The Poetics of Shuhūd

To consider Muḥyī al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī ibn al-ʿArabī

(d.638/1240) as the expounder of his own poetic theory, or

at least strands of a theory, opens up exciting opportunities

for scholars and admirers of Sufism and Sufi poetry. Not only

does Ibn al-ʿArabī have much to say about almost every facet

of the sciences held important by Arabic writers in his age, he

also usually manages to place each discussion within a larger

visionary and ontological framework. That framework (even

if reinterpreted and eventually somewhat altered) found a

captive audience among thinkers and practitioners of Sufism

to such an extent, that it is not difficult to label Ibn al-ʿArabī

the most influential theorist in all of Sufism. To know how

Ibn al-ʿArabī might read a poem, or how he might evaluate its

degree of literary success, and also to know how he might place

that interpretation and evaluation in his visionary framework,

would shed more light on both the master’s overall worldview

as well as the place of poetry, more generally, in Sufism.

In a recent and remarkable monograph, Denis E. McAuley

has studied Ibn al-ʿArabī’s own discussions of the meaning of

poetry and poetic composition.3 What emerges is Ibn al-ʿArabī

the poet, both his individual inclinations as well as the poetic

1. An earlier version of this paper was presented at ‘Mystical Perception

and Beauty’, the 30th annual UK symposium of the Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabi

Society, held in Oxford on 11–12 May 2013.

2. I must thank H. Talat Halman and my brother, Sohrab Kadivar, for

their suggestions concerning this article.

3. Denis E. McAuley, Ibn ʿArabī’s Mystical Poetics (Oxford: Oxford Uni-

versity Press, 2012).

14 Cyrus Ali Zargar

and social milieu in which his poems took shape. McAuley,

however, focuses on Ibn al-ʿArabī’s Dīwān, which contains very

little in terms of love poetry, and so his discussion considers

poetry that is mostly topical – whether related to Quranic chap-

ters or descriptions of mystical knowledge and experience. Yet,

in order to understand more fully Ibn al-ʿArabī’s views on the

meaning and even essence of poetry, a look at his statements

about love and love poetry can complement McAuley’s discus-

sion. Indeed, a consideration of love poetry is necessary, for

clearly love poetry was not, for Ibn al-ʿArabī and his students,

one poetic form among many, nor was it composed or recited

merely for its own sake as an exercise in poetic ability. Rather,

it seems to have been an integral part of studying the path and

acquiring gnosis for Ibn al-ʿArabī and his students. The teacher,

Ibn al-ʿArabī, wrote an extensive commentary on his own col-

lection of love lyrics, Tarjumān al-Ashwāq (that commentary

is titled Dhakhāʾir al-Aʿlāq). While avoiding misunderstand-

ing, as he mentions in his own introduction, was certainly the

main motivating factor for Ibn al-ʿArabī’s commentary on his

love poems, his commentary as a whole shows that his world-

view, along with the details of his cosmology, abide and per-

haps even inhere in his love poetry, assuming the reader has

a discerning and receptive heart.4 Such a commentary, as imi-

tated later by those in his school, shows that love poetry has

the ability to keep within it the crux of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s teach-

ings, almost, it would seem, in their entirety. We know that Ibn

al-ʿArabī’s foremost student Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī (d.673/1273–

74) placed heavy emphasis on Ibn al-ʿArabī’s collection of love

lyrics, Tarjumān al-Ashwāq, making the reading of poems from

this collection a consistent part of his meetings with pupils.5

4. Dhakhāʾir al-Aʿlāq, Sharḥ Tarjumān al-Ashwāq, ed. Muḥammad

ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Najm al-Dīn al-Kurdī (Cairo: College of Arabic, al-Azhar

University, 1968), p.4.

5. See Michael A. Sells, Stations of Desire: Love Elegies from Ibn ʿArabi

and New Poems (Jerusalem: Ibis Editions, 2000), p.37, in which Sells

relies on a bibliographical study by Gerald Elmore, namely, ‘Sadr al-Din

al-Qunawi’s Personal Study-List of Books by Ibn al-ʿArabi,’ Journal of Near

Eastern Studies 56, no. 3 (1997): 161–81, here especially 175 and 179.

The Poetics of Shuhūd 15

Moreover, al-Qūnawī’s enthusiasm for the love poetry of Ibn

al-Fāriḍ seems to have been contagious, leading to numerous

commentaries on those lyrics by those over whom al-Qūnawī

had either direct or indirect influence.6 Lastly, as I have tried to

show elsewhere, love poetry as an art form springs from what is

arguably the most pivotal principle in Ibn al-ʿArabī’s writings:

love as a cosmological principle, indeed perhaps even the divine

essence itself, and one that attunes the soul and the senses of

designated knowers-of-God to its own ways.7 For that reason,

in this article, I will consider Ibn al-ʿArabī’s poetics in the con-

text of love poetry. More specifically, I will illustrate the ways in

which Ibn al-ʿArabī’s own critique of a love poem in Chapter

198 of al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya touches on his observations about

the correspondence between love as truly experienced and love

as truly expressed, that is, the relationship between gnosis and

lyrical love poetry.

Defining poetry

First, what is poetry? For Muḥyī al-Dīn and his contemporaries

the question would not be one of category. Metered

language, usually in set numbers of feet, stood out from

other compositional forms, making it rather easy for the

famous lexicographer Muḥammad ibn Mukarram ibn Manẓūr

(d.711/1311–12) to describe poetry (al-shiʿr) as ‘that utterance

which is arranged, marked in its high distinction by the

predominance of meter and rhyme.’8 Even Ibn al-ʿArabī himself,

6. Cyrus Ali Zargar, Sufi Aesthetics: Beauty, Love, and the Human Form

in the Writings of Ibn ʿArabi and ʿIraqi (Columbia, SC: University of South

Carolina Press, 2011), pp.103–4. McAuley argues that the systematization

of Sufism, during and especially after Ibn al-ʿArabī’s day, led to greater

reliance on both didactic poetry and lyrical poetry that could be read using

Sufi terms and doctrines; this meant that Sufi love lyrics, such as those of

Ibn al-Fāriḍ, became more popular. See McAuley, Mystical Poetics, pp.214–

15.

