Sufism
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.
Book · Sufism · the 1250s
Fīhi Mā Fīhi
Taken Down, Not Written
Rumi's table talk: seventy-one Persian prose discourses taken down by listeners, read as him thinking aloud.
SignificanceThe title means 'it is what is in it' — a refusal to summarise, attached to a book Rumi did not write. These are his listeners' notes of him talking, so the teaching arrives unarranged, and the tradition values it for exactly that: doctrine caught before it was tidied.
The FindingThe one book of Rumi talking is thin at seventy-one discourses, and thick with statesmen, because — Jawid Mojaddedi argues from the text itself — his own disciples could rarely reach his conversation except when distinguished guests were in the room.
Poems from the Masnavi 38
- ‘Allah’ and ‘Here Am I’Sufism
- Ayāz and His SheepskinSufism
- Daqūqī and the Seven CandlesSufism
- I Died as a MineralSufism
- Moses and the ShepherdSufism
- Muʿāwiya and IblīsSufism
- The Bear and the FoolSufism
- The Bird's Three CounselsSufism
- The Chickpea to the CookSufism
- The Chinese and the Greek PaintersSufism
- The Dream of the Treasure in CairoSufism
- The Elephant in the DarkSufism
- The Embryo in the WombSufism
- The Faqir and the Hidden TreasureSufism
- The Four Men and the GrapesSufism
- The Garden WithinSufism
- The Grammarian and the BoatmanSufism
- The Greengrocer and the ParrotSufism
- The Journey Through the KingdomsSufism
- The King and the HandmaidenSufism
- The Lion and the HareSufism
- The Lover and the Night PatrolSufism
- The Man Who Planted ThornsSufism
- The Merchant and the ParrotSufism
- The Moaning PillarSufism
- The Mouse and the CamelSufism
- The Old HarperSufism
- The Ruby and the SunSufism
- The Sage and the PeacockSufism
- The Snake-Catcher and the Frozen SnakeSufism
- The Song of the ReedSufism
- The Sufi's DonkeySufism
- The Tanner in the Perfume MarketSufism
- The Three FishSufism
- The Three TravellersSufism
- The Turkish Amir and the MinstrelSufism
- Who Is at the Door?Sufism
- ʿAlī and the KnightSufism
Poems from the Dīvān-e Shams-e Tabrīzī 11
- Every Form You SeeSufism
- Every Moment the Voice of LoveSufism
- Neither Christian nor JewSufism
- On the Day of My DeathSufism
- Out Beyond Ideas of Wrongdoing and RightdoingSufism
- Seek Him in the PlacelessSufism
- Show Thy FaceSufism
- The Man of GodSufism
- Up, O Ye LoversSufism
- When the Names Were NotSufism
- Why Does Not the Soul Take WingSufism