Perspectives on Physical Beauty in the Thought of Ibn Arabi and Rumi

by Timothy Schum BA in Liberal Arts, May 2013, St. John’s College

A Thesis submitted to

The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

January 31st, 2016

Thesis Directed By

Mohammad H. Faghfoory Professorial Lecturer and Director of Graduate Program in Islamic Studies

Table of Contents

Table of Transliterations...... iv

Chapter I: Introduction and Methodology ...... 1

Chapter II: The Limitations of Form ...... 8

Chapter III. The Transcendent Reality of Form ...... 17

Chapter IV. Imaginal Perception and the Possessor of Two Eyes...... 24

Chapter V: Beauty and Love ...... 38

Chapter VI: Praxis ...... 47

Chapter VII: Conclusion ...... 78

Chapter Bibliography ...... 81

iii

Table of Transliterations

Arabic Latin Arabic Latin ‘ ء b Short Vowels ب t َ a ت th َ i ث j َ u ج ḥ ح kh Long Vowels خ ā ا d د ī ي dh ذ ū و r ر z ز a ة s س sh ش ṣ ص ḍ ض ṭ ط p پ ẓ ظ ‘ ع gh غ f ف q ق k ك l ل m م n ن h ه w و y ي

(Transliterations found in quotes have been preserved without changes.)

I: Introduction and Methodology

“I speak no more, but for the sake of averting headache, O cup-bearer, make drunken my languishing eye.”1

Individual mystical traditions, so far as they attempt to address fundamental metaphysical, cosmic, and – most critically – human questions, aspire to being comprehensive; i.e. mysticism understands itself as relevant to all aspects of thought and life. Thus a given system of mystical thought – whether it is Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, etc. – possesses an aesthetic relevance, maintaining – either explicitly or implicitly – certain aesthetic positions and perspectives. Though the Islamic mystical tradition – generally referred to as Sufism – did not develop a distinct discipline of aesthetics, a fact it shares in common with the Islamic philosophic tradition, it does indeed have much to say on the theoretical and practical dimensions of aesthetic experience. As a means of approaching this topic, this thesis examines the role of physical beauty in the thought of two major Sufi authors, Ibn ‘Arabī and Mawlānā Jalāluddīn Rūmī,2 who are sufficiently prominent so as to consider their thought typical – if not representative – of aesthetic attitudes in Islamic mysticism. Examining these masters together is promising so far as they exhibit similar perspectives toward physical beauty, while writing in different literary modes, languages

(i.e. Arabic and Persian), and with varying degrees of systematization. Hailing from the geographic extremes of the 13th-century Islamic world – one from Arab Spain, the other from Persianate Central Asia – Ibn Arabi (d. 1240) and Rumi (d. 1273) were near-

______1 Rumi, 2004: 13 2 Diacritical marks will henceforth be foregone when referring to our primary authors; their names will thus be transliterated as Ibn Arabi and Jalaluddin Rumi.

1 contemporaries that together represent the coalescence of the Islamic spiritual tradition as it developed before them, and have for over seven centuries held over it unparalleled posthumous influence. Taken together, their thoughts on physical beauty thus serve as a suitable starting point from which to investigate perspectives toward physical beauty in the broader Sufi tradition, both before and after the 13th century.

To that end, this this work intends to provide an introductory conceptual overview of the authors’ perspectives on physical beauty, as presented in their writings. This thesis intends to discuss physical – and exclusively visual – beauty, precisely because spiritual or

‘beatific’ vision, including its modes and mechanics of perception, have received greater scholarly attention. Moreover, it is physical beauty specifically that presents a more direct correlate to the work of Western aesthetic studies, both philosophic and religious. This topic is approached conceptually, so far as the present work elucidates common themes and attitudes that run throughout the primary sources while not necessarily being treated in isolation by Ibn Arabi and Rumi themselves. Indeed, Sufi writing – no less so the writing of Ibn Arabi and Rumi – is often syntactically and conceptually polyvalent, thus lending itself to brevity, ease of memorization, and of course prolonged or repetitive contemplation on the part of the audience. This does, however, present difficulties insofar as it does not provide a clear exposition of the authors’ aesthetic views; thus, for an academic paper interested in this specific topic, a conceptual approach is invaluable. Furthermore, the conceptual approach allows for a ‘filling in’ of presuppositions, common notions, and logical steps that for a variety of reasons pass unarticulated in the primary sources, thus hopefully providing the reader with a sense of the coherent logic that underlies somewhat opaque and – quite properly – esoteric ‘speculations.’ This work does not pretend to be a

2 comprehensive exposition of these aesthetic perspectives, a task that exceeds our present scope. It does, however, hopefully provide a sufficient conceptual framework, treating all major attitudes and the majority of technical concepts in connection with physical beauty, with the intention of serving as a starting point for further personal and academic investigations.

With this approach and its goals in mind, this thesis is directed at an audience already conversant in the basic doctrinal and historical contours of Islamic religion and civilization, as well as its mystical tradition, i.e. Sufism, in its literary and historical dimensions. Accordingly, there is minimal explanatory and contextual material beyond the limits of the immediate discussion. Nonetheless, certain crucial concepts, in particular certain prophetic aḥadīth (utterances) and Sufi philosophic/mystical doctrines have been briefly outlined given their centrality to the arguments and positions assumed by Ibn Arabi and Rumi. Hopefully these will be sufficient refreshers for those with prior knowledge, as well as adequate provisional introductions for those to whom such concepts are completely new. Quotations and references drawn from other Sufi authors, e.g. Fakhruddīn ‘Irāqī, are included for the purposes of clarifying and expanding upon concepts present in Ibn Arabi and Rumi; for the sake of brevity, information regarding the historical contexts of such authors is left to the prior knowledge or further research of the reader.

In keeping with a conceptual approach, the content of Ibn Arabi and Rumi’s thought takes precedence here over historical contextualization, considering their thoughts as well as those of other Sufi authors to be intrinsically conversant and interrelateable. This position is itself historically tenable so far as the pre-modern Islamic world possessed a

3 remarkable degree of intellectual and idiomatic integration, especially among the literate class to which Ibn Arabi and Rumi belonged; in contemporary academic terms, it can be said that Sufi authors possessed historically significant imagined solidarities that contributed to and maintained a common literate culture across vast geographies. This was in large part due to the trans-cultural role of Arabic as a sacred and intellectual lingua franca throughout the Islamic world, as well as the dissemination of a largely uniform intellectual culture that maintained a common hierarchy of intellectual disciplines, linguistic/conceptual symbols, and technical terminology. Of course the ultimate conclusion from this is that beyond the self-evident conceptual commonalities that run throughout Ibn Arabi and Rumi’s writing, as well as the literature of the broader Sufi tradition, there also existed a tangible historical milieu which influenced and was in turn influenced by our authors. The notable exception to this work’s generally ahistorical approach is found in turning from theoretical to practical approaches to physical beauty, where a historical approach is necessitated by the fact that our authors’ comments in this area are themselves contextualized within an established discourse on ritualized gazing

(Arabic: naẓar, Persian: shāhidbāzī), and thus cannot be sufficiently interpreted without the aid of historical contextualization.

In terms of organization, the earlier chapters of this thesis (II, III, IV) proceed in sequence, detailing two contrary perspectives that consider physical beauty as either intrinsically limited/other-than-God or as divine manifestation/naught-but-God, before turning to a discussion of the metaphysics of perception that provides a solution to this tension. The later chapters (V, VI) stand somewhat independent of the others and each other. Chapter Five addresses one of the fundamental spiritual ‘functions’ of physical

4 beauty in the thought of Ibn Arabi and Rumi, namely its capacity to enjoin love in the heart of the mystic, whereas Chapter Six concerns itself with practical, rather than theoretical/speculative attitudes toward physical beauty. Throughout the course of the work, the authors are referenced and considered simultaneously rather than receiving their own discrete sections of each chapter. This approach is be helpful, so far as avoids redundancy and allows the greater systematization of Ibn Arabi's writing to elaborate on and complement similar assertions found in Rumi's oeuvre.

Having discussed the purposes of this thesis along with its methodology and structure a brief overview of the idiomatic framing and conceptual role of beauty in the

Qur’an and Prophetic ḥadīths (utterances) will be helpful before moving on, to remind the reader of the general intellectual framework in which beauty is addressed by the

Islamic tradition. As far back as the Qur’an and the example of the Prophet Muhammad, the Islamic tradition is notable for its consistent pairing of Truth and Beauty; that is to say that the goals of the religious and especially mystical life is inseparable from the presence of beauty. Perhaps the most decisive articulation of this is in the famous saying of the

Prophet, "God is beautiful and He loves Beauty." (Inna Allahu jamīl yuḥibbu al-jamāl)

The sentiment behind this ḥadīth is echoed in the Qur'an, itself a masterpiece of quasi- poetic prose, where it asserts that "God's [names] are the Most Beautiful Names,"3 i.e. the

Asmā' al-Ḥusnā.4 Significant here is that while 'The Beautiful' (al-Jamīl) is not among the 99 enumerated divine names found in the Qur’an, these names are contained within divine Beauty, so far as they are collectively considered the ‘Most Beautiful Names.’

______3 7:180 4 Also referenced in Qur’an 17:110, 20:8, 59:24.

The Islamic tradition has given further religious significance to beauty where it has organized the 99 enumerated Names into names of Majesty (jalāl) – such as the Powerful

(al-Qawī) or the Compeller (al-Jabbār) – and Beauty (jamāl), which includes the All-

Merciful, (ar-Raḥman), The Loving (al-Wadūd) etc. It is also notable that the Qur’an is itself inalienable from a profoundly aesthetic experience, possessing a distinctive eloquence (balāgha) which reverberates with a unique musicality when recited. It is again significant that this aesthetic quality is not considered by the Islamic tradition as a mere accident of the text, but rather one of its most significant features, even serving as a means of facilitating conversion and proving its miraculous nature.5

This is in large part because beauty, as conceived by the Islamic intellectual tradition, is not a superfluous – albeit pleasurable – cosmic accident; rather, it is an inherently ontological quality, which, as will be demonstrated later in Chapter 5, is a fundamental element of existence itself. This attitude can be observed even in a linguistic investigation of the twin Arabic terms for beauty, jamāl and ḥusn. Jamāl conveys both beauty and propriety,6 a sense of 'being fitting.' Ḥusn, alternatively, simultaneously conveys both beauty and excellence.7 This carries obvious ontological import, so far as discussions of excellence, perfection, or completion (kamāl) imply gradations of Being. (wujūd) Thus both major terms for beauty possess something of the sense of the good (al-khayr), either relationally – as in being proper or fit (jamāl) – or self-referentially, essentially, intrinsically – as in possessing excellence. (ḥusn) This is of course demonstrably different from the English ‘beauty,’ which originally derives from

______5 For a detailed study of this topic, see Navid Kermani, “God is Beautiful: The Aesthetic Experience of the Qur’an,” Polity Press 2014. 6 Wehr, 1976: 137 7 Ibid.: 209

Latin bellitas – the "state of being handsome...charming " – via the Old French biauté, 8 and is thus confined to the purely sensorial.

A particular ḥadīth of the Prophet highlights the ontological significance of ḥusn, stating that iḥsān, i.e. ḥusn in its particular aspect as 'excellence,' was ‘written on every

(individual) thing.’ (Inn'Allaha kataba al-iḥsān 'ala kulli shay’) Thus a thing’s ḥusn is implicitly linked to its quiddity, as it is by means of a particular beauty that a thing is individuated. In other words, while particulars participate in a fundamentally unitary, divine Beauty (ḥusn, iḥsān), it is manifested in a unique form for each. Thus the quintessential beauty of a horse, for example, serves as a manifestation of and pointer to its quiddity as a horse, rather than as anything else. Similarly, the mountain possesses its own ḥusn, which though typical of the mountain is nonetheless – ultimately – of the same, unitary divine ḥusn in which it participates and manifests, along with the other particulars.

______8 Online Etymology Dictionary, “Beauty”

II: The Limitations of Form

To begin, it is apparent that the Islamic universe in which Ibn Arabi and Rumi wrote presupposes a transcendent god. Like Christianity and Judaism, Islam conceives of divinity as a wholly nondelimited (muṭlaq) reality – it is at once omniscient, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent – in the sense of the Augustinian argument that evil is a privation.

Ontologically, nondelimitation indicates that divinity is not a contingent being; rather, it is the sole Necessary Being (wājib al-wujūd). It is also not delimited in terms of person: strictly speaking, divinity is neither ‘he,’ nor ‘she,’ nor ‘you.’ Ibn Arabi is careful to articulate this in his Meccan Openings (Futūḥāt al-Makkīya), 9 recalling for his reader that only for the servant (‘abd) is the divine reality God (Allah) or Lord (Rabb). There cannot be a god (ilah) except which has “that which is ‘godded over’”10 (ma’lūh), just as there can be no Lord (Rabb) except which has a vassal (marbūb).11 In itself, divinity is

Ḥaqq – the Real, which exists beyond all dualistic relationships. This absolute unicity of the divine essence precludes access to itself by any other than itself, as Ibn Arabi says:

In respect to His Essence and His Being, nothing stands up to the Real [al-Haqq]; He cannot be desired or sought in His Essence. The seeker seeks and the desirer desires only knowledge (ma'rifa) of Him, witnessing of Him, or vision of Him, and all of these are from Him; they are not He Himself.12 (II 663. 9)

______9 Though English translators more commonly render futūḥāt as ‘revelations,’ this is unsatisfying so far as it misses the spiritual immediacy of the term’s literal meaning, i.e. ‘openings,’ instead preferring to emphasize one of its exclusively religious meanings. 10 Chittick, 1989: 60 11 Ibid.: 60 12 Ibid.: 228

Thus it is operative knowledge13 of the Real – not the Real itself – that constitutes the ultimate goal of spiritual practice, so far as none has access to it save itself.

This divine nondelimitation is intuitively perceived through point of contrast with material existence, at which point one can speak relationally, and assert that ‘God possesses tanzīḥ.’ (transcendence) Accordingly, the Islamic intellectual tradition has often defined the cosmos as “everything other than God.”14 Spatial entities are inherently bounded, and temporal entities are subject to the world of becoming, passing through phases of generation and corruption. Wherever one turns in the world of forms, which are inherently delimited, the nondelimited cannot be found. Thus emerge negative theology, which can continuously describe what God is not by point of contrast with the inherently limited things of the world. This is of course not a question of magnitude – i.e. no matter a thing’s size, its delimitation categorically precludes its identification with the divine reality. Rumi clarifies this for his students, reminding them that even the spatial and temporal matrices themselves cannot be predicated of God:

'Above' and 'below' are for us who have physical existence… He [God] transcends 'above' and 'below.' They are all the same to Him.15

Delimited by space and time, matter is manifestly finite and delimited, and it is in this sense that the Qur’an forbids idolatry, so far as no material object can encompass the

______13 Knowledge in the sense of mental information is not the goal for either Ibn Arabi or Rumi, so far as it maintains a distinction between the knower and the known. Operative knowledge, however, indicates the individual’s actualization of what Rumi calls the universal intellect (‘aql-i kullī), which by virtue of its theomorphic nature does not participate in dualistic relationships, such as the I-thou dichotomies of creator and created, master and servant, knower and known, lover and beloved, etc. 14 Chittick, 1989: 114 15 Thackston, 1994: 108

9 reality of the Real; form and divinity are of entirely different orders altogether, and are in that sense incommensurable.

