شهر شهرِ فرنگ ِ خوب تماشا کن 0049
Regardez notre ville! Notre ville est la belle ville de France
A brief study on Mowlana Jalal ed-Din Muhammad Balkhi known as Rumi (XV)
Rumi and Ibn-i Arabi
Jallal ed-Din Rumi, commonly referred to as Mawlana or “Master”, sometimes called the “Pole of Love,” was born in Balkh in 1207, in what is now situated in Afghanistan. He traveled west across the Islamic world and eventually settled in the Anatolian city of Konya, now in central Turkey, which was at that time the capital of the Seljuk Dynasty. Rumi is arguably the greatest Sufi poet, and his works in English translation have become immensely popular over the last twenty years.
Friends, don’t be discouraged.
Compassion comes after trouble.
Don’t put on any dress but Love
Don’t cover yourself with any garment but Love. . . .
The day I met my Beloved,
I screamed, I lost my mind.
My trials to avoid guilt all disappeared.
But this is Absence inside of Presence.
This is an eternal blessing.
If Love slips out of your hand
Don’t fall into despair. Keep searching.
Fight to find it.
Until you reach Him, see Him,
Don’t sleep, don’t eat, don’t relax.
In verses such as these, Rumi shows a generosity of spirit and encouragement that crosses cultural boundaries and centuries. His paeans to the Beloved work both as great love poems and as descriptions of the mystical state of annihilation.
Rumi’s mentor and master was a remarkable Dervish known as Shams-i Tabriz. Shams to some researchers was something of a malamati [1] Rumi’s followers were aghast when their teacher found Shams’ company more irresistible than their own. Shams provoked Rumi to new heights of mystical love, inspiring some of Rumi’s greatest poetry:
A soul that is not clothed
with the inner garment of Love
should be ashamed of its existence.
Be drunk with Love,
for Love is all that exists.
Where is intimacy found?
?if not in the give and take of Love?
If they ask what Love is,
say: the sacrifice of will.
If you have not left your will behind,
you have no will at all.
Tradition has it that Rumi’s jealous followers eventually murdered Shams, but the intensity of Rumi’s love for the Beloved [2] has been immortalized in his works. The whirling “turn” that Rumi prescribed to his students as a form of moving meditation became one of the central practices of the Mulavi order that was founded soon after Rumi’s death. The “whirling dervishes” of Turkey have gone on to become possibly the most famous Sufis in the West, although, at this late date, not all public practitioners of the “turn” are in fact active Sufis.
Muhi id-Din Ibn al-‘Arabi, Ibn ‘Arabi for short, followed a path quite different from Rumi’s. Born in twelfth-century Moorish Spain, he traveled eastward across North Africa, eventually settling in Damascus in Syria. If Rumi, the “Pole of Love,” exemplifies what is called in yoga the devotional approach, Ibn ‘Arabi is Sufism’s greatest exponent of the way of knowledge or pure consciousness and he has been called the “Pole of Knowledge” or, more commonly, “Sheikh al-‘Akbar”, “The Greatest Sheikh”.
Ibn ‘Arabi, who wrote over two hundred works, had an enormous impact on the development of Sufism. He was an exponent of the philosophy known as “the Unity of Being,” an all-encompassing perspective that holds that Allah is the Being from which everything manifests and that the countless qualities or “Names” of God are the root of all created things. The human being, as the reflection of the divine, can experience the Names and trace his or her own consciousness back to the Source.
In Ibn ‘Arabi’s system, God’s Being is both transcendent and immanent, and we are born with this innate knowledge whether we realize it or not. To truly know one’s self, then, is to know God and vice versa. The whole of the universe can be found within ourselves, as Ibn ‘Arabi indicates in his typically dense prose: “Every time that an intuitive person contemplates a form which communicates to him new knowledge which he had not been able previously to comprehend, its form will be an expression of his own essence and nothing unknown to him.”
One of Ibn ‘Arabi’s most important teachings was that of the “Perfect [3] Man” / “Complete [4] Human”. Existing both as a primordial template for the human being and as the potential destiny of each of us, the Perfect Man has realized all of Allah’s Names, or qualities, within himself. The Prophet Muhammad is perhaps the quintessential example of the Perfect Man. He represents the model of nobility, generosity, and mercy that Muslims in general and Sufis in particular are urged to emulate.
In contrast to Rumi whose forte was poetry and story, Ibn ‘Arabi set out his rather complicated system in a series of demanding philosophical works and commentaries on the prophets, the Qur’an, and Sharia’t, the Islamic law. Although Ibn ‘Arabi did not find a formal tariq’at, or order, his ideas and realization had a seminal influence on the early masters of the Naqshbandi order, on the Shadhili and Qadari orders, and on numerous others. In addition, lines of “Akbari” [5] teaching and oral traditions survived the centuries.
Reference:
[1]- literally someone on “the path of blame,” a category of Sufis usually operating outside of formal orders who often courted criticism from others as a way to diminish their egos.
[2]- both as God and in the guise of Shams
[3] – “Perfect” is used here in the sense of “perfected”
[4] – “complete,” not in the sense of “flawless.”
[5] – a name derived from Ibn-i ‘Arabi’s title “Sheikh Al-Akbar”
Source: Ahmad Shahvary. World Outlook of Rumi. 2005. Seoul, ISBN: 978-622-00-1461-4
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