MYSTICAL TREATISES OF MUHYIDDIN IBN 'ARABI

The Universal Tree
and the Four Birds

Translated by Angela Jaffray

I am in love with no other than myself,
and my very separation is my union...

I am my beloved and my lover;
I am my knight and my maiden.

Muḥyiddīn Ibn ʿArabī

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I owe special thanks to my friend Rafi Zabor, who suggested several years ago that I translate the Ittiḥād al-kawnī for the Web journal Words without Borders, and supplied the illuminating introductory essay.

Thanks, also, to Words without Borders who published an early version of the translation in their August 2004 issue.

I couldn’t ask for more responsive and meticulous editors than Stephen Hirtenstein and Michael Tiernan at Anqa Publishing. Stephen’s learned comments enriched my commentary immensely, and Michael’s design and careful editing are each, in their own domain, things of beauty.

Without the sublime French translation, sagacious notes, and expert edition of the Ittiḥād by Denis Gril, I would have found myself frequently at a loss. Lovers of Ibn ‘Arabī owe a tremendous debt to him and other pioneers in the enterprise of Ibn ‘Arabī translation for their deep knowledge of the Shaykh’s words and works.

Jim Robinson, eagle-eyed companion in devoir, has accompanied this translation from fledgling stage to final flight. He has given me many helpful suggestions, kept me from colossal mistakes, and offered unflagging encouragement all the way.

Lā tawfīq illā bi-llāh

OF THE TREE AND
ITS FOUR BIRDS

RAFI ZABOR

It is He who is revealed in every face, sought in every
sign, gazed upon by every eye, worshipped in every
object of worship, and pursued in the unseen and
the visible. Not a single one of His creatures can fail
to find Him in its primordial and original nature.

Muḥyiddīn Ibn ʿArabī

Ibn ʿArabī or Abū ‘Abd Allah Muḥammad ibn al-‘Arabī at-Ṭā’ī al-Ḥātimī at-Ta’i al-Hatimī, also called Muḥyiddīn, the Revivifier of the Faith— was born in 1165 CE in the city of Murcia in Muslim Andalusia, and died seventy-five years later in Damascus: a narrative traversal of the Islamic world more than mirrored by his encompassment of its internal, esoteric aspect. Called within the Sufi tradition the Shaykh al-Akbar, or Greatest Master, and seen as its ultimate exemplar of esoteric Knowledge, he was, among many other things, the author of approximately three hundred books, some of them no longer than a pamphlet, others comprising several volumes. The best known and doubtless most important of these are the Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam, in many ways the crystallization of a lifetime’s gnosis, and the enormous Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, which combines the functions of a spiritual encyclopedia and intimate autobiography. The work translated here (Risālat al-ittiḥād al-kawnī, likely written before the author’s arrival in Mecca circa 1203 CE), combining verse, prose, and rhymed prose, is certainly one of Ibn ʿArabī's most beautiful and, while quite unlike any other of his books so far translated into English, it is wholly characteristic of his genius.

In it the reader will encounter a work of extraordinary literary and spiritual artistry, followed by a commentary whose lucidity and acuity of articulation will introduce the neophyte— its thoroughness should also please the specialist— to some of the details of the cosmological order to which our author’s imagery, in this work and elsewhere, belongs; but there ought also to be room for a few general words of introduction for the general reader who might happen by.

In the history of monotheistic spirituality, in particular its Western, Abrahamic branch incorporating Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, you may find an aspected resemblance here and there, but there is really no one, from taproot to topmost leaftip, like Muḥyiddīn Ibn ʿArabī. In Islamic esotericism per se, especially with regard to its metaphysical and exegetical component, virtually everyone before him is an anticipation and everyone after a commentator or interpreter.

In encountering him you come upon the ultimate implications of monotheism whole and unaltered. Since in exoteric Islam the Unity and Absoluteness of God is the primary axiom, it follows that for its definitive esotericist a One and Absolute God implies the non-existence of anything other than Himself— since that would qualify His Singleness and Absoluteness— so that there is not, in existence or the many shades of relative existence and non-existence in the eighteen thousand Universes anything other than Him tout court. From this vantage point we pass to a world of apparently infinite paradox, actually a series of antinomic affirmations logically exclusive of each other but united in the suprarational fact that is the One Existence: the Universes are His appearance, He is the same as the existence of the things, although nothing can be associated with Him and He is transcendent from all qualification, even that of transcendence; everything that exists is the self-manifestation of possibilities latent in His essence, existentiated by His Mercy, yet the possibilities themselves choose their modes of being and demand existentiation from Him, so that their will is free and their own, and the consequences of their actions rebound upon themselves, although there is essentially no will but His, and He is transcendent from the existent things without difference although He is their being and substance, and He guides them, perpetually, because He is their inextricable essence. The conscious, perfected human being— the normal run of humans are veiled from the Reality by the illusion of their own self-existence is the complete reflection of its infinite and eternal Source, and it is precisely for the sake of this mirroring that the Absolute breathed His mercy upon the possibilities and potentials latent in Himself and permitted the Universes to become, although their existence is pure contingency, a veil, an illusion, and also the Truth in Truth, while there is only He, and nothing with or beside Him, ever. And so on, almost ad infinitum, according to each particular face of revelation implicit in the nature of the Reality. Ibn ‘Arabī's cosmology sometimes seems as detailed as the Universe whose ontology it addresses; at other times he demolishes all secondary consideration in a totalizing affirmation of the indivisible and unconditionable One: these two components of his vision do not exclude each other but are essentially the same, and cannot be halved. And as the Shaykh sometimes likes to put it: if you understand it that way, fine; and if not, then not.

What after Ibn ‘Arabī's death came to be called the doctrine of the Unity of Being was not, however, some ultimate ingenuity of exegesis but the result of profound self-experience, and when you read one of his books you encounter in some measure the extraordinary individual who experienced it. His is a flavor one comes to recognize and distinguish from all others, a genius both inclusive of and beyond rational compass, a forthrightness challenging all complacencies, and at times a robustly humorous overturner of all cognitive convention. His complications dazzle and bewilder the intellect and imagination; alternately his bluntness can, at times, make even so bold a visionary as William Blake seem almost an equivocator by comparison.

***

He is also a poet of extraordinary expressive power, as a reader of the Ittiḥād will quickly discover. The book begins with a preludinal poem which even in translation seems one of the great one-time only coups of the world-long poetic tradition:

From my incompleteness to my completeness, and from my
inclination to my equilibrium

From my grandeur to my beauty, and from my splendour to my
majesty

From my scattering to my gathering, and from my exclusion to my
reunion

From my baseness to my preciousness, and from my stones to my
pearls…

For thirteen lines Ibn ‘Arabī's contemplation swings like a pendulum between the polarities of a self whose sphere of allusion and reference is the entire subsolar and sublunary world with its risings and settings, breezes, boughs, and shade, its steeds and gazelles— an extraordinary ambit of discourse that shudders to a halt with the abrupt discovery of that self’s isolation and the limits of its enclosured love. The last line of the section reveals the reality behind even so inspired and inevitable a self- absorption and uncovers the crux of its anguish— Do not blame me for my passion. I am inconsolable over the one who has fled me— but if we have left the sphere of the passional self and the romance of its poetics, it is not in obeisance to the dictates of a conventional mysteriosophy; neither will Ibn ‘Arabī, as his accustomed readers know, end his quest with a conventionally diffuse devotional yearning for the Infinite as traditionally conceived: when the Shaykh al-Akbar seeks something he almost invariably finds it, on a large scale and in plenty.

When, after this reflective pause, the tolling of the polarities resumes, a measure of discrimination inserts itself into the cascade of couplets— Continuous is the light of knowledge; ephemeral the light of intuition even, shortly, a teleology, and a changing a sense of quest:

So that I might bring to light what lies hidden in night’s core…

To explain the mysteries’ roots and express the realities’ enigmas.

The author ends this phase of his invocation by affirming the Spiritual nature of his inspiration and by distinguishing it from that of the willfully ignorant.

Ibn ‘Arabī then calls his book to order, announces its title, and dedicates it to Abū al-Fawāris Ṣakhr b. Sinān, a “master of the triads and dyads” in whose nature, manner, or teaching must surely lie the root of the introduction’s uniquely “dyadic words of praise."Ibn ‘Arabī then praises God, with reference to a particularly important Qur’anic passage— “Surely We created man with the most beautiful of constitutions”, that is, in the essential image of God, “then We reduced him to the lowest of the low” (Q. 95: 4-5), which in part is to say the mortality and limits of this world but especially the blinkered consciousness we typically have in it before— resuming a rapturous poetics one might have thought eliminated by so firm a theological intrusion. In the following strophes, self and Self, essence and Essence, humanity and the properly Divine are both distinguished from each other— with particular reference to some occulted aspects of the individuated subjectivity— and revealed as inextricable.

In the last moment of this introductory section the author delineates still more precisely the book’s locus of revelation: situated “on the equator,” that is to say at the meeting-point, of “the most beautiful of constitutions” and the “lowest of degrees” that encompass between them the essential human state— the comprehensive conjunction of the Transcendent and the Manifest, in other texts the place where “the two seas meet,” and where the Arc of Necessarily-so-ness and the Arc of Possibilities converge— metaphorically rendered here as the City of human habitation and the Sinai that is the archetypal site of human receptivity to the continuous Divine self-revelation.

Having articulated the book’s metaphysical context, Ibn ʿArabī plunges us into the heart of a drama drawn on a consciously cosmic scale— there is tremendous urgency behind the narrative from the first— evincing an impetuosity and directness, a singleness of feeling whose impassioned expressiveness is quite distinct from the Persian genius for decoration and ameliorative address to a normative audience, most familiar in the West in the work of Ibn ʿArabī's great near-contemporary Jālaluddīn Rūmī. In fact Rūmī, recognized within the Sufi tradition as its ultimate exemplar of divine and spiritual Love, is not Ibn ‘Arabī's opposite but his complement. Ibn ‘Arabī is alleged to have seen the child Rūmī and to have remarked upon his future greatness, but the two are more substantially and convincingly linked through Ibn ‘Arabī's adopted son and great disciple Ṣadr al-Dīn Qūnawī, who later was a friend and collaborator of Rūmī's in Konya, the capital of thirteenth-century Seljuk Turkey; and it may be that Ibn ʿArabī and Jālaluddīn Rūmī are ideally understood in terms of each other, one expressing explicitly what is implicit in his counterpart.

Unlike the Turkish-Persian master, who usually took care to veil his jalāl, or fierce majestic aspect, Ibn ʿArabī not only rushes straight at the Truth but trusts It to let the chips fall where they may: subjective after-effects and secondary concatenations are not his responsibility. Our author exemplifies not only the Arabic genius but the compressive power of the Arabic language, which like its cousin Hebrew and perhaps metaphorically the cosmos those languages characteristically describe, parlays a finite number of consonantal roots into an improbably multiform eloquence of expression.

Ibn ʿArabī shouts, “Alas, my burning heart. I fled from the universe and here I am in it. Where is what I seek?,” and is answered by a voice remarkably like the one that addressed Job from the whirlwind— the author scruples to note that it comes from neither inside nor outside him— demanding where he was at the setting up of the Throne and the placement of the celestial couches, not to mention before the establishment of the supreme horizon, and so on for a staggering paragraph delineating the utter incommensurability of the human and the Divine.

The Voice from the Whirlwind quite silenced Job’s inquiries, but the ever-impetuous Ibn ʿArabī, registering that voice and its implications completely within himself, goes onward and inward through aspect after aspect in his quest for the entire unedited human reality’s reflection of the Divine Itselfness. Through an audacity of question and answer, in a sort of active submission to the Reality’s fullness of will, in a dialogue of extreme spiritual subtlety dense with Qur’anic allusion and references to the Shaykh’s own extensive terminology much of which will be lost upon the neophyte reader but which registers as strong gnostic drama regardless; also see the Commentary Ibn ʿArabī finally arrives at the book’s central image of revelation: a Tree with four birds in its branches. Our author will converse with each of them.

Up to this point the protagonist’s struggle has been to detach himself from the last traces of contingent creation and so address himself appropriately to the unqualified Reality.(Along the way, the reader will have noted Ibn ‘Arabī's characteristic combination of the evocative and the categorical: “If you extract me from the crashing waves and deliver me from the horror of this gloomy night I will never more pronounce the adverb or the preposition of place.” Later on, the Crow will tell him: “I am the lamp and the winds. I am the chain against the rock and the wing. I am the sea whose waves constantly strike one another. I am, of the countable, the singular and the paired.”) Beginning with his converse with the Tree, our author has reached his goal, and everything that follows is fruition and harvest.

At the very end of the text, Ibn ‘Arabī tells us what the Tree and the birds represent, so it is probably best for the reader first to submit to their unassisted poetic authority. Still, for a reader unacquainted with the tradition and its symbology a few words of explication will probably not go amiss. Much of Ibn ‘‘Arabī's personal terminology is a more abstract rendering of the language of the Qur’an, hence the Pen appears as the First Intellect, the Tablet as Soul, and so forth. Of the birds in the Tree, the third, or “strange ‘Anqā’, could certainly use a small interpretative assist and a bit of speciation. Sometimes translated as Phoenix, the strange ‘Anqā’ in any case is proverbially a bird that has a Name but no manifest Being— Ismi var, varlik yok, as almost any Turk can tell you— and hence is associated with the Reality of Realities, a mercurial entity which is the foundation of the world. The Reality of Realities is, as Ibn ‘Arabī writes in The Book of the Description of the Encompassing Circles: the All embracing Universal which includes the temporal and the eternal, increasing by the multiplicity of existents without however subdividing by their fractioning… It is neither existent nor non-existent; it is not the world, and yet it also is; it is other without being other, given that otherness implies [at least] two existents, whereas sameness implies matching… resulting in a third notion qualified as form.

It is co-eternal with the eternal and co-temporal with the temporal. The Reality of Realities is the core of Ibn ‘Arabī's logos doctrine, and ultimately it is perfectly manifested in the heart of the Perfected Human Being.(Further ambiguities of its indeterminacy are treated within the translator’s Commentary.)

Amid all the beauty and allusiveness of Ibn ‘Arabī's dialogue with the Tree and its birds, I would especially point out the peroration of the Crow, which is in part a reproach to spiritual types who disdain the created world of bodies and limitation and night. The Shaykh says elsewhere that there are People of the Right Hand, who care only for spiritual things, and People of the Left Hand, who care only for the things of this world; then there are the people who make no distinction between the spiritual and the mundane, and they are Those Who Have Been Brought Near— yet another piece of a rich, meticulously and majestically developed perspective that this short, lyrical and evocative book, youthful but already magisterial, with a conceptual spine strong as tensile steel, makes palpably real to the reader through the eloquence of its imagery and the uniqueness of its author’s unforgettable voice.

BIOGRAPHY OF IBN ‘ARABĪ

Muḥyiddīn Muḥammad Ibn ‘Arabī, known as “al-Shaykh al-Akbar”, or Greatest Shaykh, was born in 1165 in Murcia, Spain. His father held an important post in the government, first of Ibn Mardanīsh and later of his rival Abū Ya’qūb Yūsuf, the Almohad ruler. When he was seven, his family moved to Seville where, despite an initial attraction to youthful diversions, an even stronger inclination toward the devotional life began to emerge. Even as a very young man he began to undertake retreats, spent considerable time in cemeteries communing with spirits, and realized astounding mystical insights.

Ibn ‘Arabī tells us little about his first formative retreat, other than to say that, unlike most other mystical wayfarers, he was seized by a kind of divine attraction or ecstasy (jadhba), instead of proceeding slowly and laboriously by disciplined stages. This illuminative event, if the later report of al-Qāri’ al-Baghdādī (d.1418) is to be believed, had its inception in the midst of a typical Andalusian fête attended by the teenaged Ibn ‘Arabī. About to raise a cup of wine to his lips, the young man heard a voice proclaim: “O Muḥammad, it was not for this that you were created!” He left the party abruptly and fled to a cemetery, where he engaged in solitary invocation of God.

It was there in the cemetery that Ibn ‘Arabī experienced a triple vision of the Prophets Jesus, Moses, and Muḥammad. Each of these three masters illuminated certain aspects of the Path: from Jesus he learned the necessity of asceticism; from Moses, he learned that he would attain ‘ilm ladunī, the kind of knowledge bestowed by God as a gift rather than the result of striving followed by acquisition. Finally, in the midst of a vision in which he was threatened by assailants, the young man saw the Prophet Muhammad, standing on a hill. The Prophet urged him to “hold fast to me and you will be safe.” From that point on, Ibn ‘Arabī became an ardent student of hadith, those traditions that recount the Prophet’s words and actions, taking them as a model for his own behaviour.

This extraordinary retreat, however, was followed by a period of “abandonment” fatra which is not at all uncommon in either prophets or friends of God (awliyā’). The Prophet Muḥammad himself experienced it. It is a period of silence from the divine side. The mystic finds himself, as it were, in a desert, completely without sustenance, tormented by doubts and unsure of how, or even whether, to proceed. It is a state in which one may wander compassless forever; or one can emerge safely, as Ibn ‘Arabī did, hearing the divine voice recite to him the Qur’anic verses:

And He it is who sendeth the winds as tidings heralding His mercy, till, when they bear a cloud heavy [with rain], We lead it to a dead land, and then cause water to descend thereon and thereby bring forth fruits of every kind. Thus we bring forth the dead. Haply you will remember. As for the good land, its vegetation cometh forth by permission of its Lord. (Q. 7: 57-58)

Hearkening to the advice of Jesus, his “first master,” whom the Shaykh was to meet numerous times in visions, the young man pledged himself to an ascetic life and gave away all his possessions to his father. From then on, as he recounts in the Futūḥāt, he lived on gifts and alms, trusting in God for his needs. Henceforth, the young Ibn ʿArabī became a bona fide man of the Sufi Way. He studied the traditional Islamic sciences with some of the foremost scholars of Andalusia, and concurrently realized, in a very short time, the panoply of mystical stations he describes in his various writings.

