Ibn El-Arabi, The Greatest Sheikh

From Idries Shah's THE SUFIS (1964)

IBN EL-ARABI: THE GREATEST SHEIKH

"To the sinful and vicious, I may appear to be evil. But to the good-- beneficent am I." (Mirza Khan, Ansari)

Love poetry, as with everything else to the Sufi, is capable of reflecting a complete and coherent experience of divinity, while concurrently fulfilling various other functions. Every Sufi experience is an experience in depth and in qualitative infinity. It is only to the ordinary man or woman that a word has only one meaning, or an experience less than a large number of equally valid, whole significances. This multiplicity of being is something which, although accepted as a contention by non-Sufis, is frequently forgotten by them when they deal with Sufi material. At best they can generally appreciate that there is an allegory-which means to them just one alternative meaning.

To the theologians, committed to a literal acceptance of divine formalism, Ibn El-Arabi bluntly says that "Angels are the powers hidden in the faculties and organs of man." It is the Sufi's objective to activate these organs.

....

Ibn El-Arabi, who studied under the Spanish woman Sufi Fatima b. Waliyya, was undoubtedly subject to special psychic states, such as are cultivated by the Sufis. He refers to these on various occasions. Some of his work was written in trance, and its meaning did not become clear to him until some time after its writing down. When he was thirty-seven, he visited'Ceuta, where the renowned Ibn Sabain (who advised the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick) had his school. There he had a strange vision or dream, which was interpreted by a famous scholar. The sage said: "Immeasurable. . . . If this individual is in Ceuta, it can be none other than the recently arrived young Spaniard."

The source of his inspiration was reverie in which the consciousness was still active. By the exercise of this Sufi faculty, he was able to produce from the innermost mind a contact with supreme reality-the reality which he explained underlay the appearances of the familiar world.

His teaching stressed the importance of this exercise of faculties which are unknown to most people, and consigned to credulous occultism by the many. "A person," he said, "must control his thoughts in a dream. The training of this alertness will produce awareness of the intermediate dimension. It will produce great benefits for the individual. Everyone should apply himself to the attainment of this ability of such great value."

It is quite hopeless to attempt an interpretation of lbn El-Arabi from a fixed position. His teachings are derived from the inner experiences, then presented within a form which itself has a function. Where his poetry has a double meaning, and it often has, he intends not only to convey both meanings but to affirm that both are valid. Where it is expressed in terms used by others before him, it is not intended by him that this should be taken as evidence of outside influence. What he is doing here is to address himself to people in terminology which forms a part of their own cultural background. There are poems of Ibn El-Arabi's which can be read in a shifting sense-the meaning starting in one theme and drifting into another. He has done this deliberately, in order to prevent the automatic associative processes from carrying the reader away into ordinary enjoyment; because El-Arabi is a teacher, not an entertainer.

For Ibn El-Arabi, as for all Sufis, Mohammed represents the Perfected Man. At the same time, it is necessary to know what is meant by "Mohammed" in this context. Ibn El Arabi is more explicit than most on this point. There are two versions of Mohammed-the man who lived in Mecca and Medina, and the eternal Mohammed. It is this latter one of whom he speaks. This Mohammed is identified with all the prophets, including Jesus. This idea has caused people with a Christian background to claim that Ibn El-Arabi or the Sufis or both were secret Christians. The Sufi claim is that all the individuals who have performed certain functions are in a sense one. This oneness they call in its origin haqiqat-el-Mohammedia, the Reality of Mohammed.

Jili, in his standard Sufi text, The Perfect Man, explains the incarnation of this Reality among all peoples. He seeks to describe the essential factor, by showing the multiplicity of what we call an individual. Mohammed, for instance, means The Praised One. Another name, which is only a description of a function, is Father of El-Qasim. In his name of Abdullah, he stands for its literal meaning-Servant of God. Names are qualities or functions. Incarnation is a secondary factor: "He is given names and in every age has a name which is appropriate to the guise in which he appears in that age. . . When he is seen as Mohammed, he is Mohammed, but when he is seen in another form, he is called by the name of that form."

This is not a reincarnation theory, however much it may resemble one. The essential reality which activates the man called Mohammed or anything else has to be given a name in conformity with the environment. Those who have identified this attitude with the Logos doctrine of Plotinus are, according to the Sufis, ascribing a historical connection to a situation which has objective reality. The Sufis did not copy the Logos doctrine, though the idea of the Logos and of the Reality of Mohammed have a common source. Ultimately the source of Sufi information on this, as on other points, is the personal experience of the Sufi, not the literary formulation which has been one of its historical manifestations. The trap of historical thinking, which assumes no basic interior source for knowledge and has to seek literary and superficial inspiration, is constantly avoided by the Sufi. Several Western students of Sufism have, it must be admitted, emphasized that similarity of appearances, of terminology or of date do not prove transmission of the essential idea.

Ibn El-Arabi confused the scholars because he was what is called in Islam a conformist in religion while remaining an esotericist in inner life. Like all Sufis he claimed that there was a coherent, continuous and perfectly acceptable progression between formal religion of any kind and the inner understanding of that religion, leading to a personal enlightenment. This doctrine, naturally, could not be accepted by theologians, whose importance depended upon more or less static facts, historical material and the use of reasoning powers.

*********

El-Arabi realized that human beauty was connected with divine reality; and for this reason he was able to produce poems which both celebrated the perfection of the maiden and also, in correct perspective, stood for a deeper reality. But the capacity to see the connection was denied to the formal religionists, who professed themselves scandalized. The poet's supporters have pointed out, often in vain, that real truth may be expressed in several different ways simultaneously. They refer to Ibn El-Arabi's use of myths and legends, as well as traditional history, to express the esoteric truths which are concealed within them, as well as the entertainment value which they have. Such a concept of the multiplicity of the meaning of one and the same factor was as little understood during his time as it is today. The nearest that the ordinary individual can get to this is to allow that "a beautiful woman is a divine work of art.' He is not able to perceive the beautiful woman and the divinity at the same time. This is the entire problem of Sufi statement in a nutshell.

Ibn EL Arabi's Interpreter therefore reads, on the surface, as a collection of erotic poems. When he traveled to Aleppo in Syria, a stronghold of religious orthodoxy, he found that the divines of Islam were saying that he was a mere pretender, trying to justify his erotic poesy by claiming a deeper meaning. He immediately set to work on a commentary to bring the work into orthodox focus. The result was that the scholars were entirely satisfied, because the author had helped to support their own interpretations of the religious law by his explanations of the meaning of his work. For the Sufi, however, there was a third meaning to the Interpreter. Ibn El-Arabi, by using familiar terminology, was showing them that superficialities might be true, that human love might be completely valid; but that both of these things in actuality veiled an inner truth, or were an ex tension ofit. It is this inner reality which he refers to when he accepts all formalism, yet claims a truth behind and beyond it.

Professor Nicholson has thus translated one of the poems which most shocked the devout, who believed that theirs was the road to human salvation:

My heart is capable of every form:
A cloister for the monk, a fane for idols,
A pasture for gazelles, the votary's Ka'ba [temple],
The tables of the Torah, the Quran.
Love is the creed I hold: wherever turn His camels,
Love is still my creed and faith.
The romantically minded person may take this as meaning that the familiar, quantitative kind of love with which his mind automatically associates these words is what the Greatest Sheikh means. For the Sufi, it is Sufism, of which the familiar "love," is only a part, a limited part beyond which, under ordinary circumstances, the average person never goes.