The fundamental limitation of form is a fact of human experience. Purely formal analyses are rarely sufficient to understand the myriad things that populate the world, and judgments based solely on appearances quickly prove to be faulty. Living things – particularly animals and humans – provide the clearest evidence of this, so far as their faculties and behaviors are not formal qualities. As one proceeds through the various kingdoms of medieval natural philosophy – the mineral, vegetal, animal, and human realms

– it becomes increasingly apparent that while some qualities are manifest (ẓāhir), i.e. pertaining to form, there are a great many others that are concealed (bāṭin) within form.

Rumi reminds his students that "an ear that can hear and a deaf ear look the same. They both have the same shape, but one does not hear. Hearing then is concealed in the ear and cannot be seen."16 For him as well as Ibn Arabi, this state of affairs gives rise to a dichotomy between sensible forms (ṣūrah, pl.: ṣūwār) and their inner dimension, most commonly identified as meaning (ma’na), although both authors at times use different sets of terms – such as the Qur’anic terms body (jasad) and spirit (rūḥ) – which express the same dichotomy in its more specific cases:

The whole of the cosmos is body and spirit, and through the two of these, existence17 is configured. The cosmos is to the Real as the body is to the spirit. Just as the spirit is not known except through the body (so also the Real is not known except through the cosmos)… We name that meaning the "spirit" of this body. (III 314.22)

______16 Thackston, 1994: 224-225 17 For Ibn Arabi, existence (kawn) is distinct from Being. (wujūd) Whereas all things have eternal– albeit potential – being in God, it is creation actualizes this being and augments it with existence, i.e. a distinct reality not wholly identifiable with the divine reality. Understood as an act of mercy, (nafas ar-Raḥman) the purpose of this creation is the subject of the opening discussion of his Bezels of Wisdom. (Fuṣūṣ al- Ḥikam) See The Ringstones of Wisdom, trans. Caner Dagli, 2004, pgs. 3-17. A similar distinction between existence and Being is discernable, though less explicitly articulated, in Rumi’s work.

In concept, form and meaning “are mutually exclusive, since meanings belong to the World of Intelligence and are free of any sort of matter or substratum (madda), while sensory forms belong to the external world of corporeal bodies”18 and are thus intrinsically material. However, as the above quote from Ibn Arabi indicates, in the sensible world these two are effectively conjoined in various objects of sensation despite remaining conceptually distinct: every object with form is simultaneously imbued with meaning. In creating the world, "God… combined body with spirit for a day or two."19

In its particular function as spirit (rūḥ), the vital cosmic function of meaning is implied. Indeed, the fact that even inanimate rocks possess meaning is due to the fact that it is only through meaning that form exists whatsoever. “The gross subsists through the subtle,” Rumi says, “from which it derives whatever it has. Without the subtle the gross would be useless, foul, coarse, and unworthy."20 Form is called useless because it is inherently passive and inert, in contrast to meaning or spirit (rūḥ) which is active and capable of imposing itself upon form. Thus, Rumi’s extensive discussion of the form/meaning dichotomy in his discourses21 maintains that form is but the manifestation of meaning, the vehicle through which meaning is conveyed to the senses: “You can see your breath in winter but not in summer… Likewise, all your attributes and substances are

______18 Chittick, 1989: 115 19 Thackston, 1994: 231 20 Ibid.: 149 21 The dichotomy between form and meaning runs throughout the Fīhi Mā Fī, and provides much of the groundwork for Rumi’s arguments about language and epistemology, informing his understanding of such categories as ‘ilm al-abdān (the knowledge of bodies) and ‘ilm al-adyān, (the knowledge of religions, i.e. meanings). Which are concepts crucial to broader studies of his work and thought.

11 too subtle to be seen except through the medium of action,”22 i.e. dynamic form. Imagined in spatial terms, meaning is superior and heavenly, while form is inferior and worldly. "It's the gist that counts; the rest just gives you a headache."23

This is not to say that form is entirely negative worthless for Ibn Arabi and Rumi, who understand it to have immense value, especially as a didactic tool, even in its dichotomous relationship with spirit or meaning.24 Were this not the case, their poetic works would be superfluous and discursive treatises alone would be of any benefit. In his role as a teacher and spiritual guide, Rumi is realistic and honest about the importance of form as a means of explaining conceptual issues to students who would otherwise either miss the point entirely, or become bored with purely conceptual discussions of cosmology, morality, and the spiritual path.25 “"If I am silent,” he admits, “the people who come to me will get bored,”26 “and so I compose poetry to entertain them lest they grow weary.

Otherwise, why on earth would I be spouting poetry?”27 Arguably the greatest poet in

Islamic history, it may seem odd for Rumi to compare poetic composition to something as vile as putting “one's hands into tripe to wash it for one's guests.”28 In the context of his discussion on form and meaning, however, it appears that such provocative statements are intended to remind his students of the fact that all form, however beautiful or useful, is vain and worthless when divorced from meaning. In its capacity as the vehicle of meaning,

______22 Ibid.: 222 23 Ibid.: 90 24 This will prove especially relevant in Chapter Five, regarding the relationship between physical beauty and love. 25 At points in the Fīhi Mā Fī, Rumi appears exasperated by the density and inattentiveness of his students. "If these words seem repetitious to you,” he says, “it is because, since you have not yet learned the first lesson, we have to say the same thing over every day." (Thackston, 1994: 123)

26 Ibid.: 97 27 Ibid.: 77 28 Ibid.: 77

12 form allows "all unintelligible things [to] become intelligible and sensible through analogies."29 Rumi expresses this in the form of an Arabic pun to his students: "Since the sun is subtle (latif) – and He is the gracious (latif) – there must be a medium of grossness for it to be seen."30 Rumi also sees this as relevant to an individual’s success on the Sufi path, where he considers the physical presence of one’s spiritual guide (sheikh/pīr) as a prerequisite to gaining their blessings:

Is it not said that the Water of Life is in the land of darkness? The darkness is the body of the saints, where the Water of Life is. The Water of Life can be found only in the darkness. If you hate the darkness and find it distasteful, how will you find the Water of Life?31

Rumi will even go so far as to say that form, in its negative aspect as a conditioned thing, is beneficial to mankind as such: "If all knowledge and no ignorance were in man, he would be burnt up and cease to exist. Therefore, ignorance is desirable from the point of view that continued existence depends upon it. Learning is desirable also inasmuch as it is a means to knowing the Creator…Each one helps the other.”32

Nevertheless, so far as meaning is distinct from form, it remains veiled over by it.

As stated at the beginning of this chapter, if form were sufficient in itself, then things could be judged by appearances alone. Rumi indicates this limitation of form by referring to the

Prophetic ḥadīth “Show me things as they are!”33 In this schema, one must be take care to

______29 Ibid.:173-74 30 Thackston, 1994: 206 31 Ibid.: 100 32 Ibid.: 222 33 Ibid.: 52

13 remember the subordinate role form plays to spirit, and be on guard against deceptive incongruities between the two:

Things may look good outwardly, but there may be evil contained inside…If everything were as it seemed, the Prophet would not have cried out with such illuminated and illuminating perspicacity, 'Show me things as they are! You make things appear beautiful when in reality they are ugly; You make things appear ugly when in reality they are beautiful. Show us therefore each thing as it is lest we fall into a snare and be ever errant.34

The conclusion to be drawn here is that "one…must pass beyond these pleasures and delights which are only shadows and reflections [i.e. forms] of the Real. One should not become content with this small amount, which, although is of God's grace and a shadow of His beauty, it is still not permanent.”35 To understand the divine mysteries, Rumi asserts, one must access the “brides of intrinsic meaning [which] are manifested within you,”36 rather than the world of forms which serve only to symbolize those meanings. “Although not pleasant at first, [the turn toward meaning] becomes sweeter the further you go. In contrast, form appears beautiful at first, but the more you stay with it the more disenchanted with it you become. What is the form of the Koran [sic] in comparison with its substance?"37

This spiritual attitude toward the form/meaning dichotomy can perhaps be summarized through consideration of the following metaphor:

______34 Thackston, 1994: 6 35 Ibid.: 62 36 Ibid.: 73 37 Ibid.: 88

Those who love gold and those who love pearls look at the back of the mirror. Those who love mirrors, however, do not look at the pearls and gold; they look always at the mirror itself. They love the mirror… for its 'mirrorness.' Because they can see beauty in the mirror, they never grow tired of it.38

Like the cosmos, the mirror of Rumi’s example is a whole composed of parts – the mirror proper, and the obverse side, which constitute the body and soul of the object, its form and meaning.39 Thus the mirror’s two sides are indeed related to one another: the gold and pearls on the obverse would have no purpose were it not for the mirror they adorn, and conversely the mirror would be lost if not for the gold and pearl backing that gives it a definite form. Gold and pearls are indeed eye-catching, and some people love them to the exclusion of the mirror. This does not mean, however, that they are equally important features: for the person who knows the value and purpose of mirrors, they see that those fixated on the gold and pearls have completely missed the point: “Anyone who has an ugly face [i.e. one who seeks arts and accomplishments] will desire the back of the mirror.”40

For the lover of mirrors – i.e. the person of sound intellect – the delimitation of gold and pearls into specific forms means that their allure is ultimately fleeting, and anyone who remains transfixed on them is engaged in a vain pursuit. For Ibn Arabi and Rumi, it is thus the task of a reasonable person to recognize the purpose for which the gold and pearls exist, and to turn their attention to that purpose, i.e. the reflective mirror. In contrast to the gold and pearls, which are delimited and thus possess a finite beauty, the mirror – by virtue of its nondelimitation – can manifest a nigh infinite degree of beauty: “Anyone who has a

______38 Ibid.: 84 39 The mirror surface is an excellent symbol of meaning (ma’na) precisely because it exists despite lacking formal qualities of its own. Like meaning, the intrinsically formless mirror gains form (ṣūrah, lit. ‘image’) only through being paired with what is intrinsically formal. 40 Thackston, 1994: 195

15 fair countenance [i.e. one who strives for intrinsic meaning] will go to any length for the sake of the face of the mirror because it reflects that person's own beauty.”41 Thus for Rumi, a sound intellect will determine that spirit/meaning alone is truly fitting for the human being because the human being is intrinsically supraformal. Rumi of course understands revealed religion as a primary means of understanding this fact of the human condition, and one’s individual predisposition as the determinant of whether its truth is received and acted upon: "Faith is discernment to distinguish between the real and the false and also between the true and the imitation…Anyone who does have discernment will benefit from these words we speak, while our words are wasted on any who have no discernment."42

______41 Ibid.: 195 42 Thackston, 1994: 154

III. The Transcendent Reality of Form

The Islamic universe in which Ibn Arabi and Rumi wrote does not only assert divine transcendence, with its attendant form/meaning dichotomies, but also the divine immanence; as the Qur’an asserts of the individual human being, God is ‘nearer to him than his jugular vein.’43 Thus in keeping with mainstream Islamic doctrine, Ibn Arabi and

Rumi are adamant that the divine reality is not the absconded deity of purely transcendent theologies. As God, divinity is as equally present as the Seeing (al-Baṣīr) and Hearing

(as-Samī’) as He is withdrawn and sanctified as The Holy. (al-Quddūs) On the ontological level, this immanence or similitude to creation (tashbīḥ) indicates that nothing can be separate from God, so far as a firm dichotomy between the creator and creation would imply the independent existence of the latter, which is itself no less doctrinally objectionable than asserting – from the other point of view – that the divine is identifiable with creation. To posit a world ontologically distinct from God contradicts divine unicity, which as the ostensive goal of asserting God’s oneness (tawḥīd) lies at the heart of Islamic belief. In this perspective, physical beauty is no less than divine beauty itself, so far as it is not ontologically distinct from its divine source.

Whereas the exoteric dictates of religion perhaps lend themselves more readily to an exclusively transcendent (tanzīḥī) perspective, but Ibn Arabi and Rumi are keen to point out this out as an egregious error. Ibn Arabi cleverly turns the exoteric perspective on its head, stating that “one should not marvel at him who declares His Oneness, [i.e. seeing the unity of God and creation] but at him who declares His manyness [i.e. the

______43 Qur’an, 50: 16 (‘Wa naḥnu aqrabu ilayhi min ḥabli al-warīd’)

17 distinction between God and creation] without proof or demonstration… (III 94.16)”44 In other words, the comforting simplicity of a creation/Creator dichotomy is fundamentally deceptive. For the one who asserts transcendence alone, "he imagines that he has realized something, when in actuality it has passed him by."45 Assertion of transcendence to the exclusion of immanence can masquerade as knowledge, but it is an immature knowledge. According to those who truly know – i.e. accomplished Sufis, referred to by

Ibn Arabi as ‘Folk of the Realities’ –– "assert[ing] incomparability [tanzīḥ] as regards the Divine is to assert delimitation [taḥdīd] and qualification [taqīīd].” Anyone who asserts this “is either ignorant… or [if concealing this knowledge having already attained it] is a man of poor adab [etiquette].”46

Speaking to the same issue, one of Rumi’s comments in the Mathnawi is instructive: “each and every part of this world,” he says, “is a snare for the fool and a means of deliverance for the wise.”47 For the fool – the ignorant man of Ibn Arabi’s formulation – it is only appropriate that he treat the world as other-than-God, so far as he must be aware of the enemy that would snare him and consign him to error and confusion; for those who truly know, however, there is an alternative approach to the world of forms, which does not find form as intrinsically problematic. In other words,

“form and meaning are inextricably connected; form derives from meaning, and meaning manifests itself as form… the two are [nothing but] the outward and inward aspects of a

______44 Chittick, 1989: 363

45 Ibn Arabi, 2004: 37 46 Ibid.: 37 47 Chittick, 1983: 24

18 single reality;”48 error only occurs in treating form and meaning as ontological facts, rather than as the merely conceptual categories that they are.