By around the age of twenty, Ibn ʿArabī had acquired his first Sufi teacher, Abū al-‘Abbās al-‘Uryabī, an illiterate peasant whom he met in Seville. Among this shaykh’s many virtues was that he had realized the station of perfect servitude, the highest of all stations. al-‘Uryabī was not the only shaykh that the young Muhyiddīn frequented during the thirty years he spent in Andalusia prior to his departure to the east. In his two compendia devoted to Andalusian saints, he lists and describes some seventy-one Sufi shaykhs, four of them women, from whom he received important spiritual direction.

Ibn ‘Arabī's own spiritual state was made clear to him in three successive visions between 1190 and 1202. In them, he saw all of the messengers and prophets as well as “all the believers— those who have been and those who will be— until the Day of Resurrection.” He learned that the major reason why the prophets and messengers had assembled in the spiritual world was to congratulate him at being designated the Seal of the Muḥammadan Sainthood— the heir to the Seal of the Prophets, Muḥammad. As he explains in his Futūḥāt, the Seal of the Muḥammadan Sainthood combines all the qualities of all the saints; and since prophets are also saints, it includes all the qualities of all the prophets, excluding those pertaining to their legislative roles.

In 1193, Ibn ‘Arabī made his first journey beyond the Iberian Peninsula, to North Africa. He stayed in Tunis for a year, studying with Shaykh al-Mahdawī, a disciple of the famous Algerian saint Abū Madyan, whose tomb is a site of pilgrimage to this day. When Ibn ‘Arabī returned to al-Andalus, he began to compose the first of his more than 300 works. His primary activity, however, seems to have been spiritual wayfaring in order to learn from Sufi masters and study Prophetic Traditions. Between the years 1195 and 1200, he was engaged in constant travel between Spain and North Africa, while concurrently traversing another landscape, not visible to the physical eye. To many of these purely spiritual locales he gave evocative names, such as “God’s Vast Earth” where “the spiritual takes body and the body becomes spiritual,” and the “Abode of Light,” where all destinies are known from beginning to end.

But the greatest vision he experienced at this time was no doubt the spiritual ascent (mi‘rāj) he made in imitation of the Prophet’s corporeal ascent to the seven heavens and to the Divine Presence Itself. Mounted on the “Buraq” of his spiritual aspiration, he travelled through the seven celestial spheres, each one presided over by a prophet. Beyond the seventh heaven lies the goal of every mi‘rāj: the “Lote Tree of the Limit,” alluded to in the Qur’an. It was here that he became, as he puts it, “nothing but light.” He realized that, despite the multiplicity of God’s names, attributes, and acts, there is but a single Being to which they refer, and that “the journey that [he] made was inside [him] self, and it was toward [him] self he had been guided.”

The year 1200 marks the beginning of Ibn ʿArabī's journey to the east. He was never again to return to Spain. From North Africa he went first to Cairo, then to Hebron— where he visited the tomb of Abraham— then Jerusalem, where he prayed at the al-Aqsa Mosque. His final goal was Mecca, where he intended to perform the pilgrimage. Among his many visions and meetings with remarkable men and women, two merit special mention. The first was his astonishing encounter with the strange personage he calls the Fatā, or youth, evocatively described in the first chapter of the Futūḥāt. One evening, when he was performing the ritual circumambulations of the Ka‘ba, a mysterious youth accosted him. Was he an angel or a human being? The embodiment of the Black Stone, or the personification of the Holy Spirit? Ibn ʿArabī's celestial twin or an epitome of the Futūḥāt itself? Perhaps he was all of these and more. After describing their conversation, recounted in poetry and rhymed prose, a pact between the young man and the Shaykh was concluded. The result of this epiphany is the some 2000 tightly-packed folio pages of the Futūḥāt, a masterpiece of mystical literature.

It was also in Mecca that he made the acquaintance of the young woman Niẓām, who would become the inspiration for his love poems, written approximately fifteen years later (1215) and collected in the Tarjumān al-ashwāq (The Interpreter of Desires). Niẓām was a young Iranian lady of considerable beauty, piety, and intelligence “the ornament of our gatherings,” as Ibn ʿArabī says in his Preface to the Tarjumān. Commentators have seen in Niẓām the archetypal Eternal Feminine, the embodiment of Sophia, the equivalent of Dante’s Beatrice, and the coincidentia oppositorum. She is not only the muse of the Interpreter of Desires but also may have inspired the paean to Woman found in the final chapter of the Fuṣūs, on the Wisdom of Singularity in the Word of Muhammad. “Contemplation of the Reality without formal support is not possible,” he says. “The best and most perfect kind [of contemplation] is the contemplation of God in women.”

Ibn ʿArabī was to spend roughly two years in Mecca. It was at Mecca, during a brief period of dissatisfaction with the aptitude of his students that, in a dream vision, the Shaykh was given the divine advice to “counsel God’s servants.” Whether addressing jurists or Sufis, rulers or simple folk, for the remainder of his life the Shaykh made it a point to convey his message, orally and in his many writings, to all the believers he encountered and at the level of their varied understandings. Some of the texts he wrote were short, composed at a single sitting; some ran to hundreds, even thousands, of pages, as in the case of the Futūḥāt, and were the products of years of labour and revision.

Just as his early years were devoted to constant wayfaring throughout Andalusia and the Maghreb, Ibn ʿArabī spent the years spanning 1204 to 1220 travelling back and forth across Syria, Palestine, Anatolia, Egypt, Iraq, and the Hijaz. During this time he acquired many disciples, continued his literary output, and even became an advisor to the Seljuk sultan Kaykā’ūs. It was not until the final twenty years of his life that he ceased his peregrinations and in 1221 settled permanently in Damascus.

At the end of 1229, an event occurred that resulted in the writing of the Shaykh’s best known book, the Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam, or “Bezels of Wisdom.” In a dream, he saw the Prophet Muhammad, holding a book. The Prophet told him: “This is the book of the Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam. Take and give it to humanity so that they may find benefit from it.” The twenty-seven chapters contained therein— each one devoted to a different prophet and elucidating a particular facet of wisdom— were, according to Ibn ʿArabī, inspired by the Prophet with no personal input on his part whatsoever. The Fuṣūṣ has remained to this day his most provocative and most frequently commented— upon work.

Ibn ʿArabī died in Damascus in November 1240. Over the centuries, his teachings spread east as far as China, disseminated by devoted students— many of them gifted mystics and poets in their own rights. For the past century, the West has also played a part in this process, as scholars and translators continue the effort to bring the Shaykh’s remarkable writings to the attention of the contemporary world.

INTRODUCTION

Overview

The Ittiḥād al-kawnī is one of Ibn ʿArabī’s early works, most likely written before the author’s journey to the eastern Islamic lands in 1201/02 CE (AH 598). Written primarily in rhymed prose and poetry, it shares the charm of its cousins among the visionary mystical-philosophical fables of the Islamic world, such as those penned by Avicenna, Suhrawardī, and ‘Aṭṭār.

It also belongs to the genre of mystical ascent literature. Although ascent literature is represented in many of the world’s traditions, in Islam the model derives from the Prophet Muḥammad’s ascension through the seven heavens to the Divine Presence as allusively recounted in Suras 17:1 and 53:4-18. In later years, Sufis undertook to imitate the Prophet’s ascent and, beginning with Abū Yazīd al- Bisṭāmī (d.874 CE), several described their visions, either orally or in treatise form. Abū Yazīd al- Bisṭāmī Yazīd’s strange account of his mi‘raj, for example, was recounted by (pseudo-?) al-Junayd (d.910) and interpreted by al-Sarrāj (d.988). Plaving flown in the form of a bird to the Tree of Unity, the Lote Tree of the Limit, described in Sura 53: 14, Abū Yazīd remarked that it was “all a cheat” a remark interpreted by Sarrāj as meaning that Abū Yazīd found anything but attention to God a useless vanity.

Besides the Ittiḥād al-kawnī, Ibn ʿArabī wrote at least two independent works, K. al-isrā and R. al-anwār, devoted to the subject, and included two extensive mi‘rāj accounts in his Futūḥāt. In addition, treatises such as K. al-isfār, a spiritual itinerary, cover much of the same ground as the mi‘rāj accounts. It is evident that the Shaykh found the ascent genre a fitting one to describe both the boons and the perils of the spiritual path.

Despite its shimmering surface, the Ittiḥād is not an easy work to fathom because of its dense symbolism and enigmatic style. The initial series of poems immediately plunges the reader into a veritable sea of perplexity, as the author “swings like a pendulum between the polarities of [the] self.” The poems are then followed by a dedication whose dedicatee appears to be a long-dead Arabian prophet, while all the while the author claims to be addressing none other than himself. At last the narrative begins, but where? It appears that the reader has been set down at the centre of the world, the symbolic locus of balanced oppositions. Here the tension aroused by the constant fluctuation from state to state, amply elaborated in the opening verses, turns to lament as the author engages in an obscure dialogue with the Supreme Being of his very self. From this place of momentary equilibrium, the author ascends on a Night Journey to the outer limits of creation. There, in a garden at the farthest boundary of the cosmos, he hears the discourse of a Tree and four Birds, whose charming tales and flowery speech mask the fact that they are none other than the awesome images of the Perfect Human Being and his four cosmic faculties: the First Intellect, the Universal Soul, Prime Matter, and Universal Body. Never before have these abstruse philosophical concepts been described in such an elliptical and suggestive way.

Stylistic Considerations

The Ittiḥād al-kawnī is written in a combination of rhymed prose (saj’) and poetry. As a youth Ibn Arabī seems to have been particularly taken with belles-lettres and his early works, despite their complex metaphysics, are remarkably lyrical. He never lost his love of either rhymed prose or poetry, as we see in many of his works. His Dīwān contains more than 800 verses and his Tarjumān al-ashwāq, a collection of sixty-one mystical love poems, is considered one of the finest collections of Arabic verse. His 560-chapter magnum opus, the Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, begins with a lengthy proemium, embellished with flowing saj‘ and punctuated by many lines of verse. Nearly every chapter of this lengthy summa begins with poetry and many of the chapters contain additional lines of original verse.

Ibn ‘Arabī’s sheer love of the Arabic language can be felt on every page of his work, both poetry and prose. Among the various schools of thought concerning the origin of language, Ibn ‘Arabī would have to be put in the category of those who favoured the divine institution of language. Thus for him, to take a word back to its root meaning and then to extend it to its full semantic range is a process that reflects the nature of the primal divine speech as one/many: “God takes one of these words and makes it many, for He says, Our only word to a thing, when We desire it, is to say to it ‘Be!’(kun)(Q. 16:40).” On the one hand, as a Qu’ranic hermeneut, he insists on a sometimes shocking literalism that peels away incrusted layers of traditional interpretation. On the other hand, he allows for a word in the hands of a spiritually realized interpreter to bear any meaning as long as it lies within the range of understandable Arabic. God, he says, is fully aware of all the possible meanings of any given word, thus the gnostic interpreter is encouraged to open himself up to the full spectrum of interpretations, as long as there is evidence for them, based on the actual Qur’anic text.

Drawing from nearly all the disciplines of his time— the traditional Islamic sciences, mysticism, theology, philosophy, and even alchemy and magic, Ibn ‘Arabī’s working vocabulary is astoundingly rich. Anchoring himself on the (primarily) tri-consonantal Arabic root, he leaves his imagination free to explore a complex world of interpenetrating meanings and associations attainable by acceptable morphological permutations. Although this approach generally produces a scintillating multifaceted gem whose surfaces delight and whose deep hues attract, the reader is often at a loss when trying to fathom the seemingly endless potential meanings, both lexicographical and symbolic, of any given word or phrase. The end result is a thoroughly over-determined text that loses much in the effort of its commentator to explain it.

Unlike the Tarjumān al-ashwāq, on which the author himself— for better or worse— wrote a mystical commentary, the Ittiḥād al-kawnī provides no such aid, and there are seemingly no commentaries by the Shaykh’s followers to guide us. Other writings by Ibn ʿArabī, especially his Futūḥāt, are essential to ferreting out clues, but, as is the case of all his works in general, the Qur’an— and to a somewhat lesser extent, the Prophetic Traditions (hadith)— remains the touchstone.

Thus, in its brief compass, the The Universal Tree and the Four Birds manages both to engage the reader’s imagination and to introduce him to some of the major themes of Ibn ʿArabī's cosmology and metaphysics in a highly compressed and ciphered form. For that reason, it is an excellent entrée to Ibn ʿArabī's writings as a whole.

The following translation is based on the edition of Denis Gril in Annales Islamologiques 17, 1981. A description of the manuscripts he used can be found in the Appendix (Edition of the Text). I have generally used Muḥammad Marmaduke Pickthall’s translation, The Glorious Qur’an, for Qur’anic quotations, altering it when necessary to reflect Ibn ‘Arabī's interpretation.

The annotated translation is followed by a commentary that, while necessarily far from being conclusive, aims to provide some hints in order to make the reader’s voyage in the company of the Shaykh a bit less baffling.

TREATISE ON UNIFICATION

In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate. Blessings upon our master, Muḥammad, and upon his family and companions. This is a noble treatise in which I have consigned a tremendous discourse.

From my incompleteness to my completeness and from my inclination to my equilibrium
From my grandeur to my beauty and from my splendour to my majesty From my scattering to my gathering, and from my exclusion to my reunion
From my baseness to my preciousness, and from my stones to my pearls
From my rising to my setting, and from my days to my nights
From my luminosity to my darkness, and from my guidance to my straying
From my perigee to my apogee, and from the base of my lance to its tip

From my waxing to my waning, and from the void of my moon to its crescent
From my pursuit to my flight, and from my steed to my gazelle
From my breeze to my boughs, and from my boughs to my shade
From my shade to my bliss, and from my bliss to my wrath
From my wrath to my likeness, and from my likeness to my impossibility
From my impossibility to my validity, and from my validity to my deficiency.
I am no one in existence but myself, so—
Whom do I treat as foe and whom do I treat as friend?
Whom do I call to aid my heart, pierced by a penetrating arrow,
When the archer is my eyelid, striking my heart without an arrow?
Why defend my station? It matters little to me; what do I care?
For I am in love with none other than myself, and my very separation is my union.
Do not blame me for my passion. I am inconsolable over the one who has fled me.

In this book I never cease addressing myself about myself and returning in it to myself from myself.

From my heaven to my earth, from my exemplary practice to my religious duty,
From my pact to my perjury, from my length to my breadth.

***

From my sense to my intellect and from my intellect to my sense,—
From whence derive two strange sciences, without doubt or confusion.
From my soul to my spirit and from my spirit to my soul,—
By means of dissolution and coagulation, like the corpse in the tomb.
From my intuition to my knowledge and from my knowledge to my intuition,—
Continuous is the light of knowledge; ephemeral the light of intuition.
From my sanctity to my impurity and from my impurity to my sanctity,—
Sanctity is in my present and impurity is in yesterday.
From my human-nature to my jinn-nature, and from my jinn-nature to my human-nature,—
For my jinn-nature seeks to disquiet me and my human-nature seeks to set me at ease.
From the narrowness of my body to the vastness of my soul,
And from the vastness of my soul to the prison of my body,— For my soul denies my intellect and my intellect my soul.
From my entity to my nonentity, and my nonentity to my entity,— Where I rejoice to find my composition and lament to find my dispersion.
From my likeness to my opposite and from my opposite to my likeness,—
Were it not for Bāqil no light of excellence would shine in Quss.
From my sun to my full moon and from my full moon to my sun,—
So that I might bring to light what lies hidden in night’s core.
From Persian to Arab and from Arab to Persian, To explain the mysteries’ roots and express the realities’ enigmas.
From my root to my branch and from my branch to my root,

—For the sake of a life that was buried in death, animate or inanimate.
Pay no heed, my soul, to the words of that jealous spite monger,
Or to the remarks of that ignorant presumer, O myrtle of my soul!
How many ignoramuses have slandered us spiritual beings!
While my revelation descends from the Spirit of inspiration and sanctity,
He is like a man possessed by a demon whose touch makes him tremble.
On the matter of spiritual realization mankind does not cease to err,
For God’s secret is poised between the shout and the whisper.

I have called this treatise “Cosmic unification in the presence of essential witnessing, through the assembling of the Human Tree and the Four Spiritual Birds.” I have dedicated it to Abū al-Fawāris Ṣakhr ibn Sinān, master of the reins of generosity and eloquence. I seek help from God. He is my support and my assistance, glory be to him!

Dedication

To the third and the second— the master of the triads and dyads— the one alluded to in the doubled words of praise, the evanescent conqueror who restrains his mount, the one who turns toward his shadow and bows his head in humility; the generous one whose generosity never runs dry, the perfect being whose existence is not known, the one who is sent from the two divine presences and the envoy of the two powers; he whose foundations are certain, whose possibility is discounted, and whose place is known; channel of subtle graces, reality of time, goal of faith, seat of Mercy, subtlety of the moment, sultan of men and jinn, Jānn son of jinn, pupil of man’s eye, beneficent giver, Abū al-Fawāris Sakhr b. Sinān, master of the reins of generosity and eloquence. I ask God to give him the most perfect and elevated of ranks.

As Gril mentions, this refers to the opening sura of the Qur’an, the Fātiḥa, often called “the seven doubled” or “oft-repeated” since it contains seven lines and is recited repeatedly in every ritual prayer. According to Ibn ‘Arabī, the Perfect Human Being “opens” or initiates (fataḥa) existence just as the Fātiḥa opens the Qur’an. See Gril, Arbre, p. 10. The inner structure of the Fātiḥa is based on a division of the sura into two parts, one of which belongs to the Lord and one to the servant. At the same time, it is a synthesis of the entire Qur’an. These three aspects are echoed in the first verse of the Fātiḥa: “In the Name of Allah, the All-Merciful, the All-Compassion- ate”. The Name Allah embraces all Divine Names and Attributes while All-Merciful and All-Compassionate express nuanced modalities of Mercy (raḥma). See Fut. I. 102, Chap. 5.

