by Robert Irwin
In his writings Ibn al-‘Arabi set out the elements of an immensely complex spiritual psychology and cosmology. He described visions he had been granted of such marvels as the invisible hierarchy which governed the universe, and of the Divine Throne resting on a pillar of light. The perception of the transcendent unity of Being was central to his thinking. This doctrine brought him perilously close to what was, in Muslim terms, the heresy of pantheism and his enemies did indeed accuse him of this. However, Ibn al-‘Arabi was careful to support his position with quotations from the Qur’an and the hadiths. Indeed, he actually claimed to be a Zahirite – that is, a strict literalist of the same stamp as Ibn Hazm. Al-lnsan al-Kamil, ‘the Universal Man’, a macrocosmic figure who was simultaneously the guide and model of the universe, played a key role in Ibn al-‘Arabi’s thinking, as did the concept of al-Alam al-Mithal, the world of similitudes or images. In Ibn al-‘Arabi’s cosmology, man sought to return to his origin by achieving union with the Divine. Despite their superficial differences, he held that all religions were fundamentally one, as these lines from the Tarjuman al-Ashwaq indicate:
My heart is capable of every form:
Pasture for deer, a monastery for monks,
Temple for idols, pilgrim’s Ka’bah,
Tables of Torah and book of Qur’an.
My religion is love’s religion: where turn
Her camels, that religion my religion is, my faith.
Martin Lings (trans.), in Ashtiany et al. (eds.), The Cambridge
History of Arabic Literature: ‘Abbasid Belles-Lettres, p. 252
Ibn al-‘Arabi was a prolific author who wrote on many subjects (though it is certain that much of what has been ascribed to him – over 900 titles – is not by him). Divine forces drove him to write. As he put it, ‘influxes from God have entered upon me and nearly burned me alive. In order to find relief… I have composed works, without any intention on my own part. Many other books I have composed because of a divine command given during a dream or unveiling.’ (Ibn al-‘Arabi’s way of creating literature does not seem so very far removed from the automatic writing espoused by the Surrealists in the 1920s.)
Al-Futuhat al-Makkiyah, ‘The Meccan Revelations’, is his most substantial work on metaphysics and mysticism. It is an esoteric encyclopedia in which the hidden meaning of everything is expounded. Special stress is placed on the power of Divine Names. In a chapter entitled ‘The Alchemy of Happiness’ Ibn al-‘Arabi describes a journey into Hell and then an ascent through the heavens. Although Al-Futuhat al-Makkiyah is essentially a prose work, it nevertheless contains hundreds of poems. Fusus al-Hikam, ‘Bezels of Wisdom’, is a mystical treatise which Ibn al-‘Arabi first saw in a dream in the hand of the Prophet. Each chapter is a ‘bezel’, or jewel of sacred wisdom. In Shajarat al-Qawm, or ‘Tree of Existence’, Ibn al-‘Arabi described the Prophet’s night journey through the seven heavens, and his encounters with tutelary prophets of these heavens. To Ibn al-‘Arabi, the Prophet’s night journey is an allegory of the journey of the mystic’s heart.
Tarjuman al-Ashwaq, ‘The Interpreter of Desires’, is Ibn al-‘Arabi’s poetic masterpiece. It is a small collection of sixty-one qasidas, addressed to that young daughter of a Persian Sufi friend, whom Ibn al-‘Arabi had encountered in Mecca. The girl is called by various names in the poems (presumably to meet the exigencies of rhyme and metre). ‘Virtuous, learned, devout and modest, she was a feast for the eyes and bound in chains all who beheld her. Were it not that pusillanimous minds are ever prone to think of evil, I would dwell at greater length upon the qualities with which God has endowed both her body and her soul which was a garden of generous feeling.’ Although Ibn al-‘Arabi formally dedicated these love poems to her, as far as he was concerned there was no sensual content in them. They were allegories; the girl’s beauty was an exteriorization of divine beauty and the poet’s fervent devotion was actually directed to God. ‘If, to express these lofty thoughts, I used the language of love, it was because the minds of men are prone to dally with such amorous fancies and would thus be more readily attracted to the subject of my songs.’