The groundwork for this conclusion constitutes an extensive theme in the work of

Ibn Arabi and Rumi, and a brief synopsis of their arguments is helpful in this case. To begin, it is related in a hadīth qudsī49 that God says ‘I was a hidden treasure, and I loved to be known, so I created the world to know me.’50 According to Ibn Arabi, this longing of the divine reality to be known is really nothing but its longing to know itself, for the creation is nothing but the manifestation of divine attributes that lay latent in divine

Being before the moment of creation. The distinction to be made is not one of this-and- that, creation and Creator as separate entities, form and meaning as discrete components; rather, it is only a distinction of manifest (ẓāhir) and unmanifest (bāṭin):

The root of the cosmos or ‘everything other than God’ is God, while the cosmos is nothing but the Being of God within which appear the properties of the nonexistent entities, properties which themselves are the effects of the divine names. So what we see are the names, and the cosmos is the outward form of all the names in differentiated mode (tafsil).51

Accordingly, the various beautiful forms of the world are nothing more than the various manifest particularizations of an infinite, divine Beauty, which contains all particular forms but cannot be exclusively identified with any single one of them. Thus when Ibn Arabi quotes the Qur’anic dictum “All things perish save His Face,”52 it is in

______48 Chittick, 1983: 24 49 As opposed to the ‘prophetic utterances’ (aḥadīth nabawīyya) which relate the sayings or doings of the Prophet Muhammad as a human being, the aḥadīth qudsīyya are understood as Prophetic utterances spoken through him by the divine person, in a category distinct from the Qur’an. 50(‘Kuntu kunzan makhfīyyan, fa ahbabtu an ‘arifa fa khalaqtu khalqan fa’arfatuhum bī fa’arafunī’) 51 Chittick, 1989: 114 52 Ibn Arabi, 2004: 50; Qur’an 28:88

19 effect to remind his reader that the locus of manifestation qua locus is insubstantial and ultimately non-existent, but the same locus of manifestation qua manifestation is substantial, so far as it is nothing other than God Himself. The continued identity of these manifestations with the divine reality is maintained, for Ibn Arabi, by an ontological unity that pervades the entire system of non-manifest and manifest existence, and is only augmented by a visual dimension in the realm of manifestation: “Wujūd

[Being] as such belongs to the Nonmanifest, though its reverberations fill the cosmos. In contrast, shuhūd [witnessing] is the vision of self-disclosure and belongs to the manifest realm.”53 Rumi’s figurative language speaks of the same issue in terms of a ‘garbing’ that occurs in the realm of manifestation:

"It is apparent to the saint that the lion or tiger's form he is seeing is not of this world but rather an ‘ideal’ form, one that has been given shape: it is God revealing himself in a form of exquisite beauty. Gardens, camels, houris, mansions, food and drink, robes of honor, cities, houses, and various wonders are the same: the saint knows that none of these is of this world, but God has made them visible by garbing them in form.”54

These considerations are of course equally applicable to the human being, both inwardly and outwardly. Whereas the cosmos is “the outward form of all the names in differentiated mode

(tafsil),” the human being, made in the image of God, “is the outward form of all the names in undifferentiated mode (ijmal).”55 As Ibn Arabi terms it in the opening chapter of his Fuṣūṣ al-

Ḥikam, the human being has a microcosmic function in that he manifests all the divine attributes in a “comprehensive being,”56 as opposed to the dispersion of these attributes in various loci of manifestation throughout the cosmos. In this perspective, asserting divine transcendence

______53 Chittick, 1989: 226-7 54 Thackston, 1994: 46 55 Chittick, 1989: 114 56 Ibn Arabi, 2004: 3

20 becomes increasingly problematic. As Rumi says, “anyone who says ‘I am God's servant’ predicates two existences, his own and God's,” as opposed to the assertion of immanence, which takes the controversial form of saying “’I am God’ [which, in actuality,] means… Existence is

God's alone, I am utter, pure nonexistence; I am nothing."57 58

The key point of consideration here is that the physical forms of the world are the same

‘stuff’ as the human soul, so far as both are nothing but manifestations of the divine attributes; thus, witnessing of beautiful forms is particularly instructive to the human subject as it is through the vision of these forms that the human being sees himself – not dissimilar to the process through which the divine reality witnesses itself in the creation of the cosmos. Rumi articulates this rather concretely in one passage of his Fīhi Mā Fī:

All manner of trades…have been discovered from within man, not from under rocks and mud clumps. It is said that a raven taught man to bury the dead, but it actually came from a reflection of man cast onto the raven. It was man's own urge that caused him to do it, for, after all, animals are part of man. How can a part teach the whole?59

This sentiment obviously pertains to the doctrine of the Perfect Man (al-insān al- kāmil), which by virtue of his microcosmic identity contains all divine attributes – and thus all macrocosmic manifestations – within himself. This is not a doctrinal innovation on the part of Sufi mystics such as Ibn Arabi and Rumi; rather, it is intimately linked to the Qur’anic assertion that “We [God] will show them [humankind] our signs on the horizons and in themselves”60 – the signs are the same, it is their locus that varies.

______57 Thackston, 1994: 45 58 This concept recurs throughout Rumi’s discourses. Specifically referencing the martyrdom of al-Ḥallāj, Rumi characterizes the sentence ‘I am the Real/Truth’ (Ana al-Ḥaqq) as an expression of “extreme humility and servitude” which avoids the ontological duality implicit in master/servant dichotomies. (Ibid.: 203)

59 Ibid.: 52 60 Qur’an, 41: 53

Ultimately, it appears that Ibn Arabi and Rumi maintain that once physical beauty is recognized as divine manifestation, a certain spiritual aestheticism becomes possible for the individual. It should be remembered, however, that this ‘recognition’ is the product of an intellectual achievement of the highest order, which is to say it involves operative knowledge rather than merely mental information. The Perfect Man, i.e. the fully actualized human individual, may possess the capacity to see all outward forms for what they fundamentally are – the macrocosmic manifestations of a divine reality that, by virtue of having attained human perfection, the individual has likewise manifested in himself. This state of affairs is, however, not the common human condition. Defining man as a "’rational (= speaking) animal’ (hayawan natiq) is misleading, since [for Ibn

Arabi] the whole cosmos is animate and speaking,”61 by virtue of its identity as a manifestation of divine attributes. Rather, in Ibn Arabi’s perspective, the vast majority of human beings live without being truly human, and are instead known as ‘animal man,’ in which the Divine Form “remains but a virtuality.”62 Their humanity – or at least what Ibn

Arabi understands as the quintessential qualities that make one human – is generally concealed by layers of illusion, egotism, and error.63

As a final note, for those individuals who do attain the status of the Perfect Man – and are thus capable of witnessing physical beauty as nothing but the divine itself – their

______61 Chittick, 1989: 276 62 Ibid.: 276 63 This does not mean that such people fall short of manifesting the divine reality altogether; rather, their manifestation is considered insufficient in proportion to their innermost being (sirr). Rumi highlights this in his discourses, reminding his students that "one who denies God's existence is also a manifestor [sic] because affirmation is something that cannot be imagined without denial," (Thackston, 1994: 184) which in fact corresponds to the divine self-negation that to a certain degree must occur in order to facilitate the creation of the cosmos.

22 aesthetic experience operates itself at the highest levels of intellectual endeavor, so far as

“Ibn al-'Arabi frequently claims that the knowledge acquired by means of unveiling is superior to that which is earned through the efforts of intellectual investigation and rational inquiry… Certain subjects lie ‘beyond the stage of reason,’ so man can gain no knowledge of them without the help of revelation,”64 which occurs continuously and perceptibly in every locus of manifestation. Ultimately, Ibn Arabi can remark that "The

Real has a special manifestation in every created thing. He is the Manifest in every object of understanding… He is not hidden from the understanding of one who holds that the world is His Image and Selfhood."65 Seen according to what it truly is, rather than according to the dictates of reason (‘aql) in its negative sense as the partial intellect (‘aql- i juzī), physical beauty poses no danger to the viewer; rather, it is a crucial spiritual support and theophany of divine reality in the domain of manifestation and witnessing.

______64 Chittick, 1989: 232 65 Ibn Arabi, 2004: 38

IV. Imaginal Perception and the Possessor of Two Eyes

There are thus two attitudes toward physical beauty, situated within two perspectives toward the world. The first, stemming from an ascetic or renunciatory spiritual attitude that sees the world (al-kawn or al-khalq) as other-than-God, who possesses incomparability and transcendence, (tanzīḥ) cannot but mistrust physical forms; beauty thus has the possibility of being deceptive, an attractive form (ṣūrah) veiling over an unworthy or even malicious inner meaning (ma’na). The second attitude – situated in a world-affirming attitude that recognizes the fundamental ontological unity of Creator and Creation as unmanifest and manifest (baṭin wa ẓahir) aspects of a single reality – sees the cosmos as ‘God in disguise,’ and thus recognizes the experience of physical beauty as spiritually efficacious. Both of these perspectives are valid for Ibn Arabi and

Rumi, so far as each attitude is a coherent interpretation of the most fundamental tenant of Islamic thought, the first testimony of faith (shahāda) lā ilaha illā Allah – ‘there is no god but God.’ Read in light of the first perspective, lā ilaha illā Allah enjoins the believer to recognize the ultimate transcendence of God, discouraging one’s individual attention being occupied by the ultimately ephemeral and unsatisfying ‘gods’ of the world. In light of the second perspective, lā ilaha illā Allah indicates that there is no god

– no thing – except that it is in fact God Himself; the world is of itself empty, and only has being and existence through its participation in the divine Being. In other words, “the

[individual created] thing is only God in its existence and attributes, not in its specific existential thingness, where it is precisely the [delimited] thing.”66 For Ibn Arabi, “the first [perspective] represents the point of view of the rational faculty, which declares

______66 Chittick, 1989: 112

God's Unity (tawḥīd) and is perfectly able to grasp that the cosmos is ruled by a God who must be One. The second represents the point of view of imagination, [khayāl] which perceives God's theophany or self-disclosure in all that exists.”67 Ultimately, these two formulations of the shahāda correspond to the divine incomparability (tanzīḥ) and divine similarity, (tashbīḥ) which are themselves a relational formulation of the divine attributes of Glory (Jalāl) and of Beauty (Jamāl).68 Ibn Arabi addresses the tension between them in his chapter on Noah, which is largely concerned with the relationship between transcendence and immanence:

If thou set beyond compare then thou dost qualify and if thou speak of being same, thou dost delimit… Beware of speaking sameness if thou speakest of a second and beware to set beyond compare, if thou dost speak of One.69

At this juncture it is appears that this tension is seemingly irreducible, so far as the two contradictory perspectives are each rooted in different, although equally valid, interpretations of religious doctrine. Indeed, the fact that both perspectives find validation in the works of Ibn Arabi and Rumi indicates that neither can be easily discarded. This tension is of course a fundamental element of the human condition: there are moments, especially those engendered by the aesthetic encounter with beauty, that speak to the fundamental unity of being, and the presence of divinity in forms; conversely, this spell is often broken by witnessing the ephemerality and finitude of the

______67 Chittick, 1989: 29 68 Ibid.: 360

69 Ibn Arabi, 2004: 40

25 world, beauty not excluded. This experience may occur for any person, but acquires a certain acuteness for individuals inclined toward mysticism:

Wherever the gnostic looks, he sees the One God, but, dwelling as he does in manyness, he sees Him from two points of view. On the one hand, he witnesses God as incomparable. Everything he sees is but a sign saying, ‘God is not this.’ On the other hand, he witnesses Him as similar. Everything he sees says, ‘God is like this; God is disclosing Himself in this; God is not other than this; God is this.’70

This can lead to perplexity, where the individual asks whether the world is divine or not divine. For Ibn Arabi, this is not a question at all, but a fact. As he famously asserted, all that we observe in the world is ‘He/ not He.’71 (Hū lā Hū),72 which is for Chittick the most “succinct expression”73 of Ibn Arabi’s thought in its entirety.

By asserting He/not He, Ibn Arabi is calling attention to the fundamental ignorance of those who still ask if the world is this or that. As Chittick explains, Ibn

Arabi believes that “no one will find true knowledge of the nature of things by seeking explanations in ‘either/or.’ The real situation will have to be sought in ‘both/and’ or

‘neither/nor.’ Ambiguity does not grow up simply from our ignorance: it is an ontological

______70 Chittick, 1989: 361 71 I have adopted Chittick’s orthographic convention of rendering ‘Hū lā Hū’ as “He/not He,” which is perhaps the clearest English rendering of the original phrase’s syntactical meaning. 72 It is important to recognize that this is not a doctrinal innovation on the part of Ibn Arabi. Chittick observes that simultaneous “negation (nafy) and affirmation (ithbāt) is hardly new in Islamic thought. The Koran often negates the very things it affirms, a fact that has led to a great deal of theological squabbling.” (Ibid: 113)

73 Ibid: 358

26 fact, inherent in the nature of the cosmos.”74 This is due to the fact that “the Absolute allows for no absolutizing of anything other than Itself,”75 indicating that all which is considered ‘other-than-God’ or ‘divine manifestation’ is of an intermediate ontological quality; it is neither pure Being – ‘He’ – nor pure non-Being – ‘not He.’ Hence the cosmos is fundamentally ambiguous.

Both Ibn Arabi and Rumi can find Qur’anic justification for this in the verse:

"You [Muhammad] did not throw when you threw, but God threw" (8:17),76 which is ambiguous in both content and syntax, as there is an inherent paradox to saying ‘you did not throw when you threw.’ (wa mā ramayta idh ramayta) For our authors, however, this does not constitute an insurmountable impasse for the human being, at least not the fully actualized human being (al-Insān al-Kāmil), whose “perfect knowledge of God… necessarily combines the declaration of God's incomparability with that of His similarity.”77 Ibn Arabi frames the issue accordingly in the Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam:

The Real has a face in every object of worship [i.e. in every thing]; whosoever knows it knows it, and whosoever is ignorant of it is ignorant of it. For the Muhammadan,78 Thy Lord hath decreed that ye shall worship only Him, that is to say He decided. The man of knowledge knows who is worshipped, and in what form He is manifest in order to be worshipped, and that separation and multiplicity are like the bodily parts of a sensible form or the spiritual faculties of a spiritual form.79

______74 Ibid: 112 75 Ibid: 29 76 Chittick, 1989: 113 77 Ibid.: 276 78 For Ibn Arabi, the ‘Muhammadan’ (Muḥammadī) does not refer to Muslims as in the English usage, but instead refers to individuals whose spiritual ‘type’ is that of the Prophet Muhammad himself, as opposed to being modeled after other prophets and saints. 79 Ibn Arabi, 2004: 45

It is important to remember that for Ibn Arabi and Rumi, perception, like existence, is not absolute, and is likewise fundamentally ambiguous. These two positions are of course metaphysically related: the fundamental ambiguity of the cosmos – derived from the fact that only the divine Reality is absolutely existent – necessitates a similar condition for both the faculties and objects of perception. Thus, the subjective human observer and the objects of perception, the world, are not wholly distinct, which would only be possible were they to possess the absolute being of the Real itself. The faculty of imagination (khayāl), which facilitates visual perception, is in fact “an intermediate reality,” that likewise “can best be defined by saying that it is neither this nor that, or both this and that.”80 “Just as our imagination is the barzakh [liminal barrier] between our spirits and bodies, so also [cosmic] existence is the barzakh between Being and nothingness.”81 Thus there is a necessary correspondence between the microcosmic reality of the human being, and the macrocosmic reality of the physical world, both of which are manifestations of the divine attributes. 82 For Ibn Arabi and Rumi, the act of dreaming is the most evident instance of this fundamental ambiguity of imagination. In his discourses, Rumi even traces this concept back to the Prophet himself, citing a hadith that likens the world to “a sleeper's dream.”83 There is a modern tendency to associate dreams, and imagination, with the completely unreal, but in this case that would be a mistake. As an imaginal state, is not non-being – i.e. the completely unreal or fantastic – but is instead a middling condition between the absolutes of Being and Non-Being.

