A00202 - Book of the Month for the Month of October 2023: Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Last week, I finished reading Surviving Death by Leslie Kean, and on September 30, I finished reading The Song of Bernadette by Franz Werfel. Surviving Death was interesting but a bit disappointing in not exploring the rather abundant documented afterlife beliefs and practices of other cultures and the prolific afterlife beliefs of many established religions. In conjunction with these worldwide beliefs and practices, it seems clear to me that there is life after death. And The Song of Bernadette simply confirmed that an afterlife consciousness can continue to exist thousands of years after the body is gone.
While all of Ibn ‘Arabî’s writings – and most especially the Futuhat – are replete with autobiographical discussions of his extraordinary inner visionary life and spiritual experiences, everything that is known about him from external sources indicates that in his later years he rigorously lived up to his own ideal of the hidden, “solitary” Friends of God (the afrâd or malâmîya) as the highest of the spiritual ranks, “invisible” in their outward conformity to the normative practices of the revelation and the ethical and social obligations common to all – carefully avoiding the public, visible “spiritual gifts” (karamât) popularly associated with many shaykhs and the then-nascent forms of institutionalized Sufism. Although he was accompanied by a small group of friends and close disciples, who became the eventual vehicles for his later wider influence, Ibn ‘Arabî seems to have been best known in his own day as a religious scholar and student of hadith, an impression that could only have been encouraged by his phenomenally prolific literary output of hundreds of works, of which the Futuhat was apparently by far the longest and most comprehensive. [5]
Even Ibn ‘Arabî’s most skeptical biographers have been compelled to note the remarkable way subsequent history has come to confirm his self-conception of his destined role as the “Seal of Muhammadan Sainthood”, [6] whose voluminous writings – and more important, the underlying spiritual “Reality” that they are meant to reveal and convey – were specially intended to open up the inner spiritual meanings at the heart of all preceding prophetic revelations (and especially the Qur’an and hadith). At the time of his death, Ibn ‘Arabî himself was virtually unknown, in any wider public sense, in that Mongol/Crusader period when Islamic public authority almost vanished for some decades from all but a handful of Arab cities (and permanently from most of his native Andalusia).
Moreover, all of his “books” discussed here existed only in a handful of manuscript copies, left behind in the Maghreb or restricted to the assiduous students and future transmitters of his teachings during his final years in Damascus. Yet within a few centuries, through one of those mysterious developments so familiar to the historian of religions, his writings – foremost among them the Bezels of Wisdom (Fusûs al-Hikam) and these Meccan Revelations – had come to constitute the constantly cited source of inspiration, and justification (and, as a result, a frequent polemic target) for that vast movement of religious, cultural, social, and literary creativity that brought into being the institutions and masterworks of the Islamic humanities. It was through those creative developments, in a wide gamut of languages, cultures and new institutions, that Islam became a true world religion, with its new cultural and political centers stretching from Southern and Eastern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa across to Central Asia, India and Southeast Asia. [7] Despite the historically quite recent ideological responses to colonialism, the transformations of modernity and the new demands of the nation-state, most Muslims throughout the world have lived for the past six or seven centuries in cultural, spiritual and religious worlds [8] whose accomplished forms would be unimaginable without the profound impact of ideas rooted in and expressed by Ibn ‘Arabî. Even his later honorific title, “the greatest Master” (al-Shaykh al-Akbar), does not really begin to suggest the full extent of those influences.
A second, equally mysterious stage in Ibn ‘Arabî’s ongoing influence has been the ways his writings and concepts have served, over the past century, to inspire contemporary intellectuals and students of religion and spirituality outside traditionally Islamic cultures. Faced with a cosmopolitan, multireligious world not unlike the great Muslim empires of the Ottomans, Safavids and Moguls, these thinkers have increasingly relied on Ibn ‘Arabî’s works and ideas for the task of creating the common language and subtle conceptual structure required to communicate universal spiritual realities in an increasingly global civilization. [9]
Comments
Post a Comment