The legend that is a precursor to the Qur’anic revelation immediately draws our attention to one of the central tenets of authoritarian leadership – that of the assumption that certain people may claim superior knowledge over others. It also gives the necessary information for understanding the significance of one of the central symbols of the story, the symbol of the fish.
The prophet Moses was rebuked by Allah for having once asserted that he was the wisest of all men.
Immediately we are faced with a challenge to hubris. If Allah would rebuke a prophet for making such an assertion, so, too, would any other human being be rebuked for doing the same – no matter what their social position or presumed inner state. For who with any humility can rightfully claim to be the equal of Moses – who himself was once rebuked for a lack of humility? Although Moses may in fact have been the wisest of men, it was his assertion of his own superiority for which he was rebuked.
Allah subsequently revealed to Moses that a ‘servant of Allah’ who lived at the junction of the two seas was far superior to him in wisdom.
Who is this ‘servant of Allah’, and what is the ‘junction of the two seas’? Traditionally, the ‘servant of Allah’ is understood to be Khidr, "an allegoric figure representing the utmost depth of mystic insight accessible to man."
This ‘servant of Allah’ is superior in wisdom to the eminently rational Moses. To return to and reassert the question of human claims to divine insight: Who can rightfully claim to be the equal of Khidr, when he was superior in wisdom to Moses, one of the wisest, most just and compassionate of human beings?
‘The junction of the two seas’ was described in Qur’anic commentary as "the two sources or streams of knowledge – the one obtainable through observation and intellectual coordination of outward phenomena (ilm az-zahir), and the other through intuitive, mystic insight (ilm al-batin), the meeting of which is the goal of Moses’ quest." It may be alternately described as the junction between sleep and wakefulness, the theta or twilight state rich in vision and intuition, the gateway to the dream world, the point at which divine perfection meets human limitation. It also represents the meeting of the masculine and feminine principles, the junction at which the syllable Al- meets the syllable -lah in the spoken invocation of the name of Allah.
In fact, ‘the junction of the two seas’ provides a rich metaphor that may frame most polarities of manifestation in the world of created things.
When Moses expressed his eagerness to find that man, Allah commanded him to catch a fish, put it in a basket, and travel with it until the fish disappeared.
The fish is born of the sea, the source of all knowledge, the ultimate source of life, its water essential to the maintenance of all life. It is a seemingly boundless place, vaster than the human mind can imagine. The fish is a symbol of symbols themselves. The fish-symbol has its origin in the sea of divine wisdom, serves as a sign-post to it, and will always return to it. The image of putting the fish in the basket evokes an image of humans seeking to contain divine wisdom within the container of human limitation. The wisdom cannot be contained in the basket, nor in the elusive fish itself. The fish may stay for a while, but eventually it will disappear – right at the point where we are convinced that we have found some very fine sustenance. Its function is to serve not as physical sustenance itself, but as a guide to a finer sustenance.
Its disappearance would be a sign that the goal had been reached – the place where the ‘servant of Allah’ could be found.
We might ordinarily look upon a fish as something that we could eat, something that could sustain our bodies for a day. But the ‘servant of Allah’, that being of superior wisdom, inspiration and subtle understanding, will only be found at a place within which our sustenance seems to be lost – where we are left hungry and confused, not knowing how it is that our goals have seemed to elude us. It is the loss itself that takes us where we need to go.