Chittick provides a useful example of this, noting that “In dreams we see things that are not things… We can say to someone, ‘I saw you in a dream last night,’ knowing full well that the statement is not completely true nor completely false. What we saw was both the person and not

______80 Chittick, 1989: 117 81 Ibid: 113 82 Ibid: 113 83 Thackston, 1994: 194

28 the person; it was our own self and not our own self.“84 Thus, “‘He/not He’ finds its clearest expression in the cosmos through imagination (khayal),”85 which “refers both to the mental faculty known as imagination and the objective world ‘out there’ known as imagination.”86 Ibn

Arabi can therefore identify three kinds of imagination, which while conceptually distinct are nonetheless all of one substance: all existence is Nondelimited Imagination (al-khayāl al-muṭlaq) containing within itself both discontiguous imagination (al-khayāl al-munfaṣil), i.e. the world and therefore inclusive of physical beauty, and contiguous imagination (al-khayāl al-muttaṣil) or the individual observer’s faculty of imagination.87 As an intermediate state, these types of imagination therefore are also dynamic, as “there is no true existence that does not accept change except God.” 88 As Ibn Arabi states:

Everything other than the Essence of the Real is in the station of transmutation, speedy and slow. Everything other than the Essence of the Real is intervening imagination and vanishing shadow. No engendered thing remains in this world, the hereafter, and what is between the two, neither spirit, nor soul, nor anything other than God – I mean the Essence of God – upon a single state; rather, it undergoes continual change from form to form constantly and forever. (II 313.12)89

This is crucial to Ibn Arabi and Rumi’s understanding of perception and physical beauty, so far as the locus of perception – in their view – is the spiritual heart, an organ which – like its physical counterpart – is in a continuous state of fluctuation.90

‘Irāqī offers a helpful comment to better understand the role of such fluctuation in the thought of Ibn Arabi, stating that “manifestation, ceaseless and perpetual, is the

______84 Chittick, 1989: 118-119 85 Ibid: 115 86 Ibid: 117 87 Chittick, 1989: 117 88 Ibid: 118 89 Ibid: 118 90 Ibid: 107

Beloved’s attribute; concealment – hiddenness – that of the lover. When the Beloved’s form appears in the lover’s mirror-entity [i.e. the heart, that glass – in keeping with its own realities – exercises a certain influence on the image which is manifested, just as manifestation itself bestows a name on what appears.”91 While the Beloved and the lover are interchangeable for ‘Iraqi, indeed they are identifiable with one another, this particular formulation most readily identifies the Beloved with the divine. When loved by the human lover, the divine Beloved longs to make itself manifest, as it is only through manifestation in the lover that the Beloved can witness its own good qualities, a concept reflected in al-Ghazzālī’s Sawāniḥ as well as Ibn Arabi’s treatment of the ḥadīth of the Hidden Treasure. However, due to the incommensurability of the Beloved’s infinitude to the finite existence of its lover, this manifestation necessarily is ever- changing, which in the finite receptacle of the human individual produces a sequential facsimile of what exists simultaneously in divine eternality. As a consequence of the facsimile of infinitude intended by this fluctuation, Rumi says, "Although He may manifest himself in a hundred ways, no two are ever the same. This very instant you are seeing God in various traces and deeds. Every moment you see in various ways that no two of His acts resemble each other.” 92

Yet in keeping with Ibn Arabi’s notion of the constitutions of receptive entities, the image of the Beloved in the mirror of the lover is necessarily conditioned by the constitution particular to that locus of manifestation, the most famous instance of this occurring in the case of the Immaculate Conception, where Mary’s constitution – as a

______91 ‘Iraqi, 1982: 91 92 Thackston, 1994: 119

30 human being – conditions her receipt of the Holy Spirit, which thus appears in the form of a man and produces Christ as a human child. In other words, the union of spirit and matter produces a synthetic and unified whole, conditioned by both the divine attributes and the condition of the receptacle in which they are localized. The heart (qalb) upon which these images of the divine Beloved descend is always turning (taqallub), one form giving way to another, to manifest the infinite in the finitude of its locus of manifestation.

Hence, Ibn Arabi’s metaphysics of perception arrives at the notion of the Moment (al- waqt), which plays a central role in earlier characterizations of the heart in the Sufi tradition, such as that offered by Ahmad al-Ghazzālī. Thus the myriad individual beauties of the world are received sequentially as divine theophanies, contingent with the fluctuating nature of the human heart which is incapable of perceiving all divine beauty simultaneously.

This notion of the moment (al-waqt) is crucial for the study of physical beauty, as it is by the changing dictates of the moment that the myriad beautiful forms of the world can be made present to the heart, and sequentially display the infinite beauty of God. In other words, whatever Love – God –“sends down [upon the heart as the center of perception] depends on the dictates of Time,”93 which in each instant carries a unique manifestation of beauty. This is not a new term for the Sufi tradition, and had already been elaborated upon extensively before Ibn Arabi or Rumi lived and wrote. In his translation of Ahmad al-Ghazzālī’s Sawāniḥ, Pourjavady’s defines waqt as: “Time, or instant... The terms waqt and ḥāl (q.v.) [condition, state] are sometimes used interchangeably, because of the close relationship between them…Since the nature of the

______93 Ghazzālī, 1986: 21

31 states (aḥwal) is transitory, waqt, in this book [the Sawāniḥ], is said to be a chameleon.”94

This definition is sufficient for the use of waqt in the work of Ibn Arabi, from whose work Michael Sells gleans the definition of waqt as “the duration of a given mystical condition (ḥāl).”95

Demonstrative of the common imaginal reality of the cosmos, the self, and the seat of perception in the heart, it is in this perspective the fluctuations of the Moment that drive and facilitates the heart’s characteristic turning (taqallub), whereby it adopts at every instant new forms, a connection made in the Sawāniḥ: “If you gain insight into the secret of your Time (waqt), then you will realize the ‘the two bows’ of pre-temporality

(azal) and post-temporality (abad) are your heart and your Time.”96 Elsewhere, Ahmad al- Ghazzālī describes how

When it [Love] finds the house [i.e. the heart] vacant and the mirror has become clean, then a form is reflected and established in the air of the purity of the spirit. Its perfection is that if the spirit wants to see himself with his eye of inspection, then he sees the image (paykar) of the beloved or her name or her attribute together with it, and this changes according to (the dictates of) Time (waqt).97

This state of affairs persists “so long as the lover subsists through his own self [i.e. before attainment of baqa’].” Being imaginal, his self qua self is fundamentally ambiguous, and therefore the individual “is subject to separation and union, acceptance and refusal, contraction (qabḍ) and expansion (basṭ), sorrow and delight, etc. Thus he is a captive of

Time (waqt) – when Time overcomes him, everything depends on its command, and it

______94 Ibid: 122 95 Sells, 1994: 105 96 Ghazzālī, 1986: 29 97 Ibid: 18

32 will model him according to its own (particular) feature – and Time is in a decision making and commanding position.”98 Alternatively, at the point of union with the divine

– which alone is beyond the ambiguities and therefore fluctuations of imaginal existence

- the lover becomes “the master of Time…he will have supremacy over Time, instead of

Time having supremacy over him”99 precisely because, as Pourjavady explains, “at this level it would be absurd to say that the lover is subject to Time and its decrees. In fact, there is no longer a lover left. Whoever subsists is ‘the master of Time.’”100

Michael Sells points out that Ibn Arabi’s crucially reformulated distinct understandings of the moment, determining that “the moment is the nexus for the tajalli

(the self-manifestation of the real) and kashf (the human act of unveiling): the two acts are one act,”101 combining instantaneously the subjective experiences of subsistence within God (baqa’) and annihilation therein (fana’). “In his new interpretation [of waqt], he unites once again mythic time (time beyond time) and the mystical eternal moment

(the eternal within time)... The one primordial breath [nafas ar-Rahman] by which the world flowed into actuality is seen now as the eternal breath that has always occurred and always is occurring.”102 Accordingly, that which is perceived in a given moment is simultaneously identified as both the world and otherworldly, as God and other-than God.

Characteristic of much of Rumi and Ibn Arabi’s work, this state of affairs concerning the ontological ambiguity of the world and human perception is not a separate mode of being proper only to realized or ‘enlightened’ souls; rather, it is a constant and

______98 Ibid: 38 99 Ibid: 39 100 Ghazzālī, 1986: 100 101 Sells, 1994: 107 102 Ibid: 106

33 pervasive condition that is at all times and in all places manifest and clear. If an individual is unaware of it, they argue, it is due to a deficiency in their individual self: for

Rumi, it is a deficiency of integration between the partial intellect (‘aql-i juzī) and the universal intellect (‘aql-i kulli), which is proper to the human essence (insānīyyah) but is not a given of the human condition. In Rumi’s words, “All creatures, day and night, make manifestation of God. Some of them know what they are doing and are aware of their manifesting, while others are unaware."103 Fakhruddīn ‘Irāqī addresses the explicitly aesthetic aspect of this state of affairs in his Lama’āt (Divine Flashes):

Everyone with eyes sees just such a vision – but remains ignorant of what he perceives. Every ant which leaves its nest and goes to the desert will see the sun – but not know what it sees. What irony! Everyone perceives Divine Beauty with Certainty’s Eye, for in reality nothing exists but Transcendent Unity; they look, they see, but do not comprehend. They take no pleasure in the view, for to enjoy it one must know through the Truth of Certainty what he is seeing, through Whom, and why.104

This lack of comprehension is, as a fact of cosmic existence, likewise ambiguous. On one hand, it is an inherent human deficiency, so far as individuals are unaware of the divine reality that is being perceived in every instant; on the other, it is part of divine mercy to be left in ignorance, for as Rumi says, "there are few who can tolerate God's presence. For most people it is better for Him to be absent,” likening vision of the divinity to that of the sun. Ultimately, for the common person, “It is better for him to occupy himself with something that could be called 'absence.'"105 In other words, operative self-awareness of one’s continual perception of divine beauty is best left for those with sufficient spiritual capacity as to merit and endure it. A notion common to Ibn

______103 Thackston, 1994: 184 104 ‘Iraqi, 1982: 120 105 Thackston, 1994: 228

Arabi and Rumi’s thoughts on physical beauty, Ibn Arabi refers to such spiritual elites as

Possessors of Two Eyes" (dhu'l-'aynayn).106

The Possessor of Two Eyes is therefore distinguished not insofar as he possesses an altogether different mode of vision; rather, it is that due to a heightened – or in another idiom ‘actualized’ – personal constitution, he interprets and experiences human vision in an altogether different manner. In effect, the Possessor of Two Eyes is so called because

“one eye sees Being and the other perceives nothingness,”107 which is to say that the individual perceives equally divine immanence/comparability (tashbīḥ) and divine transcendence/incomparability, (tanzīḥ) and thus consistently ‘sees things as they are,’ i.e. as He/not He. For Ibn Arabi and Rumi, this Possessor of Two Eyes is thus the Perfect

Man (al-insān al-kāmil) in aspect as an aesthetic being capable of visual perception.

Chittick elaborates:

In the case of perfect man, spiritual realization has opened up the imagination to the actual vision of the embodiment of God when He discloses Himself in theophany. He does not know "how" God discloses Himself, but he sees Him doing so. He understands the truth of God's similarity with all things through a God- given vision, seeing clearly that all things are neither/nor, both/and, but never either/or.108

Seeing with both eyes effectively allows the observer to witness the comprehensive reality of a thing, its innate divinity and its innate otherness, allowing for the contemplation of intrinsic meaning (ma’na) in forms themselves, leading to a

‘spiritual corporeality.’ For he who insists exclusively on divine transcendence, (tanzīḥ) meaning has no presence in form, and physical beauty is distracting or, worse, deceptive.

______106 Chittick, 1989: 362 107 Chittick, 1989: 362 108 Ibid: 29

For he who insists exclusively on divine immanence, (tashbīḥ) there is no meaning to be accessed in the readily apparent forms of the world, and physical beauty has no intrinsically meaningful dimension beyond its aesthetic value. What Rumi and Ibn Arabi offer, alternatively, is a synthetic appreciation whereby forms can be observed as visible manifestation (ẓāhir) or self-disclosure (tajallī) of divine beauty itself. Hence, Rumi can state of one of his disciples: "Even though he [Akmaluddin] doesn't think about the next life or God, it is all inherent in this love [of Rumi himself] and is thus remembered…Although a disciple may not think of the next life in all its details, his pleasure at seeing his master and his fear of being separated from him comprehend all those details."109 This vision is of course highly particularized to the particular arrangement of subject and object, the heart of the disciple Akmaluddin and its capacity to witness Rumi’s physical presence as a locus of divine manifestation.

Perhaps the one of the greatest instances of vision for the Possessor of Two Eyes is thus his witnessing of another Perfect Man. Rumi alludes to this in telling his disciples:

"The 'man of heart' [i.e. the Perfect Man] is the All. When you have seen him, you have seen everything...All the people in the world are parts of him, and he is the whole…When you have seen a dervish you have certainly seen the whole world. Anyone you see after him is superfluous."110 This holds potential significance for the importance of spiritual communion (saḥbah) in the Sufi tradition, a practice that was obviously of intense importance for Rumi given his affinity for Shams of Tabriz. As described it in another portion of Fīhi Mā Fī, the contemplation of the beauty of one’s pious companions is

______109 Thackston, 1994: 218 110 Ibid: 80

36 highly significant to the practice of spiritual companionship: "There is no greater endeavor than to sit with pious friends, the sight of whom causes the carnal soul to melt and pass away. For this reason it is said that when a snake does not see a human being for forty years it turns into a dragon."111

______111 Ibid: 245

V: Beauty and Love

With these considerations in mind, the question then arises, for what purpose is physical beauty to be viewed? For what end is it a means? Alternatively, where becoming the possessor of Two Eyes (Dhu’l ‘Aynayn) is considered an intrinsically worthy act for the perfect gnostic (‘ārif), one can then ask what this vision ‘does’ to him.

What does beauty do to the perfect spiritual aesthete, according to Ibn Arabi and Rumi?

Their answer is, in short, that beauty engenders love: “Love is caused by beauty (al- jamāl)…beauty is beloved by its very essence.”112 Fakhruddīn ‘Irāqī, following in the school of Ibn Arabi, would later define beauty in the same way: “Beauty is beloved by its very essence,’”113 demonstrating the tenacity of Ibn Arabi’s definition in later Sufi literature. Thus “beauty in the writings of both of these mystics [Ibn Arabi and ‘Irāqī] corresponds to ‘lovability,’ that is, the extent to which a perceived object evokes love in its perceiver,”114 thus allowing Zargar to summarize “Ibn ‘Arabi’s disparate accounts of beauty” as “‘that which causes love.’”115 In the school of Ibn Arabi, “similitude (tashbiḥ), beauty, and love cannot be separated from one another.”116

While Rumi’s collected works often focus on the central theme of divine love as the force that creates and sustains the cosmos – per the ḥadīth of the Hidden Treasure –

Ibn Arabi’s definition of beauty explicitly highlights its role as the root of that love, and thus the fundamental cosmic function of beauty: Asked “from where does this love that comprehends all existence come? …He answers ‘From the self-disclosure of his name

______112 Zargar, 2011: 45 113 Ibid: 53 114 Ibid: 5 115 Ibid: 45 116 Ibid: 29

‘the Beautiful.’”117 In this connection, so far as beauty is ‘that which occasions love,’ it is only the presence of beauty in created things that facilitates the act of creation, which is itself fundamentally an act of love, i.e. the breath of the All-Merciful. (nafas ar-Raḥman)

The entire creation comes into being through love, precisely because – as Rumi says – the manifestation of the Beautiful leaves some degree of beauty in every form. In the Divan- i Shams-i Tabriz, he remarks: “I desire the fair face of Joseph of Canaan… Filings of beauty are in the possession of every one [i.e. every thing] that exists; / I desire that quarry and that mine of exquisite loveliness.”118 Thus where some loci of manifestation possess superior receptivity to the divine attributes, and thus the prophet Joseph is commonly considered to have received half of all created beauty, every individual thing possesses its own share – its own ‘filing from the mine of beauty.’ In this connection, beauty has a profound cosmogonic role. “Love permeates the cosmos, drawing all things toward one another,” but this is facilitated through “Beauty, the common alluring Source that pulls every lover toward every beloved.”119

Love’s cosmic role, and thus the importance of beauty, does not stop at the creation. Depending on one’s point of view, it can be said that the world is created and then is sustained by the divine presence within itself, or, like Ibn Arabi, one can say that the creation is perpetually re-created in each moment. Either way, the role of Love and beauty is a constant necessity for the perpetuation of existence (al-kawn): “Each existent is infused with need and desire [the twin components of love] for other existents and is constantly striving to gain union with them. These individual loves are the immediate

______117 Zargar, 2011: 47 118 Rumi, 2004: 67 119 Zargar, 2011: 83

39 source of all movement and activity,”120 i.e. the ambiguous world of becoming, with its myriad and ephemeral forms. If it can be said that “Love courses throughout the world’s arteries,”121 it is beauty that is the motive force for its circulation.

