#1 The Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya of Ibn Arabi with Dr E Winkel
Summary
We are taken by Dr. Eric Winkel behind the scenes of the Futūḥāt al-Makkiya project to catch a glimpse of grace in action like the imagery of the sun, the moon, and Nur Muḥammad (the Light of Muḥammad). Dr. Winkel shares his own personal journey into the works of Ibn al-ʿArabī: The Futūḥāt, which he says, is...
written from the Source. Its unfolding into this material plane is described as an intricate coming together from the world of the barzakh. The methodology of translation as he explains allows for the etymology of words to come into play, drawing meaning and inference from text. He provides a brief evaluation of the critical editions of the Futūḥāt books available today, with clarity to the pitfalls of using the electronic versions of the Futūḥāt for study.
Ibn al-ʿArabī’s teachings on proximity and distance are brought closer to home as Dr. Eric Winkel explains ‘two bows lengths’, the geometrical, mathematical reality when two curves are brought closer and closer together. The study of the Futūḥāt is a counsel to mankind; a living continuation of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s job as a dragoman for our time to help us draw closer to the True. It provides counseling; it shifts our perspective; and throughout, Dr. Eric Winkel affirms this conveyor role that is anchored in his translations by pinning the directive question: ‘What does Ibn al-ʿArabī say in English, today?’
An introductory to Akbarian metaphysics, the role of Ibn al-ʿArabī as the conveyor of the universal message of Islam, the Nur Muḥammad and the seal of Muḥammadan sanctity, the culmination of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) and the seal of the sanctity of Ibn al-ʿArabī, and what it means to the everyday person to be an inheritor. of Ibn al-ʿArab.
Speakers: Saqib, Dr. Winkel
Saqib
Bismillāh. Welcome, everyone, to this episode on The Hikma Project podcast. Today, I’m joined with Professor Eric Winkel, who has been working away on the Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya project, which he can tell us more about in a minute. And he is a wonderful soul who’s been holding regular study circles with people all over the world. And I think his project has gained more and more popularity with people interested in studying Ibn al-ʿArabī. As-salāmu ʿalaykum, Sidi.
Dr. Winkel
Wa ʿalaykumu s-salāmu wa-raḥmatullāhi wa-barakātuhu.
Saqib
Wonderful to have you with us today.
Dr. Winkel
Thank you.
Saqib
So if we can maybe begin with just a bit about your own journey? How is it that you came to be involved in studying Ibn al-ʿArabī?
Dr. Winkel
Yeah. The first book, I guess, I was reading was Ralph Austin’s Sufis of Andalusia. And I was in, I guess, the late teenage years, and very interested in reading Foucault. And all these other postmodern, post-structuralist kind of writers. And what I liked about them so much was that they were challenging the conventional view of the world. And, of course, as a seeker—as you are, and others are, there listening—seekers are, they’re always finding out that they don’t really belong in this place. And that the way people think, they think that’s just not enough. They’re really seeking for something else. So I was drawn to them to try to understand how the world really is, what’s happening behind the curtains. And so when I came across Sufis of Andalusia, and I read about this person who was talking about these souls and saints, who are so far beyond the boundary of the intellect and are so far outside of convention, I knew that there was something special going on.
Dr. Winkel
And so throughout the years since then, I’ve always been looking for ideas coming from the Ibn al-ʿArabī tradition. And the idea also is that, what’s so beautiful is that, I’d always been reading, throughout many religions, and throughout many cultures and languages, I studied many languages over the years. And I kept looking for someone who could answer my questions. And when I came across these writers, I would often get very excited about them. And then I would say, at one point, I was, see my heroes had clay feet, and that they were not that tan, that they had just seen things that I thought, ‘Oh, my goodness, even I know that that’s not right, you know, about women, about people of other religions and things like that.’ And I would just say, ‘Oh, my goodness.’ And I’ve never had that experience with Ibn al-ʿArabī. What’s so beautiful is that every time I dive into Ibn al-ʿArabī[‘s] writings, I never come to a place where I say, ‘Oh I know that and he doesn’t know.’ It’s always, ‘What does he know?’ It’s so reassuring and comforting to read Ibn al-ʿArabī because he really sees how things are. And he’s full of mercy, and goodness and kindness. And so, when I came across him, and then began to dive in, I in a sense, I did what he says, I read no other books. So once I began reading the Futūḥāt, and I since don’t read any other books.
Saqib
Wow. So just to be clear, at this time, when you started exploring his work, was this from a religious perspective, an agnostic perspective, from the Islamic perspective?
Dr. Winkel
Well, in those years, I was pretty much, very much eclectic. And when I got to college, I would sort of hang out with one religion on Thursday, and another religion on Friday, and then Saturday, Shabbat, and hang out with the Jews on Saturday, Sunday with the Christians and the Catholics. And so I was really able to be in all the different religious expressions. And so when I read Ibn al-ʿArabī, it was as someone who is talking of universal Islam. This was the Islam that doesn’t really go by name, because it’s found everywhere. And Ibn al-ʿArabī himself, he doesn’t have a named way of doing things. He doesn’t have a spiritual path that is named, but it’s in all of the spiritual paths.
Saqib
Wow. So, you mentioned Austin, and I’m sure readers are, where there are various translations from Chittick, to James Morris, to Chodkiewicz. Who would you say has been your greatest influence?
Dr. Winkel
Well, I’ve certainly read all of them. And it’s so important to read every one. What we see is that the text itself opens up in many different levels, in many different facets. And so, in a sense, the way you, yourself, see the world, that’s how you translate Ibn al-ʿArabī. Most of the people who have translated have been very much in the philosophical tradition, [the] intellectual Islamic tradition. And so they see that, and in a sense, they transmit Ibn al-ʿArabī’s teaching to their language, their way of looking at the world. And so, when I was doing my own translations, and coming across things, I would often find—[in] mathematic[s] and physics—another way of looking at these things. That, when you understand his numbers and letters, in a geometrical way, that all sorts of other openings began to occur. And so, it’s so important to see everyone’s translations because they’re coming from their own solid foundation in philosophy, or wherever it is. If you’ll see my translation, you’ll probably, in a sense, you’ll see who I am also and how I approach things. And of course, I’m in a sense, anti-intellectual, even anti-philosophical. And so that’s what I bring to that. So it’s good to be able to see all of these translations. Because what Ibn al-ʿArabī is doing, he’s not writing from his own limited personality or his own limited view of the world. He really is dipping into the Source. And when you dip into the Source, everyone who reads you, listens to you, they will also find Truths that even the person speaking might not have known about. So that’s why we’re discovering things. If you just think about his writings, he is addressing people, and they’re usually a very small circle. And the small circle would go throughout the world with him. And they would write down whatever he was saying. And it’s just so clear that as he is writing and reading his work, and the Futūḥāt, the audience must have been saying, ‘What the heck is this? What’s he saying?’ Because it is just so far beyond anything. He’ll start saying, ‘And this is a treasure trove, which has a lock, which has 13 wheels that turn. And 160 of them go this way, and they go that way.’ And people are saying, ‘What is he talking about?’ So in a sense, he knows he is writing for the future, for people who will come at some point in the history of humankind. And we’ll find things that the immediate audience probably would not have understood.