May he receive the scent of the most perfect and the most pure of greetings, as well as the mercy and benedictions of God, the most Exalted.

I praise God who has “fashioned” me and “balanced” me, and cast me in “the most beautiful of constitutions.” For he made me know myself through myself and caused me to appear to myself, so that I became enamoured of only myself. Between my distance and my proximity I have become mad with love for myself, and I address myself alone.

Were I to see myself when I came to myself by myself, secretly or openly,
And said, “Greetings” and answered, “At your service,”
And if my turning were from me to me,
My very “Here I am!” would annihilate me from myself,
From my enemies and my trusty friends,
From my threat [of punishment] and my surplus [grace],
From my delight and my promises [of paradise],
From my witnessing and my testimony.
What wonderful favour would be mine through myself!
Oh I! Return me by me to me until I see my stability.
He returned me by me to me from me, and only my qualities subsisted in me.My palm grasped my stick, my staff smote my rock;
The river of constellations flowed from it: Twelve heralds!

See Q.2:60: “And when Moses asked for water for his people, We said: Smite with thy staff the rock. And there gushed out therefrom twelve springs [so that] each tribe knew their drinking place.” See also Q. 7:60: “We divided them into twelve tribes, nations; and We inspired Moses, when his people asked him for water, saying: Smite with thy staff the rock! And there gushed forth therefrom twelve springs, so that each tribe knew their drinking-place.” See also Fut. II. 441, where the rivers mentioned in the verse are placed within the three different Gardens of Paradise: four in the Garden of the Elites, four in the Garden of Inheritance, and four in the Garden of Deeds. The rivers are then assigned various types of sciences. The river of unbrackish water = the science of life; the river of wine = the science of states; the river of honey = the science of revelation; and the river of milk = the science of the secrets.

I said to myself: Oh I! Add constancy to my constancy!
These are the sciences of life, scattering light from all that grows upon my being.
Where in me does that subtle secret reside that God has placed within my essences?
I was filled with what I sought from myself, but my desire for death remained.
I took to complaining to myself of my passion so that my signs would appear
Upon my eyelids from the essence of my creation.
Then he lavished gathering on my scattering.
My essence conjoined passionately with my essence, for my essence, my whole life long.
I did not hold my harshness against myself,
Or the length of my abandonment or my misdeeds—
I am my beloved and my lover; I am my knight and my maiden.

This book came to me from the city situated on the equator, assigned to the temperate clime, fortified by [spiritual] powers: Mount Sinai, the Land Made Safe, fashioned of water and clay, uniting the “most beautiful of constitutions” with the “lowest of degrees”. This treatise informed me of what passed between myself and myself and what my existence contemplated of my existence.

When the signs of witnessing were lifted from me and the suffering of spiritual combat was removed, and harmony and succour began to flow through me, I mounted the Buraq of my spiritual aspiration and departed from the cycle of this grief. I fell into the sea of hylic matter, and beheld the next world and the present one. I said: “May he perish, whoever denies the gardens and the abode of life, the sporting boys and embracing houris, and the union of bodies with bodies! He who sees the Preserver affirms the existence of the Speaker, for the line of equilibrium does not waver.” I understood here that those who deny the resurrection of the body will continue to waver and will never be rid of the noose of the four and the two.

Then I shouted: “Oh alas!” and “Alas, my burning heart. I fled from the universe and here I am in it. Where is what I seek?”

I heard a voice coming from me— but neither inside me nor out side me— say: “Why do you demand a high station when you are on the road? What have you to do with the sittings [on the Throne]What have you to do with the celestial couches and sublime litters? What have you to do with the uppermost horizon? What have you to do with the screens of splendour? What have you to do with the radiant curtain? What have you to do with the Cloud? What have you to do with the impenetrable Veil of Sublimity? What have you to do with the absolute ipseities? What have you to do with the confirmed realities? What have you to do with the presence of allusions? What have you to do with the conversations? What have you to do with the nightly confidences? What have you to do with the sublime Tree? What have you to do with the branches of the world? What have you to do with the strange ‘Anqā’? What have you to do with the Ringdove? What have you to do with the Jet-Black Crow? What have you to do with the Royal Eagle? O you who are veiled, how can you ask ‘where?’ about the Essence, when you are in a station that does not admit lies!”

I answered: “Oh you who rebuke me, your words have wounded me. Do you not know that you speak from your own station? You are in the presence of the Essence, divested of time and place, while I am in this dark abyss, in this black gloom and this fearful calamity, in this mine of lies and doubt, this place of faults and defects. Does the prisoner of quantity and the one confined to wise maxims not cry out: Woe! If you extract me from the crashing waves and deliver me from the struggles of this gloomy night I will never more pronounce an adverb or stop at a particle.”

Through his irresistible power he attracted me to himself and said to me: “You are vanquished, so seek help!”

I said: “I will save myself by your right hand, for both your hands are right hands. For he is the powerful, the trustworthy, the faithful, and the true one who never lies.”

He said: “How can one mock me whose hope abides in me?”
I said: “Just like one who praises you bestows favour upon you.”
When he attracted me to himself I saw myself in another form than my previous one. I established myself there and took a firm position.

I said: “Oh I!”
He said: “I, welcome!”
I said: “No welcome, no greetings, no make yourself at ease!”
He said: “Oh eye-balm, what is disquieting you? Oh prisoner of creation, what is afflicting you?”
I answered: “You do not cease from veiling me from myself. Unveil me to myself so that I can know myself! Here is my tablet outspread, my banner is raised, my knowledge is delimited, my station is praised, my secret self is witnessed, my heart is found, the goal I seek is lost, and I, in my world, am what is sought. I am called the word of existence. If these entities were to become annihilated, if these creatures were to vanish, and if I were to retreat from the Throne of Mercy and the lordly name, I would be able to enjoy the divine regard and not be harmed by this favour.”

He said: “The pens have been spent, the signs have gone away, the names have departed, the Throne has been veiled, the tablets have been put away, and the hearts and spirits have been lost. But these are necessary: the dark-green gloom of the Garden, the sphere of water, the Supreme Pen, the first step, the hidden letter nūn, so and the guarded right hand.”

When I heard that there was still a trace of createdness before me, I feared that it would cut me off from my cognizance. So I rose from that gloomy darkness, leaving the Burāq of my aspiration in it. I was transported to the thrones of subtle grace and the couches of the celestial cushions, until I reached the station of rejoicing where I set myself to oscillate like a hanging lamp. said: “What have I to do with the state of audition?”

Someone said: “It is the beauty of the rhythm that has set you in motion.”

I said: “I didn’t feel it.”
Someone said to me: “Be careful! For you are with yourself and not with him!”
I said: “Reality is beyond the rhythms of song. What it demands is extinction within extinction.”
Then a veil was lowered between my essence and its Essence and a state came between me and it.
Then he said to me: “Where are you, do you belong to the world or to me?”

I said: “[I am] between drudgery and desire. My goal is the blinding Cloud while I am in the water. My spirit is in the heavens while my throne is in the primordial Dust and my family is in Sabā. My kingdom is in the Throne and my authority in the two feet of equivalence. My constellation is in the celestial sphere, my veil is in the angel, my obscurity is in prime matter, and my trial is in this world. My beginning is the first state while my end is the next world. My intimacy is in the intimate friend Abraham; my conversations are in Moses, who spoke with God; my vicegerency is in Aaron, the sage; my elevation is in Idrīs; my form is in Joseph; my knowledge in its diversity and multiplicity is in Jesus; my body is in Adam, the father of mankind; my heart is from Abraham, the greatest of masters; and my physical frame is in the four elements.”

The seven prophets enumerated in this series are the same ones encountered by the Prophet Muḥammad during his mi’ rāj. They are associated with seven planets and seven attributes: Saturn - Abraham - intimacy; Jupiter - Moses - face-to-face- conversation; Mars - Aaron - vicegerency; Sun - Idrīs - elevation; Venus - Joseph - form of beauty; Mercury - Jesus - diverse sciences; Moon - Adam - body. It is odd that Abraham should be mentioned twice, occurring both at the head and the foot of the list. It may be, as Stephen Hirtenstein has suggested to me, that when the Real, in descending through the levels of existence, reaches the lowest heaven, that of the Moon, It is met by the heart of the Perfect Human Being, symbolized here by Abraham, the custodian of the heart. The heart, in turn, is the synthesizing spiritual organ in which the four elements combine. In the mi’ rāj literature, Abraham’s place is the Visited House (al-Bayt al-Ma’mūr), the celestial equivalent of the Ka’ba, whose microcosmic equivalent is the heart of the believer. See Hirtenstein, “The Brotherhood of Milk”.

He said: “That is your portion from my creation, but where is your portion from my essence?”

I said: “Oh you, who speak by allusion! Relationship exists either with something contrary or something similar, and when the similar is inherent [to this relationship] it is inherent essentially and necessarily.”

The one who speaks by allusion said: “I mean the relationship of the similar.”

I said: “My trace is yours and my attribute is yours. Summation is better than particularization in this manner, for the sake of the Wayfarers.”

He said: “You’ve spoken correctly. But where is the relationship of the contrary, according to reality, not according to equivocation?”

I said: “In my non-existence is your existence and in my avarice is your generosity; in your speech is my muteness and in your discourse is my bell-peal. In my impossibility is your eternity and in my beginning is your precedence.”

He said: “I know now that you know. How excellent is your judgement!”

Then the Universal Tree of the garden, described as the Likeness, was unveiled to me. I observed a tree “whose root is firm and whose branches are in the heavens.” Its fruit is in the hand of the Deity, who sits upon the Throne. Among its branches sat the Crow and the strange ‘Anqā and in the shelter of its boughs perched the Eagle and the Ringdove. I greeted the Tree and it answered, greeting me even more finely. It said: “Listen, O wayfarer, O king.”

Discourse of the Universal Tree, Described as the Likeness

I am the Universal Tree of synthesis and likeness. I have deep roots and my branches are lofty. The hand of the One planted me in the garden of eternity, protected from the vicissitudes of time. I have spirit and body. My fruit is gathered with no hand touching it. These fruits contain more sciences and knowledge than sound intellects and subtle hearts can bear. My leaves are “raised couches,” my fruits are not “out of reach nor yet forbidden.” My centre is the desired goal. My branches perpetually draw nigh and come down. Some come down to provide benefit and aid, while some draw nigh gradually to bestow favour. My constitution is like the celestial sphere in roundness and my branches are homes to the winged spirits. My flowers are like the stars whose course engenders the minerals, flowing in their bodies.

I am the Tree of light, speech, and the eye-balm of Moses, upon whom be peace. Of directions mine is the most excellent right-handed one, of places mine is the holy valley. Of times mine is the instant. Of dwelling places, mine is the equator and the temperate climes. I have perpetuity, everlastingness, and felicity without misery. The fruits of my two gardens are near to hand and my bough sways loftily as if intoxicated. It bestows grace and tenderness on all living creatures. My branches always offer frankincense to the spirits of the Guarded Tablet, and my foliage is a protection for them against the diurnal rays. My shade extends over those whom God envelops in his solicitude and my wings are spread over the people of sainthood. The spirit-winds blow on me from many different directions and disarrange the order of my branches. From this entanglement one hears such melodious sounds. They enrapture the supreme intellects in the utmost heights and set them running on the course inscribed upon their scroll.

I am the music of wisdom that removes care through the beauty of its rhythmic song. I am the luminous light. Mine is the green carpet and the most resplendent round face. Assisted by the powers and ennobled by the one who is seated on the Throne, I have become like prime matter, receiving all forms in the afterworld and the present one. I am not too narrow to bear anything! I am never apart from a faithful light that shines upon me; it consoles the one who leans upon me.

I am the “spreading shade,” the clustered plantains, the intended meaning, the word of existence, the most noble of originated beings, the most transcendent of limited beings. My power is unsurpassable, my place most holy, my lamp most elevated. I am the source from which issue the lights, the synthesis of the divine words, the mine of secrets and wisdoms.

Mine are the vast earth and the heavens.
In my centre are equivalence and straightness.
Mine are the firmly-rooted majesty, the splendour,
The secret of the worlds, and the exaltation.
When thoughts betake themselves to my essence
The distance and the blinding Cloud bewilder them.

No one in the universe knows my existence
Save one undelimited by praise.
He disposes over and governs us.

The choice is his - he does what he wills.

Discourse of the Ringdove

When the Ringdove heard the Universal Tree’s discourse and the eternal knowledge it brought forth, she uttered a cry in the garden of her sanctity, declaring about herself:

When God wished to bring my creation into existence, he made me contemplate my own essence; he encircled my neck with the ring of splendour and he gave me the “Lote Tree of the Limit” as a dwelling place. He called to the Eagle, assuring him that he would be preserved from punishment. The Eagle, who was in the courtyard in front of his door, answered obediently: “Your call is heard.” He told him: “Now you are in exile, even though you remain in the locus of my proximity. I am not of your kind, so you must feel lonely. But in you is eye-balm. Make her appear in reality. Enjoy her company and be cheered by her conversation, because familiarity with me is impossible, for I am ‘mighty in power.”

The Eagle asked: “How can something be manifested from me when my station is weakness and my power and might have no authority?”

He answered him: “Continue to call plaintively and that very one will appear before you, face to face. This is the second harmony and union through doubling.”

The Eagle obeyed. He doubled his plaint and I appeared; the Real called me and I hastened. The Eagle, however, had not understood what was happening, since he was preoccupied with the dower and my coming into existence from his loins. When he heard me respond to the divine call, he asked: “What is this that has appeared?”

As soon as he had seen me, he fell in love with me. The beauty God had surrounded me with made him mad with love. Passion made him groan with pain: “I’m burning! I’m drowning!” He was like a nightingale, warbling his plaint, trying to heal his condition, but the burning only became more extensive and solace more impossible. I would not permit him to kiss me, although his cure was in lying with me and embracing me. The veils of doubt were raised, and from behind the pavilions of the Unseen someone called: “What is wrong with you that you don’t regard her lineaments and the performance of her song? Why have you not looked upon her qualities and the marvels of her wisdom?”

He called me to him. “Here I am!” I responded. He commanded me to sit before him. He said: “I was so inflamed with ardour at your form that I overlooked the knowledge of your spiritual qualities.

The divine order has come that you make yourself known to me and that a ray of your sunlight shine for me.”

I said: “God has brought me into existence from you, face to face. And he has made me manifest from your loins, following our inclination for one another. I emanate from your power and am manifested through your form. God has entrusted me with two realities and has given me two subtle threads: one reality by which I know and one reality by which I bring into existence what I wish by means of its occasion. One thread is attached to you; it is sent down to me when I desire you and draws me to your presence. The second joins me to him and is sent down to me when he calls me to him.”

When he heard that a subtle thread extended from me to him, and having verified the realities of love, the Eagle descended toward me along this thread. My essence mingled with his, my qualities disappeared into his, and we were absorbed in the pleasures of union, cheered by the attainment of harmony. The spiritual wedding took place. The two waters flowed together in the womb of the moment, which received them in virtue of that divine wisdom that bestows grace to some and accords misery to others. The lover recovered from his malady and found rest in a desire to answer the divine call. Wavering between two desires, he set in the two wests and rose in the two easts.

See Q. 55: 17: “Lord of the two easts, and Lord of the two wests.” The exoteric sense of “two easts” may refer to the extreme points where the sun rises in winter and summer, while the “two wests” may be the extreme points where the sun sets in summer and winter. See Pickthall, Glorious Qur’an, p. 590, and Yūsuf ‘Ali, Meaning of the Glorious Qur’an, p. 1474, n.5184. The latter adds “extreme” to qualify the points and says that they include all points in between. Hence God is everywhere. Additional esoteric meanings are given by Ibn ‘Arabl in another early work, the ‘Anqā’ mughrib. The east in general is associated with the world of manifestation, while the west is associated with the world of transcendence (see Elmore, Islamic Sainthood, p. 493). With respect to the two solar risings, he says: “Even as the sun necessarily changes its time of rising and shifts its place - similarly your own ‘Sun’ must rise upon the exterior of your physical constitution. And know that the sun, by an inherent [motion] is constantly circulating from the west to the east, even as it proceeds by [compulsion from] another from the east to the west, though sight is unable [to perceive the former movement] and the mind is staggered [by its computation]. But it must be that one day [the Sun rising from the West] will openly manifest its [inherent] movement [eastwards] and [freely] bestow its blessing.” (Trans. Elmore, Islamic Sainthood, p. 487.) Note: the sun’s rising in the west is a sign of the Mahdi’s coming.

When he had recovered from his suffering and had departed to his abode, I found in myself a fullness that I had never before known. The paths and roads to him were blocked. The divine thread moved and I said: “Oh, my God. What is this that has befallen me?”

He said: “Exhale when you mention me so that the word of my command may manifest from you.”

So I exhaled like one oppressed. And there was the Anqā’, who filled my refuge with life. Ask the Anqā’ about herself and she will tell you what God has deposited in her of his subtle graces and what he has given to her of knowledge.

I am the Dove of oft-repeated praises.
My dwelling is in the Garden of spiritual meanings.
I am an essence in the entities. I have nothing but dualities.
They call me “O second!”— but I am not second.
Everything in creation ends up at my existence.
I come after the one whose essence is too high for sight.
My authority is useful to those most far and near.
I have no likeness save one whose nature is similar to mine.Reproach me if you wish for what my tongue brings forth:
Beautiful realities descend upon threads
Toward the hearts that turn from the ornaments of the gardens.In search of the one who transcends the vicissitudes of time.
He is the singular, the exalted. No second shares his authoriy.He is the one who selected me.
He has placed me in equilibrium between pot and potter.
I banish every distant one and draw each near one closer.
I befriend every friend and I afflict all the wretched.
When I swoop down low, it is with the spirit of diffusing,
And when I rise high above, bodily constitutions dissolve.
It is I who confer sense and leave the inhabited places deserted.