Thus for both Ibn Arabi and Rumi, the visual contemplation of beauty is a primary means of participating in Love, which is itself the substance and purpose of the world itself: “Be drunken in love,” Rumi enjoins his audience, “for love is all that exists; without dealing of love there is no entrance to the Beloved.”122 Rumi’s desire for the face of Joseph indicates, moreover, that there exists a proportionality between the degree of beauty manifested in a particular thing and the capacity of that thing to engender love in the soul; in effect, certain loci are more ‘useful’ or capable of facilitating this process.

The supreme manifestation of beauty is of course the human being, which is the creation par excellence for both Ibn Arabi and Rumi – and Islamic thought generally. So excellent is the human being at manifesting divine beauty that Ibn Arabi exhibits a

“reluctance to make a distinction between human and divine beauty”123 – the two are nearly indistinguishable. This unparalleled beauty of human beings, surpassing all other created things, is not merely a point of doctrine for our authors. Rather, they assert it as a fact of human experience. Beauty, being the source of love, consistently coincides with pleasure, the experience of which allows beauty to be determined objectively. Simply put, where vision does not stimulate pleasure, there is no beauty. Consequently, Ibn

Arabi notes that “no object of beauty more ably arouses human pleasure and evokes love

______120 Chittick, 1983: 198 121 Ibid: 197 122 Rumi, 2004: 51 123 Zargar, 2011: 45

40 than the human form.”124 The pleasure that thus arises from beauty is, in the school of

Ibn Arabi, understood to derive from a feeling of proximity – here again tied in with the attractions that motivate love. Later commentators on Ibn Arabi’s work would explain that beauty necessitates the preservation of subject and object, perceiver and perceived:

The viewer perceives a divine manifestation through some medium – the divine attributes or acts – so the viewer does not experience complete bewilderment or a loss of self. This medium allows the beloved to be witnessed, since, after all, nothing can be witnessed without the limitations of form. The proximity the gnostic experiences in witnessing the beloved brings him pleasure. Such is not the case with the manifestation of splendor [jalāl], that is, the vision of meaning, which overwhelms the viewer.125

It thus appears that the pleasure of beauty is a default condition of cosmic – and therefore intrinsically ambiguous –existence. The proximity felt in the contemplation of beauty is naught but the recognition of similitude, the recognition of something common between the subject and the object, which is naught but the fundamental purpose of the cosmos itself, the facilitation of divine self-disclosure. As per the ḥadīth of the Hidden

Treasure and its treatment at the beginning of the Fuṣūṣ, God wanted to see Himself in an all-encompassing object, i.e. the human being, a process which He loves and is microcosmically replicated at the level of individual human vision. Reminiscent of

Aristophanes’ speech in the Symposium126, it is through recognition of oneself in a separate locus that brings pleasure. For God, this is the primary purpose of creation itself, i.e. “The

Real willed, glorified be He… to see His Identity – in a comprehensive being that comprises the whole affair”127 – per the hadith of the Hidden Treasure. For the human

______124 Zargar, 2011: 66 125 Ibid: 42 126 See Plato’s Symposium, 189c-189d. 127 Ibn Arabi, 2004: 3

41 subject, this occurs in recognizing its innermost, theomorphic self in the beautiful manifestation of divine attributes, per the ḥadīth ‘He who knows himself knows his Lord.’

(Man ‘arafa nafsuhu faqad ‘afara Rabbuhu)

This pleasure is called a default condition of cosmic existence precisely because where there is no pleasure, there is no duality in any sense. This is confirmed by the marked contrast between revelations of divine Majesty (Jalāl) and divine Beauty (Jamāl).

It is according to Ibn Arabi and his school categorically impossible for the revelation of divine Majesty to induce pleasure, seeing as it completely overpowers and effaces the human individual; there is accordingly no subject to experience pleasure whatsoever, unlike the revelation of Beauty, which necessitates the continuation of the perceiving human subject capable of being pleased.128 The overpowering – and unpleasant – revelation of the divine Majesty (Jalāl) complements the Qur’anic claim that man was created weak,129 implying his incapacity of direct witnessing of the divine Reality. Thus the forms of the world are not only theophanies, manifestations of the divine attributes; they are moreover established out of mercy to the human being, without which human beings could not continue to exist.

It is important, however, to remember that the preservation of the individual subject through the revelation of beauty is not absolutely dualistic; so far as human existence (kawn) is fundamentally imaginal, it remains suspended between the absolutes

______128 This reminisces of the claim by al-Ghazzālī that “the lover is nearer to the beloved’s loveliness than the beloved herself,” (Ghazzālī, 1986: 34) so far as the divine beauty is veiled from him to whom Majesty is revealed – by virtue of his annihilation (fanā’) – and it is similarly obscured from the self-knowledge of the One when it is without a separate locus of manifestation.

129 Qur’an, 4: 28

42 of Being and Non-Being. Similarly, beauty is not without its own tendency to union, so far as it engenders love by its very essence. Thus, revelations of Majesty (Jalāl) and of

Beauty (Jamāl) both tend toward union, but only in the latter case does the preservation of the subject and object allow for the cosmogonic Love – the world-preserving

‘ignorance’130 Rumi speaks of – that is the purpose of creation itself. Thus the revelation of Beauty is pleasurable according to Ibn Arabi and Rumi, so far as it participates in the very purpose of existence (al-kawn) itself. Moreover, Ibn Arabi asserts that “even the gnostic’s encounter with divine splendor [jalāl] springs from divine beauty.”131 This should make sense given Ibn Arabi’s intense interest in the ḥadīth of the Hidden Treasure and the function of the human being in the divine self-disclosure. In this schema, all attributes require manifestation, even those of Majesty which efface the human subject; nonetheless, this effacement is ultimately for the purposes of self-disclosure, itself a fundamentally loving or merciful act, corresponding to the famous ḥadīth qudsī that claims God’s mercy precedes his wrath.132

In this system it is thus not surprising that intense pleasure that arises at the sight of the human form, largely due to man’s unparalleled similitude among created things to other human beings. Thus for a follower of Ibn Arabi such as ‘Irāqī, the human being is the supreme locus of manifestation, not only in its meaning (ma’na) but also precisely because of the similarity that arises by its very physicality.133 There is of course a hierarchy of witnessing even among human objects of perception, where “the greatest

______130 "God, however, wants us to be here so that there may be two worlds. To that end He has stationed two headmen, heedlessness and heedfulness, so that both worlds will flourish." (Thackston, 2004: 114)

131 Zargar, 2011: 46 132 “Inna raḥmatī sabaqat ghaḍabī” 133 Ibid: 56

43 witnessing of existence is that which is most comprehensive.”134 Ibn Arabi explicitly identifies this in the man’s witnessing of a woman, in his commentary on the Prophetic

ḥadīth “Three things have been made worthy for me to love,” i.e. women, perfume, and ritual prayer.135 He argues that the “heights of witnessing (shuhūd) [are] achievable in [a male’s] beholding and enjoying the female form, a witnessing unattainable through any other medium.”136 Where the visual contemplation of beauty microcosmically replicates

– and in fact facilitates – the macrocosmic process through which the divine reality discloses Itself to Itself, i.e. witnesses itself in a separate locus of manifestation, the male’s witnessing of the female is for Ibn Arabi the supreme instance of this.

“Enlightened men… see in women a place of creation (mahall al-takwin),”137 just as the divine reality sees a place of creation in the cosmos. This vision is what fundamentally stimulates the intense pleasure and desire for procreation that accompany observation of the female form: “Man, moreover, seeks perfection and, like his Creator, desires to produce nothing less than perfection (al-kamal). In terms of creation, there is nothing more perfect or complete (akmal) than human existence; thus no undertaking can outdo the creation of a human.”138 This perspective contributes to Ibn Arabi’s broader argument, found elsewhere in his writings, that given the unity of beauty, all love poetry

– so far as it is authentically motivated by love – validly describes the ultimate Beloved.

“The accuracy of lovers in describing love is due to their attention to its effects and concomitants, for these are phenomena common to all lovers, those aware of their true

______134 Zargar, 2011: 71 135 Ibn Arabi, 2004: 277 136 Zargar, 2011: 67 137 Ibid: 69 138 Ibid: 69

Beloved as well as the oblivious.”139 Thus physical beauty, even appreciated in a mundane fashion, instructs the individual in the path of love, which is always – even if unknowingly – directed toward the ultimate Beloved.

The perpetual turning of the heart discussed in Chapter Four, its adoption of a new form in each moment, is not only a consequence of the infinite particularizations of divine Beauty, but also plays a crucial role on the path of love for keeping the human soul, with its limited attention span, interested in its ultimate object – the divine Beloved, without which it would in fact become bored. To keep the human soul interested, and thus keep it on the path of love, new forms arise continually. "A beloved is a good thing,” Rumi says, “because a lover derives strength and life from the image of his beloved. Why should this be strange? Layla's image gave Majnun strength and sustenance."140 Thus the heart’s adoption of a sequence of beautiful forms keeps its love perpetually renewed and reinvigorated. For some, including Ahmad al-Ghazzālī, this fluctuation has served as a sign testifying to the superiority of love over knowledge as a spiritual path, due to the ever-changing forms through which love is supported, leading to greater self-effacement and aweing of the individual in light of ever-unfolding divine manifestation:

All this [fluctuation in the activity of Love] is the display of Time (waqt) as it appears in the light of knowledge, the limit of which is the seashore and has nothing to do with the depths of this ocean; while the splendor of love transcends the limitations of description, explanation, and comprehension which belong to knowledge.141

______139 Zargar, 2011: 84 140 Thackston, 2004: 125 141 Ghazzālī, 1986: 21

Furthermore, Rumi mentions that the turning of the heart, where individual forms are serially recognized as ephemeral, also helps prepare one for the ascent from ‘worldly love’ to consciously spiritual love. Where the supreme beauty of the human being fades on a relatively short timescale, thus allowing the spiritual aspirant to seek aesthetic satisfaction in a variety of forms, “the lover discerns the true Beloved from derivative beloveds, augments his seeking and need through spiritual discipline under the guidance of a shaykh, and negates all things other than the Beloved, including himself, so that only

He remains.”142 This will in time lead the disciple to an operative understanding of the divine source of all beauty, by which formal beauty can be contemplated precisely for what it is – a manifestation of eternal Beauty. As expressed in Ibn Arabi’s thought, “the key, then, to complete love or ‘divine love’ is merging spiritual and natural love, while acknowledging the true object of love: the Real…The representational beloved can vary or even be multiple in number, for the true Beloved is invariably the Real.”143

______142 Chittick, 1983: 212 143 Zargar, 2011: 82

VI: Praxis

Discussions on the dichotomy between form and matter, their ontological unity, and middle vision obviously have vast implications for the theoretical understanding of physical beauty for Ibn Arabi and Rumi. So far as these authors are interested in operative realization (taḥaqquq) of spiritual knowledge, they are not content with mere concepts – respectively understood as a binding fetter (‘iqāl) or partial intellect (‘aql-i juzī) – it remains to be seen how these considerations translate into the realm of practice.

Transitioning from theoretical to practical approaches to physical beauty requires a corresponding methodological shift. In contrast to theory, practice is largely subject to historical contingencies, and in that sense gains a degree of specificity which cannot be adequately apprehended or understood except through historical analysis, an approach methodologically equipped to treat the specificities of events and traditions that for various reasons pass unmentioned in more theoretical works. A historical mode of analysis is all the more necessary in this context so far as Ibn Arabi and Rumi generally do not expound practical spiritual guidelines in their writings, much less guidelines specifically concerned with physical beauty. It is possible to speculate at this juncture that such explicit practical guidelines, if they historically existed at all, were promulgated orally to individual disciples, or, alternatively, were inherited from prior spiritual masters and thus needed no independent formulation on the part of Ibn Arabi and Rumi.

It is imperative to recognize at the outset that by the 13th century, Islamicate societies had already developed a sophisticated and nuanced discourse on practical approaches to physical beauty, most significantly and controversially focused on human beauty. This discourse is diverse and spans many centuries, witnessing a variety of

47 perspectives on the part of spiritual aesthetes and their critics, who approached the issue from several angles, as well as the inevitable rebuttal from the advocates of ritualized aesthetic practices. For Ibn Arabi and Rumi, the portions of their writings that pertain to the practical spiritual attitude toward physical beauty are effectively enmeshed in this pre-existing discourse. Accordingly, it is impossible to give a fair and informed opinion concerning Ibn Arabi and Rumi’s perspectives on this topic without recourse to the broader historical context whence emerged their comments and in which they situated.

Like all human cultures, medieval Islamic societies placed value physical beauty in idioms not exclusively or explicitly identified with religious attitudes, i.e. understanding beauty as a phenomenon of human experience receptive to aesthetic appreciation, and capable of manipulation and enhancement through human intervention.

It is on this level that artisans, landscapers, architects, painters and calligraphers plied their trades in the service of various clients, usually members of the political and economic elite. This appreciation of beauty was in certain cases fetishized, which contributed to the rise of ritualized forms of aesthetic appreciation in certain religious circles, which while emerging from and partaking of customary cultural practices and tropes, went “beyond the enjoyment of beautiful forms that offer themselves to the senses”144 and operated at self-consciously spiritual and mystic levels of cognition.

As mystics and public spiritual figures, Ibn Arabi and Rumi were certainly familiar with the tradition of ritualized aestheticism – commonly associated with Sufism

– which involved focused visual contemplation of beautiful things, generally performed

______144 Ritter, 2003: 448

48 with the aim of observing the divine in physical forms. This ritualized aestheticism was not monolithic, and a diversity of approaches to ‘mystical gazing’ appeared, differing so far as disagreements existed regarding the exact relationship between the beautiful and the divine. Perhaps the most extreme case was that of the Hulūlis, so named because of their belief that physical beauty, and human beauty in particular, indicated the presence of a divine incarnation (ḥulūl). This stands in contrast to other mystical aesthetes who, according to Ibn al-Jawzī, marveled at the excellence of physical forms merely as a means of "inferring the Creator from creation."145 While this latter approach may seem tame when compared with the Ḥulūlis, it is noteworthy that neither of these approaches to ritualized aesthetic appreciation avoided the censure and criticism of the mainstream religious establishment. Indeed, criticisms arose not only from exoteric jurists, but also were voiced by more restrained Sufis such as ‘Umar Suhrawardī.146 In fact, it is the concept of ‘inferring Creator from creation’ that drew the ire of Ibn al-Jawzī, who saw ritual gazing – even when undertaken in this conceptual framework –as an illegitimate spiritual practice. Considered as “the acme of pursuing lusts, deceiving reason and opposing religious science,”147 it was for al-Jawzī and similar critics only legitimated through appeals to religious sensibilities. This is not to say that the religious mainstream was unanimous in its condemnation, and even prominent ‘ulama, most notably as ‘Abd al-Ghānī an-Nabulsī (d. 1731), sought to defend Sufi mystics, and by extension their rituals, from such character assassination. Weighing in on a controversy surrounding the amorous imagery of Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s dīwān, an-Nabulsī argues in his Kashf as-Sirr al-

______145 Ritter, 2003: 511 146 Ibid: 513 147 Ibid: 511

Ghāmiḍ (Unveiling of the Hidden Secret) “it is not possible to attribute to the people of

God…the amatory meanings that occur to the uninitiated...The proper explanation of the words of the people of God is an explanation in terms of God, applying to God and nothing else."148 In the thirteenth century, it appears that Ibn Arabi faced similar criticisms, which prompted him to write an explanatory commentary of Tarjuman al-

Ashwāq (Interpreter of Desires).

