Light of the Real

In his introduction to a translation of Mahmud Shabistari’s works on the concept of the Unity of Existence (wahdat al-wujud), Robert Abdul Hayy Darr compares the God-Cosmos relation to a projector’s relationship to a screen. The projector is what Ibn Arabi would describe as the Narrator of our individual and collective lives in this Universe, one that praises God just as we do, and that instructs our souls of the world to come before we come into being. It takes on a similar function to the Plotinian Nous or Divine Intellect (see figure 1) structuring matter according to forms, giving trees and humans their shapes and their essential attributes, forms that are for Ibn Arabi qualitative reflections of God’s Names. The Light it projects is the Light of Being, the Reality, God’s essence. The Light shapes reality in another profound way as well, it also animates our bodies, our internal and communal lives. The film on the screen, the moving images themselves, is the unfolding of our lives, our own life, that of the living ecosystem on the globe we live with, and the passage of the history of our cosmos. Empirical experience of Creation, just as Creation in itself, operates in the intersection of the screen of non-being, or non-existence, and Absolute Being, the Light of Reality. Without non-existence, the film would have no stark background to project the Light against. Without the Light of Being, the singular Reality, there would be no film playing, no active, changing and living creation, just non-Being. Despite matter being organized according to different forms, and the characters in the Film differing from one another or their environment, they nevertheless are composed of the same Light, the same life-giving Spirit at the root of both their non-Being and the Light of their Being on the screen. There is an organic and commanding unity that Hearts alone can experience when they situate their spirits within an ecosystem of Spirit, one that binds together all life on Earth, across the Stars, and to the Essential and Grand Spirit on which the Cosmos is dependent on for existence. The relation between the unity of this Spirit and the multiplicity in creation is often compared by ‘Arabi to a white light diffusing into color once hitting a prism. The colors are not the same as the Light, creation is not the same as the Creator, and yet, the colors consist of nothing but the white Light, and creation nothing but its Creator. This kind of unity is a lot more actionable and universally accessible to a community of loving hearts, than the artificial unity that rises from the centralized efforts of the few to compel a community of minds to fall in line with a particular, temporally static and conceptual vision of unity and universality. Whether the doors of the Sharia are opened by direct reception of revelatory divine Law, or by means of an already revealed Law of which we are only followers of, these doors can only be opened by “independent effort” (ijtihâd) to experience the Light in all its modes and dwellings (112).

This experience of the divine Law for Arabi, may in fact coincide with the visions of order, unity, and purposeful symmetry of a rationalist that takes God as Nous, however as far as Ibn Arabi is concerned, these rational experiences are incomplete without a love of the “divine side to every existing thing other than God” (212). It is only when “the servant draws near to Him through supererogatory works”, when they love and are loved by God and practice their ‘proximity of gifts’ that God says “ I am his hearing, his sight, and his hand” (101). A rationalist would seek the rational design through which God as Nous orders the cosmos. However, the experience in question remains, as wonderstruck as it might be, an intelligible one. The ‘divine side’ of existents can be taken to mean a supra-sensible experience of the governing spirit being self-disclosed in material existents, an awareness of the Spirit that permeates matter into a formal being but cannot be reduced to an intellectual appreciation of the underlying design of Nous ordering mattering into forms. A true experience of the divine Law for Arabi must be led by a Heart open to the Love that the Real has composed the world from. Ibn Arabi situates the Heart in the opposite direction of al-zahir, the sensible world. Its production of knowledge departs rather, from al-batin, the inner and abstract world from which it observes the properties of the unseen world of divine principles. 

Al-Ghorab , Mahmoud, and Michael Tiernan. “Muhyiddin Ibn Al-’Arabi Amidst Religions (Adyân) and School of Thought (Madhâhib).” Muhyiddin Ibn ’Arabi: A Commemorative Volume , edited by Stephen Hirtenstein, Element Books, pp. 199–227.

Chittick , William  C. “Two Chapters from the Futûhât Al-Makkiyya .” Muhyiddin Ibn ’Arabi , edited by Stephen Hirtenstein Hirtenstein, Elements Books , Longmead, Shaftesbury , 1993, pp. 90–123.