7. Zargar, Sufi Aesthetics, especially pp.82–3.

8. Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-ʿArab (Qom: Nashr Adab al-Ḥawza, 1984),

4:410. All translations in this article are my own, unless otherwise noted.

16 Cyrus Ali Zargar

when discussing what makes poetry distinctly similar to God’s

creation, focuses on its rhythm and structure – which he seems

to see as poetry’s defining traits.9 The question, then, becomes

one of essence: what really is poetry?

In Ibn al-ʿArabī’s discussions of the topic, it is clear that

poetry is a venue for a summative, perceptive sort of know-

ledge lacking detail – as opposed to a venue for clarity, spe-

cifics, or lucid expression; that is, it is a place of al-ijmāl, or

synoptic expression, and not al-tafṣīl, or expositional expres-

sion.10 According to Ibn al-ʿArabī, this is why the Prophet

Muhammad, who was sent to clarify and expound, was not

made a poet, as is announced in the Quran.11 In this regard,

poetry (al-shiʿr) is related to the word al-shuʿūr, which one

might translate as ‘perceptiveness.’ Elsewhere, Ibn al-ʿArabī

clarifies that ‘perceptiveness’ (al-shuʿūr) can be explained by

imagining a locked chest in which you sense movement; you

know that there is an animal in the chest, and yet you cannot

determine its species.12 Similarly, if the chest is heavy, you can

sense that something is weighing it down without knowing

the identity of its contents. Clearly, then, poetry comes from a

sort of ‘knowing,’ but one that is intuitive and unclear. What

one sees in dreams has form and carries meaning – some-

times incredibly profound meaning. The places, people and

9. McAuley, Mystical Poetics, pp.44–5.

10. al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1968), 2:274, hereafter

cited as ‘Fut.’.

11. Q.36:69. It seems that, according to Ibn al-ʿArabī, the Prophet’s

role as a clarifier and expounder of God’s religion is the only reason that

he was not made a poet. In other words, were it not to avoid confusion,

the Prophet certainly would have been made a poet, since poetry can

bear spiritual meanings not borne by prose. Moreover, even if the Prophet

did not compose poetry, Ibn al-ʿArabī’s statements do still leave open the

possibility of his receiving or perceiving as a poet. Indeed, according to

his own account, Ibn al-ʿArabī himself ‘received’ in his heart the divine

command ‘which none can perceive but a poet,’ but that experience

was ‘arranged... as prose’; in other words, experiences that befit the

perceptiveness of poets can be expressed as prose. See McAuley, Mystical

Poetics, p.207.

12. Fut.3:514.

The Poetics of Shuhūd 17

events encountered in a dream can be called if not knowledge

then certainly a sort of awareness, especially since a dream

is ‘one-forty-sixth part of prophecy,’ as is stated in a hadith

that Ibn al-ʿArabī will often quote.13 And yet the experiences

of dreams require interpretation, or al-taʿbīr, a phrase that

Ibn al-ʿArabī uses to describe the ‘crossing over’ from form to

meaning, once meaning has been captured in form. For this

reason, in Ibn al-ʿArabī’s astrology, dream interpretation and

poetic composition belong to the same heaven, namely, the

third heaven, the heaven of the divine name ‘the Form-giver’

(al-muṣawwir), whose acts of creation testify to the capture of

meaning in varieties of form. It is the heaven of the prophet

Joseph, who unraveled form to get to the meaning of dreams

and the heaven of ‘proper fashioning’ and al-niẓām or ‘har-

monious arrangement.’ The word for ‘harmonious arrange-

ment’ is closely related to the word al-naẓm, a word that

describes the structures and symmetries that define, among

other things, verse itself.14 Other modes of language – specifi-

cally, prosaic composition and speech – belong to the second

heaven, the heaven of knowledge.15 Poetry, as opposed to

prose, might be described as an act of creation rather than

speech, an act of conjuring images rather than proceeding dis-

cursively, a verbal act beyond time, space and contradictions

rather than one bound by reason. In this regard, Claude Addas

has proposed that poetry – and only poetry – can carry certain

ineffable realities.16 In fact, in his own preface to his Dīwān

13. William Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge (Albany: State University

of New York Press, 1989), pp.121 and 397, n.11.

14. William Chittick, Imaginal Worlds: Ibn al-ʿArabī and the Problem of

Religious Diversity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), p.81.

15. It should be mentioned that Titus Burckhardt places the prophet

Joseph and Venus in the fifth heaven, and not the third, in his Mystical

Astrology According to Ibn ʿArabi, trans. Bulent Rauf (Abingdon, UK: Beshara

Press, 1977), pp.32–3. Chittick’s version is supported by the passage he

translates from Fut.2:275.

16. Claude Addas, ‘The Ship of Stone,’ in The Journey of the Heart, ed.

John Mercer (Oxford: Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabi Society, 1996), pp.5–24, here

p.24.

18 Cyrus Ali Zargar

al-Maʿārif, Ibn al-ʿArabī describes poetic language, as ‘the

permanent principle (al-jawhar al-thābit), while prose is the

immutable consequence (al-farʿ al-thābit).’17 In other words,

poetry captures an essential reality of things, an inexplicable

ordering, that exists throughout the cosmos and within an

individual’s imagination, while prose functions in the arena

of consequences and explains itself at every turn. It is not

only that prose must acknowledge cause and effect, but rather

that its words are all causes and effects.

