Note 516 — THE QUEEN OF THE SERPENTS.[507]

Alluding to an oft-quoted saying “Lau lá-ka, etc. Without thee (O Mohammed) We (Allah) had not created the spheres,” which may have been suggested by “Before Abraham was, I am” (John viii. 58); and by Gate xci. of Zoroastrianism “O Zardusht, for thy sake I have created the world” (Dabistan i. 344). The sentiment is by no means “Shi’ah,” as my learned friend Prof. Aloys Springer supposes. In his Mohammed (p. 220) we find an extract from a sectarian poet, “For thee we dispread the earth; for thee we caused the waters to flow; for thee we vaulted the heavens.” As Baron Alfred von Kremer, another learned and experienced Orientalist, reminds me the “Shi’ahs” have always shown a decided tendency to this kind of apotheosis and have deified or quasi-deified Ali and the Imams. But the formula is first found in the highly orthodox Burdah-poem of Al-Busiri:—

“But for him (Lau lá-hu) the world had never come out of nothingness.”

Hence it has been widely diffused. See Les Aventures de Kamrup (pp. 146–7) and Les Œuvres de Wali (pp. 51–52), by M. Garcin de Tassy and the Dabistan (vol. i. pp. 2–3).