Saqib
So, having read some Ibn al-ʿArabī myself, I know he’s an absolute genius and master of etymology, and is able to extrapolate the highest level of metaphysical, esoteric meaning from the subtlest grammatical nuance or word, permutations of meanings in Arabic in the trilateral route, and never is satisfied with a fixed meaning of a word, but is able to almost open a word to its multiple variations of sound meanings as he talks about in the Qur’ān, for having multiple levels of meaning within verses. What difference did it make when you started reading him in Arabic?
Dr. Winkel
Yeah. This I’ve been watching over the years and I’ve had feedback about the way I read the Futūḥāt and the Qur’ān. What it turns out is that I’ve never been able to speak Arabic, contemporary Arabic. If someone speaks Arabic to me, I don’t understand what’s going on. What I understand and what I’m immersed in 10 hours a day is the ‘ʿArabī’ of the Futūḥāt. What that does is it has freed me to be able to see all of the facets that he’s bringing out based on words. And so, as you say, that these three-letter roots, they have a semantic field. And when you’re approaching the Futūḥāt, and when he’s approaching the Qur’ān, you have to see all of those, that entire semantic field open in front of you. And you can’t say it only means this or it only means that. That kind of process has really helped me, I think, see things very fresh, because I don’t have this Arabic language background. I can speak other languages, but why don’t I speak Arabic? It’s always been a question. And people have told me—someone said, ‘I just come from Damascus. And I’m going to tell you that you’re not going to be able to speak Arabic, because you have to be able to read the “ʿArabī” of the Futūḥāt.’ And that is quite different.
Saqib
Wow. So if you’ve got somebody who’s keen to follow suit and maybe learn classical Arabic, or we’ve got listeners who are already learning Arabic, but I’m not quite there yet to read Ibn al-ʿArabī—which, in my humble experience, he’s also very difficult for native Arabs speakers, including teachers of Arabic. And I’ve queried passages from Ibn al-ʿArabī. It’s like, keep away, the depth of this is, beyond us. So what advice—how did you go about learning this lovely language to that level where you can then access Ibn al-ʿArabī?
Dr. Winkel
Yeah, I have such great admiration for the lexicographers. The people who made dictionaries over the centuries. See, right from the very beginning, the Muslims understood that the ‘ʿArabī’ language, the language of Qur’ān, is the language that ended with the passing of Muḥammad ﷺ. That whatever happened to the language afterwards has no reflection on what the ‘ʿArabī’ means. They knew that they had to go back to find the original Arabic. And so they were going to the Bedouin and different peoples, and asking them what the meaning of something was. In fact, one of the ḥadīth transmitters is saying that, ‘I never knew what fatir here meant, until I saw two Bedouins. They were arguing over who dug the hole for the well. The one who dug the hole said, I am the fatir of it. I am the opener of it, the beginner of it.’ And so they realised that to understand a word like fatir, in the Qur’ān, they were going to have to know what the Arabs that it was sent to, what they understood from that. And so I’ve always gone to these classical dictionaries, lexicons. At one moment, I began to realise that the dictionary Tāj al-ʿArūs—the words themselves held the secrets that Ibn al-ʿArabī was talking about. So inside the word itself was the secret that Ibn al-ʿArabī was describing to us. And then I realised also that the author of Taj al-Arus saw himself in the lineage of Ibn al-ʿArabī. He connected to the lineage of Ibn al-ʿArabī. So he was very much propagating and transmitting and conveying the Futūḥāt through this dictionary. Through the language itself.
Saqib
Wow. So talking about translations before we dive into that, just a couple of points maybe about the different versions of the Arabic of the Futūḥāt. I know there’s Osman Yahia, the Beiruti, and Manṣūb in Yemen, who appeared in the ‘In Search of Muhyiddin’ documentary and was talking about the need to standardise the various versions of the Futūḥāt. Could you tell us about the differences in these and which one is accepted as a standard text, or at least in the academic intellectual circles, and which one is it you use and why?
Dr. Winkel
Right. Yeah, the critical addition that ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Sulṭān al-Manṣūb in Sana’a Yemen, the one he created and prepared was 11 years in the making. He took 11 years, and he looked at the handwritten manuscripts that were available in Turkey. He used these three manuscripts to come up with the critical edition, the one that we have that he’s now published in 12 volumes. And it’s just a beautiful piece of work, he’s done an amazing job with it. Just as, when you read a translator, you begin to know who the translator is, what their personality is like, and so on? I really feel that, immersed 10 hours a day in the Futūḥāt, I really begin to understand who this person is, in Sana’a. And we’ve communicated now and then. He’s a wonderful, wonderful person. And he’s the one person, I think, over hundreds of years, the one person who understands the Futūḥāt. And he understands it because he sees the entire work in front of him.
Dr. Winkel
And so, as I was beginning my translation, I would write to him and say, ‘How come this is qadam instead of qidam Osman Yahia says this, and that, and you would write back in the most generous and polite and so beautiful manner.’ He’s saying, ‘Well, if you read six pages in the front, you’ll see that this is a reference to the Qur’ān and [Surah] Yusuf and then, therefore, the word is qidam and not qadam.’ After the third time, I wrote to him and I said, ‘Please give me the answer to this question, I’m not going to doubt you anymore.’ And so, what it meant is that every time I come to something that just feels it can’t be moved, it’s just can’t be understood—What people will do is, they’ll say, ‘Well, let’s vocalise it this way.’ Or, ‘Maybe it’s a mistranscription.’ And so, they make something up, and then they go on—I’ve said, ‘Every time I come to somewhere I don’t understand, I will stay with it until I understand it.’ And knowing that ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Sulṭān al-Manṣūb has gone through this, and he knows all of it. That tells me to sit patiently until I understand and not try to mangle the word with the different vocalisation that makes sense to me. So it’s been such a teaching to have that.
Dr. Winkel
Now Osman Yahia’s critical edition—he died just after, I think, completing the 14th book. He was in Sorbonne in Paris. And his is very, very good. But he also, his critical apparatus, the footnotes, are very, very big. And, in a sense, many of them are not quite necessary. So because in one of the manuscripts, they might use a hamza, and then other manuscripts, they’ll just have the alif and assume that you know that hamza comes later. And so you don’t really need to keep telling us that each stage of the way. But having said that, it is a perfect critical edition to book 14. And what Sidi Manṣūb has done is he’s made that critical edition all the way to the 37 books.
