The Desert Near the Threshold (Forms of Time and Space in Islamic Culture)

The Arabs, who have lived in deserts for centuries, obviously owe a lot of the good and the bad to it. From time immemorial-from the “deepest” ǧāhiliyya (the epoch of the pre-Islamic unawareness)-utterly set into the desert environment, they derived the fundamental life patterns from it, first of all the ways of conceiving time, space and motion. These forms have turned out to be not so prone to changes and seem to continue to be a live issue.

Maciej Klimiuk