McAuley, also, reviews three useful prose passages by Ibn

al-ʿArabī, in which he describes either the poetic process or

the nature of poetry itself. First, in Chapter 167 of al-Futūḥāt

al-Makkiyya, Ibn al-ʿArabī uses the principles of alchemy to

describe the poetic process. Images come together, for the poet,

in the structures of ordered speech, in the form of rhyme and

meter, much like alchemy brings a balance to the elements.18

Second, in the introduction to his Dīwān al-Maʿārif, we learn

of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s views not only concerning the relationship

between prosody and the natural order, but also concerning

poetry’s ability to keep certain esoteric matters obscure and thus

secret. We also learn that Ibn al-ʿArabī’s view of poetic com-

position may have been influenced by a long-held association

in Arabic literature and lore between poets and the jinn who

were thought to inspire them. Ibn al-ʿArabī clearly describes an

imaginal event in his life that renders him a poet and one that

resembles the model of demonic possession: he swallows the

twenty-sixth chapter of the Quran, Sūrat al-Shuʿarāʾ (the Chap-

ter of the Poets), which appears to him as light and grows, after

his swallowing it, as a hair ‘sprouting from my chest’ that has

the limbs and faculties of an animal; its head reaches the hori-

zons of East and West before retreating back into Ibn al-ʿArabī’s

chest, which means to him that his audience will extend to

both East and West.19 Third and last, we learn that in Chapter

398 of al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, Ibn al-ʿArabī states that preachers

17. Ibid. p.16.

18. McAuley, Mystical Poetics, p.43.

19. Ibid. pp.47–8.

The Poetics of Shuhūd 19

should choose the poetry they use in their sermons carefully.

They should avoid those love poems in which the author had

no intention whatsoever that God (and not a human being) is

the beloved.20

Must the poet be a knower?

The aforementioned passage about poetry in sermons from

Chapter 398 of al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya seems, to me, to have

more to do with effective preaching than with the nature of

poetry as a whole. The preacher that Ibn al-ʿArabī describes as

chided by God in the afterlife, Manṣūr ibn ʿAmmār, is repri-

manded for having a dry eye and a hard heart and yet, still,

reciting love poetry; the love poetry, while unworthy for

preaching, still seems less at issue than the impure combina-

tion of sermons, profane love lyrics, and an ethically unwor-

thy preacher.21 The message seems to be that, for successful

and God-accepted preaching, sincerity must pervade every-

thing – including the intention of the original poet. Indeed, Ibn

al-ʿArabī mentions ikhlāṣ (sincerity of intention) as a prerequi-

site for pure food, comparing that to poetry, which can be pure

or impure depending on the intentions of its author.22 Where

people gather to remember God, purity of intention matters.

Yet one must remember that Ibn al-ʿArabī can write, as McAu-

ley notes, as a ‘literary critic, as a Sufi, and as a jurist.’23 I would

add to Ibn al-ʿArabī’s various roles that he can also write ‘as a

knower-of-God writing to other knowers-of-God,’ because the

more elite ‘knowers’ and the more general ‘Sufis’ are separate

categories in his writings.24 So, preaching aside, what would Ibn

al-ʿArabī – the knower-of-God (ʿārif ) – say to other elect know-

ers-of-God about love poetry, written with the intention of a

human beloved?

20. Ibid. pp.52–3.

21. Ibid. p.51.

22. Ibid. p.52.

23. Ibid. p.54.

24. Ibn al-ʿArabī makes this distinction, for example, in Fut.2:190

(Chap. 108).

20 Cyrus Ali Zargar

For an audience of elite knowers, those whom Ibn al-ʿArabī

calls al-ʿārifīn, it does not matter whether the poet intended

God or a human beloved in his or her love lyric – the poem will

necessarily be read in the right way. He clarifies this in Chapter

178 of al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, when he says that, even though

poets have ‘wasted away their words on existent things while

being unaware,’ praising the created instead of the creator,

nevertheless, ‘the knowers (al-ʿārifūn), on the other hand, do

not hear a poem, or a riddle, or a panegyric, or a love lyric,

without [knowing] who is in it behind the veil of forms.’25

They can hear a love poem, regardless of its original intent,

and trace it back to its proper source; in fact, the knowers can

do nothing else when they hear words of love. This is because

the elite knowers-of-God have realized the oneness of love:

according to Ibn al-ʿArabī’s reading of the Quran 17:23 (‘And

your Lord has decreed that you worship none but Him’),

God does not allow for anything other than Himself to be

worshipped, such that anyone worshipping – even if one thinks

one worships something other than God – actually only seeks

divinity as imagined within that thing.26 Similarly, in actuality,

‘a person can love nothing but his creator,’ because God is the

true possessor of beauty in all things, and ‘the cause of love is

beauty.’ The entire cosmos, indeed, acts out God’s own act of

self-admiration and self-love: ‘He is manifest in every beloved

for the eye of every lover, and every existent is necessarily a

lover. The cosmos is all lover and beloved, and it all returns

to Him, just as nothing is actually worshipped but Him.’27

Therefore, the poet-lover who has intuition, awareness, and,

especially, sincere love has the proper state of heart to produce

good poetry, or at least poetry that becomes good when read

by the knower-of-God, as can be seen in Ibn al-ʿArabī’s own

critiques of poetry that follow.

25. Fut.2:326.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid.

The Poetics of Shuhūd 21

Poetry composed by the intuitive,

subtle heart

Despite his discussion of authorial intentions, Ibn al-ʿArabī’s

approach to poetic commentary places less emphasis on the

author and much more emphasis on the correspondence

between the poem in question and the universal laws of love,

universal because these laws apply to true lovers in the natural,

spiritual, and divine sense; in other words, they apply to any

sort of love experienced sincerely and expressed precisely. The

able poet has the perceptiveness needed to capture ineffable

meaning in the form of poetry, even if not wholly aware

of the spiritual subtleties captured in that poem. Yet good

poetic interpretation seems to be the exclusive domain of the

knower, as Ibn al-ʿArabī shows in his critiques. The knower-of-

God will read a poem and recognize in it the spiritual subtleties

that the poem’s own author might know only by intuition, and

not in any detailed fashion. In that regard, twice in al-Futūḥāt

al-Makkiyya Ibn al-ʿArabī comments on a poem by the Abbasid

caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd (r.170–93/786–809). In the poem, the

caliph confesses his overwhelming infatuation with three slave

girls, Ghādir, Mārida, and Haylāna:28

Three delightful maidens possess my bridle rein

and have alighted in every place of my heart.