Discourse of the Royal Eagle

When the Eagle heard what the Ringdove had mentioned and what she had related about the certain sciences, he said: “What she has affirmed is true. She has disclosed to you all the sciences she encompasses.”

I said to him: “Fly through the air of your eloquence and tell us clearly about your nature.” The throne of the Eagle shook. He flapped his wings joyfully and said:

I am the Eagle.
To me belong the most elevated station, beauty, and the most brilliant shining light.
I carry out everything according to its determined rank
On this world’s shores, but my power is more inaccessible.I am his sublime effusion, the light of his existence.
I am he who summons existence and it obeys.
I am the one who never ceases to be the “handful” of my creator,
The instrument of his openhandedness.
The realities hurry toward me to seek their fill.
I give to and withhold from whomever I wish.
If I approach, the beauty of his being dazzles me.
If I retreat, his most magnificent splendour summons me.
Approach confers upon me a pleasing wisdom
But it rends the heart of the high one.Distance invests me with an apportioned command Whose light illuminates their borders.
When I am distant I am the commander- My misery is in my command and my felicity when it is removed.
The most pleasing of my moments is when I see the essences of the new moons arising.

I was still non-existent as an entity in one of the levels of creation when the divine solicitude came forth and made my existence the beginning. Having manifested himself to himself, my existence was prolonged in my contemplation. I received the supreme rank through the form, and the most secret part of my being became his Throne. The divine all-encompassing Name sat itself down upon me. His two viziers, He-who-gives and He-who-withholds, and his two chamberlains, He-who-confers-harm and He-who-confers-good, stood at his two stirrups. When the sitting had taken place, and the other appeared, and the names “mighty” and “sublime” were given to me, the courtyard became filled. Subsistence and annihilation appeared; just allotment and effusive plenty followed one another in alternating course, and expansiveness and contraction were firmly established. By the kingdom the king was confirmed, by the message the angel became manifest, and by the stars the sphere was set in motion.

Then he called me to instruct me with the language of arbitration: “Look into your essence, bringing together all that delights you.” When I began to look and could distinguish between those that required precedence and those that required contemplation, I laid down the different laws and divided the lights between merits and graces. I said to those enraptured spirits whom I surveyed: “Adhere to the enrapturing presence!” And I said to the subjected spirits whom I surveyed: “Adhere to the subjecting stations!” And I said to the governing spirits whom I surveyed: “Adhere to the governed bodies!” Each of these departed to seek its waystation in order to contemplate there the one who had caused them to descend. I had already seen the Ringdove, pregnant with the strange Anqa, but in dividing up the waystations, I had neglected the one who shares my waystation.

I am the knowledge of creation concealed in the cloak of the divine inviolability. A band of philosophers invented lies about me and a gang of noblemen tried to capture me. They set up the fowler’s net of their thoughts to hunt me and used against me the very means that I myself had provided them with in order to gain from my toil. And when their spiritual aspirations were sufficient to grasp me in their fowler’s net of thought, there fell into it an eagle with my form from the country of illusion. They said, “This is the clear truth!” Would that they knew that the truth is not clear to them and never will be. Knowledge of me and my existence depends upon what is granted as a gift or recompensed for merit. Satan incited them to doubt and they imagined that they had alighted at the summit when their station was the low plains. They mistook anteriority for eternity, declaring me eternal and that my existence did not stem from non-existence. 1 abandoned them to their confusion “like meat on the butcher’s block.” Those who commit an injustice to the divine command must be oppressed! I am free from what they attribute to me, and an unbeliever in what they set up. For God, may his glory be magnified, was from all eternity while I was under the decree of non-existence. Then he brought me into existence from non-existence through a pre-eternal precedence, and my essence became manifest. He illuminated my existence with his knowledge and entrusted me with poverty and weakness, turning me away from might and glory. I am the humble one who has no glory and the powerful one who does not cease to be weak.

Discourse of the Strange Anqā’

When the Eagle completed his discourse and finished explaining his station, the Anqā’ began to speak clearly about her existence and spoke strangely about the high rank of her limit.

She said: I am the strange ‘Anqa’. My dwelling is forever in the west, in the middle station, on the banks of the surrounding sea. Glory embraces me on two sides without my entity ever becoming manifest at all.

I am the one who has no existent entity, the one who lacks no property,
Strange ‘Anqa’, they’ve come to call me.
Although the door of my existence is sealedThe Merciful has not made my mention in vain But it has to do with a meaning whose secret must be sought—It is that I am the one who bestows gnosis to their innermost beings.
Our straight path stretches on, and the wayfarers are each at the levels of their light:
The greatest one is he whose light is sheer detachment.

Limits derive from me, and upon me existence depends. One hears mention of me but I am invisible, and the report of me is not one that can be declared a lie. I am the strange one, the Anqā. My mother is the Ringdove and my father the Royal Eagle. My son is the Jet-Black Crow. I am the element of light and darkness, the place of trust and suspicion. I do not receive the unqualified light, for it is my contrary. I am unacquainted with knowledge, for I cannot produce or reproduce. Everyone who praises me is far from understanding me, subdued by the sultan of imagination. I have no might in which to seek protection. The bodily frames of superior and inferior creation trace their origin to me. I am the reality that has no character, because of the vastness that I have. I clothe every condition with either happiness or misery. I am capable of bearing any form. I have no rank in any known form. But I have received the gift of transmitting the sciences although I am no knower, and of bestowing determinations although I am no judge. Nothing can be manifested that I am not in, but no seeker can attain it as something grasped or perceived in its entirety. I am of very great value in the eyes of those who realize the truth. I wander through the gathering of those with bowed heads. Thus I have explained my state and have made manifest what is true and what is impossible about myself.

Discourse of the Jet-Black Crow

The Crow arose and said: I am the body of lights and the bearer of the receptacle of secrets, the receptacle of quality and quantity, and the cause of joy and sorrow. I am the leader who is led. Sense and sensible are mine and through me appear the traces [of existence].

From me arises the world of material bodies. I am the source of figures, and likenesses are struck according to the levels of my form. I am the lamp and the winds. I am the chain against the pebbles and the wing. I am the sea whose waves constantly strike one another. I am, of the numbers, the singular among counted numbers and its pair. My width is the abode of the charismatic gifts of his friends and my depth is the abode of abuse to his enemies. My height has not ceased to be face to face with his essence, through eternity without beginning and end, ever since I was brought into existence. I am the alembic of wisdom, the music of melody, and the one who brings together the realities of the words. In directing oneself toward me, one reaches the limit, and those who are endowed with intelligence rely upon me. I am the most precious gift that has been bestowed, the final goal that has no end. For my sake some are accepted and others rejected. I am those who are rolled and held in his right hand, and I am enclosed in the grasp of the evident truth. The Real summoned me into his presence and I came. lie called me to his knowledge and I readily responded. I am the form of the celestial sphere and the place of royalty. Upon me he established the Throne and I was given the name “place where it was established”. 1 am the subsequent who is not overtaken, just as the Eagle is the precedent who is not outstripped. He is the first and I am the last. His is the non-manifest dimension and mine is the manifest one. Existence has been divided between myself and him. I manifest his might and his creation, while his judgement depends on me. My knowledge flows in him, and his knowledge flows in me. When its bestower offers it, it is for our benefit, and when I acquire it, he thanks me for increasing it even more.

Some alleging to be endowed with unshakeable reason made their claim and imposed their dubious judgement. They showered me with unseemly derision and divested me of the robe of seemly praise. But the evil consequences of their actions will turn against them and their mocking will encompass them when, in the depths [of my hell]they will call for help and be answered: “Begone therein and speak not unto me,” while in the breadth [of my paradise]those who praised me well will make merry with their spouses “in a garden made joyful,”. The Law has already praised me so what do I care? The received text has made clear my rank, so why say more?

I am, with respect to my Lord, a wisdom for one who sees me,
For I am the secret whose nature was fashioned without fingertips.
My creator ordered everything within himself when he constructed me,
For I am a rock, and from me the spiritual meanings flash.
Together with the superior beings,[we are] like contesting racehorses,
Yet I am one who conceals himself modestly from view.
I'm the one who answered my Lord obediently when he summoned me.
He who, because of time’s vicissitudes, sees my existence
Like the heart of Moses’ mother, empty of spiritual meanings,
Is completely void of the verities of explanation.
I am the source of habitations and the foundation of songs.
I am the secret of an Imam, a noble one, high in place,
Whose knowledge is the most perfect knowledge
And whose rank is the greatest rank.
He fell in love with me when he saw me in the enclosures of the gardens.
I do not name him for I fear the spearhead’s sharpness.
But he who understands my riddle is Ṣakhr ibn Sinān—
The one who possesses the most generous hand
And the one who is most steadfast in combat.
Mother, Grandmother, Grandfather, and I:
The spiritual meanings of our existence derive from God, timelessly,
Like what becomes visible to the eye in the air brightened with lightning.

Oh Ṣakhr ibn Sinān, I have explained to you some of the stations of the sources of the creatures: the universal human being, the first intellect, the unique soul, prime matter, and universal body. Investigate them like an intelligent man who seeks the salvation of his soul.

Peace be upon its author and upon us!

COMMENTARY

The Title

The full title of the treatise is long and complex: Cosmic Unification in the Presence of the Eye-witnessing through the Assembly of the Human Tree and the Four Spiritual Birds (al-Ittihād al-kawnī fī hadrat al-ish-hād al-‘aynī bi-mahdūr al-shajara al-insāniyya wa-l-tuyūr al-arba’a al-ruhāniyya). As is generally the case with Ibn ‘Arabī’s titles, each word is carefully chosen for its semantic as well as symbolic resonance. While we will discuss the “human tree” and the “four spiritual birds” later, let us briefly look at the other key terms in the title.

Ittiḥād

Ittiḥād is the verbal noun deriving from the eighth form of the consonantal root W-H-D, which conveys the basic meaning of “one, unity, uniqueness.”" The eighth form of the verb primarily gives the sense of reflexivity and reciprocity. Thus the first-form verb wahada, meaning “to be one, unique”, becomes in the eighth form ittiḥada, meaning “to unite”, to make oneself and/or others one. As Ibn ‘Arabī defines it, “Ittiḥād” is that two essences become one, whether servant or Lord”, thus the term suggests a mystical union in which one essence is subsumed or annihilated in the other. But, as Souad al- Hakim has written, “the Ittiḥād in which two essences become one is impossible according to Ibn ‘Arabī.” As the Shaykh tells us, “There can be no Ittiḥād other than with respect to number and nature.”

The doctrine of Ittiḥād is censured by both the exoteric scholars, such as the theologians and philosophers, and by the mystics, albeit in a qualified sense. Not only can there be no intermingling of essences, either as an apotheosis of the human being or as an incarnation (ḥulūl) of the divine in human form, but the entire notion of Ittiḥād rests on the false assumption that there is anything at all other than the One Essence. Ittiḥād thus, from one point of view, is a meaningless concept.

This, however, is not the full story, for there are situations in which, Ibn ‘Arabī claims, the declaration of Ittiḥād is not only permissible but necessary for the mystic to profess. In the highly allusive Chapter 399 of the Futuhāt, Ibn ‘Arabī discusses Ittiḥād at length. The paradoxes of this notion are evident in the chapter’s title: On Knowledge of the Mutual Waystation of “He who enters it, I smote his neck [that is, behead him], and no one remains who does not enter it.” It is inevitable, in other words, that the creature will profess ittiḥād, whether he realizes the true situation or is completely unaware. Everyone and everything attributes his own action to himself, everything says “I”. God Himself ascribes action to Elis creatures, as Ibn ‘Arabī points out in a series of quotations from the Qur’an. Hence, although the gnostic knows that God is the only agent, there are times when his spiritual state or even a command from God allows him to attribute God’s action to himself, as in the case of spiritual annihilation (fanā’) where God, as a result of the servant’s drawing near to Elim through the supererogatory acts of worship (nawāfil), “becomes”, in the ḥadīth qudsī, the servant’s hearing, seeing, speaking, and all his faculties. When the servant enters the station of Ittiḥād, God “smote[s] his neck”; that is, He severs the connection between the absolute and the relative with respect to the servant’s perception of his ontological condition, and only Oneness (ahadiyya) remains, a Oneness that belongs to the Real alone, never to the servant. This, of course, is the reason for the “blasphemous” and unruly utterances of such well-known Sufis as al-Hallāj, who said: “I am the Real”, and Abū Yazīd al-Bistāmī, who said: “Glory be to me.”

Another instance of the permissibility of declaring ittiḥād is discussed briefly by Ibn ‘Arabī in the Futūhāt’s Chapter on Love, with reference to the hadīth qudsī mentioned above, as well as the Qur’anic dictum to the Prophet: “You did not throw when you threw but God threw” (Q. 8: 17). Further on in the chapter, ’ he describes the goal of spiritual love as ittihād, in which the essence of the Beloved becomes the essence of the lover, a statement that would seem to contradict his statements elsewhere. Fie relates this to the infamous heresy of incarnation (hulūl), but says that those who proclaim it are unaware of the real meaning of this unification.

The sense of unification between the lover and the Beloved is later explained in terms of natural love, in which two lovers exchange breath, that is, spirits, and saliva in intimate embrace. “When this breath becomes the spirit in the one toward which it is transferred and the breath of the other becomes the spirit of the first, it is interpreted as unification (ittiḥād)… So it is correct to say [as the poet al-Hallāj has said]:

I am the One I love, and the One I love is me!”

A final example, taken from this same chapter on love, shows the bewilderment of the lover who does not understand the situation as it really is. Taken from an enumeration of various essential characteristics of the lover, the passage in question has to do with the lover whose essential characteristic is that he is “annoyed (mutabarrim) by the company of what comes between him and meeting his Beloved.” As Ibn ‘Arabī explains, nothing comes between the gnostic and meeting God but non-existence, which is nothing. Existence is nothing other than God. God Elimself is the Contemplator in every eye that sees Him. The only veil between lover and Beloved is creation, and the lover is unable to remove creation for it is his very essence. As Ibn ‘Arabī explains, “A thing cannot remove itself from itself, and his self is what comes between him and meeting his Beloved… so he remains ever annoyed.” He imagines that when he is separated from his body, he will be separated from composition and he will become something simple in which there is no duality. He multiplies his own oneness (ahadiyya) with the Oneness of the Real, and this constitutes the meeting. But multiplication results only in him, not in Him. And this makes the lover even more annoyed. On the other hand, the lover who is a knower of God does not become annoyed because “he knows the affair as it really is, as we have mentioned in the Treatise on Unification (Risālat al-ittiḥād).”

And how is the affair as it really is? In one sense, one can explain it only by paradox: there is/ is not unification, depending on one’s particular understanding of the word. Ibn ‘Arabī himself explains it in terms of the Prophet’s supererogatory supplication that God make him into a light since God has said: “God is the light of the heavens and the earth” (Q. 24:35). The Shaykh explains: “The glories [of God’s Face] are lights, and light is not burned away by light. Rather, it is included within it, that is, it coheres with it because it is of the same genus. This is conjunction and unification (Ittiḥād).” The Muḥammadan light is thus consubstantial with the Divine Light. The servant, who, in himself, has only possible existence, is by his very nature something added (nafl), “light upon light” (Q.24:34) as it were: “You are fundamentally extra with respect to existence, since God was when you were not, and then you were.”

Thus Ittiḥād can only occur when the servant realizes his superfluous or supererogatory nature vis-à-vis the Real. By engaging in the supererogatory, an act that engages his will and creativity, he assumes the attributes of the Real, whereby the Real becomes his hearing, seeing, and all his faculties. It is only in this way that the Real becomes manifest in the form of the servant and the servant becomes manifest in the form of the Real. Then there is an interpenetration of attributes rather than the disappearance of one essence into another.

It is, as Ibn ‘Arabī remarks in his chapter on Abraham in the Fusūs al-hikam, like the dying of a garment, where colour penetrates the cloth. This interpenetration of attributes is known as khulla, or intimate friendship, from which the designation of Abraham as al-Khalīl derives. As the Shaykh explains, “Khulla can only be between God and His servant. It is the station of unification (ittihād).” It is a reciprocal intimacy, then, in which the loving servant plays both an active and a passive part, following the two-part structure of the aforementioned hadīth qudsī.’ In the first stage: “My servant does not approach me by something I love more than by those acts which I have prescribed.” In this first movement, one involving the performance of obligatory acts, Abraham “penetrates and encompasses” the Divine Attributes. This is followed by a second stage in which: “He does not cease approaching Me with supererogatory acts until I love him.” This love consists of the “penetration” by the Divine Spirit, which courses through every organ and limb of the servant’s body: “And when I love him, I am his ear with which he hears, his eye with which he sees, his hand with which he grasps.”

Ittihad, then, is the state in which God is “nearer” to His servant “than the jugular vein” (Q. 50: 16), but neither Lord nor vassal disappears. As Ibn ‘Arabī concludes, in the chapter on Abraham in the Fusūs:

We are His as has been shown,
As also we belong to ourselves.…
I have two aspects, He and I,
But He is not I in my I.
In me is His place of manifestation,
And we are for Him as vessels.

Kawnī

Kawnī is an adjective derived from the verbal noun kawn, cosmos, creation. It can also refer to the individual creature. The consonantal root is K-W-N, whose meanings include “to be,” “to create,” “to bring into existence.” God’s command “Be!” (kun) is the occasion for all existence. Ibn ‘Arabī finds an esoteric meaning within the structure of this command. Although it is written with only two letters, the kāf and the nūn, the wāw lies hidden within, appearing only as the short-vowel ḍamma, pronounced “u.” The seeming polarity of the Real and creation is bridged by a third thing, the linking letter wāw, which represents the Perfect Human Being. This Perfect Human Being thus serves as an isthmus, or barzakh, partaking of both sides of creation as a whole, the divine and the cosmic, yet preserving the tension inherent in them.