Where Reason Stops and the Heart Begins

Ibn Arabi takes serious issue with reason as the vehicle of engaging with and understanding the divine Law. This presents a central threat to Al-Farabi’s political program that takes God as Nous, the divine Law of the polis to be ordered in view of what is rational and defines freedom as the rational autonomy of citizens. For Ibn Arabi however, reason is an “affliction” God has tested humans with, that has afforded them the capacity of “felicity or wretchedness”, as opposed to revealed divine Law which is removed from error (206). Ibn Arabi clarifies that the real danger of reason is in the “strangest error which has appeared on Earth”, the error being subordinating the intellect to its faculty of reason. The intellect in itself is a center of judgment for Ibn Arabi, a “force without limits” infinitely receptive to instruction. Once it castrates itself in subordination to the conclusions of its rational faculty, however, the intellect becomes enchained. Freedom from its rational faculty reorients the intellect towards a different source of knowledge, the Heart (269). This practice of re-orienting the intellect towards the knowledge of the heat is a “long journey”, in which a knower tastes “anew at each moment” and acknowledges that Truth will never be attained as an end in-itself, for “knowledge has neither limit nor end” (278).

Nevertheless, Muslim scholars of Sufism and philosophy have often noted the remarkable similarities and imagined agreements between Ibn Arabi’s works, and Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, and even Zoroastrianism (207). Ibn Arabi acknowledges the works of philosophers and the outcomes of their rational inquiries as fruitful even if uttered by a philosopher with “no religion” (208). Rather Ibn Arabi views reason as “limited”, affording the likes of philosophers, the Mu’tazilites and Ash’arites partial knowledge of God that is correct in some cases, and contradictory to revealed Prophecy in others. While non-muslim scholars have sometimes presented Ibn Arabi as a philosopher in his own right, his methods of inquiry differed greatly from what most would consider philosophical methods. Traditional philosophy relies on the rational intellect (‘aql) and logic (mantiq), Ibn Arabi’s wisdom and knowledge rises from “divine effusion” (al-fayd al-ilâhî) and unveilings (futûhat). Ibn Arabi opposed reason or dialectics as the first tool of inquiry, rather than disavowing it completely to non-sufis (). Rather, direct experience, rightly aimed intuitions developed through the proper akhlaq, or character of Heart, was more adequate for determining the divine Law. The experience of the unicity that occurs in the natural world can hardly be constructed or initiated by ways of reason or dialectic without fragmenting the unity of the Truth that occurs naturally beyond the intellect. For those reasons, the rational tools of humankind remain great tools for transcribing, reconstructing or mapping out the experience of the Living Spirit, or the narrative contents of the divine Law. The intellect then, becomes a necessary bridge between Sufis and Non-Sufis, or a person’s understanding of the divine Law and the will the communicate it. The Sufis often describe the heart as drunkenness (sukr) and the intellect as lucidity. In order to produce knowledge acceptable by the law and “accessible to reason”, what is experienced in the heart must be digested, investigated and translated by the intellect (279).

Unlike the knowledge of animals which Arabi takes to be instinctive, the knowledge of humans must be acquired (266). The intellect in Arabi’s view is void of any substance or knowledge, its simple nature allows it only to direct its awareness, and affirm or deny the information each of the faculties supplies it. This center of judgment oversees the operations of each of the interdependent faculties (quwaa) available to it: reason, imagination, representation, memory, and the senses. In this respective order of dependability, each of the faculties, with reason atop the hierarchy and the senses at the bottom, is dependent on the operations of the faculties below it. While reason is dependent on the materials originally supplied to it by the senses, the senses require no other faculty to produce impressions of the world (267) In Ibn Arabi’s Illuminations he states that none of the five faculties are capable of apprehending God directly. The senses don’t register God empirically, the imagination cannot construct a model based on what its ill-equipped “senses relay to it.” The faculty of reason (quwwa mufakkira) can’t reflect on things it neither has a relation to nor can be found within itself. Reflective knowledge of the Real that stands apart from empirical reality is impossible if there exists “no relation between God and His creatures.” That relation in ‘Arabi divine effusion exists by means of Spirit, while for Al-Farabi this function is fulfilled by the Active Intellect. Our memories for Arabi, can’t recall the Face of God after they have been enjoined with a body. As a result, without a “mix of religious matter”, thoughts and intellect that departs from an already revealed text, Ibn Arabi takes reason to be inadequate in supplying direct knowledge of God (268). In this sense, Ibn Arabi limits the capacities of the rational intellect to “knowledge of the existence of God, knowledge of His Unicity, and knowledge of what is obligatory” (268). Ibn Arabi concludes that a follower of the Path of the divine Law must abandon reason as the source of knowledge for the intellect when it comes to divine matters (269). 