Why, when all of creation coils in fright of me,

do I obey them – although they constantly disobey me!

This is nothing other than the dominion of passion

with which they prevail more mightily than my

dominion.29

Although there are three maidens, Ibn al-ʿArabī explains, the

caliph describes them as possessing ‘one bridle rein.’ Here the

poet, according to Ibn al-ʿArabī, could have attributed to the

28. Ibn al-ʿArabī does not mention the details. For such details, see

Bāqir Sharīf al-Qurashī, Ḥayāt al-Imām al-Riḍā (Tehran: Manshūrāt Saʿīd

ibn Jubayr, 1992), 2:225.

29. Fut.2:113.

22 Cyrus Ali Zargar

girls multiple ‘reins’ (aʿinna), but chose to use the singular, ‘rein’

(ʿinānī).30 In other words, even though there are three girls, and

thus three beloveds, the poet describes them as unified in their

rule over the lover. The language of the poem reflects a truth

about love and desire: the lover feels ruled, indeed subjugated,

by the force of love itself – not by the girls. It is for this reason,

also, that all three girls alight together in the various places of

the caliph’s heart. As Ibn al-ʿArabī comments, the caliph ‘loves

exclusively one meaning actualized for him by these three girls’;

one meaning, that is, love itself, not as an emotion, but rather

as a cosmological principle.31 Indeed, when one bears in mind

that the first instance of love was God’s love for Himself that

created the entire cosmos, His ‘love to be known’ since He was

a ‘hidden treasure,’ the love that conquers the caliph signifies

much more than mere biology.32 Rather, in being attuned to

the condition of his heart, the caliph here has happened upon

what Ibn al-ʿArabī calls a ‘concealed secret,’ namely, that love

is one thing, and in fact, the very cause of creation and all

instantiations of love.33 For this reason, these lines of poetry,

reflecting this truth about love, deserve praise, regardless of

whether or not their author was aware of the significance of

that which he declared.

Poetry composed by the unintuitive,

coarse heart

In contrast, Ibn al-ʿArabī does not shy away from pointing out

an instance of bad love poetry. Once again, the basis for his

judgment is the correspondence between poetic expression

and the truths of the heart, which he determines through close

reading. Ibn al-ʿArabī, as usual, proves to be a very careful

and sensitive reader, as he navigates his response to a friend,

who has inquired concerning a certain set of lines ‘whether a

30. Fut.2:330.

31. Ibid.

32. See Zargar, Sufi Aesthetics, pp.12 and 53.

33. Fut.2:330 and 2:113.

The Poetics of Shuhūd 23

knower from among the divine lovers had composed them.’34

Ibn al-ʿArabī does indeed address this part of his friend’s

question (that is, whether the poet was a knower-of-God), but

he is more interested in showing that, whether the poet was

aware of divine mysteries or not, he was not a true lover – and

hence not a good poet. In other words, while Ibn al-ʿArabī’s

response does acknowledge that being a ‘knower’ of God can

affect poetic output, he places far more emphasis on the poet

as a ‘lover,’ for it seems that a poet who is not a lover simply

cannot create a properly beautiful love poem.

The analysis of this poem appears in the introductory portion

of Chapter 198 of al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, a chapter concerning

the ‘Breath of the All-Merciful,’ and the poem relates to the

theme of breath in that it describes a man under the influence

of nostalgia inspired by an oncoming breeze:

I implore you by God, oh Breeze of the East Wind

from where is this goodly-smelling breath?

Did you envelop, within your gown at midmorning,

the place where Zaynab dropped her necklace?

Or did I detect your aroma at the meadow of the

inviolate lands

[from] when you were drawing her skirt over it?35

So bring it! And receive me kindly with news of her

because your familiarity with her today is nearer

[than mine].36

Ibn al-ʿArabī agrees that the poem is ‘subtle in terms of

expression, and attractive’ but he emphatically states that it is

‘nothing in terms of meaning.’ First, he points out that when

the poet implores, he is inquiring, seeking knowledge about

something unknown. His inquiry, ‘from where is this goodly-

smelling breath,’ implies that he has encountered a number

34. Ibid. 2:392.

35. The Dār Ṣādir edition here has fawqihā, which should, of course, be

fawqihi, as quoted correctly later in the text.

36. Fut.2:392.

24 Cyrus Ali Zargar

of such ‘breaths’ since he has to ask.37 The lover should be so

preoccupied with his beloved that he does not see anything

but her; indeed, Ibn al-ʿArabī offers, the mere possibility that

an entity might share in the beloved’s beauty and perfections

should not even enter the lover’s mind. The poem, therefore,

bears witness against the poet, pointing to a lack of intimate

knowledge (maʿrifa), if the poet claims to be an intimate

knower-of-God (ʿārif ), and even to, as Ibn al-ʿArabī puts it ‘the

deficiency of his love, if he is to be a lover and a truly passionate

one.’38 Here Ibn al-ʿArabī does grant that it is possible that the

plurality intended, the possibility of multiple fragrant breaths,

could be solved if the poet intended multiple manifestations of

that beloved – namely, seeing the beloved’s face everywhere.

The next line, however, cannot be resolved: ‘Did you

envelop, within your gown at midmorning, / the place where

Zaynab dropped her necklace?’ Ibn al-ʿArabī comments that

this double-line is ‘among the most evident proofs that he [the

poet] is not a lover and that this utterance is nearer to satiriz-

ing the beloved than to praise and extolment.’39 The problem

is that the poet has actually praised not his beloved but the

necklace she has dropped, because the necklace has made the

place fragrant, and the place has passed that perfume onto the

wind. What the poet meant to say, however, was that Zaynab’s

own breaths gave to the necklace, the place, and the wind its

perfume. For that reason, Ibn al-ʿArabī offers his own rectified

version of these lines:

Did you envelop, within your gown at midmorning,

the goodly fragrance of a place made redolent

by Zaynab?

Its breaths are from the fragrance of her breaths

so her fragrance is, compared with its fragrance,

more wondrous.40

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid.