Ibn al-‘Arabi was the first mystic to turn the traditional imagery of the qasida, with its deserted campsite, lament for lost love and so on, to mystical purposes. In doing so, he borrowed lines and themes from earlier secular poets. (This process of creative stealing, or allusion, was accepted in the Arab literary world and known as mu’arada.) The mystical purport of the Tarjuman al-Ashwaq was not obvious to everyone and some of the ‘ulama accused him of having produced a collection of poems dedicated to profane love. Stung by this, Ibn al-‘Arabi produced a commentary entitled ‘The Treasury of Lovers’. In this he expounded his obscure allegories: the young girl signified the perfect soul, the flash of lightning signified a centre of manifestation of the divine essence, the camels were spiritual transports, and so forth. The poet’s journey by camel through the wasteland ended in annihilation in the Divine.
Endurance went, and patience went, when they went.
Gone, even they, tenants of mine inmost heart!
I asked where the riders rest at noon, was answered:
‘They rest where the shih and ban tree spread their fragrance.’
So said I to the wind: ‘Go and o’ertake them,
For they, even now, in the shade of the grove are biding,
And give them greetings of peace from a sorrowful man,
Whose heart sorroweth at severance from his folk.’
Martin Lings (trans.), in Ashtiany et al. (eds.), The Cambridge
History of Arabic Literature: ‘Abbasid Belles-Lettres, p. 252
Besides the Tarjuman al-Ashwaq, Ibn al-‘Arabi also produced a Diwan, a large collection of mystical poetry, including over 900 poems. Quite a few are drearily didactic efforts, in which verse and metre are firmly in the service of education. These poems are devoted to such matters as the chapters of the Qur’an, the Names of God and the letters of the alphabet. There is a lot of esoteric word-play. In other, more interesting poems, Ibn al-‘Arabi sought to render in words the ineffable experience of ecstasy; but as T. S. Eliot put it, ‘Words strain, / Crack and sometimes break under the burden’. In other poems again, Ibn al-‘Arabi reveals a certain amount about his own life and there are verses on such topics as troublesome disciples, burying a young daughter, and the pains of old age. In some poems he made use of the muwashshah, and indeed he did a great deal to make this verse form respectable.
Although Abu al-Hasan ‘Ali ibn Musa ibn Sa’id al-Maghribi (1213–86) was a poet in his own right, he is best known for an anthology of Spanish Arabic poetry which he produced in Cairo in 1243, after having left his native Granada. The Kitab Rayyat al-Mubarrizin, ‘The Book of the Banners of the Champions’, is a collection of extracts, mostly from qasidas. (The lines from Ibn Khafaja quoted on page 289 were extracted in Ibn Sa’id’s anthology.) Ibn Sa’id included specimens of his own verse in the collection. His aim in compiling the collection seems to have been to show that poetry produced in the West was as good as anything the East had to offer (and that stuff by Ibn Sa’id and his family was especially good).
1
Pass round your cups for there’s a wedding
feast on the horizon – although it would be enough
for us just to feast our eyes on your beauty.
The lightning is a henna-dyed hand, the rain,
pearls, and, like a bride, the horizon is led forth to her husband
– and the eyes of the dawn are lined with kohl.
2
If you had only been with us at the
wedding-like battle, when red saffron blood was the perfume of heroes.
The sun was a flower, the evening, crescent
moons, the arrows were rain, and the swords were
lightning flashes.
3
How fine were the warriors whose banners hovered
overhead like birds around your enemies!
And lances punctuated wha
t their swords had written,
the dust of combat dried it, and the blood was its perfume.
