Passion Before Me, My Fate Behind: Ibn al-Farid and the Poetry of Recollection

Plan of the Work

Plan of the Work This study begins with a concise biography of Ibn al-Fāriḍ based largely on accounts from his students and supplemented from the hagiography written on him by his grandson. This is followed by an overview of Islamic mysticism and a survey of early Sufi verse through the seventh/thirteenth century, which help to place Ibn al-Fāriḍ within the religious and poetic trends of his time. Chapter 1 then explores specific literary dimensions of Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s poetry and the influence on him by earlier Arab poets. Particularly important was the verse by the famous fifth/tenth-century Arab poet al-Mutanabbī, as Ibn al-Fāriḍ consciously patterned two of his poems on poems by him. A careful comparison of these poems demonstrates how Ibn al-Fāriḍ used various rhetorical strategies and Sufi ideas and terms to transform al-Mutanabbī’s poems in praise of his patrons into mystical poems on love and longing. Ibn al-Fāriḍ often employed such rhetorical elements to create a mystical paradox at the heart of his poems, including riddles and quatrains, which also reveal the poet to be erudite and, sometimes, funny. Chapter 2 focuses on Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s ghazals as the product of changing notions of love and the Sufis’ use of the language of love to convey mystical themes. Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s love poems are examined in terms of both style and content, with an inquiry into the possible identities of the beloved. In his ghazals, the beloved is sometimes male and other times, female, yet Ibn al-Fāriḍ leaves clues throughout his love poems that the beloved may be the prophet Muhammad, and occasionally, God. A close reading of Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s ghazal rhyming in “J” brings a number of these elements into sharper focus. Chapter 3 traces a similar trajectory as chapter 2, save that its subject is Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s qasīḍahs, or lyric odes. The pre-Islamic Arabic ode was adapted and transformed during the Umayyad and Abbasid periods and, in time, Sufis began to read the ode as a mystical allegory. Significantly, Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s lyric odes revolve around the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca as xiii xiv PLAN OF THE WORK the paradigmatic quest for union with God. The chapter ends with a close reading of Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s qasīḍah rhyming in “D,” to illustrate and highlight important themes and elements in these odes. Chapter 4 features Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s wine verse. Formally, he composed at least three wine poems, one of them being his massive Naẓm al-Sulūk, which is the focus of chapter 5. Chapter 4 traces preIslamic Arabic wine poetry through its Christian and Muslim varieties until the sixth/twelfth century. During the Muslim period, Sufis often composed verses on wine and intoxication to speak of love and union, and Ibn al-Fāriḍ combined these and other elements in his al-Khamrīyah. A close reading of this poem suggests why it became the most famous wine ode in all of Islamic mysticism. Staying with mystical themes, chapter 5 is organized around a reading and analysis of Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s longest and most famous poem on the Sufism. Entitled the Naẓm al-Sulūk (“Poem of the Sufi Way”) or the al-Tā’īyah al-Kubrā (“The Longer Ode in T”), this poem spans 760 verses, and, here, the poem is divided into a number of discreet sections in order to examine prominent stylistic elements and Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s views on mysticism, which were substantially influenced by thought of earlier Sufi masters, especially, al-Junayd, al-Tusturī, and Muhammad al-Ghazālī. The conclusion returns to essential elements and themes in Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s verse, including the lyrical persona and its range of tone and mood as the poetic “I” may be a lover, a student, a teacher, a mystic in union, the beloved, or the Light of Muhammad. Yet, whatever the poetic persona, Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s verse stands as a clear example of contemplative poetry for meditation is a central feature. Ibn al-Fāriḍ frequently alludes to the Sufi practices of dhikr (“recollection’) and samā˜ (“audition”), which were essential to his poetry and mystical life. As such, Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s poems draw from...