39. Ibid.

40. Ibid. 2:392–3.

The Poetics of Shuhūd 25

Ibn al-ʿArabī’s changes make the beloved, Zaynab, the undis-

putable source of goodliness; moreover, the new lines attrib-

ute to her a supremacy of beauty, over all other entities in the

poem. Simply by specifying Zaynab as the sole source of beauty

(as love itself would dictate to the true lover), this new version

obscures the distinction between God and human, attributing

all fragrant breaths to Zaynab’s fragrant breath, hence simul-

taneously invoking the theme of the chapter (the life-giving

breath of the All-Merciful). The poet has not failed as a poet

because of whom he loves; he has failed because of how he loves.

The proper lover, like the knower-of-God, sees his beloved as

the source of all beauty and yet as far more beautiful, far above

all other instances of beauty.

Critique of the poem continues. When the poet says to the

wind, ‘Or did I detect your aroma at the meadow of the inviolate

lands / [from] when you were drawing her skirt over it,’ once

again, according to Ibn al-ʿArabī he attributes the delightful

fragrance not to the beloved and her breaths, but rather to the

meadow. When he says, ‘So bring it! And receive me kindly with

news of her / because your familiarity with her today is nearer

[than mine],’ the poet reveals that he speaks falsely as opposed

to speaking in utter sincerity. After all, the poem offers no real

evidence that the wind has recently been with the beloved. It has

been at a place and at a meadow, and, during one point in time,

Zaynab was there. But the wording of the poem only establishes

a sort of probability that the wind passed by Zaynab. What we

do know is that it has passed by these places, so the poet should

speak honestly; he should say to the wind that ‘your familiarity

with it,’ that is either place, or ‘with them,’ that is, both places,

is nearer; he should not say, ‘with her.’ Moreover, Ibn al-ʿArabī

points out, how do we really know that this delightful smell has

anything to do with Zaynab? Perhaps the meadow is fragrant

because of the presence of flowers or something else.

While Ibn al-ʿArabī’s critique might seem at times facetious,

or at least sarcastic, he actually makes a rather serious declaration

about poetic expression. Poetry is not simply the compilation

of beautiful words, fine metaphors, and rhythmic, rhyming

manipulations of language. Beautiful words, when examined

26 Cyrus Ali Zargar

deeply, must capture a sort of sublimity of meaning to yield

good poetry; expression is the form, but the form without

meaning will lead to something poetically dead, dead in that it

is unable to speak to hearts that are sensitive and aware, as he

himself states:

...the beauty of poetry and speech in general lies in the

combination of refined expression and unusually exalted

meaning, such that both the one contemplating and the one

hearing are bewildered, so that each cannot tell which was more

beautiful – the expression or the meaning, or if the two were equal.

Thus when he looks into one of the two [into either expression or

meaning], the other baffles him in its beauty, and if he looks into

both of them together, they both bewilder him. Only a person

with a coarse heart would find pleasure in a poem such as this

[the poem on Zaynab and the fragrant breeze], for its expression is

fine but its meaning is coarse. If the meaning is ugly to one with

a correct view, then beauty of expression will not veil such a one

from the ugliness of meaning. A metaphor I can give for this is

that of one who loves pictures of the utmost beauty drawn on a

decorated wall in a variety of colors, complete in terms of [formal]

creation [but] without spirit. Meaning is to expression what spirit

is to form; in reality, it is its beauty.41

Ibn al-ʿArabī continues to comment that the height of this

combination, the combination of expression and meaning, can

be found in the Quran. The Quran repeats stories, in order to

teach, and yet the addition or subtraction of even one word

would disturb the meaning; this is because, as Ibn al-ʿArabī

comments, it is an instance of ‘true speech.’42 Those who find

beauty in true speech have fine hearts; those who find beauty in

decorated language that lacks meaning have coarse hearts. The

ability to judge properly lies in the subtlety of one’s heart.

One might say then that, to Ibn al-ʿArabī, good love poetry

is true love poetry, and the standards for such truth are the

experiences of a fine heart. For the lover, ‘experience’ is the

41. Ibid. 2:394.

42. Ibid.

The Poetics of Shuhūd 27

experience of love. For the lover who has intimate knowledge of

God, that is, the knower (ʿārif ), it is also the experience of love,

but one coupled with an awareness of the most sublime realities

and the full significance of that love. In Ibn al-ʿArabī’s words,

his own heroes are the great lovers and beloveds of Arabic

poetry, figures such as Hind, Bishr, Qays, and Layla – those who

loved or were loved with all their being.43 Love took away, in his

description, ‘their sense of reason and annihilated them from

themselves,’ because their beloveds – even when absent – were

imprinted in their hearts and lived on in their imaginations,

afflicting them, afflicting their lovers because they were absent

in physical form and yet ever-present in the imagination.44

Imagine, then, how much worse it must be, Ibn al-ʿArabī says,

for the lover of God. After all, for those experiencing human-

to-human love and only human-to-human love, the beloved is

seen and heard by the lover. In the case of the lover and knower-

of-God, however, the beloved (that is, God) is not just seen and

heard, but rather the very faculties of sight and hearing.45 Here

one can see that poems written about human beloveds can

be instances of what Ibn al-ʿArabī calls ‘true speech,’ that is,

poetry that is beautiful in terms of form and meaning. Poems

about human beloveds (Hind, Bishr, Qays, and Layla) can be

true if written by a poet who has loved truly, for that poet has

inadvertently loved something greater than even the poet can

understand. The target might have been another human being,

but the inevitable bull’s-eye is always the reality of love itself,

the divine self-love that permeates all things. Thus true speech,

even if intended for Hind, Bishr, Qays, and Layla, resonates for

the knowers in a way that it simply cannot for those unaware of

the measureless reaches of love.

