Land on the Edge of Time Re-reading Titus Burckhardt’s Philosophical Attitude towards the ‘Land of the Setting Sun’

Re-reading (reading what is unwritten between the lines) of Titus Burckhardt’s fascinating work on the Islamic Far West entitled Fez, City of Islam (originally published in Germen under the title of Fes, Stadt des Islam), provides us with the author’s symbolic vision-in-depth of the visionary geography of the ‘Far West’, al-Maghrib al-‘aqsā in Arabic, which means the ‘land of the setting sun’. The encounter of ‘time’ and ‘eternity’, or in other words, the assimilation of the nunc fluens (lit. ‘moving present’, the terrestrial instant) into the nunc stans (‘abiding present’) during the luminous threshold of the sundown, is the macrocosmic equivalent of microcosmic event of ‘spiritual death’, the semi-abiding ‘moment’ when the soul of the aspirant reaches its full ontological weight at the threshold of the ‘void’ of the ‘narrow gate’; this ‘concept’ is one of the major attitudes of the Far-Western (Maghribi) Sufi doctrines. This also provides us with understanding of the author’s attitude towards the ‘visionary geography’ of the ‘Far West’, as a ‘boundary region’, where the juxtapositions of dual extremes like ‘sedentarism’ and ‘nomadism’, offer the possibility of sudden unveilings of the mysteries, hidden in the world-beyond.