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The etymology of the divine name
al-Rahmân (the All-Merciful) is connected to the word for ‘womb’ (rahim). There
is a hadîth qudsî that specifically addresses that: Allah says, "I am al-Rahmân. I created the womb and
I derived its name from My name. I will be connected to whoever stays connected
to it, and I will be cut off from whoever stays cut off from it."
Here, "staying connected to the womb" is usually interpreted to mean
‘maintaining family ties’ in the social world. It’s the extension of loving,
honoring, and caring for one’s mother, which is the supreme social duty in
Islam. But in a metacosmic sense it also reminds me of the all-encompassing
importance of the Yoni in Tantra (Yoni = womb).
Verse 4:1 in the Qur’ân commands us to "Reverence your Lord . . . and
(reverence) the wombs (al-arhâm)."
Right up front, Allah puts reverence for the Yoni immediately after that of
Himself. Allah is the Ultimate Reality, the Absolute One, in which
there is no differentiation of duality. But on the very next level, He puts in
first place the Eternal Feminine. Looking at the footnote to this verse in
A. Yusuf Ali’s translation, it appears that he understood the Tantric esoterism
deep within Islam.
"Among the most wonderful mysteries of our nature is that of sex.
The unregenerate male is apt, in the pride of his physical strength, to
forget the all-important part which the female plays in his very existence, and
in all the social relationships that arise in our collective human lives. The mother that
bore us must ever have our reverence. The wife, through whom we enter
parentage, must have our reverence. Sex, which governs so much our physical
life, and has so much influence on our emotional and higher nature,
deserves—not our fear or contempt, or our amused indulgence, but—our reverence
in the highest sense of the term."
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The Yoni as a sacred symbol of the Islamic religion:
In traditional Islamic dream interpretation, a woman's vagina is understood as the doorway through which Allah has
commanded us to pass, in verse 2:189 of the Qur’an— "So come to the houses by their doors". The vulva
(farj) means "relief (faraj) for whoever is in distress." And the vulva is the mihrab (prayer niche
in a mosque) and the qiblah (the direction of Mecca toward which one faces in prayer). In the wall of a mosque
facing toward Mecca, the mihrab is like a vagina recessed into the wall to show the direction of prayer. Thus in
traditional Islam the yoni is associated with the most sacred rite of Islam, the daily prayer.
Reference: See the Islamic dream interpretation book Ta‘tîr al-anâm fî ta‘bîr al-manâm by the
17th-century Sufi scholar ‘Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi, the 5th ed. (Beirut: Dar al-Khayr, 1991), p. 358-359, for this
symbolism.
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