43. Dhakhāʾir al-Aʿlāq, p.51.

44. Ibid.

45. Zargar, Sufi Aesthetics, pp.136–7.

28 Cyrus Ali Zargar

Poetic nostalgia and shuhūd

One who is familiar with classical Arabic love poetry knows that

its major theme is nostalgia, a longing for a beloved physically

absent yet ever-present in the mind.46 This experience of love,

this mixture of absence and omnipresence, helps us understand

the most basic component of much of Sufi love poetry and

arguably all of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s love poetry, namely, shuhūd, or

‘witnessing.’ James Winston Morris, in The Reflective Heart,

discusses longing for the divine face, longing for the beatific

vision implied in the Quranic verse ‘wheresoever you turn,

there is the face of God’ (Q.2:115), which is not only a central

theme in al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, but also the driving theme

in Ibn al-ʿArabī’s poetry and poetic commentary.47 There is an

intimate and inseparable connection between God’s imagined

face and the beautiful human faces celebrated in Arabic and

Persian Sufi poetry. The universality of love and the universality

of beauty together mean that all instances of love and beauty

return to God. The key element in the human love for God is

witnessing God’s beauty; so too, the key element in the human

love for humans is gazing upon human beauty. Witnessing the

divine beloved has much in common with gazing at a human

beloved: both acts give the viewer great pleasure, fan the flames

of the viewer’s love, cause him to want union, and – when such

union is impossible – bring the viewer great pain.

Love poetry finds its spiritual significance in this act of gazing,

an act called ‘witnessing’ (shuhūd) in technical Sufi language.

Without delving too deeply into the details of witnessing

(which I have discussed elsewhere), it can be described briefly

as follows. An encounter with God leaves an impression in the

heart, an imprint left either by the act of witnessing or by a self-

46. Jaroslav Stetkevych’s important book, The Zephyrs of Najd: The

Poetics of Nostalgia in the Classical Arabic Naṣīb (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1993), traces the theme of nostalgia among such poets,

including Ibn al-ʿArabī himself.

47. James Winston Morris, The Reflective Heart: Discovering Spiritual

Intelligence in Ibn ʿArabi’s Meccan Illuminations (Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae,

2005), pp.102–13.

The Poetics of Shuhūd 29

disclosure ‘outside of matter,’ which is a self-disclosure both

unfathomable and unenjoyed.48 That imprint is called a shāhid

or ‘witness.’ The person who has this imprint on the heart – this

shāhid or visionary testimony to the Real – enjoys beholding

it, because beholding it feeds and fortifies love more than

anything else. In order to behold the shāhid, the person must

resort to phenomena as known and as perceived by the senses;

he or she views the shāhid in various places, in various forms,

forms that might exist in the imagination of the soul, or in the

natural world, but beholding the shāhid, which is called shuhūd

or ‘witnessing,’ always needs some medium.49 Here we come to

a point which Ibn al-ʿArabī makes unequivocally: the human

form, above all else, serves as the best medium for witnessing;

for one human being to contemplate the beauty of God best,

that human must take to the beauty of other human beings.

More specifically, from a male perspective, as Ibn al-ʿArabī

makes clear in his chapter on the Prophet Muhammad in Fuṣūṣ

al-Ḥikam, the witnessing of the Real in women is the greatest,

most perfect, and most complete instance of witnessing.50

Witnessing might seem pleasurable, and it can be, but there is

always an element of pain; the viewer longs for something more

immediate, longs for direct vision (al-ruʾya), but is constantly

rejected. He must resort to the media of witnessing, that is, to

indirect or mediated vision, instead. Moses, famously, longs for

direct vision in his cry, ‘Lord show me that I may gaze upon

You’ (Q.7:143); Ibn al-ʿArabī argues that it is direct vision and

not witnessing that Moses seeks because saints well below the

rank of Moses have achieved witnessing, so Moses must be

longing for something more.51

Consider, then, how closely this experience of witnessing

parallels the experience of falling in love with another human

being: a person meets, for the first time, another beautiful person

48. Fut.2:567.

49. Ibid. 3:234–5.

50. Ibn al-ʿArabī, Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam, ed. Abū ʿAlāʾ ʿAfīfī (Cairo: Dār Iḥyāʾ

al-Kutub al-ʿArabiyya, 1946), p.217.

51. Fut.2:567.

30 Cyrus Ali Zargar

and, overwhelmed by her beauty, falls in love. She leaves, but

an image of her remains in the heart of the lover. He carries

that image everywhere and indeed sees her everywhere. While

he enjoys remembering her, thinking about her always, the

memory also torments him. After all, he can only remember; he

cannot actually have. She is both omnipresent and absent. She

is both everywhere and nowhere. His only consolation is crying

out loud, and from those cries comes the mode of perceptive

expression we call love poetry. For this reason, in the following

poem from Tarjumān al-Ashwāq, Ibn al-ʿArabī describes the

pains of yearning common to lovers, lovers of humans, lovers of

God, and those like Ibn al-ʿArabī himself who are lovers of both,

or, rather, as he himself says, the ‘combination’ of the two:52

Peace be upon Salmā and whoever settles in that private

pasture,

and it is the duty of one like me, so tender-hearted, to

give greetings.

And what would she lose if she were to return these

salutations

to us? But one cannot pass judgment against beautiful

idols.

They set off, when the tenebrousness of night let down its

curtains,

and I said to her, ‘Uncontrollably in love! Stranded!

Enslaved by love!

Yearnings surrounding him! Ready to unleash violently

upon him are those [desires] who project arrows, no

matter where he turns.’

She smiled revealing her teeth. A flash of lightning struck.

I do not know which of the two broke the sheer night

darkness.

She said, ‘Doesn’t it suffice him, concerning me, that with

his heart

he witnesses me in every single moment? Doesn’t it?

Doesn’t it?’53

52. Fut.2:330 and Zargar, Sufi Aesthetics, p.82.

53. Ibn al-ʿArabī, Tarjumān al-Ashwāq (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir li-l-ṭabāʿah

wa-l-nashr, Dār Bayrūt li-l-ṭabāʿah wa-l-nashr, 1961), pp.25–7.