Dr. Winkel
Now, he’s very clear that the electronic versions are quite horrible. There are about 50,000 serious mistakes in the electronic versions. And so, in his introduction to his critical edition, he says Osman Yahia did a wonderful job. It might have been more information than we need. But then when he gets to Būlāq edition, that he says this one has problems. The Beirut one has problems, any of these electronic or digital versions are quite horrible with their 50,000, at least, serious errors. So we really do need to go back to his critical edition. And if you can’t find his critical edition right now, Osman Yahia’s 14 books, you can download them from the web in PDF form.
Saqib
Fantastic. And could you just say something about the Futūḥāt project that you were involved in? Which book are you up to now? And why the Futūḥāt? Why not say the Fuṣūṣ or the Tarjumān al-Ashwāq?
Dr. Winkel
Somehow I’ve always been drawn to the Futūḥāt and one of the reasons it’s so important, I think, is that the Futūḥāt is written for everyone. And he does say that. He’s somewhat cautious in certain areas. He’s saying because the book may land in someone’s hands, and it’s not for them. So he is somewhat cautious. But, almost always, he’s actually just saying, ‘Learn this. Please understand this.’ He is so encouraging. And people don’t necessarily realise that each chapter starts with learn. I’lam. Learn. He wants us to learn this, this is not esoteric knowledge that he doesn’t want people to know or only secrets or only qualified people can read this. He wants us all to learn this. He wants us all to learn this because he has been told by Ḥaqq by the True. He has been told to counsel, the creatures, the slaves of Ḥaqq. And so that’s his job. That’s his life mission, is to counsel us. And so he wants us to understand. He wants us to learn and to love Muḥammad ﷺ to love the Qur’ān, and to want to find ways to get closer and closer to Allah, to God. And so, that’s a non-esoteric program. He wants us to do this.
Dr. Winkel
Now, in the Futūḥāt project, I’ve always been drawn to the Futūḥāt. And the project was I had to use the word project because of course, this is such a massive undertaking at least 10,000 pages in the original, my translation will end up being 12 or 13,000 pages. It’s just a massive, massive situation. And it is it’s so interesting that it’s always even though I see myself as sometimes I’m quite alone in this in the beginning, but it was always there’s so much support coming from the very beginning. And the first support was one. Steven Hertenstein said, you know, there’s a critical edition coming from Yemen, why don’t you talk to that person. So I wrote to ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Sulṭān al-Manṣūb. And I said that I really want to translate this work. And I, I’ve heard about his critical addition. So he sent me the critical edition to Malaysia. And I took that, then I left my work in Malaysia and came back with that critical edition and just dived in.
Dr. Winkel
And then, over the years, just been working with this. And then, a few years ago, someone wrote to me, an Irishman living in France, he wrote to me and said, ‘Would you like help editing?’ Which is also a very polite way of saying, ‘Do you need some help?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I do.’ And so, he has become the editor. And what’s amazing is that he also sees the Futūḥāt as a whole. And so, when I do something in one place, he’ll say, ‘You know, in another page, you’re doing this differently. Are these the same? If they are, connect them. If they’re not, describe where they’re not connected.’ And so, that kind of ability to see this whole picture has been so helpful. So what I’ve done, all my writing, gets up to ‘this’ level. And then, he comes in, and he works with it until it becomes a truly high level. And it’s also so true that no one person can do this. It really does require this team. It really requires people with different perspectives and abilities to come together and make this all work. And that’s also been happening in the material realm, where I’ve had so much support in the material realm—’What does it need for you to keep translating?’ ‘What do you need for this editor?’ ‘What do you need to get these books printed?’ And so that’s been coming. And it’s just such a—I really can feel that in the barzakh over there somewhere, it’s all been put together. And now it’s slowly coming down into this world. And I’m watching it unfolding, with great joy and thankfulness that this is all happening, that it’s unfolding now. And that it really is because of so many people who have said this is valuable work and have come to help linguistically, editorially, materially, all these different ways.
Saqib
Mashallah. Amazing. So, just going on to the, you mentioned earlier, the geometry and the style of translation. I remember seeing, I believe it was the book of fasting, where you had a diagram with an asymptote. For those listeners who might not be from a mathematical background, [it] is a vertical line that the curve never touches. And then you had a curve going up. My background is in math. So, for me, it was fascinating to associate that with fasting. Could you say something about that, the geometry and the metaphysics of fasting and Ibn al-ʿArabī in general?
Dr. Winkel
Yeah. Let’s look at the two bow lengths. Because that’s always been very interesting. And that’s the idea of these two arcs, and that something happens when they begin to approach each other. If you imagine now a regular recurve bow, a bow and arrow. Take a bow and put one on top. It’s like an upside-down U-shape, and a line that’s like the ground. And then, below that the same shape, another recurve bow, but this time, like a U-shape. So you see a bow on top and a bow on the bottom. And the line in between is the bowstring. The bowstring here is going to be the membrane, the barzakh, the membrane. What happens is that when these two bows begin to flatten, and the two handles come closer and closer to the middle, then you’ll see that the recurve bow will stretch out flatter and flatter. As it stretched out flatter and flatter, it becomes longer. The string becomes longer. And so, the string, the membrane, becomes thin. It thins out. This is the experience of when you come close to the other side. There are places where that string, that membrane, is very thin. These are when you are feeding the poor, when you are visiting the sick, when you are approaching God with extra devotions, when you are being born, and when you’re dying, or when you’re at someone’s deathbed or at someone’s birth. Those are the times when that string is stretched very, very thin. And so, the other side becomes so very close.
Dr. Winkel
Now, think about these two bows, as the handles are coming closer. We [a Ḥadīth qudsi] said, ‘When I love my `abd, my slave, the slave comes to me walking and I come twice that speed. Or the slave approaches me a hand span, and I approach an arm span.’ And so, we have these two bows—our bow, my bow, is slowly coming towards the middle with the handle, and the divine bow is coming very quickly, it double-speed towards me. And when these two are almost touching, the bowstring is so thin, the membrane is so thin, I begin to not know who I am and who Allah is—who God is and who I am.
Dr. Winkel
And so, that’s why, all the poetry, Ibn al-ʿArabī has—Allah says, ‘Do this.’ And then Ibn al-ʿArabī says, ‘Who did you just talk to?’ Allah says, ‘I talked to you.’ And he says, ‘But I can’t see anyone but you.’ And therefore, ‘Who is “you” and who is “I”?’ I mean, it’s all confusing. But this is when getting to two bow-lengths, if I only could see it. I heard the English, I heard the Arabic, and I heard the words, but I could not understand what’s really going on ’till I could see the mechanics. And the mechanics are this geometrical, mathematical reality when two curves are brought closer and closer together. The curve is approaching straightness, approaching the infinite, and the other curve is approaching the infinite.
