3 - ‘Blessed are the Strangers (ghurabāʾ)’: An Apocalyptic Hadith on the Virtues of Loneliness, Sadness and Exile

Summary

The end returns to the beginning.

Mullā ʿAlī al-Qārī (d. 1014/1605)

By definition, we know little about strangers – their identity, character or where they come from. Enveloped in a thick fog of mystery, strangers (ghurabāʾ, sing. gharīb), are often characterised as lonely, marginal figures who are perceived as alien, foreign, other – outcasts who stand apart from the mainstream. A sympathetic and moving portrayal of the stranger is found in the lone surviving handwritten manuscript of the literary genius, William Shakespeare:

Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,

Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,

Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation.

In this scene of the once banned play, Shakespeare gives voice to the historical figure of Sir Thomas More, deputy sheriff of London, who urges a xenophobic mob fresh from a riot against immigrants to sympathise with the victims of their rage by seeing themselves as ‘wretched strangers’. More presses the mob to imagine how they would feel if they immigrated to a foreign land – poor, vulnerable, alone – and were spurned ‘like dogs’. ‘This is the stranger's case’, declares More, ‘and this your mountainish inhumanity.’ In restoring the stranger's humanity, More exposes the mob's inhumanity – a brilliant inversion that portrays the stranger as a ‘borderline figure’ who ‘defines the limits of the human’.

Premodern Muslim intellectuals also remarked on the stranger's misery and marginality. The ʿAbbāsid litterateur, Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī (d. 414/1023), portrayed the stranger as a solitary figure: ‘Wherever you see him, you find him always without a friend. People have one another, but he has no one to help him.’

Indeed, as al-Tawḥīdī points out, while most people are embedded in a social network of family and friends, the stranger stands alone. Weak and vulnerable, the stranger has no one to call on for help during difficult times. The stranger's fundamental dilemma is thus one of belonging: most people belong somewhere, but the stranger belongs nowhere. We can imagine how the stranger's social isolation may effect a constant state of anxiety that eventually spills over into despair.