Before moving on to examine the contours of this topic in detail, it is important to clarify two points about the primary source material: first, it is critical to point out certain modern misconceptions about pre-modern ritualized aestheticism in the Islamic tradition; second, it is necessary to identify the specific practices that are referenced in primary- source literature and will be discussed here. Speaking to the first point, ritualized aestheticism is a totally foreign concept to Western scholars, especially insofar as it often took a male youth as its object. No known practices of this kind existed in Western contexts, pre-modern or modern. Admittedly, the male youth represented ideal beauty in classical Greek culture, but, as Ritter observes, it was in the Islamic world alone that this ideal attained practical spiritual significance and became the center of formalized rituals:

“contemplating the beauty of God in a beautiful youth or boy is an alien element within the Semitic cultural sphere. Neither ancient Arabian paganism, nor Judaeo-Christian [sic] monotheism, nor the social structure of the Semitic peoples… favor[ed]… the emergence of such attitudes. They only arose once Muslims had come into contact with Indo-

European peoples.”149 Furthermore, so far as ritual gazing often involved mature males

______148 Rouayheb, 2005: 96 149 Ritter, 2003: 516, 517

50 observing young men or adolescent boys – often attired in what Western observers considered to be ‘feminine’ fashions – it constitutes a particularly contentious and culturally convoluted topic of research for modern academics. Like the Western explorers and adventurers of the past two centuries, contemporary readers may be tempted to react to and read these practices as purely homoerotic and pederastic; nonetheless, this would be altogether short-sighted and, ultimately, incorrect. As will be shown, there were sensual and pederastic cultural contexts in which the formal practices eventually associated with mystical gazing developed, such as the music recital (samā’) and the adornment of human objects of visual contemplation, known in Islamic sources as the shāhid. Nevertheless, it will also be demonstrated here that the historical controversies accompanying the efforts of mystics to spiritualize and re-invent such practices as techniques of spiritual realization do not lie in cultural anxieties surrounding homoeroticism and pederasty, as exist in the modern world. Rather, historical criticisms of ritualized aesthetic practices, including those voiced by Ibn Arabi and Rumi in their own writings, center on the spiritual dangers posed by physical beauty, especially for

‘weak-souled’ or novice spiritual aspirants. Perhaps ironic to the modern reader, the typically male sex of shāhid became a point on which to defend the practice from accusations of eroticism. ‘Abd al-Ghānī an-Nabulsī argued that "looking at the opposite sex was more likely to give rise to lust than looking at the identical sex; a man's sexual desire for a woman was 'natural' (tabi'i), [i.e. prone to the sexual urges proper to the natural realm] whereas his desire for a beardless boy – by implication – was not."150 In short, pejorative notions of homoeroticism and pederasty were not categories of analysis

______150 Rouayheb, 2005: 115

51 that entered into the opinions of Sufis and jurists when they discussed gazing rituals, and to apply or seek out such attitudes in this analysis would be anachronistic.

To the second point, it is necessary to briefly outline what specific practices constituted ritualized aestheticism, how they were performed, and to what object.

Borrowing its form from a mode of courtly entertainment, the most significant form of mystical aesthetic practice came to be called shāhidbāzī, or ‘play/occupation with the shāhid,’ in the Persian-speaking world. Accordingly, individual mystics who participated in shāhidbāzī were individually referred to as a shāhidbāz, with the shāhid in this case being a physical object of mushāhadah (witnessing) rather than the internal or imaginal shāhid of middle vision. As has already been stated, when referring to human beings the term shāhid usually “designates a beautiful youth, as well as more rarely a beautiful woman.”151 152 The ‘play’ (bāz) involved here is not understood in the sense of tangible interaction, but rather refers to one’s preoccupation with the object of visual contemplation. So far as similar practices pre-existed their reformulation as a spiritual exercise, the term shāhidbāzī may in fact have arisen as a polemical tool for discrediting

“representatives of the doctrine of the shāhid (al-qawl bi'l-shāhid).”153 In the Arabic east, the rather generic term naẓar (seeing) appears to have been used in reference to this practice, although this does not at all indicate a lack of controversy, especially in juridical circles.154

______151 Ritter, 2003: 487 152 The female shāhid, although uncommon, was not unknown. ‘Abd al-Ghānī an-Nabulsī "was committed to the idea that the 'handsome countenances' which reveal divine beauty could be both women and beardless youths." (Rouayheb, 2005: 103) 153 Ritter, 2003: 487 154 Rouayheb, 2005: 112-118

A Cultural Genealogy of Shāhidbāzī

It is helpful to remember that while possessing its own internal logics and symbolism, Sufism of the medieval period was organically rooted in the cultural patterns of Islamic societies and accordingly shared many formal characteristics in common with the broader culture of the time. The most conspicuous instance of this is to be found in the imagery of Sufi poetry, which was largely carried over from profane literature and given a new spiritual symbolism. The case of mystical aestheticism follows this pattern, so far as the Islamic mystical tradition took on the forms and practices of the cultural milieu and forms of aesthetic appreciation in which it organically developed. Just as the imagery of the cupbearer (sāqī) and spiritual wine (khamr) of winesong poems

(khamrīyyāt) originated in a very real and tangible drinking culture that existed in pre-

Islamic societies and continued throughout the Islamic period, similarly the practices involved in ritualized aesthetic contemplation derived from contemporary cultural practices of Islamicate societies. Accordingly, shāhidbāzī has a long genealogy as a form of entertainment in the decidedly non-mystical currents of Islamic culture, which generally considered the male youth as the peak of human beauty, ample evidence of which is recorded in the extensive poetic traditions of medieval Islamic societies.

The widespread poetic form of the ghazal, “a genre of love lyric originating in the

Umayyad period, [and] perfected during the Abbasid caliphate,” became the predominant poetic mode of Persia, Mamluk Egypt, and Andalusia155 often took as its subject

“representations of the youthful beloved.” This youth came to be depicted as a cupbearer

______155 Boone, 2014: 54

(sāqī) after the ghazal tradition “merged with the preexisting [i.e. pre-Islamic] genre of khamriyya [sic] (poetry written in praise of wine).”156 Often referred to as ghilmān, “fair youths,”157 they have served as the subjects of extended poetic treatises since the 9th century, beginning with al-Jāhiz’s work “Boasting Match over Maids and Youths.”158

Significantly, the ideal “youth was never restricted to just one national, ethnic, or racial type,”159 appreciation of which crossed “levels of class, nationality, and race.”160

This aesthetic ideal was of course not confined to literary or intellectual spheres, and instead existed as a practical reality of social life in the medieval Islamic world.

Beautiful youths were to be found among the cultural and political elite, or may have been a “youthful slave inducted into the government bureaucracy… a shop boy or trade apprentice…a student at the medrese attached to the local mosque or a Sufi acolyte; he may be a household servant; he may be a prostitute.”161 Widespread as it was, this literary and cultural trope was not without its critics and satirists: born three decades after the death of Rumi, Obeyd-e Zākāni’s satirizes the genre of ghilmān literature in his

Rishnāma.162 Similarly, while explicitly mystical appreciation of a youthful shāhid drew the ire of the religious establishment, as will be discussed in detail later on, profane fraternization with a ghilmān was often associated with other subversive activities. In describing a contemporary, one writer penned a criticism typical of its kind: “he became

[in]famous for drinking wine and loving boys.”163 Similarly, a posthumous biography of

______156 Boone, 2014: 54 157 Ibid., 58 158 Ibid., 58 159 Ibid., 62 160 Ibid., 61 161 Ibid., 62 162 Ibid., 64 163 Rouayheb, 2005: 19

Sufi notable Ayyūb al-Khalwatī al-Dimashqī notes that "People used to accuse him of frequenting beardless boys."164

The provocative connotations of associating with youths are best understood when situated within a broader pre-modern aversion to hedonism and the interest in preserving personal dignity, honor, and status as a form of social capital. The “blatantly deviant social behavior”165 of Qalandari dervishes illustrates this point. Pre-modern

Islamic societies considered the dervish provocative precisely because he did “care about the customs and opinions of the world around him but devotes himself without concern to life's pleasures, in particular to wine, and likewise develops a kind of humor toward life… [i.e.] tībat al-qulūb.”166 The modern reader may be ill-equipped to understand the moral weight that charges of hedonism – such as those which stemmed from associations with beautiful youths; nonetheless, such accusations could be quite grave in pre-modern

Islamicate societies. As Sanā’ī wrote, “until madrasa and minaret fall into ruin, this affair of the qalandar will not be settled. Until faith becomes unbelief and unbelief becomes faith, no bondsman of God will be a true Muslim.”167

Emerging out of this cultural milieu, perhaps the most direct genealogical precedent for the human shāhid were dancing boys, which “were an established institution throughout the Middle East and North Africa, performing in taverns and cafes, at court, in wedding processions, and at religious festivals.”168 Referred to as a köçek169

______164 Rouayheb, 2005: 99 165 Karamustafa, 1994: 13 166 Ritter, 2003: 503 167 Ibid., 2003: 503 168 Boone, 2014: 102 169 Ibid., 102

(‘little/pretty one’) in Turkish, they entertained at social gatherings, including those of the

Sufi variety. Whereas the generic literary and cultural trope of the ghilmān only connoted moral improprieties on the part of their older male associates, dancing boys were explicitly associated with transgressive behavior. “As was the case with coffee boys, male dancers were commonly assumed to be sexually available for pay,” with at least one contemporary author referring to them as “prostitutes.”170

The privileged status of youthful male beauty, and the social anxieties that accompanied it, pervaded the sociopolitical and physical geography of the Islamic world in which Ibn Arabi and Rumi lived. Moreover, Boone’s analysis demonstrates that the widespread appreciation of youthful beauty extended well into the colonial period, and – as he argues – only faded from Islamic cultures with the encroachment of Western cultural norms, giving indication of the extent to which it influenced Islamic societies and moral attitudes. The significance of this non-mystical cultural milieu on shāhidbāzī cannot be overstated, for two reasons: first for its importance in contributing to the formal aspects of the ritualized and self-consciously spiritual act of shāhidbāzī; second, the cultural connotations and prejudices about association with youths continued to inform criticisms of shāhidbāzī, not least because the non-mystical, informal appreciation of youthful beauty continued alongside its mystical counterpart.

Spiritual Precedents and Practical Expressions of Shāhidbāzī

That the beautiful youth was transposed from a mundane, aesthetic trope to the paragon of mystical beauty is of course not unique to Islam, but also existed in Christian

______170 Boone, 2014: 102

56 history. Ritter recalls for his readers “that Christ is also represented as a beardless youth in early Christian art,” manifesting a similar ideal of beauty that “was later supplanted in the West by different conceptions.”171 The crucial distinction that Ritter is careful to articulate, however, is that only in Islamic societies did this aesthetic ideal take concrete ritual form, although there is room to speculate about the possibility of Plato having engaged in similar rituals of gazing.172 The eventual emergence of shāhidbāzī is not entirely accidental, as there are many Prophetic utterances (aḥadīth) that spiritualize youthful beauty, along with others that establish the religious merit of gazing at beautiful faces, especially those of pious or saintly people, e.g. “gazing upon ‘Alī is ‘ibāda

[worship].” Perhaps the most famous Prophetic aḥadīth regarding youths refer to his vision of God precisely in that form. “The Prophet beheld his God in a dream, or during the ascension, in the form of a beardless youth (amrad),”173 regarding which a variety of narrations and descriptions exist. In one, “the Prophet said: I saw my Lord in the most beautiful form like a youth with abundant hair on the throne of grace, with a golden rug spread out around Him. He placed His hand between my shoulders and I felt its coolness in my liver. He spoke to me, etc.”174

There are also reported various aḥadīth attesting to the Prophet’s own association with some of his youthful companions, which were historically “uncontroversial traditions,” such as one in which the Prophet says to Mu’adh, “'I love you… Mu'adh,' and that Mu'adh replied, 'And I love you,' whereupon the Prophet gave him instructions on

______171 Ritter, 2003: 461 172 Ibid.: 459 173 Ibid.: 459 174 Ibid.: 459

57 what to say at the conclusion of a prayer."175 Similar narrations exist regarding the companion Usāma bin Zayd.176 Outside the context of Prophetic aḥadīth, spiritual attitudes toward youthful beauty were similarly read into the narratives surrounding the canonical Qur’anic prophets. Joseph (Yūsuf) is consistently regarded as beautiful, and the subsequent Islamic tradition came to believe that “Adam was created as a beardless youth.” Some mystics went so far as to interpret his Qur’anic creation story as a primordial precedent for shāhidbāzī itself: "the angels prostrating themselves before

Adam are the archtype [sic] of the mystics contemplating the beauty of beardless youths, while Satan's refusal to bow... is the archtype [sic] of those antimystical scholars who insist" against it.177

Drawing these spiritual precedents as well as preexisting cultural forms, certain

Sufis hosted dinner gatherings followed by music and dance, “known under the name samā’,”178 by means of which – contemporary records attest – they “compensated themselves for their otherwise sparse diet and their mortifications.”179 “These events did not always have the character of a strictly regulated, solemn ceremony, as until recently

[i.e. the early 20th-century] the outsider could also observe in the cloisters of the Mevlevi dervishes… The samā’ is not originally a religious exercise but, as a relaxation after such exercises, is conceived of as a concession (rukhsa).”180 In these gatherings, intentioned contemplation of beauty sometimes formed a part of the program. Ibn al-Jawzī reportedly heard of such samā’ sessions, writing: “I've heard that the people who practice

______175 Rouayheb, 2005: 102 176 Ibid.: 102 177 Ibid.: 103 178 Ritter, 2003: 507 179 Ibid.: 510 180 Ibid.: 507

58 listening to music even add to this gazing at a beardless youth. And sometimes they adorn him with jewelry and gaudy clothes and braid, and maintain that they strive after increase in faith by means of contemplative gazing.”181 These events could become quite lively –

“one would dance to the music, the high point of which is designated as wajd,”182

(ecstasy) – with the “handsome boy or youth… beautifully decked out”183 serving as an object of contemplation, ostensibly working as a dancer or cupbearer.184 Nonetheless,

“wine and sensuality were frowned upon, and a spiritual, religious character was conferred on the whole,”185 distinguishing Sufi samā’ from mundane entertainment.