Dr. Winkel
And so, you begin to see that we are getting closer and closer and closer, but like the two oceans, one will not go over the other. I will not jump into the other side and Allah will not jump into this side. But Allah will look at this membrane and the image that’s seen will be me. This is the way the two sides communicate. Then that tells you, that’s why Allah says, ‘When I love the slave, or when I love the `abd, I become the ear of that slave,’ which is hearing. That hearing, then, is no longer me because my bow has straightened up and is flattened out to the membrane. And so there is no intermediary. There’s nothing between Allah acting and Allah acting in me. Allah acting in me is acting from behind me. And so, khalīfah means min khalf—from behind. The Khalifa is the one that Allah is acting from behind. When the other side—the divine side—wants to do something, the divine side makes one of these bows, you and me, do that thing. We are doing what Allah wants to be done. And so we are then the Khalīfah, behind whom Allah is acting.
Saqib
Wow. So, as I understand the non-duality of reality, which Ibn al-ʿArabī plays on through the etymology of words, I believe Michael Sells has written something quite spectacular about this which he called a meaning event, where the pronoun in Arabic can tactically refer to both divine reality and human, and therefore open up various possibilities to meanings which he never excludes. How would you summarise the difficulty with translating Ibn al-ʿArabī in that sense, given that he himself says, for example, the Qur’ān is not fixed in meaning, but there are multiple levels, or multiple variations, or permutations, rather, of meaning. In then translating his work, surely he then— Does he use that in his own writings, where his own writings are open to multiple levels of meaning, given the permutations of words? And what’s the pedagogy? When he says, iʿlam and to learn? What’s the pedagogy he’s advocating? So if he was alive today, would he be content with his work being studied in a, say, university course? Or, is he advocating a super-rational, higher cognitive engagement with his text as a spiritual text?
Dr. Winkel
Yeah, so the multiple of the fastest that come out? Let’s look at I should have written that down. Also, I just, it just flew out, I look, it might come back. But the I what IA does with the So how to read his own writing.
Dr. Winkel
Recently I’ve been working with some colleagues. They’ve wanted to translate directly from one of the chapters. So we open up—I’ve sent everyone the critical edition—that passage, we open it up and we read the Arabic. We read, we go through and do the translation. And one of the things that I’ve been told that is a quality of my translation, is that I translate very carefully and precisely. The translation that I have is one, which doesn’t give my own ideas so much as it gives each of these words, and it puts the words in a certain order, in a certain way. And the reason I’ve realised I’ve been led to do that, is because when I translate something, I might have one meaning, or two meanings. I have to make sure that I translate very carefully, each of the words a certain way. And that is because when I find the third meaning, or the fourth meaning, that sentence still has to survive. That sentence still has to be a place from which the third and fourth meaning can be understood.
Dr. Winkel
I think sometime last year, I just had an amazing opening and understanding of something, some beautiful, beautiful insight. And I said, ‘Oh, actually that’s in chapter two!’ There’s something in chapter two about that. And I realised, I said, ‘I’ve only learned this now, but I wrote that translation a year ago!’ And so I wonder what it looks like. So I went to that chapter, and I went to that passage, and I read—Oh! Even though I didn’t know it, the insight I just got last week is in the sentence. The sentence holds that meaning. And so, then I realise that, as long as I don’t define everything, and push everything into my understanding, I’m able to translate a certain way that years later, and other people, will be able to find things that I didn’t even know were there. This is really because the Futūḥāt is written from the Source. And that’s why I said, you can’t define me in a school of thought, because the pen will never get dry that’s speaking about these things.
Dr. Winkel
This is his understanding of how the Qur’ān is transmitted. We think about the Qur’ān as a group of pages with writing on it and that’s the Qur’ān. Therefore, we take this writing, and then we use grammar, and dictionaries, and ḥadīth, and tafsīr, and other ways of trying to find out what these words mean. Ibn al-ʿArabī says—and we’re going to be doing this insha’Allah, in the 2021 sessions that come up, starting next Friday. These sessions will be looking at the way he says, you read the Qur’ān. He says, ‘You go to the place where the Qur’ān was revealed. And you go there, heart to heart with the Prophet ﷺ. And you see the transmission of the Qur’ān to the Prophet ﷺ, to his heart, and you are right there with your heart. Then, when you go back into the real or regular world, you have something transmitted. And so, the words have not changed. It’s still the same Arabic, Qur’ān words. But the meaning has changed, because you’ve been to the site that revelation was provided, was given, as bestowed.’
Dr. Winkel
And this is the way Ibn al-ʿArabī does things. And so, in a sense, when I see that Ibn al-ʿArabī did something with the two bows, and that my imagery is the bow-and-arrow, I can then say, ‘How do I make sure that every time I write this, that the person who is ready for that will hear what Ibn al-ʿArabī has seen by that? And he has seen those two bows coming closer and closer together.’ So, I want to make sure that the translation conveys what he’s doing. And that, in a sense, also tells me that what I am doing is not so much a translation as a conveyance or conveying, and this is his word tarjumān or dragoman. The dragoman or the tarjumān is not translating but is conveying. So I’m in a sense saying, ‘Ibn al-ʿArabī here. He’s telling me “this”. Now, when he says it with these words, do I translate them into English this way?’ Or do I say, ‘If I translate that way people are not going to understand. And it’s not going to be the way that makes sense to our culture in our language right now. So what does he want to say in English?’ My work is to say, ‘What does Ibn al-ʿArabī say in English, today?’ And not, ‘Here are these Arabic words that I now translate into English.’
Saqib
So, that brings us nicely onto a quote by Junaid, which I remember emailing you about some time back. I think it reads something along the lines of, ‘Qāl al-Junaid,’—just get the Arabic up— ” قال الجنيد : ” لا يبلغ أحد درج الحقيقة حتى يشهد فيه ألف صديق بأنه زنديق – I won’t try and translate that. I’ll leave you to expand on that, if you wish. But, I’m not sure if it still stands. But I think the discussion was sadīq was translated as ‘integrated ones’ and zindīq as ‘dualists’, and often zindīq is also translated as ‘heretic’, or something along those lines, and siddīq ‘the truthful’, somebody who testifies. Why have you chosen those words? And what does Ibn al-ʿArabī mean by that anyway? I think he recites it in the Futūḥāt. I think it’s Book Three, somewhere, amazing passage by Junaid. Could you say something about that?
