Sufism · Philosophers & Mystics
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.
Person · Sufism · 1278
Rūmī
Muslim Preacher, American Bestseller
Qurʾanic teaching by story, plain enough for a shopkeeper; the popular English versions cut the Islam out.
Who they wereThe Masnavi gives its own instruction for reading it: the story is the husk and the meaning the kernel, and a listener who stops at the tale has eaten the shell. He preached in stories because a shopkeeper could follow one, and the Qurʾan is under almost every page.
The FindingThe Rumi who sells in English is Coleman Barks's — versions begun in 1984 and made without Persian from Nicholson and Arberry, in which īmān and kufr become 'wrongdoing and rightdoing' — while the poet himself was a Hanafi jurist whose verse runs on the Qurʾan.