty of the visible. … Beauty is a reflection of paradise, and paradise a nostalgia for your lost being”; 31).

The brotherhood's “nostalgie du paradis” (“nostalgia for paradise”) takes shape as a “pacte de chasteté” (“chastity pact”) that renounces the body in a false binary of the sacred and profane (21), recalling Khatibi's critique of “une ascèse fétichisante” (“a fetishizing asceticism”; La blessure 181; “Excerpts” 340; trans. amended). Their project erupts in erotic carnage when Muthna, disguised as L’Échanson, infiltrates the “Asile des inconsolés” (“Asylum of the Inconsolables”) in order to poison its members. Exposing their body to its congregants, Muthna disrupts not only the brothers’ spiritual communion oriented toward Mecca, but crucially, their logics of the sexed body. The brotherhood's members violently kill the twins before their master, who then slits his own wrists in literal self-annihilation that renders spiritual annihilation, or فناء (fanāʾ), impossible (Qader 156).

Qader astutely notes Khatibi's distinction between the “‘mystical’ (la mystique) … as a special kind of opening toward the self and other” and “the transcendental mode of mysticism” that codifies a practice of interiority that privileges “nostalgia for the immaterial, for the invisible, and for lost unity” over “the material and the visible” (153–54). In the register of Suzanne Gauch's and Réda Bensmaïa's analyses of the tale, Qader reads Le livre du sang as a parabolic orgy that takes the transcendental mystical impulse to its logical, and impossible, ends. Khatibi's critique of the brotherhood's ascetic isolation is epitomized in the group's fatal exclusion of Muthna, whose sex work associates her with the polluted materiality of embodied forms of social care work that stand in dialectical opposition to the transcendental chaste beauty of her (br)other.

Read alongside his philosophical writings on Islam, the Qurʾan, and mysticism, Le livre du sang renders legible a Khatibian ethics of care and ontology of becoming. The brotherhood demonstrates the dangers of disavowing bodily materiality and sociality for the promise of self-same unification. Khatibi instead places the ethical self in the ever-evolving critical praxis of pensée-autre. Just as he arrives at a theory of intersemiotics through the Qurʾan and divine intersign, so too does Khatibi outline his ontology of becoming through an engagement with mystical thought. Committed to the project of double critique, he supplants the unattainable Beloved with forms of cultural materiality fashioned in and around Islamic traditions—from the intersemiotic traces of calligraphy, tattooing, and carpets to the sacred erotics of the body celebrated in Le livre du sang, Amour bilingue (Love in Two Languages), La mémoire tatouée (Tattooed Memory), and La blessure du nom propre (The Wound of the Proper Name). In so doing, Khatibi cultivates a way of being, thinking, and relating rooted in the speculative act of becoming that is always already narrated in the register of the “future perfect” (Bensmaïa, Experimental Nations 143–45). The (per)version of mysticism that emerges under Khatibi's double critique is one that embraces the interpretive capaciousness of esoteric hermeneutics, but whose gaze toward the future promises differentiated proliferation—rather than consolidated unification—in ecstatic pursuit of the unthought and as-yet-unnameable.