Dr. Winkel
The place I’m working on right now—Chapter 276, I think. He begins to talk about that. Everything that we see from Allah never repeats. So this is back to the idea that the tajalli, the shining, radiating, brilliance of God does not repeat. No two people have the same vision. And no one vision goes to two people. And you will not get the same vision again, twice. So in this passage, he just ends up with this last sentence here. Not one recognises anything from the True except oneself. So it’s not that, oh, I now know what God is like or what God is. I only know who I am. And so, who recognises oneself recognises one’s Cherisher. All I know about the divine is what I am. So I can know myself, but I can’t know God. Because that God never ends, is infinite, can’t be fenced in, can’t be defined, and so on. Everything I know about the divine will be what I see in myself. And that will always then change. Because it will always change, that everyone on the outside will say, ‘But you said “x” yesterday, and you’re saying “y” today, and you’re saying “z” tomorrow. What’s going on with that?’ And that’s because there is never going to be a single fixed end-point. They’ll say, ‘This is it, there’s no more.’ And so because there’s no more, the person who is integrated is the one who knows of God only that we do not know. This is that the perception of the incapacity to perceive is perception. If I know that I’m unable to perceive God, that’s knowing God. It’s a negative, it’s an ever-changing, and it’s a ‘not this, not that’. So in Sanskrit, neti neti, ‘not this, not that’. And so because it’s ‘not this, not that’, the outsider says, ‘Oh, it looks like you’re always changing, or you’re a dualist. Or it looks like you believe one thing, but then you say you believe the opposite also.’ And Ibn al-ʿArabī says with ʿaqīdah, that there are aqāʾid. They are belief systems. And each person has a belief system, because Allah is revealing to each person. No two people will have the same belief system. Because no people will have the same belief system, no people have the same vision of Allah. This tells us that we only, by convention, say, ‘Okay, we’ll agree on these certain things. But when it comes to the Absolute Truth, we must agree that we cannot know. We cannot confine and we cannot define.’ He ends up this paragraph by saying, ‘Not one recognises anything of Ḥaqq except themself.’
Saqib
Wow. So Sidi, could you say a bit more about why Ibn al-ʿArabī is controversial throughout time, not just within critics, like Ibn Taymiyya and others who brought some severe attacks on him. But also within some Sufi circles. Often, it’s sometimes not encouraged to read Ibn al-ʿArabī, or to have a teacher. Sometimes it’s hard to get hold of a teacher who’s an expert in Akbarian metaphysics. What are some of the things he’s actually saying or suggesting, which causes people to encounter these problems of understanding him?
Dr. Winkel
When I was first starting the translations explicitly, I was in Malaysia, and people would tell me that, all of our spiritual teachers say, ‘Don’t read Ibn al-ʿArabī.’ But as a positive way, saying that it is too difficult. Not that it’s heretical, but that it is too difficult to read. Then I would say, ‘Yeah, but look at this. We got 1000 pages talking about every tiny detail of the fiqh, of the Islamic legal system. We have 1000 pages saying, “Do you put your hands this way, this way, or that way, when you’re doing the ṣalāh? What constitutes a traveller when you’re fasting?” All these detailed questions. And every time he comes to the disagreements among the scholars, he always says, “Go to the majority; the hand of God is with the majority.” All of these statements, all he’s doing is saying, “Follow the Sharia and follow even more carefully than you might otherwise have followed it. Follow it very carefully.” So I wonder as to why … people would say, “Don’t read him.” Because he’s telling you to follow the Sharia and to follow it even more carefully than you ever would have followed before.’
Dr. Winkel
And then, I kind of think back, that in a sense, they know what’s really going on. And they are reading Ibn al-ʿArabī very correctly. I’ll give you two examples of how I began to see that years ago, in Albuquerque when we started doing a dars of Ibn al-ʿArabī. We went through one passage, and at the end, some people were confused. And so one of the persons came up to my friend who’s Libyan, Arabic speaker, and said, ‘What was he saying in that last paragraph?’ And the person says, ‘I have no idea, but I loved it!’ And then, years later, I think I was in Delhi, and there was someone from Yemen, was doing a PhD or something in one of the very traditional Islamic Studies, Niẓāmiyyah studies. And so, I said, ‘You’re kind of like a neo-Wahhabi, why don’t you come talk with me? Let’s talk about Ibn al-ʿArabī.’ So he said, ‘Okay.’ And I said, ‘Well you know, I’ve got the book with me. I’ve got the Futūḥāt with me. Let’s go over it. And you tell me what you guys don’t like about Ibn al-ʿArabī.’ So we opened it up. He went through, and he said, ‘Well, that’s a ḥadīth.’ ‘That’s true.’ ‘Well, that’s the Qur’ān. And that’s another ḥadīth. That’s another verse from Qur’ān.’ And then, in the end, he just frustratingly said, ‘I don’t know why, but we hate him!’ And I just, that’s it! Because Ibn al-ʿArabī comes across, and you love it if you love dipping into the Source, and you hate it because you realise that Ibn al-ʿArabī is saying, ‘Everything you think is going to be shaken.’
Dr. Winkel
When you read the Qur’ān and you think it means this, you’re going to be shaken when you find out what truly is happening here. Every law that you do in Sharia, when you realise what’s really going on, you’ll be shaken. And that is the case. Ibn al-ʿArabī says when you put your right arm over the left arm in the prayer position, he says, ‘The right arm is the right hand of God, and you are the left arm. The right arm is holding up your left arm. And so, the picture is Allah as the right hand protecting and preserving and holding you up because you’re not capable to do all of this amazing thing called the intimate conversation of the ṣalāh.’ So he’s talking about the right arm over the left arm, but when you really know what’s going on—Wow, this is incredible! He’s saying that God Himself is helping you prepare yourself to listen and converse with God Himself in the najwā, in this secret conversation, which is the ṣalāh.
Saqib
Wow. Sidi, you mentioned earlier about the lineage of Ibn al-ʿArabī. And I know having read some Emir ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jazairi, who was, spiritually speaking, very close to his Akbarian master Ibn al-ʿArabī, and he was reading his sermons. It’s so evident how deeply steeped he was in Akbarian metaphysics. But at the same time, as you said earlier, there isn’t any lineage, as in spiritual ṭarīqah or system, that explicitly comes from him, as you have with Rūmī or as Muʿīn al-Dīn Chishtī, for example, and so forth. Is there a spiritual lineage of Ibn al-ʿArabī that seekers can access? And, if so, how?
Dr. Winkel
That’s something that we’ve been exploring in these sessions on zoom—thefutuhat.com. When you go there, you can pick up the sessions that have been recorded. In the last two sessions, December 11th and December 18th, have been the seal of Muḥammadan sanctity. And Ibn al-ʿArabī is the one who is the seal. What that means for us is that he is showing us that the light of Muḥammad—the Nūr Muḥammadi—which came down into the body of Muḥammad ﷺ in a time and a place that, with his passing, the light of Muḥammad, that Nūr, became invisible, and then became visible in his lifetime, invisible again, and then in the last day, on the day of judgement, there will be the visible light again. That light of Muḥammad, will be the one who intercedes for all of us, for all of humanity. So he says that Muḥammad ﷺ was given something that the other prophets and messengers were not given. And that’s universal message. The message is universal, it’s for all people, and that he is the Sayyid al-Nās. He is the master of the people, all of them. So everyone who has ever been born and whoever will be born, is in the mother community of Muḥammad ﷺ, and he then is the universal one to give this message of this light, which is the message to perfect humanity, which is all of humanity.