As an alternative to reason, Ibn Arabi describes a different process of knowledge acquisition led by the heart. The Heart is described as a barzakh, a “link, bridge or isthmus” (Murata 1992, 310), a formless form, or a living void, this barzakh is used to describe different spaces of in-betweenness that Chittick describes as the space that “stands between and separates two other things yet combines the attributes of both” (1989,14). Every open Heart, through the barzakh, “encompasses the Real” for ‘Arabi ([fusūs] 125). This emptiness is where our being is enjoined with a substrate of Spirit that connects all Hearts to one another, and to the Light of the Real’s self-disclosure in material reality. The barzakh is also used to describe the middle ground between existence and non-existence, between life and death where each soul is instructed of the world to come and of “each kind of form” that we will come to experience in our lives (102). While this void at the center of every Heart seems empty at first glance, Ibn ‘Arabi assures that with sufficient patience, and love, we realize that this emptiness is in fact “like openings in the covering of the lamp of Being” as Mahumud Shabistari puts it. Through them, our Heart lets through the Light of Reality just as it lets through the Love of Friends, this void not only allows us to connect to all other living hearts through this medium of loving spirit, but it is also the birthplace of reality in Ibn Arabi’s cosmology.  

This process of refining the Heart to better reflect or let through the Light of the Real, involves cultivating a perceptive attitude, towards the Beloved, and requires the development of “all Sufi qualities, from patience (sabr) to love (mahabba)” as well as detachment and hope (277). This process is a transformation, or more aptly a reorientation of our cognitive faculties towards the mandates of the heart rather than reason (264-265). Traditionally, the five faculties serve the intellect. Ibn Arabi’s conception of positive freedom, if he were to have formulated one as the Falasifa did in the form of rational autonomy through pedagogical-political programs, would instead have been aimed at developing the polity’s capacity to investigate and interact with creation with Love. In Arabi’s epistemology as Souad Hakim the translator of this excerpt put it, action is changed into knowledge, devotion into understanding, and the logic of the intellect is substituted for the “logic of the heart” (265). Both Al-Farabi and Ibn Arabi’s legislators are charged with the purpose of seeking “the face of God” (87). The face of God for the Falasifa, however, is taken to mean the rational order that structures the cosmos. For Ibn Arabi, this means seeking the self-disclosure of the governing spirit that breathes material creation into life, out in the world (105). All living beings, even material artifacts retain a “form of life” in that their very existence (wujûd) participates in the self-disclosures (tajallî) and glorification of God. Not only do mountains and rivers, rocks, and bronze statues contain a form of life, but they also benefit from the attributes “intrinsic to existence”, they are knowing and desiring of God (94). A person who embarks on the spiritual path of the divine Law “perceives the intrinsic [and divine] life which is found in all bodies” rather than only bodies filled with a rational soul. The primary difference between these two faces, is that God is not only an underlying principle of the geometry or harmony in the Ibn Arabi’s experience of the world, but also an active and Loving participant in the productivity of nature and the internal and social lives of its inhabitants. The goal of Ibn Arabi’s interpretation of the divine Law is to facilitate the path that leads inhabitants to the experience of this loving Spirit in all other living beings and existents. God, the spirit of the cosmos, is, whether we are aware of the origin of the life force animating us or not, the hearing and sight of the cosmos, and ours. When a servant recognizes the spirit animating them and their faculties as the very same spirit animating the cosmos, this station of consciousness is reached.