Bellamy and Steiner, Ibn Said al-Maghribi’s ‘The
Banners of the Champions’, pp. 7, 152, 153
After the Almohads suffered a massive defeat at the hands of an alliance of the Christian kings of Spain at the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, their power in Spain and North Africa declined very rapidly. The Almohads withdrew from Spain and Cordova was lost to the Christians in 1236; Seville followed in 1248. Eventually Muslim power was confined to the southernmost part of the Iberian peninsula. From 1232 until the expulsion of the last of its rulers in 1492 the Nasirid dynasty ruled this region from their capital in Granada. Their palace-citadel in Granada, which was in practice a series of interlinked palaces, came to be known as the Alhambra, ‘the Red’. The Nasirid kingdom was vulnerable to Christian attacks and for much of their history the Nasirids paid tribute to their neighbours in the north. Nevertheless, the Nasirids presided over a splendid literary and intellectual culture.
Although Ibn Khaldun was born in Tunisia, he was of Andalusian stock and he was briefly to serve the Nasirids of Granada as a diplomat. ‘Abd al-Rahman ibn Muhammad IBN KHALDUN (1332–1408) is one of the towering geniuses in the history of Arab thought (indeed his writings remain influential today, not just in Arab countries, but throughout the world). Ibn Khaldun spent most of his life in the service of various rulers in Spain, North Africa and Egypt. His political career was chequered and it was during a period of political disgrace and temporary retirement in a North African castle in the years 1375–9 that he wrote the greater part of his masterpiece, the Muqaddima(‘The Prolegomena’). The Muqaddima was designed as a lengthy historico-philosophical introduction to an even longer but more conventional historical chronicle, the Kitab al-‘lbar, ‘The Book of Examples’. From 1382 onwards Ibn Khaldun sought to pursue an academic career in Cairo, then the capital of the Mamluk sultanate of Egypt and Syria. When Timur invaded Mamluk Syria and briefly occupied Damascus in 1400, Ibn Khaldun went to meet him and was welcomed by the great Turco-Mongol warlord as one of the world’s most renowned scholars. Ibn Khaldun wrote up his debates with Timur in a brief history-cum-autobiography, the Ta’rif. Ibn Khaldun died in Cairo.
He initially intended his big history-book, the Kitab al-‘Ibar, to be an account of the Maghreb and al-Andalus only. Although he subsequently expanded its coverage to the rest of world, Ibn Khaldun’s treatment of the histories of China, India and Christian Europe is perfunctory and ill-informed. As the title, ‘The Book of Examples’, suggests, he designed it as a historical narrative from which one should take lessons. The past contains lessons for the present and the future, for – as he put it – ‘the past resembles the future more than one drop of water does another’.
The lessons of history are spelt out more explicitly in his theoretical preface, the Muqaddima. Much of Ibn Khaldun’s thinking about the cyclical nature of history and the rise and fall of dynasties was shaped by his observation of the successive fortunes and misfortunes of the Almoravids, the Almohads and then the Merinids in North Africa. Study of the history of these and other dynasties led him to elaborate a theory of history in which successive empires are created by vigorous nomads who, fired by religion and bonded by the rigours of tribal life in the desert, are able to conquer settled lands. However, in time the nomads settle and adopt the civilized manners of the cities they have conquered. They become urbanized and they acquire wealth and high culture. Leisure and culture are conducive to decay and the settled conquerors become in their turn vulnerable to defeat and conquest by a new wave of tribal barbarians.
It is a pessimistic vision of a historical process in which dynasties have their youth, maturity and senility. Moreover, Ibn Khaldun, depressed by the vanished grandeurs of past Islamic dynasties, by the continuing successes of the Christians in Spain and by the ravages of the Black Death in the Middle East and North Africa in the late 1340s, thought of himself as a historian writing near the end of time. Although the cyclical rise and fall of dynasties furnished the template for Ibn Khaldun’s interpretation of the past, as he continued to write his interests became wider and the last part of the Muqaddima is an encyclopedic survey of the arts and sciences. He was and is an exciting thinker, but he was not a great stylist. His prose is somewhat flat and sometimes also a bit obscure. He hated the fancy flourishes which had become fashionable among the chancery officials of his day.
