Silence and night together provide a portal to self-knowledge in traditional Islam. In “The Last Third of the Night,” David Sander explores their relationship through a meditation upon The Thousand and One Nights.

The relationship between silence and language is about the relationship between transcendence and immanence, the absence with the presence. Silence and night, in many traditional contexts, are the medium of this linkage, through dream, intimacy, dread, imagination, prayer, ecstasy, loneliness. Night silence is a hidden site of human healing and restoration of wholeness, overlooked in the busy world of “mute” referential language. Love seeks its own ways of making itself known, of becoming manifest in existence without eliminating the mystery of the secret, the unknown and transcendent.