Ishhād

Ishhād is the fourth-form verbal noun of the verb ashhada. Its root SH-H-D has to do with seeing, witnessing. One of the senses of fourth-form verbs is causative, hence in this case “to make see or witness.” For Ibn ‘Arabī, seeing possesses an inner as well as out ward sense. The Essence or Being of the Real can never be grasped but Ilis manifestation in the cosmos can be witnessed in its infinite self-disclosures. In the state of annihilation of self (fanā’) and the subsistence of God (baqā’), the gnostic realizes that it is God who is both Witness and witnesser.

‘Aynī

‘Aynī is an adjective related to the consonantal root ‘-Y-N. ‘Ayn is the paradigmatic homonym, with a wide range of meanings as diverse as eye,” “spring,” “source,” essence,” “entity,” and “self.” Ibn ‘Arabī fully exploits the range of possibilities of this word’s meaning in his title and throughout the treatise. What the author is being made to witness with the eye of his inner vision is the Root of his existence and his very self. The title could easily be read: Cosmic Unification in the Presence of the I-witnessing.

***

There is an unmistakable affinity between the paired terms al-ittiad al-kawni and al-ishhad al- ‘ayni. While the first term may suggest to some the notion that has mistakenly been ascribed to Ibn ‘Arab! through the centuries, wahdat al-wujud, oneness or unity of being, the form of the word Ittiḥād is much more in line with Ibn ‘Arabl’s manner of thinking. The fact that the word is in a form that implies reflexivity and reciprocity provides a dynamism that we do not find in the more static word waḥda. Since we know from the Shaykh’s own words that two incommensurable essences- the Real and the servant- cannot enter into a true unity, and that in reality there is only one absolute unqualified Being, the effort is directed to the realization of what it means to be the locus where absolute and relative being meet.

The Proemial Poems

The Ittiḥād al-kawnī begins abruptly with a series of proemial poems— a Stemning, in Kierkegaardian terms— that sets the tone for the first part of the risāla. The series consists of three poems of differing lengths and metres, interspersed by prose remarks, including the dedication and naming of the treatise. In reality, the three poems form a single poem, regularly repeating the refrain: “From my… to my…” They are all marked by end rhymes to which the letter yā’ (transliterated “ī”) or the shortened variant “i” is appended. The first poem’s end rhyme is in lām plus the additional “ī” -ālī (for example, i’tidālī// jalālī); the second’s is dād plus “ī”-ardi: (farḍī// ‘arḍī); the third’s is sīn, hence-sī: (hissī// 'labsī).The result is fifty lines of verse, all ending with the long “ee” sound. In Arabic, the long consonantal “ya,” which gives the sound of a long “ee,” is the marker of the first person possessive pronoun suffix. Thus the author truly does not cease to speak about himself throughout the entire initial sequence and beyond. Imagine the effect if we were to read an English poem of equivalent length, all ending in the word “me.”

The first poem, in the metre basīt, is nineteen lines in length, thirteen of which present paired terms in each hemistich for a total of twenty-six paired terms. Nine lines consist of dyads that are not repeated: incompleteness/ completeness; inclination/ equilibrium. Represented by letters, the pattern would be: A—» B—» C—» D. This pattern is repeated for nine lines, after which come four lines in which the second of the dyads is repeated, while the fourth is new: breeze, boughs/ boughs, shade. The pattern here is A—» B= B—» C. Following the thirteen lines of paired terms are six lines with no paired terms.

The first thirteen lines are full of dyadic fluctuations, oppositions, ascents, and descents, in dizzying succession. Some of the terms are states, some things. Generally, the movement is along a variety of horizontal axes, but at the mention of the moon, a cyclical variant of this fluctuation is brought into consideration. This is made even more apparent as the author begins to repeat the last term of the line as the first term of the next line: breeze to boughs, boughs to shade, and so forth.

The reader is caught in the sheer instability of human— nay all— nature, and the words of the Prophetic tradition may come to mind: “The heart is between two of the fingers of the All-Merciful; He makes it fluctuate as He desires.”

The second poem consists of only two lines in the rare metre mudāri‘.The pairs here: heaven, earth; exemplary practice, religious duty// pact, perjury; length, breadth, are contraries. There are no repeated terms among the eight, hence we return to the first pattern of the first sequence: A—» B—> C—» D.

The third poem consists of twenty-nine lines in the metre hazaj. The first pair of each hemistich, with one exception, is presented in reverse order in the second: sense, intellect/ intellect, sense. Thus the pattern here is A—> B= B <— A. A line of explanation or elaboration follows each of these pair-embeded lines. As we have mentioned, all but one of the pairs in the first hemisitich are repreated in reverse order in the second. The exception is the eleventh line: body, vastness; vastness / prison. This gives a total of eleven pairs made up of five individual terms plus the extra "prison." A final contrasting pair, shout/ whisper, is given in the last line.

We have mentioned the pattern of the three proemial poems for a reason. The movement of the first sequence is along a horizontal line: ABCD⟶ The second can be seen as a Z:

The two-lined third sequence returns to ABCD 🡒 and the fourth forms a perfectly self-contained X:

We also note that the terms in each line have been reduced in sequences one, two, and four from four terms to three and then to two. The wild ricocheting has settled down to an even swing as equilibrium approaches. The poet seems to have progressed from the sensation of being caught in the dualities at every level of existence to a realization of the Unity at the core.

The Dedicatee

As we have already noted, Ibn ‘Arabī states often in the treatise that he addresses only himself. What, then, is his relation to the dedicate of the work? The Ittiḥād al-kawnī is dedicated to a mysterious personage who, as Ibn ‘Arabī says, “understands my riddle”. In the Ittiḥād he is called by the name Abū al-Fawāris Ṣakhr ibn Sinan, but as Gril has pointed out, there is no doubt that he is the semi-legendary prophet Khālid ibn Sinān b. Ayth (or al-Ghayth) al-‘Absī, to whom Ibn ‘Arabī devotes his penultimate chapter in the Fūṣuṣ al-ḥikam. In the Ittiḥād, however, he is not called Khālid but Ṣakhr. Nonetheless, the two men are one and the same, as will become clear later when we deconstruct these names.

The dedicatee’s role in the narrative seems minor at best, appearing only once in the Jet-Black Crow’s poem at the end, but this insignificance is only apparent. In reality, he holds a major key to the work, as a possible alter ego of the author himself and as a symbol for the Perfect Human Being as a barzakh, or isthmus, whose nature will be discussed below. Some delving into Khalid’s history and the various components of his name yields important clues.

Khālid, whom some, including Ibn ‘Arabī, regard as a pre-Islamic Arabian prophet, is said to have lived at the time of what is known as the fatra - the intermediate period between specific legislative revelations, in this case between Jesus and Muhammad. He is considered to be a ḥanīf a natural monotheist or Muslim avant le lettre, in part because of a Prophetic tradition that links him with the message of tawḥīd - the declaration of God’s Oneness. According to this tradition, when the Prophet recited the Sura of Sincerity, Surat al-Ikhlas: “Say: He, Allah, is One, Allah the Eternal Refuge (al-Ṣamad )”, Khalid’s daughter informed him that she had heard her father recite the very same verse.

Khālid is not mentioned by name in the Qur’an, and his status as a prophet is sometimes cast into doubt by the Prophet’s having said, “I am the nearest of men to Jesus son of Mary, for there is no prophet between him and me.” But as Sadr al-Dīn Qūnawī says in the Fukūk, this was due to the fact that Khālid “did not manifest prophecy on the sensory plane”.

Why Khālid failed to manifest his prophecy in this world is associated with a strange story, several versions of which are recounted by the Shaykh and his followers. We will mention first the more extensive account given in Jāmī’s commentary on Ibn ‘Arabī’s own chapter headings of the Fuṣūṣ. The story goes as follows. Khālid lived with his people in Aden. One day, a great fire (traditionally called “nār al-ḥarratayn”), accompanied by billows of smoke and a deafening noise, came out of a cave and wreaked havoc upon the people, their farms, and their livestock, causing them to flee to Khalid for refuge. Khalid approached the fire and beat it with his staff until it retreated back into the cave. He told his sons that he was going to follow the fire into the cave and extinguish it completely. He then instructed them to call him after three days, and warned them that if they called him before that, he would come out but that they— presumably the sons as well as their father— would die. The sons waited two days before their patience wore out— or as JamI says, Satan made them restless— and they began to suspect that their father had died. So they called him before the appointed time. Khalid emerged from the cave, his head wounded by their call. He told them, “You have caused me to perish, and you have let my words and instructions perish.”

He then told them that he was going to die and ordered them to bury him and watch over his grave for forty days. At that time a flock of sheep would come to them, led by a bob-tailed donkey. When the donkey stopped in front of his grave, they were to disinter him. He would then tell them about the states of the barzakh, the isthmus between life and death.

The people waited forty days, as instructed, and the flock, led by the bob-tailed donkey, came by, just as Khālid predicted. When it stopped in front of his grave, the believers among his people wanted to open the grave and hear Khālid’s message. His sons, however, once more thwarted their father’s plans, fearing the disgrace of being called “the sons of him whose grave was opened.” “So it was the pagan ignorance of the Arabs that caused his instructions to perish and let him perish.”

The sign that confirmed his prophecy— his revelation concerning the barzakh— was to become manifest after death but, as Ibn ‘Arabī says, “He let his sign perish, since he did not manifest it during his lifetime, and he let his people perish also, for he did not show it to them, so they let him perish.” This is alluded to in another tradition linking Khalid to the Prophet, in which the latter is reported to have said to one of Khalid’s daughters: “Welcome to the daughter of a prophet whose people let him perish!” Ibn ‘Arabī, however, points out that the blame was to be assigned only to Khalid’s sons.

A second version, recounted by Ibn ‘Arabī in his Muḥāḍarāt al- abrār wa-musāmarāt al-aḥyār, a work of belles-lettres, stays close to the hadith reports. It traces the report to Ibn ‘Abbās, and places the story in the steppe lands between Mecca and Medina during the fatra. The fire that appeared was called “Budā” by the Bedouin and some of them were on the point of worshipping it like the Magians. Khālid, presumably because of his monotheism, sought to stamp out the root of this heresy. He confronted the fire with his staff, beating it until God put it out. The exertion seems to have mortally wounded Khālid. The remainder of the story is as above, complete with burial instructions and donkey (full-tailed here). Khālid promises to tell the people how things are in the world of the dead. The rest of the story passes as already recounted, the sons once more being assigned the blame for the failure to exhume their father. A coda links the story to two sayings of the Prophet, one of which we have encountered above, that is, the Prophet’s greeting to Khālid’s daughter, the other of which reflects the aborted message: “Then [the Messenger of God] said, ‘Had they disinterred him, he would have told them about me and my community and what would come to be from them.’”

We should also mention al-Qāshānī’s version that provides the intriguing detail that from the fire that terrified Khālid’s people emerged an ‘anuq- a male ‘anqā’ — whose body partly resembled a camel and partly a snake. It was this serpent-like creature that Khalid beat back into the cave with his staff, his tribe following timorously behind.

The Fuṣūṣ, however, reflects yet another version, in which Khalid tells his people that he will reveal the secrets of the barzakh only after his death and disinterment; he claims that the barzakh is in the form of this world, thus confirming what the messengers had revealed. As the Ottoman commentator remarks in his commentary on the Fuṣūṣ, “It was not that Khālid was manifested with the prophecy of barzakhiyya, but that he would first die and would witness the states of the barzakh and then, after becoming alive again by divine order, he would be manifested with the prophecy of barzakhiyya. Hence Khālid’s failure to manifest his prophecy is the reason for the Prophet’s statement: “I am the nearest of men to Jesus son of Mary, for there is no prophet between him and me.” According to this commentator, then, Khalid did not become manifest with the prophecy of the barzakh, since his pronouncements upon its joys and sorrows were not confirmed by his resurrection: “Because for the general public, if a prophet dies and comes back, the effect of the news he gives of the other world is more definite than the information of the other world given by a prophet who is not dead but who is alive in this world.”

In the Fuṣūṣ version, Khālid is also attributed with foretelling Muḥammad’s mission. Khālid’s desire, according to Ibn ‘Arabī, was that all mankind believe in the message of the prophets and particularly in Muḥammad’s mission as a mercy to the universes, which he apparently foresaw. His people, however, did not allow him to fulfil his purpose. Thus this version differs in that the message concerning the barzakh is delivered, but not confirmed, and the role of harbinger of universal mercy is denied him.

The prophecy of Khālid is in many ways the exact opposite of Muḥammad’s. While Muhammad’s was fully visible, Khālid’s was hidden. While Muḥammad’s mission was successful, Khālid’s was a failure. While Muḥammad ascends to the heavens during his mi rāj, Khālid is best known for his descents underground— practising a sort of katabasis in a cave, pursuing knowledge in the tomb. Like a seed deposited in the ground, or an embryo in the dark womb, Khālid awaits the time when his people will disinter him, enabling him to proclaim his message, confirming the words of the messengers before him. But Khālid himself could not achieve his wish. His message remains in sheer potentiality with respect to this world.

At this point, a certain constellation of notions discussed at great length in the Futūḥāt comes to mind. These include the opposing states of seclusion (khalwa) and society (jalwa), the various stages of annihilation (fanā) and perdurance (baqā’), and the spiritual voyage that ends either in arrival (wuṣūl) and halting (waqfa) or arrival and return (rujū‘). Considered in relation to these discussions, Khālid’s prophecy was imperfect for it was entirely concerned with khalwa and waqfa. He was not granted the possibility of manifesting his prophecy in public and was not able to return to his people. Muḥammad’s prophecy, on the other hand, was perfect for it embraced these opposites. The initial stage of his spiritual initiation, before the coming of the angel Gabriel, took place in the cave of Hirā. Thus it was a period of seclusion and flight from the world. In the wake of the descent of revelation upon him, however, his apostolic mission demanded that he manifest within the world. And his heavenly mi‘rāj did not culminate in any permanent absorption in the divine but was followed by a return to his community. As the Shaykh says in his Futūḥāt, “The perfection of the heritage of the prophets and the messengers consists in the return to the creatures.” And Khālid is a clear example of a prophet who arrived and halted, unable to make the return to the world.

Secrets of the Name Abū al-Fāwaris Ṣakhr
[= Khālid] ibn Sinān

The first kunya, or agnomen— Abū al-Fawāris— means “father of the knights.” The fawāris were “a class of Arab chivalrous heroes distinguished by eloquence (bayān) as well as courage and generosity (jūd)”. The appellation suggests pre-Islamic values and may have a connection with the fatā, or chivalrous knight, of the Futūḥāt’s first chapter. Ibn ‘Arabī makes reference to these values in his dedication and again at the end of the Risāla when he praises Ṣakhr ibn Sinān for his generosity and steadfastness in combat.

Gril points out that the word jūd (generosity) calls to mind the word wujūd (existence) and vice versa; as an Arabic proverb states, “Al-wujūd fī al-jūd” (Existence is— or consists— in generosity). Bayān (eloquence) brings to mind the Qur’an, since this is one of its appellations. Hence not only are generosity and eloquence evoked in this passage but existence and revelation as well.

The root F-R-S is also connected with the quasi-occult science of firāsa, or physiognomy. A fāris discerns the unseen nature of things, and especially human beings, from visible signs. To be fāris of something, says Ibn Manzur in Lisān al-Arab, is to know it.

The dedicatee’s second kunya— Ibn Sinān— means “son of a spearhead”. This again suggests the notion of pre-Islamic warrior values.

***

The name Khālid has two main meanings, one concerned with rocks (ṣakhr/ḥajar) and the other with everlastingness (ṣamādiyya). But let us begin with the name Khālid itself and the Arabic root KH-L-D from which it is derived.

Khāalid-eternal= ṣamad= rock= ṣakhr

“Khālid” is an active participle, deriving from the verb khalada: to remain or last forever; to be immortal; to remain in a place. In the fourth form, akhlada, it has many of the same meanings as form one, but it also means: to incline, lean, tend to. In this form it appears in the Qur’an: “And had We willed We could have raised him by their means, but he inclined toward [or clung to] the earth (akhlada) and followed his own whim” (Q. 7:176). Khālida (pi. khawālid.) are rocks or mountains, “the immovable ones,… the earth-riveted, unchanging,… clasping the ground”. Addressed by the poet Labid, they are “the mute immovable ones whose speech yields no sense” (ḍumman khawālida mā yabīnu kalāmuhā).

The verbal noun khuld conveys the sense of infinite duration and eternity. Dār al-khuld is an epithet for the hereafter. Jaroslav Stetkevych has discussed the “binary semantic tension that inheres in the word khuld itself.” In the Qur’an, this noun appears both in a positive (Q. 2 1: 15) and negative (Q. 10:52; 32: 14; 41:28) sense; and verbs and participles based on this root reflect the same ambivalence: “Where did khuld begin— in ‘heaven’ or in ‘hell,’ or rather: in the higher regions of the awareness of self or in the lower ones? Is it an origin or an aspiration?… Is it the future or the past?” Khuld is also a word for mole, a blind burrowing creature who lives underground. Thus both the prophet Khalid and the animal khuld are associated with the chthonic realm. Stetkevych remarks that even the celestial associations of this root in the Qur’an, wherein the term khuld/khālid is frequently coupled with the term jannah, garden/paradise, cannot be divorced from the chthonic: “… jannah… may itself only be ‘projected’ into the eschatological ‘heavenly’ sphere out of its primary chthonic ‘hiddenness,’ ‘buriedness,’ ‘darkness,’ and also ‘protectedness.’” For the semantic range of the root /-N-A/ includes such words as “to veil”, “to conceal”, “fetus” (janīn), “jinn,” and “grave” (janan). Ibn ‘Arabī’s appellation of Khālid as “Jānn ibn Jānn” (Jānn, son of the Jinn) in his dedication is thus entirely appropriate.