The Poetics of Shuhūd 31

And of course the answer is, ‘No, it does not.’ In fact, witnessing

the beloved always and everywhere is far from a consolation for

the afflicted lover. Rather, it is this witnessing and not having

that sums up his agony. In fact, the beloved’s statement is not

meant to console; it is meant to mock, to trifle with the lover,

and to underscore the pleasure she takes in his pains. Rather

than sympathize with his cries, she smiles. Rather than offer

an end to his torture, she tells him that he can enjoy it, always

and everywhere. The beloved’s ironic response, more than

mere coyness, exhibits a sadistic indifference to his suffering.

Moreover, it is not even the actual beloved saying this; it is the

beloved as lodged in the lover’s memory; she is that unattainable.

As Ibn al-ʿArabī mentions, the lover in this state of suffering

combines opposites, which is one of the qualities of love. The

beloved loves separation. The lover loves union. But the lover is

also supposed to love that which the beloved loves. So does the

lover then also love separation? That would be impossible and

‘contrary to the dictates of love.’ Rather, the lover must love ‘the

beloved’s love of separation, not separation itself, and also love

union.’54 This is not the state of some temporary and fleeting

relationship, but, rather, the nature of love, since the lover and

the beloved, no matter how much the same, and even if the

beloved is lodged in the lover’s own memory, must be separated

by their opposing roles. Thus, when Moses cries out ‘Lord show

me that I may gaze upon you,’ the answer comes back: ‘You

will not see me’ (Q.7:143). And yet the witnessing described

in this poem – the awareness of the beloved imprinted in the

heart and seen everywhere through the imagination – does

indeed give to the viewer something he would not otherwise

have; as Ibn al-ʿArabī describes it in his commentary on this

poem, it is a witnessing of the beloved ‘in his [the lover’s] own

essence, through his essence, at every moment.’55 Without such

witnessing, love and esoteric knowledge lose their source of

nourishment; without such witnessing, the knower would not

be a knower.

54. Fut.2:327.

55. Dhakhāʾir al-Aʿlāq, p.28.

32 Cyrus Ali Zargar

Love poetry as lived practice

of the imagination

If our goal is a true ‘poetics’ of Ibn al-ʿArabī, then Sufi love poetry

and Sufi commentaries on such poetry should be read in their

own, very real conceptual and historical context, which is why

studies such as that of McAuley are so valuable. Poetry, in the

case of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s love lyrics, can capture the contradictions

of love because it is not bound by the laws of reason; remember

that poetry originates in the imagination and answers to the

imagination. Poetry aims to do that which the imagination

does, namely, capture meaning in forms. That which appears in

the imagination is both sensory and super-sensory; it conveys

meaning – or we might say spiritual realities – but does so

using everything one has acquired from the senses. An abstract

concept such as ‘knowledge’ cannot appear as knowledge. How

can one ‘see’ something like knowledge, something that has

no form? Rather, in the imagination, knowledge might appear

as milk, to give an example. The importance placed on both

imagination and witnessing allows Ibn al-ʿArabī to embrace

the sensory, and even the sensual, in ways foreign to, or even

rejected by, many among ascetics and those we call mystics. We

know that Ibn al-ʿArabī himself proclaims that he came to the

love of women only after struggling with it. Upon originally

entering the path, Ibn al-ʿArabī detested women and union with

them – according to his own account – for a period of eighteen

years.56 The insight given to him in this matter reflects his

newer alignment with the spiritual perfection of Muhammad.

For both the Prophet Muhammad and Ibn al-ʿArabī, it is not

that they loved women, but that, through divine agency and

their own inherent perfections, women were made beloved of

them. In declaring this, Ibn al-ʿArabī refers to the hadith of the

Prophet Muhammad, ‘Three things have been made beloved of

56. Claude Addas, Quest for the Red Sulphur: The Life of Ibn ʿArabī,

trans. Peter Kingsley (Cambridge, UK: The Islamic Texts Society, 1993),

p.40; Fut.4:84.

The Poetics of Shuhūd 33

me from this world of yours: women, perfume, and the delight

of my eye has been placed in the prescribed prayer.’57

Ibn al-ʿArabī’s love lyrics are poetic venerations of very

real human beauty, closely related to his theories on beauty

(including human beauty) and any practices that might have

resulted from such theories. For that reason, the intimate link

between love poetry and the human form that one finds in Ibn

al-ʿArabī’s corpus should not be understood in vague terms.

The centrality of erotic poetry and the human form in Ibn

al-ʿArabī’s thought should not be confused or conflated with

other instances of erotic poetry in a religious-spiritual context,

or other instances of erotic poetry as part of a spiritual regimen.

Ibn al-ʿArabī’s reading of erotic poetry is especially unlike

many metaphorical uses of erotic poetry to describe a spiritual

experience distinct or distant from the bodily. In the case of

Ibn al-ʿArabī, his fascination with erotic poetry blossomed in

a certain context, a context in which many Persian-speaking

Sufis with whom he was acquainted (such as Awḥad al-Dīn

Kirmānī, d.635/1238) proclaimed their allegiance to a School

of Passionate Love (madhhab-i ʿishq, in Persian). Erotic poetry

for many adherents to the School of Passionate Love occurred

in settings where actual human beloveds – often young men

whose beards had not yet grown – sat before these saints;

the viewers would recite poetry, weep, and witness unlimited

divine beauty in the form of an actual human face. Remember

that shuhūd is the knower-lover’s primary occupation and

that its best medium is the human form. While there is some

evidence that Ibn al-ʿArabī opposed this practice of gazing

upon human faces, I have argued that there is better evidence

that Ibn al-ʿArabī sympathized with it.58 In fact, Ibn al-ʿArabī’s

57. Fut.3:501; for the hadith, see Aḥmad ibn Hanbal (d.241/855),

Musnad Aḥmad ibn Hanbal (Riyadh: Bayt al-Afkār al-Duwaliyya, 1998), no.

12318/9, p.868.

58. Claude Addas discusses this in Quest for the Red Sulphur, pp.163–4.

She uses Ibn al-ʿArabī’s Kitāb al-Amr as translated by Miguel Asín Palacios

in his El islam cristianizado: Estudio del ‘Sufismo’ a través de las obras de

Abenarabi de Murcia (Madrid: Editorial Plutarco, 1931), pp.300–51. My

discussion in Sufi Aesthetics (pp.73–6) is based on Fut.2:190.

