The year was 1202, in the Christian calendar. A highly controversial Muslim scholar was making the Hajj -- the trip to Mecca required of all believers (if possible) at least once in their lives. Traveling all the way from Damascus, this teacher of religious law was almost assassinated in Egypt by a type of fundamentalist of the day. This scholar was viewed by some authorities as a heretic, even dangerously so. But tradition allowed safety to pilgrims, so Muhiyuddin Ibn el-Arabi was OK once he approached the Holy City. One story says that, while circumnavigating the Ka'aba, el-Arabi spotted a beautiful teenage girl -- a Persian -- doing the same. She stopped his spiritual progress cold.
Her name was Nizam. She was said to be devout and well-versed in Islamic law -- unusual for a female, especially a teenager, of the era. She was traveling with a Persian community led by her father. If, as I suspect, she dressed much as traditional women in Iran do now, her face was unveiled. So, at least at some point, the middle-aged Ibn-el-Arabi could have seen her facial beauty. Another story (this one from Idries Shah's The Sufis -- my primary source for this post) says that el-Arabi was welcomed into this Persian community for the time of its stay.
El Arabi (in another source) apparently had no position at the time and probably little money. Said to possess a quiet dignity, he nonetheless taught his particular interpretation of Islamic law to ordinary citizens -- once reportedly having said the Day of Calamity (Judgment Day, basically) would surely be a whole lot closer when persons of eminence were interested in what he had to say.
But seeing Nizam in Mecca basically blew el-Arabi's mind. He began writing poems about her and his experience of loving her from afar, while in some kind of waking trance -- one in which he was basically "there, but not there." Shah reports el-Arabi confessing that he did not know what some of his poems even meant until years after writing them.
There is a translation online of one poem, in which he apparently watches Nizam and her family's caravan headed back home after the Hajj, saying how much he wants to scream curses at them for taking her away (my interpretation of this translation), but he just comes so unglued that he can't.
The poems are collected in a book called Tarjuman al Aswaq: The Interpreter of Desires. Apparently the experience of loving young Nizam chastely became a kind of prism for el-Arabi to break down the light of his own soul and know himself better. British scholar R.A. Nicholson translated some of these poems back in 1911, and there have been more recent ones published as well.
The most famous lines (translated by Nicholson) are as follows:
My heart is capable of every form:
A cloister for the monk, a fane for idols,
A pasture for gazelles, the votary's Ka'aba,
The tables of the Torah, the Koran.
Love is the creed I hold: wherever turn
His camels, Love is still my creed and faith.
If el-Arabi wasn't in the soup with the religious authorities when he got to Mecca, he sure was by the time those words hit the street. The rest of these love odes shocked the entire Muslim world. It got so bad that el-Arabi was called back to Syria to face what Shah calls an inquisition. He defended himself so eloquently that the inquisitors let him go. He also wrote an extensive commentary to the Tarjuman that Shah says remains a Sufi classic.
The story doesn't end there: el-Arabi stayed in Mecca for three years (I presume the inquisition came after that), writing or dictating to a secretary a commentary on the Koran. I look forward to reading some of the translation someday. I say "some of it" for good reason. The Meccan Revelations is 37 volumes in length. Yes, that's volumes, not chapters. Volumes, as in "separate books."
So, we have a little book of red-hot love allegories, plus a super-long Koranic commentary (said to be highly nonlinear, even theosophical, in nature). That's the deal on el-Arabi, right? Nope. He kept writing books, so many the Arabic originals are said to fill several shelves* in libraries. He died in Damascus about the time the young Rumi was probably getting going as a Shar'iah teacher in the mountains of Turkey. El-Arabi (you more commonly see "Ibn Arabi" these days, the "el" apparently being a glottalized resonant really hard for English speakers to pronounce). One of his courtesy titles is "Sheikh of Sheikhs" -- rendered "master of masters." He was from Spain, originally.
There is an entire English-language organization devoted to his teachings. You'll find the appropriate links in the Wikipedia. To this day, his work remains highly controversial among Muslims.
While we're looking for help in understanding this part of the world, we need to get the proper take on its seminal figures in history. Ironically, we're all attracted to the hardest ones for us to understand, like Rumi and el-Arabi. And, get this: Idries Shah claims Dante basically plagiarized el-Arabi's cosmology for his Divine Comedy. He also claims Carl Jung took the idea of the collective unconscious from el-Arabi's writings, but did not give him due credit. It doesn't stop there: a Sufi named Al-Ghazali wrote a book about a 'Conference of Birds' many years before Chaucer did the same. And some say ol' Geoff's Troilus and Criseyde takes whole chunks from that other thing that got me started on this subject a few days ago: Nizami's Layla and Majnun.
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*Many of ibn el-Arabi's books are pamphlet-length works. Some of the inaccuracies in this and the previous post I corrected in the next one.
LJ orig.: 09/03/07
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