Dr. Winkel
And so, in the last two weeks, we began to explore what Ibn al-ʿArabī means by being the seal of that sanctity. And being the seal of that sanctity means that he is going to be speaking from a place of universality. And so it is universal. It’s not in a particular language. It’s not in a particular religion. It’s not in a particular mode. It’s universal. It’s for everyone. And everyone who then inherits this light of Muḥammad—truth—whatever field they’re in, whatever activity they are doing, they are inheritors of the seal of the sanctity of Ibn al-ʿArabī. So we should be looking for inheritors of Ibn al-ʿArabī. Not necessarily in Islamic Studies, or in religious studies, but they will be healers in psychology, and they will be engineers, and they will be scientists, and they will be mothers, and they will be guides. And they will be the ones who are working to bring out the reality of the light to all of humanity. Those are the inheritors of Ibn al-ʿArabī. He’s explicit in none, and implicit or folded into all of them. All of these ways, all of these guidance, all of these paths, are ways that are infused with this seal of sanctity, with Ibn al-ʿArabī’s sealing, and which is the culmination of the light of Muḥammad ﷺ. ‘Seal’ then becomes the word ‘culmination’ in English.
Dr. Winkel
And so, that is when all these things come together, we see that they all are true. Again, back to geometry, I began to see this, with what’s called now the Möbius strip, which is, you take a strip of paper, you twist it once and connect them. And then when you go around that loop, you are inside, outside, and then the place that you mark as first is the place that is the last. When you go around this loop, it’s one surface. There is only an inside, which is also the outside, which is also the inside. And what’s interesting, then you take that one loop, one surface, and you cut it down the middle, you cut it as a cross-section. Then what comes after that is a single loop with four sections inside, outside, inside, outside. So you’ve come up with Ẓāhir, Bāṭin, Ẓāhir, Bāṭin. You come up with the invisible, the visible, the invisible and the visible. And you realise that that is our life. We have in Qur’ān that we were nothing, we were dead, we were nothing. That’s the invisible. And then, ‘We brought you to life.’ That’s then the visible realm, where we are right now. And, ‘We will give you death’, again. That will be the third part. And then you will have eternal life. And that’s the fourth part. And the same way that the light of Muḥammad starts out invisible, before Adam Eve was a lump of clay, he was the Prophet. And so that invisible light reaches all the way until he’s born. And then there’s the visible time of the light of Muḥammad. And then when he passes, it’s invisible again. And then on the Day of Judgement, he’s then visible again as the Master of the people. So I began to see that geometrically that shows us what is truly happening. Therefore, when you look back, the light of Muḥammad is in all of these stars. You don’t know that all these stars are the light of Muḥammad until the culmination of prophecy takes place. And yet when he’s born, you still don’t know that these stars were true, and true lights, because now all you see is him. He’s the sun, he’s the solar Islam. And when you see the sun, all the stars have disappeared. But when he passes, we get the moon, and all of this imagery of Muḥammad and the moon. The sun behind the curtain of the Earth is illuminating this moon, and the stars are all out there. And then, at that moment, only after he’s passed, can we say he is the culmination of prophecy because all of these lights are his lights.
Saqib
Wow. So yes, I think this is touching on a really important point here. One is the universality of Islam, of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s message and his writings. And just to be clear, is he saying that universality is within the Islamic tradition itself, as in, the Qur’ān is explicitly or implicitly a universal text? Or, is he saying, ‘My teachings, or this perspective, is universal, and Islam is a perspective within that universality?’ Or, is he saying, ‘The universal is within the actual Islamic message, by nature, is universal?’ And also, where does he see perennial philosophy? What would Ibn al-ʿArabī suggest to the modern seeker, that a new age approach or a non-Islamic religious approach is completely valid? Or, does he believe that the Islamic message through the prophet Muḥammad superseded or put an end to the various previous revelations which have been affirmed in the Qur’ān? Or, are there still valid means to salvation and knowing Truth?
Dr. Winkel
In a way, the same way that when Rasulullah ﷺ, when he’s alive, you hear mostly about what he is seeing in front of him. He’s the sun. He’s the one who is shining bright. And it’s when he passes away that you realise that these stars and the moon, that it’s all one light. And in a way, when Ibn al-ʿArabī is talking, he’s talking to his immediate audience, is Muslim. And when he’s talking that way, if he’s talking to me and saying, ‘I should do something,’ he’s gonna say, ‘Follow the Sharia.’ He said, ‘Follow the Sharia, as you have been taught, by your grandparents, or by the Muslim community, or whatever it is.’ And so we have to, in a sense, read between the lines or read certain parts to find out what Ibn al-ʿArabī—how do you make that practical? How do you practically do that? One of the ways he did that, when he went to Greece, he went to people who he thought were sun worshipers. When he talks to one of their Ulema, he calls him the Ulema, one of the wise people, the people who know. As any good Muslim, he says, ‘What’s wrong with you? You’re worshipping the sun? Don’t you know that God is one?’ You can hear that that’s kind of what Muslims do when we see idols and things like that. We say, ‘What’s wrong with you?! Don’t you know that God is one?’ And he gets the answer that, ‘Of course, we know God is one! Of course we have tawḥīd. We know that God is one. But the sun is the closest image that we have to this life-giving divinity, who gives us light and nourishment, and feeds us, and cherishes us. And so, therefore, we honour and respect the sun above all other objects in creation.’ Ibn al-ʿArabī said he was happy with this answer, and sat down and they ate together.
Dr. Winkel
So what’s interesting at this point, Ibn al-ʿArabī did not say, ‘Here’s a 600-page book manual on fiqh.’ He did not give him a 600-page manual on fiqh. He did not say, ‘Oh, you should be a Shafii or you should be a Hanafi or you should be Hanbali.’ He did not say, ‘I want to hear you convert right now, and I want you to promise to follow Islam and all its details, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.’ He said, ‘I was happy with his answer.’ So Ibn al-ʿArabī is saying, ‘When you find someone who can articulate for you the truth that they have, which is a God is one, and if they can articulate that truth for you, you honour that truth. And you say, you are pleased to hear that someone has that truth.’
Dr. Winkel
As to what goes next, that all depends on circumstances and situations. One of the first thing that we learned when we studied fiqh, and I think a friend of mine wrote this maybe on Facebook or something and I don’t know if he said that before, but the fundamental principle of fiqh for the fuqahā is M.Y.O.B.—mind your own business. Because, and Ibn al-ʿArabī tells us, when Ḥajjāj, who by all accounts was the most horrible oppressive leader the world has ever seen, was murdering Muslims left and right, he was a horrible person. And yet, he was leading the prayer. Ibn al-ʿArabī says people at that time said, ‘Should we follow this person as the imām when he’s such a horrible person?’ And Ibn al-ʿArabī says, ‘The answer is quite easy. I look at him and he has done his wuḍūʾ, his ablutions. And he is saying Allahu Akbar, and he is leading the prayer correctly. What happened before to him in his past, what trauma he experienced, I don’t know. And what Allah will do with him in the future, I don’t know. So Allah might make him to be a wonderful person who helps everyone tomorrow. So what he does, has done in the past, we don’t know. What happens to him in the future, we don’t know. All we know is the present. And at the present moment, he did his ablution, he stood up correctly. He is the imām for us.’
