WAW | Darvish
WAW
Salaam and Greetins of Peace:
An excellent letter from our esteemed brother, Ayn Kha:
With the wise, gracious, and venerable Shaikh Luan (center), head of a Bosnian branch of Naqshabandis, at the Qadiri Sufi Lodge in Sarajevo last year. For some time, no one had been able to give me a satisfying explanation of the symbolism and meaning of the calligraphized letter waw (و) encountered so frequently in Islamic art – until I met Shaikh Luan and posed the question to him. He informed me that it is first and foremost a symbol of love, being the first letter of the Divine Name, The Loving (al-Wadūd). As the Arabic word for the conjunctive “and,” it implies both duality and union, joining the lover with the beloved, and archetypically, the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ with God. Morphologically, it has the shape of a tear drop protruding out of the eye, a sign of the pain of separation that inevitably accompanies every experience of love and longing. And finally, its numeric value of six corresponds to the six directions it represents, there being no place where the traces of love are absent.
Ya Haqq!