Ṣakhr-rock= ḥajar= khālid= jabal

The word “ṣakhr” appears three times in the Qur’an:(1) “Didst thou see, when we took refuge in the rock” (Q. 18:63). The context is the voyage undertaken by Moses and Khiḍr;(2) “though it be in a rock, or in the heavens, or in the earth… God will bring it forth” (Q. 31:16). The context is Luqmān’s advice to his son; and (3) “and Thamūd, who hollowed the rocks in the valley” (Q. 89:9). Thus rocks may be refuges, hiding places, and ruins of a pre-Islamic people who disobeyed their prophet Hūd.

The other word for rock is ḥajar. This is the word used in the Qur’an in connection with Moses: “Strike with thy staff the rock” (Q. 2:60; 7:160), and “for there are stones from which rivers come gushing” (Q. 2:74). Ibn ‘Arabī seems to be referring to this image in the final poem of the Ittiḥād, “I am a rock (ṣakhr), and from me the spiritual meanings flash.”

The Moses/rock analogy is evident in another early work of Ibn ‘Arabī’s, Mashāhid al-asrār. One of the contemplations involves the “light of the Rock (ṣakhra)” at the end of which the Real addresses the Moon: “Tell the rock to let twelve springs pour forth…” According to Ibn Sawdakīn, who commented on this work, the rock is a symbol of the body and its knowledges, the Moon represents the knowledge of Nature, the twelve springs are the constellations.

Ṣamad

“Ṣamad” is a curious word that appears only once in the Qur’an, in Sura 112. It is variously translated in that context as “eternal refuge,” “everlasting,” and “resource.” As such it is an epithet for God.

The legends of Khālid emphasize Khālid’s role as the support and refuge of his people. It is to him that they turn in times of danger or need, as in the case of the fire that came out of the cave. We have also seen that in the traditions, Khālid is specifically associated with Sura 112, which calls God “Aḥad ” and “Ṣamad.” Thus, the two elements of dependable recourse and strict monotheism are brought together as Khālid’s distinguishing features.

In the Fuṣūṣ, these suppositions are tacitly understood, for the particular wisdom associated with Khalid ibn Sinān is ṣamadiyya. The chapter on Khālid does not specifically mention what the precise connection is between Khālid and ṣamadiyya, although Sadr al-Dln Qunawl in his Fukuk interprets ṣamaad as “aim.” In the Fuṣūṣ, this is one of the two main foci of the chapter— the other being the barzakh— since Khālid is associated with the notions of intention and fulfilment. Khālid’s mission, as we have noted, was a failure. Yet Ibn ‘Arabī concludes in the Fuṣūṣ that God “allow[ed] him to achieve the reward (ajr) of his wish (umniyya)”. But he adds: “There is doubt and dispute as to whether he attained the reward (ajr) of his quest (maṭlūb).” In other words, is wishing to perform an action equivalent to accomplishing the act itself, and does desire merit a reward even if it fails to be carried to fruition? “In the outward sense”, says Ibn ‘Arabi, “they are not equal. Therefore, Khālid b. Sinān sought to attain both so he could have the station of bringing together both things and thus gain two rewards.” His success, however, is inconclusive.

Another word belonging to this root is “ṣamda,” which is “a rock firmly imbedded in the earth, even with the surface thereof” or “somewhat elevated.” Thus we find again associations connecting Ṣakhr/ Khālid ibn Sinān with enduring rocks and subterranean existence.

“Ṣamad” also means “solid, not hollow” and is applied to someone who takes no nourishment yet neither hungers nor thirsts in war. Thus it is connected in particular with fasting. Ibn ‘Arabī, for example, calls Ramadan “ṣamadiyya.” One finds this same connection in the Shaykh’s small treatise Hilyat al-abdāl: “The station is that of universal sustenance. It is a very elevated condition characterized by intellectual secrets, contemplative unveilings, and spiritual states.”

Finally, the Presence of ṣamad is discussed in the Futūḥāt, Chapter 287. The particular self-disclosure of this Presence has to do with the descent of the Qur’an on the Night of Power, which occurs during the fasting month of Ramadan.

The Dedicatee

Khālid ibn Sinān, Prophet of the Barzakh

When we bring together all the etymological clues with the legendary account of Khālid’s mission, we find that this final Arabian prophet before the advent of Muhammad is admirably suited to be called “Prophet of the barzakh.” We have already encountered one meaning of barzakh in connection with the content of Khālid’s message. It is “the interval between the present life and that which is to come, from the period of death to the resurrection.” But in its broadest definition a barzakh is anything that separates two things, anything that is neither one thing nor another: it is the dream world that partakes of both life and death, the image in the mirror that both is and is not the observer; it is the unperceivable instant between past and future; the dawn and dusk when it is neither fully light nor dark; and the moon as it waxes and wanes in its cycle, forever in transit from crescent to void. As Chittick has noted,

A barzakh is something that stands between and separates two other things, yet combines the attributes of both. Strictly speaking, every existent thing is a barzakh, since everything has its own niche between two other niches within the ontological hierarchy known as the cosmos.

Chittick goes on to say: “Existence itself is a barzakh between Being and nothingness.” Between the One, unchanging Being and the equally unchanging nothingness (adam) lies the barzakh of the ever-fluctuating existent things.

Two contradictories never stand opposite each other without a separator through which each is distinguished from the other and which prevents the one from being described by the attribute of the other.... This is the Supreme Barzakh, or the Barzakh of Barzakhs. It possesses a face toward Being and a face toward nothingness. It stands opposite each of these two known things in its very essence. It is the third known thing. Within it are all possible things. It is infinite, just as each of the other two known things is infinite.

When we take this passage into consideration, the initially puzzling reference to Ṣakhr’s being “master of the dyads and triads” becomes a bit clearer. The Perfect Human Being, as we have stated above, brings together opposites and provides the resolving bridge between them. Thus he is able to reflect in response to the moment all the divine attributes on either side of the cosmic divide— mercy and severity, beauty and majesty, transcendence and immanence— while simultaneously preserving the oddness and singularity inherent in the whole, representing, as he does, the human axis of unity. While in himself he is non-existent, as a locus for the infinite manifestations of the divine in every instant, he is God’s representative (khalīfa) in the world. For its part, the triplicate order is evident everywhere. There are three levels of existence: Real, creation and barzakh; three points of articulation for the letters: throat, lips, and middle of the mouth; three levels within the human being: reason, sense and barzakh.

Barzakh is the world of the imagination that stands as a mesocosm between the spiritual and material worlds. It is the “interworld,” as Flenry Corbin calls it, the place where psycho-spiritual events including miracles, spiritual ascents, and theurgical operations take place. “Imagination,” as the Shaykh tells us, “is neither existent nor non-existent, neither known nor unknown, neither negated nor affirmed.” It is the broadest of universal planes, since, unlike the world of the senses, it contains everything that exists, “real” and “imaginary.” It is in this world of image-exemplars that the dialectical-monologue between the narrator and the various personae and faculties of himself takes place.

The Fourth Poem

After explaining the title and offering homage to the Prophet of the barzakh, the author turns again to rhyme. The fourth poem consists of eighteen lines in the metre basīṭ. Although separated from the preceding three poems, the fourth poem is connected with its predecessors through its end rhyme tā’ coupled with the first person singular pronoun suffix yā’: ātī:(bi-dhātī// iltifātī).

In addition, the author continues to group things in pairs, five of which are contrasting pairs: secretly/openly; enemies/friends; threat/grace; gathering/scattering; knight/maiden. Their effect here is more subdued than in the first three poems since they are not marked by the repeated refrain: “from… to…” (min… ilā…).

In this poem, the author engages in a clever repartee with himself. It is replete with paradoxes.His very assertion of self (innanī: here I am, or indeed I) would cause his annihilation. To utter “I” throws the speaker into a state of fanā— annihilation— in which friends and enemies, grace and punishment, disappear. There is only One who can properly say “I.”

Meetings in the Barzakh

The author now finds himself in a land “situated on the equator,” that is, in a momentary state of equilibrium where opposites are joined and realization of the Oneness of Being prevails. It is both a placeless place from which he will begin his ascent through the celestial spheres in imitation of the Prophet Muḥammad, and a balance-point within his very nature, anchoring his corporeal and spiritual dimensions. Thus we find both a cluster of sacred sites connected to this place of ascent: Mount Sinai, Mecca, Jerusalem (as the locus from which the Prophet was taken on his heavenly journey,) and an allusion to the father of humanity, Adam, “fashioned of water and clay,” the synthesis of what is highest and lowest in creation.

The first stage in the ascent paradoxically involves a “plunge” into the sea of hayūlā, prime matter, later in the narrative to be symbolized by the Anqā’ bird. Hayūlā is yet another barzakh, the matrix of all form, spiritual and material. It is here that the levels of heaven and hell are made sensible to the inner vision. The Shaykh insists on the reality of these realms as they are depicted in the Qur’an.

Then he engages in a popular rhetorical device he had made good use of in earlier works: “Question and answer” (su’āl wa-jawāb). This abstruse exchange between the author and his unnamed interlocutor —who alludes to rather than explains his meaning clearly— serves to heighten the narrative’s drama. Used with unequaled power by the tenth-century Sufi al-Niffarl to describe the ineffable dialogue between the servant and God, his Andalusian admirer finds the opportunity to engage in riddled speech with the divine aspect of his being. In a speech that recalls Job’s Interlocutor from the Whirlwind, this alter ego, who both is and is not the author, both is and is not the Real, seems to be seeking to cut the author down to size: Where were you when I created the world and the spiritual realities?

The truth demanded by the station demands that the servant realize his utter nonentity with respect to the transcendent and all-powerful God.

Seeking deliverance from the sea of matter, he is transformed into a more subtle form, which, despite its station, is still connected to the material world and at some remove from the One Reality. At the point where he leaves his Burāq— just as the Prophet dismounted and tied his steed to a post at the Masjid al-Aqsā— we know that the author has begun his upward ascent. In a state of oscillation, like a lamp set swinging to celestial music, that brings to mind the poems at the beginning of the treatise, he realizes that he is still within the world of form, spiritual though it may be. What he longs for is annihilation in annihilation (al-fanā fī al-fanā’), and the state of baqā', subsistence, where all of the servant’s faculties are realized to be, in truth, God’s. When asked by his interlocutor where he is, whether established in this world or in the Essence, he can only answer in dualities and then invoke the prophets who are the guardians of the seven heavens through which he passes, high to low: Abraham, Moses, Aaron, Idrīs, Joseph, Jesus, and Adam. Despite what he acquires from the prophets, all of this pertains to the created world, not to the Essence itself. It seems that there is no escape on any level from his essential creatureliness.

The conversation that follows seeks to define the relationship between the Real and creation (ḥaqq and khalq). It culminates in the realization that, as God says in the aforementioned Prophetic tradition: “I am his hearing through which he hears, his eyesight through which he sees, his hand through which he holds, and his foot through which he walks.” The servant now knows the meaning of ittiḥād as the coincidence of opposites— relative and absolute— in one locus, the Perfect Human Being: “Insofar as he manifests the Divine Attributes through his positive qualities, Man finds himself with God in a relation of similitude, but insofar as being is concerned, the difference is absolute, for Being (al-wujūd) belongs only to God.”

At this point, the Universal Tree and the Four Birds are revealed— an echo of the Prophet’s arrival at the Lote Tree of the Limit. Each of the fantastic creatures, imaginatively conceived representations of the Perfect Human Being’s own faculties, addresses him both with an elegant speech in saj’ and a poem.

Soliloquies of the Universal Tree
and the Four Birds

The Universal Tree ( al-shajara al-kullī)

If you ask: What is the Tree?, we answer:[It is] the Perfect Human
Being who governs the bodily temple (haykal) of the Crow.

The first to address the author is the Universal Tree, otherwise known as the “human tree,” for it symbolizes the Human Being writ large, the archetypal “Perfect Human Being,” exemplified by such individuals as the Prophet Muḥammad, who reflect the totality of the Divine Names and Attributes in a synthetic form.

The Universal Tree is found in many of the world’s traditions, symbol of life eternal. Positioned as the central axis of the cosmos, it serves as a pivotal point around which creation revolves.

Significant trees are found in numerous places in the Qur’an, including: the “goodly tree” (Q. 14:24-5); the “green tree” (Q.36:80); Adam’s Tree of Immortality (Q.20:12); Moses’ Burning Bush (Q.28:30); the desiccated palm tree that Mary shook to provide her with dates (Q.19:25); the tree underneath which the believers swore allegiance to Muhammad (Q.48:18); the Lote Tree of the Limit (Q.53:14); the “Blessed Olive Tree” (Q.24:35); and, on a far less pleasing note, the “Accursed Tree” (Q.17:60), the Tree of Zaqqūm, “a torment for wrongdoers” (see Q.37:62-8) and “the food of the sinner” (see Q.44:43-6). Prophetic reports give us the Tūba tree, planted by God in the Garden of Paradise with His hand and the tree in which Muḥammad and the angel Gabriel nested during one of the Prophet’s Night Journeys.

Ibn ‘Arabī’s works are also replete with trees. In the Futūḥāt, for example, all of the prominent trees mentioned in the Qur’an and hadith are discussed and interpreted, some at great length. Man himself, at one point, is called a tree.

In a work once ascribed to Ibn ‘Arabī, entitled Shajarat al-kawn, or the Universal Tree, this symbol is extended and described in detail. The axial trunk of the cosmic Tree splits into two branches that represent the multifarious opposing qualities manifesting in all of creation: male/female; active/passive; Pen/Tablet; and so forth. Thus a ternary structure consisting of right-hand branch, left-hand branch, and central axis can be imagined. When leaves, symbolizing the myriad and ever-renewed forms of creation, are generated, a fourth element results, and a circle, encompassing this cruciform structure, comes into view. Quaternity embraces such notions as the four elements: fire, air, water, and earth, and four temperaments: hot, cold, dry, and wet— the basic building blocks and qualities of the embodied world. In our treatise, in keeping with this quaternity, Ibn ‘Arabī has placed four birds among the branches, representing the four-fold structure of the cosmos.

In Ibn ‘Arabī’s mapping of correspondences, the Universal Tree finds its human counterpart in the Quṭb, or Spiritual Pole, who anchors the coincidentia oppositorum and balances creation. “The Pole is the point round which everything turns— hence another symbol of the [S]elf”. Were he to disappear, the cosmos would dissolve into chaos. Mircea Eliade has noted, in his studies of symbols of sacred space, that whatever is privileged with centrality— be it mountain, city, or tree— provides a threshold between heaven and earth. The human representative of this mediation, the Pole, serves the same function in Ibn ‘Arabl’s writings, and is thus considered a barzakhī, or liminal figure.

In the Ittiḥād, the Tree is described as the Likeness, that is, the likeness of the Real, “whose root is firm and whose branches are in the heavens”. The likeness of the Tree/ Perfect Human Being consists of its being modelled “upon the form” of the Divinity, hence it has both unity— represented by the well-rooted trunk— and multiplicity, reflected in the appearance of its branches, leaves, and fruits, as well as in its very name itself. One of the meanings of the Arabic root SH-J-R is “difference in opinion, dispute”. This is alluded to in the Futūḥāt, where the Shaykh states: “[God] made [man] a tree in which there is contentiousness (tashājur), because of his being created from contraries.”

The Perfect Human Being is a copy (nuskha) of the divine, a synthesis of all the Divine Names and Attributes, and a heart capable of assuming any form. Like the Ṭūbā tree, the Universal Tree is planted with God’s own hand in the “where”-less place in the centre of the cosmos.

The Universal Tree’s Poem

The Tree’s poem consists of but five lines, in the metre wāfir. Its end rhyme is appropriately hamza, the first pronounced letter of the Arabic alphabet. In the majestic sway of the Tree’s recitation, the themes of straightness, balance, all-encompassment, and non delimitation by form are reiterated.

The Ringdove (al-muṭawwaqa al-ivarqā’)

The Dove is the Soul that is between Nature and the Intellect.

The dove is the universally recognized symbol of peace and universal love. In alchemy, as in Christian iconography, the dove represents pneuma, or spirit.

The Ringdove is more often called ḥamāma in Arabic literature, but her name here is muṭawwaqa warqā. What do we make of this less common appellation given to her by Ibn ‘Arabī? Again we must look to etymology. The consonantal root T-W-Q is connected with rings.

The Ringdove is famous for her fidelity. Because of her dark neck ring (ṭawq), she is faithfully bound forever to her mate. Despite her devotion, she is a weak bird and can be easily seized by birds of prey, such as the eagle, just as the heart can be seized by love. Muṭawwaqa (ringed) is a passive participle, hence a receptacle of action. The Ringdove is something ringed by an agent, in this case the Eagle. The ring encircling the dove’s neck is sometimes interpreted by Ibn ‘Arabī as the covenant entrusted to her by the Real.

What first comes to mind from the root W-R-Q is “leaves” or “paper”, in other words, something that is written upon. Since the Ringdove in Ibn ‘Arabī’s mystical aviary represents the Tablet (lawh) that receives the writing of the Supreme Pen (the Eagle), this is appropriate. Ibn ‘Arabī himself makes a connection between the Ringdove and leaves in Poem IX of his Tarjumān al-ashwāq: “A ringdove flitted past and a twig put forth leaves (awraqa).” Warqā also means silver, a metal that suggests the shimmering of the moon and the reflection of the sun’s superior light. Hamāma, on the other hand, is associated with the root H-M-M, hence with the colour red and with heat.