Alongside this there of course arose a more restrained mode of shāhidbāzī, such as appears to have been practiced by Fakhruddīn ‘Irāqī, one of the foremost members of the

Akbarian school of thought and, along with Ahmad al-Ghazzālī and Awhad ad-Dīn

Kirmānī, among the most famous practitioners of shāhidbāzī.186 Jami’s Nafaḥāt describes that ‘Irāqī, having encountered an exemplary shāhid in the person of a cobbler’s apprentice, would with “his companions come every day to the shoemaker's shop, gaze without disturbance at the boy's face, and recite poetry and weep.”187

The regularity of contact between ‘Irāqī and his shāhid is indicative of a broader trend in the practice of shāhidbāzi, ostensibly carried over from the non-mystical social milieu, in which a shāhidbāz would develop and maintain amorous relationships with their shāhids. This was certainly the case for Ibn al-Fāriḍ. As indicated in an-Nabulsī’s

______181 Ritter, 2003: 511 182 Ibid.: 508 183 Ibid.: 508 184 Ibid.: 512 185 Ibid.: 508 186 Ibid.: 487 187 Ibid.: 497

59 commentary on his dīwān, the poet “loved a butcher boy in whose form God the Exalted made him see His manifestations.”188 An-Nabulsī was himself known by his contemporaries to be especially close to his student and potential shāhid, Muhammad al-

Dikdikjī. (d.1719)189 Such relationships, though curious to the modern reader, apparently became quite commonplace and matter-of-fact. As late as the 1930s, Hellmut Ritter observed that the practice of shāhidbāzī in Albania carried “no moral taint, neither for the boy nor for his family. The lovers do him no harm.”190

The Goals of Shāhidbāzi

That transcendental shāhid whose body is my soul, the soul in my breast is his shining form. And that beautiful [human] face which you call shāhid, shāhid, but His residence.191

Sufis who engaged in such practices did so for a variety of reasons, with the vision of God in material form being the most prominent. According to some devoted practitioners, "the contemplation of phenomenal beauty is not only permissible but also necessary if one is to transcend the phenomenal world, including one's own self, and experience the omnipresence of God."192 In his commentary on the dīwān of Ibn al-Fāriḍ, an-Nabulsī reminds his reader that "it is not simply by reciting supererogatory prayers and incessant invocations, without applying yourself to perceiving the manifestations of

Truth the Exalted, that you raise yourself from the depths of your self [i.e. the carnal

______188 Rouayheb, 2005: 97 189 Ibid.: 104 190 Ritter, 2003: 516 191 Ibid.: 490 192 Rouayheb, 2005: 101

60 soul] and your nature to the peak of being united with the Beloved of unbounded

Beauty."193 The implication here is that adherence to exoteric religious ritual – e.g. canonical prayer, fasting, supplication – and even meditative spiritual practices such as dhikr are not sufficient to render operative the mystic’s conceptual understanding that the beauty of the world exists only so far as it manifests the divine Beauty. This state of affairs appears to have been understood in two complementary ways. First, so far as in the world meaning (ma’na) is consistently joined to form (ṣūrah) – or, as Ibn Arabi often expresses it, spirit (rūḥ) is wedded to body (jasad) – it is only through visual contemplation that meaning/spirit can be observed. Awhad ad-Dīn Kirmānī expresses this in his quatrain:

For this reason I look with a physical eye at (earthly) form, because there is a trace of (supernatural) meaning [i.e. ma’na] in form. This world is a visible form, and we are within visible forms. One can only behold (supernatural) meaning in earthly form.194

This perspective is complemented by the additional understanding that the observation of meaning in form is a divine favor, capacity for which signals the spiritual excellence of the human being in general and the man of perfect insight in particular, referred to in Ibn Arabi’s words as Dhu’l-‘Aynayn (The Possessor of Two Eyes). This is most eloquently summarized in an-Nabulsī’s Dīwān al-Haqā’iq (Poems of Inner

Realities):

______193 Rouayheb, 2005: 101 194 Ritter, 2003: 488

We are a people who are fond of handsome countenances, and with them God augments His favors to us. From the Preserver we have an eye, which increases our certainty and insight. We have been passed the wine of divine manifestation, and with it our cup has been filled.195

Alternatively, shāhidbāzī was considered by some Sufis as an “ascetic test of strength.”196 Rather than as a means of witnessing divine traces in the shāhid, “in stories about the early Sūfīs who practiced gazing at youths (nazar ilā'l-murd)… it is a question of rejecting sensuality and combatting it, and it was a claim to fame for Sûfïs that they kept their association with youths free of sensuality.”197 The following passage from

Zakariyya Anṣārī’s Nata'ij j al-afkār (Results of Ideas), a commentary on Qushayrī’s

Risāla, is particularly instructive:

There were those (tā’ifatun) who used to take the most beautiful possible youth, dress him in the most beautiful clothes and adorn him with the most beautiful attire and place a candle in his hand during the listening to music. Each person then tested himself to see whether he would be distracted by the youth's beauty and his humanity would turn toward him,198 or whether, because of the psychic state induced by listening to music, his humanity would drop away and he would be so engrossed that the youth didn't occupy him.199

Criticisms of Shāhidbāzi

The relatively widespread practice of shāhidbāzī did not make it immune from controversy. Particularly in the Arab world, “the practice and underlying theory of…'mystical aestheticism' was highly controversial. To many Islamic religious scholars, the idea that only God truly exists, and that the created world is but a manifestation of His

______195 Rouayheb, 2005: 100 196 Ritter, 2003: 512 197 Ibid.: 474 198 ‘His,’ ‘him,’ and ‘he’ in the second sentence all refer to the shāhidbāz. 199 Ibid.: 512

62 attributes, was plain pantheism ('ayniyyah) or 'incarnationism' (hulul or ittihad).”200 In this connection, especially during the Mamluk period, religious controversies emerged regarding “the orthodoxy”201 of both Ibn Arabi and Ibn al-Fāriḍ. It is important here to reiterate for the contemporary reader that the controversies surrounding shāhidbāzī did not center on objections to pederasty or what one certain modern authors considered to be

‘unnatural’ homosexual attractions. As per Rouayheb’s account in Before

Homosexuality, it is in fact debatable if such categories existed at all in pre-modern

Islamic societies, and they certainly do not appear to have played any appreciable role in the critical historical literature on this subject. For one, the poetic tradition boasted many

“stock images to describe the [usually young, male] beloved,” familiar to anyone acquainted with Arabic and Persian poetry from the Islamic period, which describe the

“moon-shaped face, gazelle-like limbs, willowy waist, cheeks like roses, lips like cherries, teeth like pearls, brow like a crescent bow,”202 etc. More graphic poetic metaphors than these were also in circulation in pre-modern Islamic societies, though not being exclusively confined to the work of more ribald poets such as Abū Nūwās (d. 814).

Crucially, “audiences… found the public recitation of such amorous verse commonplace rather than scandalous.”203 This nonchalance regarding poetic eroticism largely carried over into the religious sphere, where even the leading ‘ulama – the very pillars of orthodoxy – did not categorically condemn poetry that espoused the contemplation of beauty in human form. The case of ‘Abd ar-Rahman al-‘Aydarusi (d.1778), whose dīwān deals with themes related to the practice of shāhidbāzi, is indicative of this trend. In spite

______200 Rouayheb, 2005: 107 201 Ibid.: 107 202 Boone, 2014: 55 203 Ibid.: 55

63 of his poetry, al-‘Aydarusi “was lionized by prominent Egyptian scholars such as the

Rectors of the Azhar college 'Abdallah al-Shabrawi (d. 1758) and Muhammad al-Hafni

(d. 1767).”204

Rather than adopting arguments concerned with moral degeneracy and ‘unnatural’ inclinations, ‘ulama and non-shāhidbāz Sufis tended to criticize what they saw as the practice’s unacceptable degree of sensuality. Whereas the shāhidbāzes argued that divine

Beauty could, or even must, be witnessed in the world of forms, their critics often saw forms as inherently and inalienably sensual, thus presenting an absolute obstacle to spiritual realization. Where proponents of shāhidbāzī could cite Prophetic aḥadīth that affirm the presence of divine beauty in the youth, critics certainly did not interpret these as unequivocal Prophetic validation of shāhidbāzī was a valid religious practice enjoined by the Prophet. On the contrary, they could cite an alternative hadith apparently forbidding the practice, stating: “Beware of looking at beardless youths because they have a complexion like the complexion of God."205 It would thus appear to critics that while the Prophet acknowledged the divine aspect of physical beauty, it is precisely the presence of such beauty that forbids the ritual contemplation of forms.

The overwhelming power of beauty is a common theme in Islamic literatures, both mystical and mundane, famous for its capacity to law low the powerful and deprive the sane of reason, the most famous instance of this being the love story of Layli and

Majnun (lit., ‘insane’). Famous Ottoman historian and social critic Mustafa Ali writes of such an experience, saying “the sprouting moustache on your lip resembles very fine

______204 Rouayheb, 2005: 105 205 Ritter, 2003: 459

64 calligraphic writing, the moles are the dots. I have become all confounded because of you, whether you scatter your hair over the cheeks or not.”206 'Abd al-Wahhāb al-Sha'rani

(d. 1565) stresses that the dangers posed by human beauty persist into the spiritual sphere, writing that a beginner on the Sufi path must “avert his eyes from attractive forms as much as possible, for looking at them is like an arrow which hits the heart and kills it, especially if he looks with lust, for that is like a poison arrow which melts a man's body instantly.”207 Thus the sensuality often associated with shāhidbāzī was frequently depicted as not only an obstacle that hindered further spiritual progress, but moreover as a corrupting force that could fell even advanced spiritual travelers, effectively undoing years of contemplative and devotional practice. The image of the spiritual master undone by worldly beauty even became the subject of satire by poets such as Sa’dī, who described an old Sufi’s desire being rekindled by “a well-muscled, power wrestler boy, a doe-eyed flirt whose arms could chains destroy.”208 This troublesome potency of human beauty in the lives of Sufis inclined to shāhidbāzī is further attested to in that many wanted “to give up gazing at beautiful youths and keeping company with them but they are unable to do so.”209 To combat this, even relatively early scholars such as Abu Ṭālib al-Makkī (d. 996) advocated limiting one’s contemplation of human beauty to “legally permitted objects of love,”210 i.e. wives and concubines, which found easier justification under the sharī’ah.

______206 Boone, 2014: 64-65 207 Rouayheb, 2005: 108 208 Boone, 2014: 64 209 Ritter, 2003: 481 210 Ibid.: 509

The real thrust of these criticisms was in effect the assertion that the shāhidbāz was deluded as to the real nature of his practice. Rather than being a sincerely spiritual or mystical ritual, many critics saw it as an avenue for the carnal soul to reassert itself in a religious guise. Qushayrī argues that for the soul susceptible to the shāhid’s beauty, the act of shāhidbāzī “bears witness against him, to the effect that his humanity has remained and that he pays the carnal soul its tribute (qiyāmihī bi-ahkāmi bashariyyatih).”211 While

Ritter characterizes many such critics, including ‘Umar Suhrawardī, as well-intentioned

“great men” who “wished to prevent those who are cut off (from absolute beauty) from… abandonment by God in the lower world of (animal) nature,”212 their words present a far less generous picture. ‘Umar Suhrawardī himself characterized the shāhidbāz as a pleasure-seeker who, despite claims to the contrary, during his shāhidbāzī persists in

“secretly harboring wicked thoughts.”213 ‘Abd al-Wahhāb ash-Sha’rāni for one appears zealously uncompromising in his condemnation of the practice:

He who... asserts that this love is spiritual rather than bodily, we say to him: that this is an interpolation from the self and the devil. The devil may make someone imagine that there is no harm in that, and that all beauty in existence derives its beauty from the beauty of God the Exalted. To this we say: He whose beauty you claim to be seeing is the one who has prohibited this seeing.214

Sanā’ī is even blunter when he writes that “The Sufis are out for pleasure, their direction of prayer is the shāhid, the candle and the belly.”215

______211 Ritter, 2003: 485 212 Ibid.: 490 213 Ibid.: 513 214 Rouayheb, 2005: 108 215 Ritter, 2003: 511

At this juncture it is crucial to acknowledge that many of these criticisms historically emerged from and were informed by a medieval tradition of heresiography- writing among mainstream jurists and Sufis. The struggle to articulate a coherent description of Islamic orthodoxy led to the association of shāhidbāzī with more extreme or so-called deviant Islamic doctrines, collectively labelled in the polemic literature as ghuluww (exaggeration.) Hence ‘Umar Suhrawardī could label the famous shāhidbāz

Awhad ad-Din Kirmani as a “heretical innovator (mubtadi’),”216 and shāhidbāzī was depicted as a practice dangerously close to those characteristic of the aforementioned

Ḥulūlīyyah (incarnationsists), who believed that the divine could take up residence in beautiful earthly forms. Hujwīrī (d. ca. 1072) actually traces a direct genealogy from the

Ḥulūlīs to the practice of shāhidbāzī, stating that the latter is but “a left-over”217 of the former. Perhaps the most vociferous proponent of the contemptable links between the

Ḥulūlīs and shāhidbāzī was none other than Abu’l Hasan al-Ash’ari (d. 936) who discusses their connection in his Maqalāt al-Islāmiyyīn.218 Presumably speaking of shāhidbāzī, he references “ascetics of the Sūfīs…. who are advocates of hulūl and maintain that the Creator takes up residence” in individual people, even animals. This heresy is, for al-Ash’ari, compounded by their laxity in following the strictures of Islamic law: “They are inclined to discard the holy laws and maintain that if a person has reached his God, no religious duties are any longer binding on him, and he no longer has to perform any practices of worship.”219

______216 Ritter, 2003: 489 217 Ibid.: 471 218 Ibid.: 465 219 Ibid.: 465

These doctrinal anxieties surrounding the Ḥulūlīyyah can in turn be seen as an extension of Qur’anic and theological polemics directed toward Christianity, specifically in regard to its doctrine of the incarnation. One scholar, Muhammad al-Bazdawi (d.1100) makes this specific connection, stating that Ḥulūlī “doctrine is close to the doctrine of the

Christians,” and that it is in fact “worse,” because whereas the Christians acknowledge a single historical incarnation, “these Sufis say: ‘The traces of divinity appear in every beardless youth,’” even among the youth of “infidels.”220 Noting this connection, Ritter argues that the existence of the Ḥulūlīs as a “historically tangible sect”221 is unlikely.

They may in fact have been no more than a literary construct derived from anti-Christian polemics as well as popular Islamic legends about the ancient Iranian prophet Mani, known as a famous painter, and his disciples who, according to Abu Shakur, “teach that

God Himself takes up residence in every shāhid.”222 Indeed, other heresiographers writing on the Ḥulūlīs, such as Abu Naṣr al-Sarrāj (d. 988), only knew them “through literary sources,”223 not from contemporary accounts. Nonetheless, as a construct on which to hang a variety of incarnationist heresies, the Hululis became a potent image of deviance and excess for the medieval religious elite, and in consequences “later Sûfïs… were accustomed to distance themselves quite explicitly from hulūl”224 and the heresy it implied.

______220 Ritter, 2003: 471 221 Ibid.: 470 222 Ibid.: 468 223 Ibid.: 466 224 Ibid.: 472

Defending Shāhidbāzi

These criticisms were not the last word on shāhidbāzī in pre-modern Islamic societies, and advocates of the practice did not hesitate to mount a robust defense, especially in cases where the criticism levied was intended as a form of character assassination. With their spiritual charisma being to a large degree contingent on personal virtue and piety, Sufi masters were particularly conscious of the need to refute attempts to impugn their character. In his Song of Lovers, Fakhruddīn “'Irāqī depicts how

Ahmad Ghazzālī admires God's beauty in a young face, comes to be rebuked for this and defends himself.225 In turn, ‘Irāqī would himself be defended from criticism on this point by the poet Jāmī, who felt “called” to defend him and two other shāhidbazes.226 Perhaps the most direct and extensive defense of shāhidbāzī comes from of ‘Abd al-Ghānī an-

Nabulsī , himself a noted shāhidbāz of the 17th and 18th centuries, in his work Ghayāt al- matlūb fi mahabbat al-mahbūb (The Goal of the Desired One in Love of the Beloved), "a lengthy and esoteric defense (in prose) of the permissibility of loving handsome beardless boys."227

The esoteric nature of the work is highly significant so far as it underpins the primary Sufi defense of shāhidbāzī, namely that the uninitiated misunderstand the practice entirely. The themes of misunderstanding and levels of knowledge run throughout Sufi discourse, so far as the esoteric character of the Sufi tradition implies a hierarchy of knowledge, with increasingly restricted access to information as one moves

______225 Ritter, 2003: 488 226 Ibid.: 497 227 Rouayheb, 2005: 102

69 to from basic to more advanced concepts. Perhaps the earliest canonical precedent for this occurs in a series of aḥadīth concerning the Prophet Muhammad’s transmission of esoteric knowledge to select disciples. In his autobiography, Shams of Tabriz narrates a typical example of this kind: Muhammad’s companion Ibn Ma’sūd stated “He [the

Prophet] would tell the meaning of such and such a verse to his Companions, and he would whisper a second meaning in my ear. If I were… to tell it to you, O Companions, you would cut my throat.”228 In keeping with this epistemological schema, detailed treatises expounding on shāhidbāzī appear to have been restricted from the uninitiated, which in all likelihood included many of its critics. Indeed, an-Nabulsī’s Ghayāt al-

Maṭlūb, perhaps the most comprehensive work on the subject, “was an esoteric work, and he instructed his sons to keep it private.”229 Although Rouayheb speculates that this may have been for practical considerations, so far as the Ghayāt “moved beyond what mainstream religious scholars would have accepted,”230 it is important to keep in mind that the initiatic ethos of pre-modern Sufism wielded a great deal of influence over the behaviors and logics of Sufi notables, such as an-Nabulsī. Accordingly, one could argue that "mystical aestheticism was a particularly sensitive issue"231 precisely because expository texts such as the Ghayāt were circulated in selective circles of Sufi disciples, and were not available to outside scholars.

