Islam · Dreams & the Unconscious
Person · Sufism · 1165
Ibn ʿArabī
The Greatest Master, Still Contested
Readers found a God disclosed through every form yet confined to none, and their experience as knowledge.
Who they wereHis most quoted lines make the heart, not the creed, the organ of religion: it has become capable of every form — a pasture for gazelles, a convent for monks, a temple, a Kaʿba, the tablets of the Torah. God is disclosed in every form and confined by none, which is what his readers found and his critics objected to.
The FindingWaḥdat al-wujūd, the phrase Ibn ʿArabī is universally labelled with, is one specialists find nowhere in his writings: on Chittick's reading Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) made it the name of a doctrine in order to condemn it, and only with Jāmī (d. 1492) did admirers take it up approvingly.
Poem · Sufism · 1278
The Dream of the Treasure in Cairo
The Detour Was the Delivery
— Masnavi VI · tr. E. H. Whinfield, 1887Ah! many earnest suppliants wail forth prayers,Till the smoke of their wailing rises to heaven;Yea, the perfume of the incense of sinners’ groansMounts up above the lofty roof of heaven.
Masnavi VI: a ruined Baghdadi dreams of treasure in Cairo, and is beaten there into hearing it lies at home.
What it meansThe treasure was at home the whole time, and he could not learn that at home. The reading is precise about the journey's function: it is not wasted and it is not the point — the road to Cairo exists so that someone in Cairo can tell him to go back.
Poem · Sufism · 1278
‘Allah’ and ‘Here Am I’
The Call Was the Answer
— Masnavi III.189–197 · tr. R. A. Nicholson, 1930One night a certain man was crying “Allah!” till his lips were growing sweet with praise of Him.The Devil said, “Prithee, O garrulous one, where is the (response) ‘Here am I’ to all this ‘Allah’?
The Devil mocks a man's unanswered cry of “Allah”; in a dream Khaḍir tells him the cry was God's answer.
What it meansRūmī's heading states the doctrine: the supplicant's invocation of God is essentially the same thing as God's response to him. Khaḍir gives it as God's own speech — the seeker's shifts were God's drawing, his fear and love the noose that catches God's favour — so the ache of a prayer that seems unanswered is itself the reply.