245

from this form, without taking into consideration
the instruments of imitation and the arrangement
of artful contrivances. Thus was it with regard to
the promised lord of the prophetic asylum. The
lord Imam Muhammed ntirbakhsh/ " the light-
^ bestower," in his treatise upon the ascent to hea-
ven, stated : " Know that the lord Muhammed, the
Selected (peace be with him!) ascended to heaven
with a body, but this body was light, like that
assumed in a dream, with which he went into a
state of trance, which is an intermediate state2 be-
tween sleeping and waking, and on that account it
is said in the first tradition of the ascent :

" I was between sleeping and waking."

And further :

44 God directed thee in the explanation of things revealed to the pro-
'* phets and saints, upon whom be peace l"

That his being carried from the mosque of Mecca to
the mosque of Jerusalem, is an image -of the migra-

1 Mir Said Muhammed Nurbaksh was the assumed name of Shams-
eddin, a descendant from a Guebre family of Irak. He fixed himself in
Kachmir, where he became the founder of a sect which acknowledged
him as a prophet and a Mahdi, and took from him the name of Nur-bak-
shian. — (See Journal des Savants, avril 1840; article de M. Mohl sur
I'Histoire de Ferishta. )

2 The word here used by the author is ^\f barzakh, <l interval of

'• time, according to the Koran (chap. XXIII) between the death of a man
" and the resurrection, before which the souls of the departed receive
44 neither reward nor punishment."