Ultimately, advocates of shāhidbāzī often understood their critics as woefully misinformed, a theme which appears repeatedly in an-Nabulsī’s commentary on the dīwān of ibn al-Fāriḍ. He writes that Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s critics make the amateur mistake of

______228 Chittick, 2004: 154 229 Rouayheb, 2005: 110 230 Ibid.: 110 231 Ibid.: 107-108

“think[ing] that he loves what is other than God, that is, the worldly images, whereas he loves the One who is apparent, manifesting Himself in these images, that is, God."232 In speaking about the physical appearance of the beloved, the poet in fact “intends therewith the true reality [i.e. God] that is apparent, manifesting itself with its eternal face in that ephemeral thing."233 Where a shahidbāz took to writing his own defense, critics could be asserted indirectly, such as by clarifying his own position on the subject. An-Nabulsī’s himself does this in his verse: "O He who is apparent in His creation, while being hidden;

O He who is hidden in Himself while being apparent …It is not my creed to love appearances, but I love what the appearances indicate.”234 Direct rebuttal to critics along these lines, such as these penned by Ayyub al-Dimashqī, could become impassioned and even approach self-righteousness: "All beauty is the beauty of God, there is no doubt, though the proscribing blamers are in doubt./ The essence and the attributes are one, without doubt. You who approach the One, consider and you would not doubt!"235 This attitude appears to have been rather quickly adopted by the followers of Ibn Arabi, as demonstrated by a poem of ‘Afīf al-Dīn al-Tilimsānī (d. 1289), who wrote: "I looked at

Her [i.e. God], and the handsome person thinks I look at him. No, by Her dark-lipped smile! / Rather, She who is lovely has lent him the attribute of beauty which he unjustly

236 claims as his own." In the colonial period, even Sir Richard Burton was able to make this connection in reflecting on his Oriental travels, writing: “We must not forget that the love of boys has its noble, sentimental side... (regarding) youths as the most cleanly and

______232 Rouayheb, 2005: 97 233 Ibid.: 97 234 Ibid.: 101 235 Ibid.: 100 236 Ibid.: 97

71 beautiful objects in this phenomenal world...without any admixture of carnal sensuality, they (Sufis…) are paying the most fervent adoration to the Causa causans."237

Given the hierarchical scheme of Sufi spirituality, shahidbāzes also defended their practice by conceding that while shāhidbāzī was indeed prohibited to the vast majority of

Muslims – both lay people and junior Sufi adepts –it was in fact permitted to spiritual masters who, presumably by virtue of their high spiritual station, could successfully overcome the dangers inherent in shāhidbāzī. In his Ghayāt al-Maṭlūb, ‘Abd al-Ghānī an-Nabulsī proposes that the division between “love that is worldly” and “love that is divine” is only subjectively valid, and is a product of a disciple’s imperfect spiritual condition. “The truth of the matter,” he says, “is that it [love] is one thing.”238

Consequently, for the perfected soul that has been purified and cleansed of dualistic thinking, its love “is accompanied by Islam and faith (iman) and charity (ihsan) and is devoid of outward or inward disobedience."239

This line of argumentation appears relatively early in the history of Sufism. In the

11th century, ‘Abd al-Qāhir al-Baghdādī’s discussion of Abu Hulman al-Dimashqi mentions that “he… advocated the doctrine of permissiveness (ibāha) and maintained that if someone has come to know his God as he imagines Him, nothing is any longer forbidden for him and he may permit himself everything that gives him pleasure and that he desires.”240 Even advocates of more restrained forms of Sufi practice, such as Abu

Hamid al-Ghazzālī, appear to have accepted this as a valid means of legitimating

______237 Rouayheb, 2005: 98 238 Ibid.: 109 239 Ibid.: 109 240 Ritter, 2003: 466

72 ritualized aestheticism for those spiritual elites who have already undergone fanā’, i.e.

‘extinction’ in the divine reality. For Imam al-Ghazzālī, when one such knower of God encounters worldly beauty, he “knows that this beauty is the beauty of God which has descended into the levels of the phenomenal world (marātib-i kawniyya).” For al-

Ghazzālī, the crucial caveat at this juncture is recognition that “someone who isn't a knower of God and doesn't possess this sight should not gaze upon beautiful persons lest he ends up in the abyss of confusion."241 The cautionary attitude in which such arguments are framed implies that, while universally provocative, shāhidbāzī was not as controversial in Sufi circles as it was portrayed to be by outside observers. Moreover, it is clear that advanced mystics were writing with the aim of checking the excesses of novices, rather than forbidding such practices altogether. Rouayheb observes a similar tone in reading Sha’rāni, arguing that his word was “aimed specifically at novices, and not to more advanced mystics”242

Ibn Arabi and Rumi, Practical Attitudes

It is, on one hand, overwhelmingly obvious from available textual sources that both Ibn Arabi and Rumi presented themselves, or at least were posthumously presented by their closest disciples, as being on the conservative side of the shāhidbāzī controversy, apparently aware of and agreeing with the perceived improprieties and spiritual dangers other scholars and mystics associated with the practice. Ritter observes multiple instances Rumi “distances himself from hulūl” controversies in his writing, particularly in

______241 Ritter, 2003: 489 242 Rouayheb, 2005: 108-109

73 their connection with shāhidbāzī; at one point in the Mathnawi he even refers to the practice as a form of spiritual “hypocrisy.”243 Numerous instances are recorded in which

Rumi expresses open disapproval of the practice and those who partake in it. In one anecdote, someone informs him that Awhad ad-Din "Kirmānī was a lover of shāhids

(shāhidbāz) but [one] who didn't do anything," to which Rumi replied: "Would that he had done something and that the matter were then finished!"244 Similarly, Ibn Arabi expresses his disapproval in the Futūḥat, formulating his opinion closely in line with other Sufi authors, such as Qushayrī, ‘Umar Suhrawardī, and Sha’rānī, who saw shāhidbāzī as an intrinsically deceptive activity, both individually and collectively:

"One of the diseases of "states" [aḥwāl] is that a person takes up association with pious people in order to be regarded as one of them, while he is actually caught up in his sensual lust. If such a person then comes to a session of listening to music while he has a love relationship with a girl or a youth about which those present know nothing, an ecstasy of love grips him and "the state" overwhelms him because he is attached to that person who is in his soul, and then he moves (dances) and shouts and sighs and says: "Allāh! Allāh!" or "He!" and makes gestures and allusions (yushīru bi-ishārāt) like the people of God. Those present believe that his state is a divine state although he possesses a normal (sahīh) sensation of love and a normal state. (Futūhāt 2/315)245

. Part of Ibn Arabi’s discomfort with formalized shāhidbāzī, where the shāhid was overwhelmingly a young male, may also in fact derive from his own metaphysical aesthetics of gender, where he envisioned the male’s appreciation of the female form as ontologically superior to witnessing others of their own sex. Ritter argues this position in his Ocean of the Soul, noting a quotation from the Futūḥāt where Ibn Arabi remarks:

"Whoever knows the worth of women and the secret contained within them will not

______243 Ritter, 2003: 472 244 Ibid.: 489 245 Ibid.: 513-14

74 refrain from loving them. Indeed, love for them is part of the perfection of the knower of

God. For such love is a legacy from the Prophet and a divine love."246

What is nonetheless clear, however, is that both authors appear more comfortable with the practical appreciation of physical – and particularly human – beauty so long as that appreciation occurs spontaneously and without affectation. Whereas there are multiple instances of Rumi being said to have expressed disapproval or condemnation of shāhidbāzī, the following anecdote narrated by his son, Sultan Walad, demonstrates that

Rumi placed the onus of his disapproval on the ritualized character of the practice, rather than the act of mystical perception itself or its particular objects:

One day the Sûfïs asked my father, the master: "Bāyazīd said: Ί saw my Lord in the form of a beardless youth.' How is this possible?" He replied: "This can mean two things. Either he saw God in the form of a particular youth, or God presented Himself to him in the form of a youth because of Bâyazīd's inclination."247

Notable here is the complete absence of opprobrium or any innuendos pointing to Rumi’s personal disapproval; his response is as matter-of-fact and direct as the narration of

Bāyazīd’s vision. It is thus clear that so far as Rumi accepts the theoretical groundwork underlying such divine disclosures, he is likewise willing to accept the practical implications of this when it occurs unaffectedly in the spiritual life – or, at least, in the spiritual life of masters such as Bāyazīd Basṭāmī. Similar attitudes can be discerned in

Rumi’s intimate companion, Shams of Tabriz, who “was against shāhidbāzī,” despite the fact that “God occasionally appeared to him in the form of a female.”248 Given the vast

______246 Ritter, 2003: 494 247 Ibid.: 462 248 Ibid.: 491

75 influence of Shams on Rumi’s life and views, this position appears increasingly representative of Rumi’s own attitude on the subject. One can even point to such spontaneous spiritual appreciation of beauty as a major biographical facet of both authors’ lives; indeed, each famously produced a dīwān of poems inspired by and in praise of a physical beloved. Notably, Ibn Arabi’s encounter with the Persian girl Nizam, characterized by some as a ‘Meccan Beatrice,’249 as well as Rumi’s friendship with

Shams of Tabriz are described by both authors as profoundly mystical, at times openly theophanic, experiences, which nonetheless occur through the medium of a very visual and, in lay terms, ‘corporeal’ perception. Rumi clarifies for his reader that his mystical experience of beauty, at least as witnessed in the person of Shams, is intensely visual and physical:

O Beloved, spiritual beauty is very fair and glorious, But thine own beauty and loveliness is another thing. …I stand open-mouthed in veneration of that beauty: ‘God is most great’ is on my heart’s lips every moment. The heart hath gotten an eye constant in desire of thee. Oh, how that desire feeds heart and eye!250

Both the Tarjuman al-Ashwaq and the Dīvān-i Shams-i Tabrīz contain references to the divine experience of the beloved’s beauty, which for Rumi takes on a soteriological character: “From Tabriz-ward shone the Sun [shams] of Truth, and I said to him:/ ‘Thy light is at once joined with all things and apart from all.’”251

It is important however to temper this analysis with a recognition of the generally hyperbolic and fantastic character adopted by Islamicate poetry, especially that which

______249 Ritter, 2003: 495 250 Rumi, 2004: 43 251 Ibid.: 37

76 finds itself concerned with emotional themes such as love, devotion, separation, and longing. In this regard, it must be remembered that the poetic persona can – without duplicity – exaggerate or as it were ‘magnify’ the individual writer’s actual or even imagined experiences, resulting in poetry not so much a direct and literal reflection of pyscho-spiritual states, but more of a presentation of idealized types and relationships.

Indication of this is given in one of Rumi’s more exaggerated statements regarding

Shams, stating: ‘Except the beauty of Shamsi Din, the pride of Tabriz / Throw not your gaze on anything in the two worlds.’252 253

______252 Rumi, 2004: 151 253 This translation is adapted from Nicholson’s original, which while more literal is manifestly awkward: “Except the beauty of Shamsi Din, the pride of Tabriz / If so be that thou throwest a glance upon (aught in) the two worlds, do not so.” (Ibid., 151)

VII: Conclusion

This concludes a conceptual overview which intended to introduce a variety of perspectives toward physical beauty found in the writings of Ibn Arabi and Mawlānā

Jalaluddin Rumi. These perspectives have been diverse, even at times appearing logically contradictory. Both authors conceive of meaning/form dichotomies, enjoining their audiences to penetrate within the substances of things to see the subtle realities that, in one perspective, cannot be purely identified with physical beauty. In this regard, we have witnessed them characterize beauty as both deceptive, so far as form is incongruous with meaning, and spiritually telling – so far as particular pairings of form and meaning are not arbitrary. Physical beauty, like sonoral and conceptual beauty, is thus conceived as a spiritual support for those capable of ‘inferring Creator from creation.’ Conversely, we have also witnessed Ibn Arabi and Rumi reject this dichotomy entirely, recognizing it as a means of organizing mental concepts rather than reflecting an extant ontological schema. This recognition of physical beauty as naught but the manifestation of divine

Beauty is accordingly rooted in monistic Sufi metaphysics which recognize the fundamental irreality of everything but the Real (al-Ḥaqq) and, therefore, acknowledges divine omnipresence in all extant things. These two positions are reconciled in the thought of Ibn Arabi and Rumi by their recognition of a fundamental cosmic ambiguity predicated on a distinction between Being (wujūd) and existence (al-kawn), the latter of which is an imaginal (khayālī) or intermediary (barzakhī) state between the absolutes of

Being and Non-Being. Accordingly, each extant thing – including the perceiving human subject and its own locus of perception, i.e. the heart, can only be characterized by the mystic as He/not He.

Physical beauty becomes a more complicated concept at this level, where the perpetual turning of the heart is invoked as both a consequence of its imaginal, and therefore inconstant, status, as well as the human subject’s means of attaining to the infinitude of divine Beauty in the confines of delimited, finite existence. Accordingly, the succession of beautiful images that appear in the heart allow the individual human subject access to such infinitude in serial fashion, which for Ibn Arabi fulfills the purpose of creation, i.e. the divine self-disclosure. Fulfilling this purpose is above all an act of

Love for both authors, and in keeping with a broader Sufi tradition on love and aesthetics both Ibn Arabi and Rumi consider beauty as the cosmic prerequisite for love. This grants beauty a vital cosmic and cosmogonic role insofar as it gives rise to the divine Love that generates and sustains existence. Finally, and perhaps most fascinatingly, it is clear that these aesthetic issues were not merely theoretical concerns for Ibn Arabi and Rumi, but were rather incorporated into a long-standing tradition of practical mysticism in which both authors lived and wrote. In keeping with their affirmation of cosmic ambiguity, it appears that both individuals held somewhat conservative views regarding ritualized aesthetic contemplation as practiced by other Sufi mystics, preferring instead that actualized mystics witness divine theophany in a spontaneous and unaffected manner.

This attitude demonstrates a strong connection between theory and practice, given their insistence on individual adherence to outward Islamic orthodoxy as well as the perpetual turning of the heart, whereby physical beauty is witnessed according to the changing dictates of the moment (al-waqt). Nonetheless, both authors were intensely affected by their experiences with physical beauty, a fact attested to by their poetry as well as by contemporary records. Ultimately, one might conclude that both Ibn Arabi and Rumi

79 were mystical aesthetes of the highest order, for whom physical beauty was not superficial or accidental, but rather held profound ontological and spiritual import.

All of these points warrant further research and exposition, which hopefully will be accomplished in the future as scholarship increasingly moves to recognize, unpack and interpret the nuanced and sophisticated aesthetic doctrines contained not just in Sufism but also in the broader Islamic intellectual tradition, with all the interdisciplinary import these issues have for the study of the artistic, intellectual, and cultural histories of the

Islamic world.

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