Recent authors employ the methods and ways of poetry in writing prose. [Their writing] contains a great deal of rhymed prose and obligatory rhymes as well as the use of the nasib before the authors say what they want to say. When one examines such prose, [one gets the impression that] it has actually become a kind of poetry. It differs from poetry only through the absence of metre. In recent times, secretaries took this up and employed it in government correspondence. They restricted all prose writing to this type, which they liked. They mixed up [all the different] methods in it. They avoided straight prose and affected to forget it, especially the people of the East. At the hand of stupid secretaries, present-day government correspondence is handled in the way described.
Franz Rosenthal (trans.), Ibn Khaldun, ‘The Muqaddimah’:
An Introduction to History (London, 1967), vol. 3, pp. 369–70
Although the Muqaddima is mostly consulted by historians, it is also a major source on literary developments and, in particular, on the poetry of Andalusia and North Africa.
The Muqaddima praised Ibn al-Khatib as one of the great masters of classical Arabic and one of the best poets in Muslim Spain: ‘… he recently died a martyr’s death as the result of denunciation by his enemies. He possessed an unequalled linguistic habit. His pupils followed in his footsteps’. Abu ‘Abdallah Muhammad IBN AL-KHATIB (1313–75) subsequently acquired the honorific name Lisan al-Din, or ‘Tongue of the Religion’. He was born in a village outside Granada. His father was in the service of the sultans of Granada, and Ibn al-Khatib himself rose through the chancery to become vizier under Muhammad V. After the latter’s temporary deposition in 1359, Ibn al-Khatib followed him into exile. In 1362 the vizier returned in triumph with Muhammad to Granada. However, the antagonism of another statesman-poet, Ibn Zamrak (see page 306), forced Ibn al-Khatib to flee to the Merinid court in Morocco. The intrigues of his enemies in Spain eventually led to Ibn al-Khatib’s arrest on a charge of heresy and he was strangled in prison in Fez.
According to his biographer, al-Maqqari, Ibn al-Khatib suffered badly from insomnia and thus he was known as Dhu al-‘Umrayn, ‘the Man of Two Lives’. He wrote at night, copiously and on a vast range of subjects. He wrote a history of Granada, as well as a brief history of the Nasirids. He also wrote on Sufism and philosophy, and produced poems that were widely admired. Nevertheless, he was primarily a historian. He was capable of writing in both the plain and the ornate styles. His ornate saj’ style can be a bit hard to take – as in this high-flown evocation of Cordova:
Cordova! What can give you an idea of what she is? Place of sweet fertile plains and solid, deep-rooted sierras, of splendid buildings, brilliant magnificence and unending delights; where a halo as of the sky’s full moon encompasses an abode formed of the lofty-built wall; where the Milky Way of her brimming river – its blade drawn from the woodland scabbard – clings neighbourly to her; where the rim of the waterwheel, evenly turning, is firm on the pivot, and creaks as with groans of yearning and memory of an old-time love; where the crown-like sierra glistens with sweet-tasting silver and pours scorn on the diadem of Chosroes or Darius; where the slender castle-bridges, like so many humpbacked camels, span the stream in a long file; where the memorials of the valorous ‘Amiri are redolent of a scented fragrance from those historic spots; where the bounteous clouds visit their dear brides the meadows, and bear to them a scatter of pearls; where the breeze of the north blows around the lofty trees morning and nightfall, so that you see the branches drunkenly tossing though they be not d
runk; where the hands of blossom-time ravish the virgin poppy-buds of the plains; where the smiling lips of the camomile are kissed by the visitant breezes, and cause a flutter in the jealous hearts of the stars; where the ancient sanctuary, with its broad spaces and tall minaret, casts utter contempt on the palace of Walid.
Beeston, Samples of Arabic Prose in
its Historical Development, p. 39
COMMENTARY
The waterwheel on the River Guadalquivir close to Cordova’s Romano Bridge is still there to be seen, but the city, in decline from the early eleventh century onwards, was lost to the Christians in 1236 when Ferdinand III of Castile occupied it. Ibn al-Khatib has produced a conventional exercise in literary evocation, not reportage.