 Much like Plato’s reservations in his 7th Letter against the immediate apperception of the divine principles as opposed to the arduous labor of familiarizing one’self with these principles, Arabi understands knowledge acquired through struggle to be more dependable; the struggle however is a spiritual one as opposed to a reflective labor. While both inquirers might reach the same understanding, ‘Arabi affords the knower through spiritual struggle the added benefit of insight or foresight (basîra) and certainty (yaqeen). This 'yaqeen' is a peculiar concept, because it implies that the knowledge gained is not a concept one can cognize as an intelligible that is hovering on a Platonic plane distinct from sensory reality, but rather it becomes an integral aspect of how a knower engages and experiences reality with the certainty of this or that divine principle as existent independently of a knower's current acknowledgment or conceptualization of the concept (210). Reason for Arabi is ill-equipped to provide such certainty. Ibn Arab notes that some travelers “reach the Reality in the first step” of the Sharia’s path, the objective of the path, however, is to see the Reality, God, in all the facets and inhabitants of creation. The means through which you reach the Light, will determine how long you'll allow yourself to experience the Light of Reality. The highest form of knowledge acquisition for Arabi comes through refined akhlaq and taqwa, or ‘God-fearing’. Akhlaq, the internal harmony and character of a believer, and taqwa are crucial in a Sufi’s spiritual development; without them and the right practices that come with them, we may get a glimpse of the Light on a drunken lull, but unless we're consciously aware of the Light, seeking it and its properties in our everyday life, of how it interacts with the cosmos, how it animates us and the world around us, the people, animals and plants in it, we'll forget the Light just as soon as it brightened our eyes. Taqwa entails surrender to the judgment and authority of God over the knowledge we encounter, whether we like the answers to this knowledge or not. This form of inquiry ensures we are discoverers of some naturally occurring truth in the Reality of God rather than manufacturers of knowledge. Consequently, this facilitates one’s experience of the divine Law’s self-disclosure in the natural world that Arabi precludes of the rationalists and the Mu’tazilites in what he takes to be their belief that “no-one can see the Real” (210). Other champions of reason such as Ibn Arabi however, maintain that the theoretical-rational faculty can receive emenations from the Real through the Active Intellect. Access to these intellectual disclosures of the Real are not as universally accessible as the self-disclosures of the Spirit Ibn Arabi grants to living beings and artifacts alike. For Al-Farabi, only true philosophers have access to what is likened to the Light of the Sun through the illumination of the material intellect into an acquired one. The “vain”, “false” or “counterfeit” philosophers on the other hand, are those that “set out to study rhe theoretical sciences without being prepared for them.” The counterfeit just as the vain philosophers complete their education in the theoretical sciences necessary to be receptive to the Light, however neglect to put their knowledge to practice, to keep it alive and gather “fruit from it.” Al-Farabi compares this incremental process of diminishment to Plato’s “extinction of the fire [sun] of Heraclitus”  ([AH] 80). Receptivity to this ‘Light of the Real’ that Al-Farabi receives from the Active Intellect and Ibn Arabi from the Governing Spirit, both require the building of practices of the mind and of the hearts, respectively to remain cognizant and in living communion with the Light.

Al-Ghorab , Mahmoud, and Michael Tiernan. “Muhyiddin Ibn Al-’Arabi Amidst Religions (Adyân) and School of Thought (Madhâhib).” Muhyiddin Ibn ’Arabi: A Commemorative Volume , edited by Stephen Hirtenstein, Element Books, pp. 199–227.

Chittick , William  C. “Two Chapters from the Futûhât Al-Makkiyya .” Muhyiddin Ibn ’Arabi , edited by Stephen Hirtenstein Hirtenstein, Elements Books , Longmead, Shaftesbury , 1993, pp. 90–123.

Gril , Denis, and Michael Tiernan . “Adab and Revelation or One of the Foundations of the Hermeneutics of Ibn Arabi.” Muhyiddin Ibn ’Arabi: A Commemorative Volume , edited by Stephen Hirtenstein, Elements Books , pp. 228–263.

Hakim , Souad, and Michael Tiernan . “Knowledge of God in Ibn ’Arabi .” Muhyiddin Ibn ’Arabi: A Commemorative Volume , edited by Stephen Hirteinstein, Elements Books , pp. 264–290.