The Ringdove is a messenger bird. In Ibn ‘Arabi’s writings, doves are sometimes seen as bearers of inspiration. In Poem XXX of the Tarjuman, for instance, doves— here called hamam— bring inspiration so overwhelming that their song causes the poet to become unconscious. Ibn ‘Arabi obligingly interprets doves here as “spirits of the intermediate world, the bearers of the inspiration that comes at the tinkling sound, which is like the noise of a chain when it strikes a rock. They cause this heart to vanish, even as they themselves vanish on hearing that sound.”

The Ringdove— when not seen with her loving partner— is more often than not found moaning and lamenting her loneliness. Poem XIII of the Tarjuman, in fact, makes reference to a ringdove who has lost her child— her unity (wahdaniyya) as the Shaykh interprets it: “the special quality which distinguishes her from all things else …whereby she knows the unity of Him who brought her into being. The loss of it consists in her not knowing what it is and in its not being plainly discerned by her.”

Another symbol represented by the ringdove is Jesus, the symbol of the universal spirit breathed into the human form. He, in turn, breathes life into the dead and the clay birds.

The Ringdove in philosophical terms is the Universal Soul. It is also occasionally called the Spirit (ruh) blown into forms, the first among existing things to come into existence through being sent forth (inbi’ath), and the first existent whose existence is the effect of a created being, a cause— that is, the First Intellect, which, in turn, was brought into existence by the Divine Command. The Universal Soul is thus passive in relation to the Intellect, just as the Intellect is passive in relation to the Real, and in this way is somewhat akin to matter’s reception of form.

The Soul, while it enjoys a high rank, occupies a subordinate level to the Intellect because of its duality, a fact that is reiterated throughout the Ringdove’s speech and poem. It has, for example, two “causes” or, as they are called in the Ittiḥād, “subtle threads” (raqā’iq). One is the “special face” that is turned toward God, which, in philosophical terms, is the efficient cause of the Soul’s existence. The other “face” is turned toward the First Intellect, which is the secondary cause (sabab) or, philosophically speaking, the formal cause, of its existence.

On raqā’iq and their relation to “faces” see Fut. III. 260, Chap. 357:Between these high celestial forms and the low elemental forms extend tenuities (raqā‘ iq) that belong to the divine names and the lordly realities. These are the specific faces belonging to each possible thing that has proceeded from Him - from the word Be through the divine face-turning (tawajjuh) of desire. The occasioned thing does not know the specific face belonging to anything else, even though he has a specific face in himself, whether or not he knows it.From this face everything is poor toward God, not toward its engendered occasion (sabab). This is the divine occasion that is nearer than the engendered occasion, for the engendered occasion is separate from the creature, but this occasion is qualified neither by separation front it nor by a proximate joining, even if, in the case of the human being it is nearer than the jugular vein (Q. 50: 16)- so its nearness is nearer than that.Trans. Chittick, SDG, p. 143. See also Fut. III. 28ff., Chap. 307, where the raqa’iq are described as forming a cosmic chain, or ladder, of reciprocal interactions, stemming from God to Intellect to Soul and beyond.

The Soul contains the attributes of both knowledge ‘ilm) and effectiveness ‘amal). Its effective attribute brings the forms of the cosmos into existence: sensory forms— which are bodies and their sensible accidents— and supra-sensible forms— which are various sciences, knowledges, and desires pertaining to these bodies. Its attribute of knowledge is called “a father, for it produces an effect, while the attribute related to action is a mother, for it is the object of an effect”; that is, it is because the Soul has received all that exists in its undifferentiated state that it can generate it in differentiated form.

Duality also pervades the Soul in terms Ibn ‘Arabī describes as light and darkness, again sometimes related to the notion of “face”. The light face is turned toward the Intellect, from which it receives light like the moon from the sun; the dark face is turned toward the material world.

In theological terms, the Ringdove is equivalent to the Preserved, or Inscribed Tablet, hence the notion of materiality is continued. The Tablet contains everything that the Pen writes upon it in detailed form, everything that God wills concerning creation until the Day of Resurrection.

The Ringdove is also the equivalent of Eve, who is born from the sleeping Adam, “as if the intellect had not become aware of its creative power”. It is only when the receptive female element becomes manifest that the active male element is able to contemplate most perfectly its own ability to know and act in this mirror that both is and is not itself.

The Ringdove’s Poem

Although we might expect the Eagle to address us first because of his precedent rank, he does not. Instead it is the Ringdove who regales us from her perch on the Tree with nineteen lines of poetry, whose end rhyme is—ānī (i). This is a fitting end rhyme for a creature whose poem both manifestly and subtly alludes to duality and doubling. First of all, there are four words in the first three lines, and an additional one in the twelfth, that are based on the consonantal root TH-N-Y, whose basic meaning is “two.” Another meaning of this root has to do with praise. The word mathnā, and its variant spelling mathnah, the plural of which in both instances is mathānin, is replete with symbolism, combining notions of repetition and praise. In particular we should note that al-mathānī can signify:(1) The Qur’an altogether, since it contains repeated mentions of certain dyads, such as reward and punishment, mercy and wrath; also that one reads it repeatedly without becoming weary.(2) The opening sura of the Qur’an, the Fātiḥa, which is repeated in every ritual prayer and at the beginning of the recitation of every Qur’anic verse, or because it contains praise of God. The Fātiḥa is often called, in fact, the “seven doubled ones” ( al-sab‘ al-mathānī). (3) Qur’anic verses that are repeated often— especially the Fātiḥa— in order to avert evil. The Ringdove, as a symbol of the Umm al-Kitāb, or heavenly prototype of the Qur’an, inscribed by the Supreme Pen, thus aptly names herself as the “doubled one.”

An additional doubling is fortuitously found in the Ringdove’s own name: al-muṭawwaqa al-warqā. The first part contains a doubled wāw and the second a qāf with two dots!

The Ringdove continues to allude to the notion of duality as she remarks: “They call me ‘O second’!” But as she tells us, and as we have already intuited by her preceding the Eagle in her address, she is not in actuality the second. As Ibn ‘Arabi explains elsewhere, the four spiritual beings: Intellect, Soul, Prime Matter, and Body, represented here by the four birds, in one sense occupy one rank.

Additional— less obvious— allusions to duality appear in the end rhyme of the poem itself: the suffix—ān in Arabic is a mark of the dual. Furthermore, the Ringdove has a penchant for repeating certain roots. Besides the five instances of words derived from TH-N-Y, there are two derived from -N-Y (meaning), three derived from its permutation ‘-Y-N, and two from a closely related root ‘-W-N. There are two derived from ‘-L-Y (high) along with three from the closely related W-L-Y (friend). Then there are two derived from D-N-N (earthen jug), along with three from its close relative D-N-W (near, low). Finally, there are three from Q-Ṣ-W (far).

The Ringdove makes repeated references to things high and low, near and far. As we have mentioned above, she is connected to the Eagle and to her Lord by “subtle threads” (raqā iq) that connect level to level in the hierarchy of existence.

The Eagle (‘uqāb)

If you ask: What is the Eagle?, we answer:[It is] the Divine Spirit which the Real breathed into the bodily temples as if they were their moving and quiescent spirits.

Eagles have long been connected with royalty and temporal power. The most regal of the birds of prey, they are known for their dizzying ascents and swooping descents, lingering on earth just long enough to grasp the unsuspecting field mouse. They have a reputation for inaccessibility, living in mountain eyries. Their vision is so powerful and acute that they are said to be able to look at the sun without blinking.

In alchemy, the Eagle, especially the double-eagle, is a symbol— along with the raven— for Mercurius, the double-natured symbol of the philosopher’s stone. The Eagle is “synonymous with phoenix, vulture, raven.”

Why does Ibn ‘Arabī call the Eagle’uqāb rather than the more common nasr? Etymology may have something to do with it. The consonantal root ‘-Q-B has a semantic range that includes: heel, coming after, following, taking one’s place (as, for example, a vicegerent), punishment, consequence, result of an action, time or state of subsequence, recompense, offspring, mountain road, retaliation, sinews, and tendons. It is also described in ancient sources as a rock or mass of stone protruding in the side of a mountain like a stair or series of stairs. From this derives the meaning of ‘aqaba as a place that is difficult to ascend. The root also has the meaning of a “chief” or a “lord”. The Eagle plays the role of a grand old shaykh. He is Adam as first vicegerent of God (khalīfa).

The word ‘uqāb is also associated with the Prophet Muḥammad. First of all, it was his standard or banner, to which rallied his supporters for battle. Secondly, the Prophet assigned the name “al-‘Āqib” to himself because he came after the other prophets and was the last of the prophets.

In philosophical terms, the Eagle is the First Intellect. The Prophet is reported to have said: “The first thing that God created was the Intellect.” It came into existence from nothing (mawjūd al-ibdā’ī), meaning directly from God without intermediary or secondary cause.

The Essential Attribute connected to the Intellect is Life. The Intellect is also compared to Light from which all other lights, that is, intellects, are kindled. As such, it is analogous to the primordial Muḥammadan. Light of prophecy, from which all prophets through-out time drew their derivative light.

In theological terms specific to Islam, the Eagle is the Supreme Pen. It is created from the Breath, which Ibn ‘Arabi in places equates with the Cloud. Ibn ‘Arabi describes the Intellect as “the bearer (ḥāmil) of everything that is known, high and low… which takes from God without intermediary.” It receives the dictation of all that is to be in summary form and inscribes it on the Tablet, which preserves it in detailed form.

The Eagle’s Poem

The Eagle recites ten lines in kāmil (meaning: “perfect”) metre, whose end rhyme is ‘ayn. The Eagle’s poem expresses well the Intellect’s high role in the hierarchy of existence. A subtext of the verse is the Qur’anic story of Adam’s creation (Q. 2:30-9) as God’s vicegerent on the earth. When God announced His plans, the angels were dismayed: “Wilt Thou place therein one who will do harm therein and shed blood?” (Q. 2: 30). Thus the lines: “Approach confers upon me a pleasing wisdom but it rends the heart of the elevated spirit.” What the angels did not know was that Adam was created “upon His form,” as a perfect reflection of his Creator. Moulded with two hands, he encompassed more of the Divinity than the angels could, as they were created only to praise and obey. As vicegerent, the Intellect/Adam was taught “all the names”— whether these are thought of as the Divine Names or the names of everything in creation: “The realities hurry toward me to seek their portion,” that is, their names. It was because of this all-encompassing knowledge that the angels— with the exception of Satan— realized Adam’s superiority and obeyed God’s command to prostrate themselves before Adam.

The poem plays with the ideas of closeness and distance, approach and retreat. As in the story of Adam, it is the Intellect’s disobedience and setting itself up as independent arbiter that causes distance from the Real, while realizing its servanthood and utter dependence is what brings it near.

The ‘Anqā’

If you ask: What is the Anqā ’?, we answer:[It is] the Dust (habā’),
which is neither existent nor non-existent, although it assumes
form in the vision-event.

The ‘Anqā’ is the Dust in which God reveals/opens (fataḥa) the
bodies of the world.

The ‘anqā’, sometimes translated into English as either gryphon or phoenix, is a mythical bird. Early Arabic lexicographers struggled to define this creature none had ever seen. It is said to be perhaps a kind of eagle (‘uqāb) or vulture (rakhama) or a crested black bird or one that is bald and has a long yellow beak. Sometimes those seeking an etymological connection describe it as long-necked ‘unuq in Arabic means “neck”). The form ‘anūq, according to the lexicographers, is either male or female, singular or plural, but the form ‘anqā is feminine. The ‘ anqa is said to live atop the inaccessible Mount Qaf. Sometimes her high mountain habitat itself is called ‘anqā’.

Many proverbs exist concerning this odd bird, and from the beginning it was associated with all that was marvellous, occult, and strange. “Rarer than the eggs of the ‘anūq” was one such proverb, and the Turkish ismi var cismi yok— it has a name but not a body— came to symbolize “everything that exists only in the imagination.”

The ‘anqā’ has certain similarities to another fanciful female bird, the simurgh, described as “the manifestation of spiritual reality.” The simurgh is the object of the birds’ quest in ‘Aṭṭār’s famous parable. The ‘anqā’ and the simurgh find a felicitous pairing in the avian symbolism of a follower of Rūzbihān Baqlī: “These are the places of the descent of the Sīmurgh of the spirit…[and] the ascent of the ‘Anqā’ of the heart.”

The phoenix plays a major role in alchemical texts, in which the very alchemical process is said to begin in chaos and end in the birth of the phoenix, or philosopher’s stone.

In Ibn ‘Arabī’s symbology, as we have discovered, etymology provides a rich mine to explore. In the case of the “Strange ‘Anqā’ ” (‘anqā’ mughrib, or sometimes mugharrib), the consonantal root GH-R-B conveys the following semantic range: distance, removal, exile, foreignness, hiddenness, the setting sun, west, strangeness, improbability, obscurity, and incomprehensibility.

It is also connected with the quality of blackness. For instance, it is a certain intensely black grape, and intensely black hair. Note that both the ‘Anqā’ and her son the Crow (ghurāb) are connected with this root, the ‘Anqā’ primarily with connotations of hiddenness and strangeness, while the Ghurāb, as we shall see, is primarily associated with distance and blackness. It was no doubt quite intentional, on Ibn ‘Arabī’s part, to choose his four birds with an eye to the symbolic gradations of light. The Eagle, as we have seen, is pure light; the Ringdove, a mixture of light and darkness, with light predominating; the ‘Anqā’, an ambiguous twilight, tending toward dark; and the Crow, jet-black midnight.

On the negative side, the term ‘anqā’ mughrib is also connected to the notion of calamity or misfortune. The expression ṭārat bihi ‘anqā’ mughrib means: calamity or misfortune carried him away. More over, the early animal encyclopaedists did not hesitate to put the ‘anūq in the category of dung-eaters. In a similarly negative vein, the ‘anqā’ was sometimes associated with the jinn. In a tradition, inna-fi kum mugharribīn means: “Among you are those in whom the jinn have a partnership or share” because of their coming from remote or foreign stock.

Because among its meanings is “west,” it is also associated both with the geographical west, that is, the Maghreb, where Ibn ‘Arabī spent much of his youth, and the spiritual meaning of “west” as esoteric knowledge. This contrasts with the Illuminationist school, founded by the martyred Suhrawardī, which saw the west as the dark realm of the body and the east as the source of spiritual knowledge and light. In Ibn ‘Arabī’s early work ‘Anqā’ mughrib, the narrator alludes cryptically to the Seal of the Saints, Jesus, both as the ‘anqā’ mughrib and as the Sun which, according to Islamic tradition, will rise in the west at the end of time.

There is an obvious parallel between the Phoenix (often the translation of choice for ‘anqā’) and Khālid, both of whom are connected with fire, death, and resurrection. Here is ‘Attar on the Phoenix:

The Phoenix is an admirable and lovely bird which lives in Hindustan. It has no mate and lives alone…. The Phoenix lives about a thousand years and he knows exactly the day of his death. When his time comes he gathers round him a quantity of palm leaves and, distraught among the leaves, utters plaintive cries…. His lamentations express the sorrow of death, and he trembles like a leaf. At the sound of his trumpet the birds and the beasts draw near to assist the spectacle. Now they fall into bewilderment, and many die because their strength fails them. While the Phoenix still has breath, he beats his wings and ruffles his feathers, and by this produces fire. The fire spreads to the palm fronds, and soon both the fronds and the bird are reduced to living coals and then to ashes. But when the last spark has flickered out a new small Phoenix arises from the ashes.

In philosophical parlance, the ‘Anqā’ is a metonym for the Greek notion of hylê (Arabic: hayūlā), or prime matter, which Ibn ‘Arabī, citing precedent in the Qur’an, ‘Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib, and the Sufi Sahl al-Tustarī (d.896), generally prefers to call Dust (habā’). In its original meaning, habā’ was the dust particles that dance in the rays of the sun. Appropriated by Arabic alchemists such as Jābir, habā’ was seen as the constitution of the material world in formation. Associated with the sheer potentiality and the female principle— hence the feminine gender of the ‘Anqā in the Ittiḥād— prime matter is capable of taking on any form and as such is the matrix and ground for the universe.

The notion of prime matter is a particularly difficult one to grasp, especially since the term “matter” in modern terms suggests the stuff of reality that we can physically sense and grasp. But prime matter is nothing of this sort. As the Ikhwān al-Ṣāfā’ (Brethren of Purity) write, “It is a simple intelligible substance that cannot be perceived by sense.” It is completely dimensionless, unquantifiable, and devoid of actual content, while containing at the same time the potential forms of all existence. As such, even understanding it becomes impossible. One is left only with knowledge of its name and the faculty of imagination, which is its domain, to give it form.

The origin of this Dust, according to Ibn ‘Arabī, is God’s desire to bring the cosmos into existence and His theophany “in the Universal Reality a reality called Dust.” The Shaykh compares it to the plaster with which a builder moulds whatever forms he wishes. God manifests Himself as Light to the Dust, and every thing existing in potentia in this Dust receives His light according to its particular predisposition, “as the corners of a room receive the light of a torch, and are more fully and brightly lit up the nearer they are to the torch.”

Habā’, says Ibn ‘Arabī, is present in all natural forms, and cannot be divided, separated, or decreased. He compares it to the whiteness that can be perceived in every white thing. In this it appears to be equivalent to the philosophical universal accident that has no reality save when it manifests in an underlying subject or substance. Another example, given in the Futūḥāt, makes this even clearer. Knowledge, says the Shaykh, in itself is neither eternal nor temporal. In the Eternal One, knowledge is eternal; in the creature, knowledge is temporally originated. “In every essence it accords with its own reality and entity. But it has no existential entity except the entity of that which it describes. So it remains in its root: an intelligible thing, not an existent thing.”