Dr. Winkel
So Ibn al-ʿArabī is counselling us to be non-judgemental. We don’t know what brought people to where they are. They do things and we don’t know what traumas they’ve gone through. We don’t know what hardships they’ve had. And we also don’t know what’s going to happen to them tomorrow. Tomorrow they may be the one person who helps us when we fall. All we have is today. There’s one moment, and that moment is to say, ‘Don’t read a 600-page manual on fiqh during that moment, but really be yourself. Be who you are. And then, I interact with you as you are in the present.’ So this non-judgemental state is so very, very important. And that is how we look at people and we interact with them. We say, in a non-judgmental way, ‘How can I recognise the truth that you have been receiving? And we can converse with the truth that I have been receiving.’ We can see our truths instead of argue about who’s right, who’s wrong, and who’s doxology and whose dogmatic things are correct or not correct. Because, that sentence right here: No one knows anything of the True except oneself.
Saqib
Wow. So Sidi, along those lines, with the fiqh side, would you say Ibn al-ʿArabī has his own school, maḏhab, the Akbarian maḏhab? Or, is he affirming the four Sunni schools and the Ja’fari school, and simply offering more perspective into that? Or, would you say that there’s an Akbarian school of religious law?
Dr. Winkel
Yes, certainly, as the seal of Muḥammadan sanctity, a seal, the culmination, he has to take the 1000 pages of fiqh. I wonder if someone has a number. They’re about 800, let’s say, 800 fiqh issues about sitting down when you’re drinking, standing up when you’re drinking, putting your hands this way, putting your hands that way, wiping your arms past your elbow or up to below the shoulder. There are maybe 800 positions, 800 issues that have positions. And Ibn al-ʿArabī as the seal, as the culmination of Sharia, then has to be able to show us that every position is there, is possible, is available. So he has to show the universality of Sharia. And that means that the Sharia has to apply to every time and place. To show that it applies to every time and place, he looks to every single fiqh issue, and then gives his inside view of that, his inward view of all of that. But he puts them all down so that you can see that he is sealing. He is saying take all of these positions on whether I wipe up to the elbow, to the below the shoulder, or just below the elbow. He takes all the positions, shows how all of them are true, and then seals them. That’s the culmination. That they are all true.
Dr. Winkel
For instance, someone who is a woman who wears the hijab. She wears the hijab, that is true. She’s not wearing the hijab, that’s also true, because there are many situations where you do not wear the hijab and there are situations where you do wear the hijab. And so it depends on the situation. Who is leading the prayer? Someone leads the prayer who is the most in Qur’ān. But also, you lead the prayer when you’re being taught how to lead the prayer. So someone who is less excellent will lead the prayer because the person who is most excellent is teaching them how to lead the prayer. In other words, non-judgemental, because when I see someone leading the prayer, I can’t say, ‘Is that the most person in the Qur’ān, or is the most person in fiqh, or is that the most oldest person, or the most male person, or any of these other things?’ I can’t know, because I don’t know what their situation is at that moment. But all of these positions are valid. And so, if they’re all valid, then he is the seal of them. He’s the culmination of them. See, if we hold on to the Sharia and the fiqh of the Sharia that one imām had, and we go to New York, or we go to Beijing, I don’t know if it’s still going to apply. I don’t know if it’s going to be universal enough to handle a situation in 21st century New York or 21st century Beijing. But if you take Ibn al-ʿArabī’s culmination of the fiqh, that one will work anywhere. It will work if you are in a Muslim country, in a non-Muslim country, if you are in the middle of being attacked for being a Muslim, or you are being loved because you’re a Muslim, or if you’re a man, if you’re a woman, if you’re a child, if you’re an old person, if you’re sick. Every single possible position is there. You will have a position and that will be your guidance and your way to the water. It will be your Sharia, your way to the water.
Saqib
So, if Ibn al-ʿArabī, was physically alive today, and he was in a room with, say, a Salafi, who took one view, shall we say. And then a more modern, postmodern person who was, say, a controversial topic, for example, reducing the fasting hours, or maybe female women-led prayers. Would Ibn al-ʿArabī say they’re both correct? Or, would he say, one is correct? Or, they’re both valid? But then the issue with the one perspective is when one particular school—either they’re mutually exclusive—so one is saying the other one is not valid, and then Ibn al-ʿArabī is saying, no, you’re both valid. But then, part of the problem is precisely that relative truth or a relative perspective, saying dogmatically or otherwise, that this is the correct opinion. So how would Ibn al-ʿArabī reconcile something like women-led prayer, for example?
Dr. Winkel
In a sense, I didn’t know it then, but when I wrote the book called The Living Law, and that’s available also online, I think. The Living Law. And that’s in a sense what you’re asking. If Ibn al-ʿArabī is living today, what does he say? What he says is that there is no relativity, and there is no exclusivity, either. Neither one of those, because there is the name, ism, the state, the hal, and rule, the ḥukm. Once you know the name of something, and you know its condition or state hal, then the ḥukm is fixed, is known. It doesn’t change. The name has to be applied correctly. I have to say, ‘Am I sick? Am I a male? Am I this? Am I that?’ And then I have to ask my hal, ‘What’s my situation?’ And then, only then, when I know my name and my situation, then the ḥukm, the rule, is fixed. That one never changes. There is no relativistic thing. You can’t say that the rule changes. The rule doesn’t change.
Dr. Winkel
So, let’s say, it’s Friday afternoon, the call of prayers is there. I’m working in a country which does not respect Islam or respect Muslims. I lose my job if I go to the Friday prayer. If that is my particular situation, as who I am, I am no longer a free man. Because a free man is the one who’s able to go to the call when the call appears there. I’m able to walk out of my house and go to that place of prayer. If I’m not that, then I’m not a free man. So you need to give me another name, like ‘slave’, because I’m not in charge of my daily life. I can’t lose this job. No one will accept—I can’t go just run away and go to Friday prayers. If that’s the case, if I’m a slave, then the rule is very clear. A slave is not required to go to Friday prayers. If I’m in prison, I’m not required to go to Friday prayers. So I have to know my name. I have to know my state. And then the rule is a single rule. That’s the way it is. It doesn’t change. I don’t have to say that Friday prayer, we need to loosen the rules. We don’t need to loosen the rules. We just need to tighten the names.
Dr. Winkel
If I’m a woman who has no kids, don’t have to worry about anything, I’m completely independent. And I hear the call to prayer, then I’m actually in a state of 1400 years ago of a man because I’m independent. But if me, as a man and taking care of my child, and no one else can help me with my baby at that moment, and the Friday prayer is called, and I’ve got a little one year old, you know, you can’t leave a little one year old. And so, I now have to take on the name, Mother. I am the mother. And the mother is not required to go to Friday prayers. And so, when that call of prayer is called, I don’t feel bad or guilty or anything. I’m a woman taking care of this child. I have not been called to go to Friday prayer. So what Ibn al-ʿArabī is doing for us is saying, find out who is being addressed. To listen carefully and find out. Are you being addressed by this command? If you are, follow it completely. Don’t bend anything. Don’t make anything loose or flexible. Follow it completely. But first, find out who is being addressed. Are you being addressed?