Loneliness and Love

These were written before and after I met a girl I once loved. To protect her anonymity I'll refer to her as O.

"Truth is madder than fiction" - Stormzy innit

"This loneliness won't leave me alone, it's nestled along the window pane of my heart, etched into the crest of a soul I have yet to meet. A soul I've loved before and am yet to love again. It disconnects me from my God as it calls into question my well of belief. It separates me from my Friends as I save my love like a madman collecting the falling rains of our Moon into my hat, just to poor it over my own head on sunnier days. It delays me from the blessing of divine timing as an inevitability makes an enemy out of that emerald Lady of the Nights. My loneliness hides behind the face of a wonderful dream whose reality has been thrown in the air by the calling winds, by ladies in red and bejeweled stellar robes. I have a hope I don't wish to let go of, but one that's distracted me from something much more important, my freedom.

I want to live to hope for another day, to dream on my own, I want to fly to tell you the truth. I'm tired of climbing the mountain time and time again just to start all over when the morning comes. I'm telling the truth Lord, my heart has yearned enough, and yet it continues to beckon that for Her, enough is never enough. But it has to be. Because she too must care for my heart's independent and soulful tune. Free me from your clasp Lady of the Moon, to which the Sky replied: "Free yourself, and fall into the arms of the Kind Master, for He is the All-Merciful, the most Magnificent Clockmaker."

"I sailed on a sea of stars and moons in my dreams last night. I watched as the planets and the constellations aligned while I bobbed on my ocean. And yet the part of my dream that seemed to intrude my waking moment was O's nightly appearance. I think she kissed my cheek and said 'ba moot feek'. This IS NOT OKAY. My mind spent the next hour or so replaying our conversations, wondering if I said anything that could have messed it up when she borrowed my vacuum, second-guessing whether my ego was at play in any form, interpretation, or dimension. This isn't healthy, doubt is the killer of man and the crippler of trusting belief, and right about now I kinda need both of those. My life is my own, I'm tired of the uncontrollable firing of neurons which leave my brain restless and fatigued, especially since I DON'T THINK SHE'S INTO ME, or maybe she is? AHH STOP!

When you chase a soul, that soul evades you, when you chase a dream, the dream falls out of grasp, but when you abandon yourself trustingly to the currents of the Universe and the substance of your uninhibited authentic self, things might just find their way to you. In Sha' Allah. I'm not getting to enjoy the ride, and that will only harbor resentment or blur the authenticity of my interest in her. I will not give my heart away recklessly, so might as well just be and let be. Maybe if I allow my authentic self to shine she'll meet me at the wavefront and feel comfortable shining herself."

"I'd rather genuine love fill the halls of my Heart like a passing beam coloring the marble red, than fill those chambers with ghosts of my wildest design just so I can feel the warmth circling my stomach for a little bit longer. Time moves on and I move forward. What's the point of asking for a teaspoon of love when we're swimming in an ocean full of it?

Faith is half patience and half gratitude. Patience for the plan of the masterful Artisan whose clock ticks towards equilibrium every time, whose network of lights guide us all towards what we need at the exact time we need it, and whose scales know all too well of those who thrust forward with the loving embrace of the ocean they swim in, whose hearts sing their kind tunes on the night air, and whose whispers have grown tired of praying for a kindred spirit. Gratitude for a world enveloped in a red hue of loving light connecting all those entangled hearts together, gratitude for a blue light that keeps me company on the walls of my apartment, for a God whose love is always a profound breath away, for a family who is alive, healthy and true to our bonds, for brothers and sisters who will always give my memories and my weary limbs a home to laugh and love in, for a world of adventures, of mistakes, of retributions, and of kindness that reminds me of my spirit's name, for a curious and wonderous mind that sees with love and in turn invites beauty to unveil herself, for ambitions and opportunities that lay along my one-track path, for the cold sheets which exchange warmth with me every night. Gratitude for freedom and for a Love I wouldn't trade for any girl, any accolade, menacing shadow, or obsessive fantasy. Patience and gratitude. That's faith."