Hayūlā, moreover, is not only associated with cosmology and epistemology but is also used in connection with the Perfect Eluman Being. For example, Ibn ‘Arabī tells the reader in his Fuṣūṣ, “Be the hayūlā of all the doctrinal beliefs,” meaning: Do not limit yourself to any particular Face that God shows to the believers, for they are infinite. It is to this all-encompassment that he refers when he says in what is perhaps his most memorable lines of verse: “My heart has become capable of every form: it is a pasture for gazelles and a convent for Christian monks,/ And a temple for idols and the pilgrim’s Ka’ba and the tables of the Tora and the book of the Koran.”

In his Dīwān, the Shaykh composed a poem to the ‘Anqā’, which we give here in full as it expresses so well the nature of this strange creature:

I marvel at a being that comprises every form,
Whether of essential angels, jinn, or humankind;
Whether of this world or of the world-supernal,
Of animal, vegetable, or mineral.
These are naught beside it,
Nor yet are they its essence,
But in any form it wills, it manifests itself.
It is what appears, by definition, to perception,
Yet it is what remains veiled from conception.
For minds cannot know it by the force of their thinking,
But Imagination makes it manifest to sense.
It is the Living, although no life supports its Essence
In the way that all the forms subsist in [life].
Inform me then, who it may be that I have indicated In what we have described (and cast aside conceptions): There it is— concealed, but without being absent;And there, again, envisaged, but hidden from vision!
I would like to know: Of the likes of it have you
Ever heard or no?- Inform me, then, who is it?But no one knows what we have adduced here Except for One, and that is God.No creature can ever comprehend it.
None there is like unto it, except one personage:
I marvel at the One Perfect that he epitomizes!

The ‘Anqā’’s Poem

The ‘Anqā”s poem, like that of the Tree, has but five lines, whose end rhyme is dāl, primarily —ūd with the exception of the final word of the poem that ends in —īd. A long “u”, inserted between the final two consonants of a first-form verb, indicates the passive participle, the recipient of an action, for example mamdūd. This participle is particularly apt for the ‘Anqā’ who, as a metonym for prime matter, receives all forms.

The Jet-Black Crow (al-ghurāb)

If you ask: What is the Crow?, we answer:[It is] the Universal Body,
which the Eagle made appear by means of the Dove.

The raven or crow is a bird that is often, perhaps because of its colour, connected with the occult. In alchemical lore, the raven— like the eagle and the phoenix— is one of the symbols for Mercurius, the lapis philosophorium. It is thus associated with everything that is solid, dark, and earthy. It represents the first stage of the alchemical process, melanosis or nigredo, “either present from the beginning as a quality of the material prima, the chaos or massa confusa, or else produced by the separation… of the elements.” Ibn ‘Arabī appears to be well acquainted with the alchemical art when he has the Ghurāb call himself the alembic (būṭāqa), an alchemical term. Jung tells us that the alembic’s ideal shape was perfectly round— or sometimes egg-shaped, in imitation of the womb and the heavenly bodies. Universal Body, the Ghurāb’s metaphysical reality, is also created round: “The first shape that this body received was the circular shape.”

Crows inhabit “the hibernal-material world” and are associated with death and entombment. The ghurāb is found in the Qur’an in this connection in the remarkable story of Cain and Abel. Following Cain’s murder of his brother: “Allah sent a raven scratching up the ground, to show him how to hide his brother’s naked corpse. He said: Woe unto me! Am I not able to be as this raven and so hide my brother’s naked corpse? And he became repentant”(Q. 5:31).

In Arabic literature, the crow or raven— the two are not distinguished— generally has a negative connotation for the reasons we have alluded to above. In Rūmī’s poetry, for example, the crow is considered an ugly and predacious bird, a consumer of carrion and dung. By extension, it is a symbol of those attracted by the material world. It also has a reputation for sharp-sightedness, caution, and pride.

Crows are almost invariably birds of ill-omen. In many a pre-Islamic poem, the ghurāb al-bayn— archetypal bird of separation— signals the impending separation of lover and beloved. Ibn ‘Arabī employs the motif of the ghurāb al-bayn in his poetry upon occasion. In Poem XV of the Tarjumān al-ashwāq, for example, he writes: “Gone, gone,/ cawed the crows of separation,/ God leave rotting on the path/ a crow that caws!// And what are the crows of separation/ but camel stallions/ pacing hard,/ taking those we love away.”

In pre-Islamic Arabia, Ghurāb was a personal name which, according to tradition, Muḥammad would not allow the Muslims to keep because of its etymological association with separation from one’s homeland (ghurba) and its natural association with the foul carrion-eating bird.

In philosophical terms, the Jet-Black Crow represents Universal Body. Universal Body is sometimes known as “Second Matter,” the first metaphysical step to concrete existence. It is absolute, unqualified body which, because it receives effects from Nature in the form of the four elements, is the first natural form. Unlike hayūlā, Universal Body is quantifiable and determinate; it has length, width, and depth. A “corporeal sphere,” it “fills the Void,” and “within it every corporeal thing in the cosmos takes shape.”

As Ibn ‘Arabī says in the ‘Uqlat al-mustawfiz: “The first form that received the form of the body is length, breadth, and depth.… Its length is from the Intellect, its width from the Soul, and its depth is the space that extends to the centre [of the earth]. For this reason, these three realities were in it, and it was three-dimensional.”

The Universal Body is given the shape of a circle, the most perfect of shapes, and it has movement, not from place to place but around its axis, “like a hand-mill”. This movement is caused by heat, for, if the elements of the body were perfectly equilibrated, it would be stationary and there would be no manifestation whatsoever. Thus the series of revolving celestial spheres are the first and finest of the corporeal bodies to come into existence in Universal Body.

Universal Body is associated with fullness (malā’) as contrasted to void (khalā’), and it is in the Shaykh’s chapter on Retreat (khalwa) in the Futūḥāt that some of his most intriguing remarks concerning Universal Body can be found. The first thing to fill the void, according to Ibn ‘Arabī, was the dimensionless Dust, a “dark substance.” Then the Real manifested Himself to this substance with His Name the Light, dyeing it and removing from it the darkness of non-existence. It then was attributed with existence and became what the early philosophers called the “Great Man” (al-insān al-kabīr), in other words, the macrocosm. The forms of shapes were unfolded within this body: shapes of the celestial spheres, the elements, and all generated beings, the human— called the “Small Man”— constituting the last of them. This human being, created upon the form of the Real and the cosmos, bringing together every attribute, is God’s vicegerent, the Perfect Human Being. Thus, as the Shaykh elegantly puts it, “the Dusty-Substance impregnated with Light is the basic element (al-basīṭ), the manifestation of the cosmos in it is the intermediary (al-wasīṭ), and the Perfect LIuman Being is the summary (al-wajīz).”

In Chapter 198 of the Futūḥāt, the Divine Name associated with Universal Body is the Manifest (al-ẓāhir), because it is the final outcome of the divine creative process, the complete filling of the void or womb of non-existence with life in all its manifest forms. The prophetic wisdom exemplified by this Name is that of Abraham, who, with his epithet “the Intimate Friend” (khalil) exhibits the complementary qualities of voiding (khalā’) of self and filling (malā’) with God. Permeated with divine qualities, as light permeates inchoate matter, Abraham becomes the manifest locus of the hidden God: “If… the creature is considered the manifest and the Reality the Unmanifest within him, then the Reality is in the hearing of the creature, as also in his sight, hand, foot, and all his faculties, as declared in the [well-known] Holy Tradition of the Prophet.” To deprecate the material world is thus to fail to witness the fullness of God’s Self-disclosure in the manifold vessels of the cosmos and to be ignorant of both oneself and God. “The spirit cannot rationally understand itself without the body, which is the locus of ‘how many’ and manyness.… It does not know its humanness without the existence of the body along with it.”

An additional connection between Abraham and the Ghurab should be noted. Corbin has pointed out that the site of the Maqam Ibrahim (Station of Abraham) is located in the western area of the Ka’ba precinct. Hence, the notions of setting and exile are appropriately attributed to this archetypal monotheist, who refused to worship what sets, and chose exile over idol worship.

The Jet-Black Crow’s Poem

The Jet-Black Crow has twenty lines of verse, whose metre is ramal and whose end rhyme is –ānī, like the Ringdove’s. The world-shunning philosophers have maligned the Body as the source of darkness and evil, but the Crow seeks to set the record straight. As a manifestation of the Divine Name “the Last,” he is the very crown of creation; as a manifestation of the Name “the Manifest” he is the matrix for the corporeal entities of the universe. Although dark himself, he is the source of the myriad sparks of light in that the stars and planets are all derived from Universal Body. His poem thus contains an extended allusion to the Light verse of Sura 24.

Since the cosmos is created upon principles of arithmetic, geometry, and music, all these principles receive their first determination in the Universal Body. For that reason, the Crow rightly calls himself the “foundation of songs.”

The Jet-Black Crow, because of his darkness, is a keeper of secrets and a repository of the Trust. The one who can unravel his secret is someone who is also associated with the chthonic realm: Ṣakhr ibn Sinān, prophet of the Barzakh.

Cosmic Marriage and
the Genealogy of the Birds

According to Ibn ‘Arabī, the entire universe is the locus of marriage and procreation, not only among material beings but in the divine and spiritual realms as well. God, for example, engenders the universe in nothingness when He brings the fixed entities (al-a’yān al-thābita) into existence.

The Pen and the Tablet are also paired as a cosmic couple:

Between the Pen and the Tablet there is an intelligible spiritual marriage and a visible sensory effect. The effect that was deposited in the Tablet was like the sperm that is ejaculated into the womb of the female. The meanings deposited within the celestial letters that became manifest from that writing are like the spirits of the children deposited within their bodies.

Even syllogisms are engaged in procreation. Deductive knowledge can only result from the “marriage” of two premises, which takes place when a single term is repeated. This constitutes the marriage act between them, and the conclusion that is “born” from them is thus called their “child.”

In many places throughout the Futūḥāt, as we have alluded to above, Ibn ‘Arabī speaks about the relations between the ontological levels in terms of fathers, mothers, and children. He states this principle as follows: “Everything that exercises an effect is a father, and everything that receives an effect is a mother…. That which is born between the two from the effect is called a son or a child.”

God is thus the “First Father” and (non-existent) “thingness” is the First Mother. Marriage on this level takes place through the existential command: Be! The child that results is the possible thing upon which existence has been bestowed. This cosmic pattern appears at every level of creation, but other than the role of First Father, which is fulfilled by God alone, the rest of the existing entities take turns at being fathers and mothers, depending on whether they have an active or a passive role. For this reason, the Eagle/Pen/Intellect is a mother as well as a father, a Tablet as well as a Pen, although we see him in the Ittiḥād primarily in his masculine role.

The four birds are thus related to one another in a variety of ways, the most evident of which is through a hierarchical descent. The Eagle, brought into existence by the Real, gives birth from himself to the Ringdove, through the agency of the Real’s command. Their mating, the tale of which constitutes a large portion of the Ring-dove’s soliloquy, results in the Anqā, who is the mother of the Crow. We are not told who the Crow’s father is, and the narrator does not pursue the genealogy further.

The bird’s family tree, if we may call it that, is complicated, however, by the fact that they represent cosmological figures whose relation to one another is a serious matter of dispute. One member of the family, for example, appears to be altogether missing.

Nature

Anyone acquainted with the Shaykh’s extensive writings on cosmology in the Futūḥāt and elsewhere will note the absence of Nature among these cosmic principles making up the family tree of the four birds. In Chapter 198 of the Futūḥāt, for example, we find an enumeration of the twenty-eight levels of existence that places Nature between the level of the Universal Soul and that of the Dust. In fact, the Shaykh explains that the level of Nature can only be between the Soul and the Dust, for “Every body that the Dust accepts, down to the last existing body, is natural.” Nature’s authority extends from the Dust to everything below it, while the Universal Soul’s authority extends from Nature to everything below it. As for what is above the Soul, that is, the Intellect and what is above it, neither Nature nor Soul have any authority over it.

In some instances, however, the Shaykh places Nature and Dust at an approximately equal level, Nature being slightly higher only because of its priority in time:

Among those things that were cast [into the Soul] through a most sanctified, spiritual casting [that is, from the First Intellect] were Nature and the Dust. Hence the Soul was the first mother to give birth to twins. The first thing she cast down was Nature, which was followed by the Dust. Flence Nature and the Dust are brother and sister from a single father and a single mother. Then [God] gave Nature in marriage to the Dust. Born from them was the form of the Universal Body, which was the first body to become manifest. Nature is the father because it produces effect. Dust is the mother because within it effects become manifest. The result is the Body.

This appears to answer the question of the Crow’s progenitor: his father is Nature. We should not be surprised at seeing Mother Nature personified here as masculine, for it only means that Nature is the active force in the marriage act between it and the Dust. But this does not solve the problem of why Nature does not appear in the Ittiḥād at all.

It is possible that a clue to this mystery can be found in a passage of the Futūḥāt in which Ibn ‘Arabī appears to completely reverse his position regarding the relative positions of the entities in question: “[T]hose who have placed Nature in a level below the Soul and above the Hyle… have no witnessing,” that is, they have not seen things as they really are. He goes on to resolve this contradiction by explaining that:

If a person does have witnessing and [nonetheless] holds this view, he means [by it] that Nature which becomes manifest through its authority in the translucent corporeal bodies, that is, in the Throne and what it surrounds. This second Nature is to the first as the daughter is to the woman who is the mother; like her mother, she gives birth, even if she is a daughter born from her.

Nature, it now appears, occupies two rungs on the genealogical ladder. Thus far, we have only been concerned with that aspect of Nature which gives rise to physical bodies, from the celestial spheres to the four elements and everything in between. This “second Nature” is the cosmogonic ‘Anqā’. But as the Shaykh tells us above, there is an aspect of Nature that transcends this second Nature and occupies a rank even higher than that of the First Intellect and Universal Soul— a Nature which, Ibn ‘Arabī says, “is more worthy to be attributed to the Real than anything else, since everything else becomes manifest only in that which becomes manifest from Nature, that is, the Breath [of the All-Merciful], which permeates the cosmos.”

Nature as first Mother is all-inclusive. Ibn ‘Arabī equates this Nature with the Breath of the All-Merciful: “Universal Nature, by its form, comes before those things that derive their being from her. In reality, Nature is the Breath of the Merciful in which are unfolded the forms of the higher and lower Cosmos.” Breath manifests as a vaporous Cloud— that symbolic representation of the totality of animated entities, generated at every instant through God’s loving mercy. With every flash of metaphysical light, the cosmos comes into existence, returns to non-existence, and receives new existence perpetually within God’s knowledge of Flimself. In every moment, an endless process of divine exhalation and inhalation breathes life into the entities, annihilates them, and revivifies them eternally.

This Cloud is sometimes equated with the Reality of Realities, or Universal Reality. It is, so to speak, hayūlā writ large. To give an example which, although provided by Ibn ‘Arabī, is probably more familiar to readers of Plato, it is the Form of Knowledge as opposed to the Form of the chair. There is nothing that this Reality does not contain, since it embraces every concept, from the Real to the real, including the very notion of being itself:

The Cloud is that which we have mentioned as eternal in the eternal and temporally originated in the temporally originated. This is like your words, or identical with your words, concerning Being/ existence. When you attribute it to the Real, you say it is Eternal, but when you attribute it to creation, you say that it is temporally originated. So the Cloud inasmuch as it is a description of the Real is a divine description, but inasmuch as it is a description of the cosmos it is an engendered description.

Since this Reality is qualified neither by existence nor by non-existence, Ibn ‘Arabī sometimes calls it the “third thing” and the “All-embracing Universal,” and says that it is from this third thing that the world becomes manifest. Embracing all realities, particularizing them at will in a myriad of forms, this is the ‘Anqā in her noetic aspect. “Call it, if you wish, the Reality of Realities, or hylê, First Matter, or supreme genus.... This third thing can never be separate from the Necessary Being, standing parallel to It, without having entified existence.”

There is still one more step we must take, one more form that the Anqa’ must assume to complete the triplicate aspect of her nature: that of the Universal Tree, symbol of the Perfect Human Being, whose “shade extends over those whom God envelops in His solicitude.”

The Perfect Human Being, and Muḥammad in particular, is sometimes depicted as the microcosmic counterpart of the Breath of the All-Merciful. We should recall that the Fuṣūṣ begins with the divine exhalation that gives form to the cosmos and its likeness Adam, and it ends with Muḥammad, the perfect vessel of mercy, who receives and gives form to the Divine Breath: “When Muḥammad was created a pure servant, he had no ambition for leadership, but continued prostrating and standing [before his Lord], a passive creation, until God effected [His purpose] in him, when He conferred on him an active role in the realm of the Breaths.”

Muḥammad, then, also occupies two levels: he is both the principle and the aim of creation. The highest of these levels is called the primordial Muḥammadan Reality, or the Muḥammadan Light, which lies above the levels of spiritual and material creation. It is to this that the Prophet’s claim, “I was a prophet when Adam was between water and clay,” refers. The other level is his specific universal mission as the Prophet Muḥammad, the embodied Seal of the Prophets, who lived and died as a fully human being.

The Perfect Human Being embraces all reality, divine and human, never known in itself, but only through relationship. The Perfect Human Being is a synthesis of all the words of existence, all Names of beauty and all Names of severity; a kaleidoscope of light and darkness; a heart that embraces every form, from mosque to fire temple; a microcosmic mundus imaginalis, where what is and what is not happily co-exist.

The secret of the birds’ genealogy, therefore, lies in the ‘Anqā’’s unique position as First and Second Mothers— a fact that allows her to rightly claim that “nothing can be manifested that I am not in.” The ‘Anqā’ as First Mother, gives life to all. In this sense, she strangely gives birth to her father, the Intellect, bringing to mind the paradoxical lines from al-Ḥallāj’s cosmological-alchemical poem “Uqtulūni yȃ thiqāti”:

My mother has given birth to her father,
What a marvel is mine!
And my daughters, ’though my daughters, are my sisters,
Not by the act of time, no,
Nor by the act of adultery.