Saqib
Wow. Sidi what does Ibn al-ʿArabī mean by, in his perspective, the transcendence and immanence, tanzīh and tašbīh of divine reality. How does that infuse his perspective and his works?
Dr. Winkel
I’ve been looking at that over in these sessions for the mid-year. It’s just absolutely fascinating, because what we see happening is that people think that, ‘If I want to be really religious, really pious, then God has to be very transcendent. And so everything that’s good and transcendent is God. And everything that’s low and immanent is me.’ So, there’s this real divide. And Ibn al-ʿArabī is telling us that that is actually neither very helpful nor very polite. And it’s not the way to understand the divine. And we go back to the passage when he talks, and I think he has this twice in the Futūḥāt. Someone asked, ‘What is the most tremendous Name of Allah? What is the most tremendous Name of God?’ And a person throws a stone at him, says, ‘You are the most tremendous name.’ What this says is that all of these names, all of the things that we see around us, are Allah doing something. They’re Divine Names. They’re all Divine Names. If I want to say only the transcendent ones are divine, then I’m really only seeing half of the Divine. And if I’m seeing half the divine, I’m really not even seeing the divine.
Dr. Winkel
And so we need to say that when Allah is going to give a force, qāhar, a force in this world, then that is the Divine Name. And I have to appreciate it as the Divine Name. Just the way I have to appreciate that your name is the most tremendous name of God. By doing that, that is the true honouring of Allah. Because otherwise, in a sense, I’m saying that Allah is ‘over there’. Whenever he does something good that I like, and it seems very transcendent and very exhalted, that’s going to be God and everything else is me. And that enters into shirk because it’s saying that I’m a god, I’m just not as good a god as that God. And Allah says, ‘No, there’s only the one God. All of it, the high and the low, is Me.’ The word Jalāl—so fascinating—Jalāl. Ibn al-ʿArabī always plays with this. Jalāl means two things. It means coarse, rough, hard, difficult. And it means easy, flexible, smooth, and loose. So Jalāl has its own antonym, has its own opposites. So Jalāl is both this course, hard, rugged, rough, and is easy, soft, flexible, and smooth. And so right there, we see that all of this is going to be the divine. My seeking is to find Allah in all of the manifestations of the Divine. Not just the ones that I think are elevated or intellectual or transcendent. So that’s why he loves to come on with a Ḥadīth Qudsi, because Allah is amazed at the youth who shows no youthful folly and says, ‘How can Allah be amazed at something if he knows everything?’ And he says, ‘Well, sit with that for a while. Sit with the Ḥadīth Qudsi.’ That’s the one that will tell us that Allah is so close. To see Allah being so close is the beginning of seeing the divine everywhere.
Saqib
Sidi, you mentioned earlier that Ibn al-ʿArabī doesn’t write from his own personal perspective, necessarily. And correct me if I’m wrong, but he actually says everything was given to him. And so, in the Futūḥāt I believe, he mentions a silent youth who meets him in Mecca, a mysterious figure who imparts the whole Futūḥāt to him. And then in the Fuṣūṣ, at the very outset, he says this book is given to him by the prophet, peace be upon him. And so, there’s nothing in the book from himself. Could you say something about that? Does that come across to you when you read Ibn al-ʿArabī?
Dr. Winkel
Yes, so the Fuṣūṣ, I used to read it years and years ago, but I haven’t read it for decades now. But when I do pick up and see someone said, ‘Oh, here’s a sentence from the Fuṣūṣ. I’ll look at that.’ I’ll say, ‘Well, that’s not the same style as the Futūḥāt at all. That’s not written by the same person at all.’ And it doesn’t mean it’s not written by Ibn al-ʿArabī. It means, it’s not Ibn al-ʿArabī’s way of writing. Because it was given to him. So the Futūḥāt is his way of writing. But what was given to him, is he went to that place, which is etched in the body of the youth. Etched in his photographic light—written. Written in light in the youth. So he reads that. And then he writes in his own language, and his own way, what he’s seen. And so, you very much get this. You understand, when you read the Futūḥāt, that you understand who this person is. It’s his language, his way of writing, his way of thinking. All of that is clear, because he’s looking at that site, in the youth, and then turning around and recording it, in Arabic, in the 13th century.
Dr. Winkel
And so, that’s in a sense also, that’s how he tells us you read the Qur’ān. You go to the site where the Qur’ān was revealed, and then you understand why it came out in those words, and then you understand it in your own language as well. And so, Ibn al-ʿArabī’s Futūḥāt, one of the things that people say, ‘When you translate, is each word translated the same way?’ Never! It’s never translated the same way. Because he’s translating, he uses the words, but you know he means something. That has to come out in the English. Like in English, we have sweat and perspire. So sweat is an English word. And perspire is a French word. We have a culture where those Anglo words like sweat are, or Germanic words, are hard and rough. And the other words that are like coming from French, are more feminine and sophisticated, and so on. So if you have a word in Arabic, ʿaraq, sweat—Do you say sweat? Or, do you say perspire? Because I’m immersed Ibn al-ʿArabī’s writings, I know when he means sweat and when he means perspire, and I can’t just use the same word. What’s he trying to say? What does he want me to hear? And especially in the poetry, his imagery is so beautiful. In the poem that I’m reading right now, he’s talking about kadr, which is like a muddiness, and ranq, which is like the motes of particles in the mud. And I have to come up with the word that’s going to explain. Muddy is not the same as soiled or polluted or off. Muddy, this is not a bad thing. It just means that there are particles in there. So I need to find those words in English that are conveying what he wants me to convey. That’s why I’m beginning to just love the poetry so much because I hear him say that. And I say, ‘Well I am English. If I say, “muddy,” do I have the idea of confounding in there? Is the idea of not being solid, you know, bad, but just that everything’s mixed up, and mixed up is different from confounding?’ So I get to play with all of these words in English as well, to say, ‘This is what he says when he speaks in English.’
Saqib
Bārakallāhu fīk. Yeah, Sidi, I really feel we can go on all night here. And I’m mindful, I’ve taken enough of your time already. But with the intention, ʾinshāʾallāh, to continue these conversations and maybe have a more focused one in the future about certain, maybe a chapter or a particular passage of the Futūḥāt. I just want to thank you so much for your time and for honouring us with your wisdom and insight of reading Ibn al-ʿArabī and sharing that with our listeners.
Dr. Winkel
Okay. Al-ḥamdu lillāh. As-salāmu ʿalaykum wa-raḥmatullāhi wa-barakātuhu.
