On Jonah

Surah Al-Anbiya: Verses 87- 88:

“And [mention] the man of the fish (Dhan Nun), when he went off in anger and thought that We would not decree [anything] upon him. And he called out within the darknesses, “There is no deity except You; exalted are You. Indeed, I have been of the wrongdoers.So We responded to him and saved him from the distress. And thus do We save the believers.”

For those unfamiliar with the Quranic story of Jonah, he preached to a people but left them before God gave him explicit leave to do so. To remind Jonah, God allows for him to be swallowed into the belly of a whale whilst he was at sea.

Dhan-Nun: It is a peculiar way to denote the Prophet Jonah. “The owner of the fish,” one could translate it. But didn’t the fish eat him? He is described as “angrily leaving” his people… it is said anger is a form of craziness (majnun), for when you are angry, you are no longer in possession of yourself and your rationale faculties. So why is Allah describing him as the owner?

In English, we say a man owns up to himself when he admits his mistake. That is what Yunus did in the whale. By owning up to his mistake, by declaring his imperfection with utter humility, by acknowledging that it is His Creator that owns him, he truly owned himself once again. “Do not be like those who forget Allah and thus forget their own selves” (Quran).

Moreover, Allah tells us in the Quran that all of creation has been subjugated to the progeny of Adam, as He made man a Khalifa (vicergent) on this Earth. A man who is in touch with that transcendent quality — that karamah (nobility) Allah has put in Man — will find that other domains of Allah’s creation will begin to humble themselves towards him — just as the angels were told to with respect to Adam. Hence, he owned the fish in that moment by declaring that Allah owns him.

But the owner of the “nun” — that mysterious Arabic letter. He could have said huut (another word for whale or fish)… Interestingly, the sheer volume of nuns in the two verses pertaining to him is quite high. At the end of the second verse, again, we see the full phonetic pronunciation of “nun” in “Nunjil-mumineen” (thus we deliver the believers).

The calligraphic shape of the nun is worth considering. Is it a cup, a ship maybe… but there is something inside — perhaps it is the heart…

Regardless, Nun stands in contrast to its preceding letter in the alphabet — meem. The meem symbolizes contraction; it is the letter of death (mawt) and the same letter that represents (in its final form) how a man looks in prostration. All of meem is coiled in one single point — squished together almost.

But the nun is open. It symbolizes a sort of opening up, a relaxation — like the relief one feels following distress. Thus Allah delivered Yunus from the most contracted, tight position imaginable (the belly of the whale under the pressure of the ocean). Even the word for “deliverance” in Arabic is made from the nun. Curiously, the “distress” he is delivered from (gham) ends with a meem.

Thus he possessed the nun; he possessed one of the greatest deliverances ever ordained by Allah. How? Through his dua: an opening only comes when you close your heart to everything but The Opener (la ilaha Ila Ant). Perhaps that is what the dot is. The circumference of a circle always converges on one singular point: Allah.