34 Cyrus Ali Zargar

contradictory statements about gazing at young men, found

in two different texts, can be explained by a difference in

audiences. In one passage, intended for ‘Sufis,’ Ibn al-ʿArabī

emphasizes the dangers of associating with beautiful young

men, or, even more dangerous, gazing at them and thus trying

to use them as ‘witnesses’ to divine beauty, which is the ‘gravest

of obstacles’ on the path.59 The other passage is intended for

elite knowers, for as Ibn al-ʿArabī says, ‘the knower (al-ʿārif)

gazes.’60 Here Ibn al-ʿArabī defends the knower’s associating

with young men and gazing at them, while still acknowledging

that such association should be forbidden for ‘novice wayfarers

(al-murīdūn) and Sufis (al-ṣūfiyya).’61 Gazing at beardless youths

is an abominable act for almost everyone; ‘almost’ because

such gazing is allowed for realized knowers and only realized

knowers, namely, those who have completely mastered their

desires. For that group, gazing has distinctive spiritual effects

that Ibn al-ʿArabī describes. Here we return to the matter of

intention, for even gazing upon women – Ibn al-ʿArabī tells us –

can be either reprehensible or allowed in differing contexts; it is

allowed in the case of courtship or medical treatment, and, for

the physician, can even be an act of worship.62

Ibn al-ʿArabī’s stance on the practice of gazing at beautiful

faces is only one factor in beginning to understand the

theoretical and historical context of his love poetry: regardless

of where he stood on the matter of gazing, he certainly and

unambiguously sympathized with the principles of the School

of Passionate Love, namely the witnessing of divine beauty in

human form. Ibn al-ʿArabī’s famous reference to his belonging

to a ‘Religion of Love’ (dīn al-ḥubb), the heroes of which are

the lovers and beloveds of erotic poetry, mirrors to some

degree the Persian title ‘School of Passionate Love.’63 And one

cannot ignore the fact that those influenced by Ibn al-ʿArabī,

59. El islam cristianizado, p.328.

60. Zargar, Sufi Aesthetics, p.73.

61. Ibid. p.74.

62. Fut.3:562–3.

63. Tarjumān al-Ashwāq, pp.43–4.

The Poetics of Shuhūd 35

especially the students of his foremost student, began a trend

of commenting on erotic poetry, often that of the Egyptian

Sufi ʿUmar ibn al-Fāriḍ (d.632/1235), and interpreting that

poetry in ways that intertwined ineffable divine appearances

and real human beauty. Figures such as Fakhr al-Dīn ʿIrāqī

(d.688/1289) and Saʿīd al-Dīn Farghānī (d.699/1300) did not

maintain a definition of erotic poetry that veered from that

of their great shaykh, Ibn al-ʿArabī. They instead continued a

way of thinking about beauty that claimed to go far back into

the memory of Sufism and Islam itself, back beyond the great

Aḥmad Ghazālī (d.520/1126), beyond even earlier advocates of

using human beauty as visual or poetic media for spiritual love,

back to the source texts themselves.64 As Ibn al-ʿArabī states,

the love of beauty, especially the full spiritual significance of

natural beauty, including the rain that falls from above and the

women with whom union reawakens human origination, had

been taught by the Prophet Muhammad himself.65

Conclusion

Ibn al-ʿArabī’s writings lead one to conclude that to ponder

the nature of love poetry one must first ponder the nature of

love itself. Love experienced between human beings, which is

the greatest model of the love between God and Himself, has

veracity. It should be no surprise, then, that the poet, gifted

with intuition, can capture something true, reflecting the

most profound cosmological realities, merely by capturing his

own true experience of love for another human. Of course,

the knower-of-God can capture such realities in poetry to an

incomparably higher degree; the knower, after all, knows and

does not merely intuit, so that even the knower’s intuition

derives its powers from intimate familiarity with God.

64. The history of what the author calls ‘religious love for a beautiful

person’ in Sufism is discussed in detail by Helmut Ritter, The Ocean of the

Soul, trans. John O’Kane (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2003), pp.448–84.

65. The hadith on women has been mentioned above. As for rain, see

Zargar, Sufi Aesthetics, pp.74–5.

36 Cyrus Ali Zargar

Moreover, the knower, and only the knower, properly translates

all instances of love, poetic and otherwise, seeing in a limited

instance of love and beauty the unlimited agent of love and

beauty. If poets have intuition and relay the ordeals of love

through synopsis (al-ijmāl), the tafṣīl or exposition of such

experiences belongs only to the knower. The word ‘translate,’

indeed, appears in the title Ibn al-ʿArabī gives to his collection

of erotic poems, Tarjumān al-Ashwāq, namely, the ‘translator’ or

‘interpreter’ of desires; love subverts reason, and since poetry

is the means for expressing that which is known and yet not

bound by reason, poetry can speak on behalf of love. Through

poetry, one can translate that which is foreign to the intellect.

For human beings, after all, nothing can be known without

translation. Just as love is best translated into poetry, so too

divine beauty is best translated into human beauty. Here one

can see a relationship between the literary vehicle of beauty

and love (poetry) and the most complete manifestation of

beauty and love (the human form): poetry, and by this I mean

love poetry as its highest expression, comes closest in terms of

art forms and modes of expression to the human form. Like the

human, poetry has the ability to capture contradictories, to be

material in form and immaterial in meaning. Ibn al-ʿArabī, as

we have seen, describes successful poetry as the combination

of beautiful and balanced form with exalted and sublime

meaning. Thus, composing (and enjoying) poetry, especially

love poetry, captures the very paradigm of being human, for the

human has the most beautiful and balanced form (Q.95:4) and

the most exalted and sublime meaning or spirit (as Ibn al-ʿArabī

announces in his first chapter on Adam in Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam).

The story of the creation of Adam, the story of the Prophet

Muhammad’s nightly ascent, and the revelation of divine

speech in human tongue known as the Quran, all point to the

marriage between absolute meaning and material form made

necessary only by love, the love of the Real to be known.

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