Sufi Aesthetics: Beauty, Love, and the Human Form in the Writings of Ibn 'Arabi and 'Iraqi

Conclusions

Conclusions E xtending beyond Ibn ‘Arabi and ‘Iraqi, and even beyond Sufi love poetry, the aesthetic outlook studied here matters because it increasingly altered the way poetry was written and read, for all love poetry fell within its purview. Unfortunately research concerning the topics of beauty and the human form in Islamic mysticism has been often plagued by either vague generalizations or mistaken analogies. The method here, however, has been first to analyze perception according to the mystics at hand, with particular emphasis on the vision of similitude (tashbih) and its relationship to love. Second, the method used here has considered beauty, especially human beauty, through the writings of Akbari mystics, as well as a number of mystics unaffiliated with Ibn ‘Arabi or his teachings. Lastly, by means of this informed perspective on gnostic witnessing and love, this study has analyzed the often misunderstood amorous lyric poetry of these two mystics, which, as we have seen, is neither mere allegory nor false in its claims to have spiritual significance. Rather, as argued, gnostic amorous lyric verse results from a complex and even confounding experience in which the sensory and the supersensory collaborate to yield something more comprehensive than either alone. The sensory serves as a form for encountering the supersensory, which can also be called “meaning” or even a “divine self-disclosure.” In other words, the divine interacts with the gnostic not only in spiritual unveilings but also through the two worlds of form, the physical and the representational . This final point has significant applications for the Islamic tradition well beyond simply Islamic mysticism. Western scholarship and popular culture have often failed to understand the sensual in Islamic thought and have claimed to discern clandestine (or even blatant) erotic-misogynistic undercurrents in Islamic conceptions of marriage, paradise, and even modes of dress. One example of this can be found in the writings of Miguel Asín Palacios (d. 1944), a Spanish scholar of Arabic literature. Asín seems, in many ways, to have been a sensitive and insightful researcher of Ibn ‘Arabi, but one burdened by unfavorable assumptions held vis-à-vis Islam. Such assumptions can be seen in the very title of his study of Sufism through an analysis of the writings of Ibn ‘Arabi, El islam cristianizado.1 As another example, in a separate study concerning Dante Alighieri (d. 1321), Asín states that “Islam, be it once more 152 Sufi Aesthetics said, is but the bastard offspring of the Gospel and the Mosaic Law, part of whose doctrines on the after-life it adopted.”2 Asín holds that the Islamic version of paradise (al-jannah) in the hereafter resulted from a lack of “the restraining influence of an infallible authority whereby the fancy of its believers might have been checked,” which allowed it to assimilate “elements from other Eastern sources,” elements that allowed the introduction of sensual and imaginative imagery to what had been a restrained and moralistic afterlife in its original Judeo-Christian context.3 While such a view might seem specific to the author’s time and cultural surroundings , Asín’s observations concerning the Islamic conception of paradise have their parallel in a contemporary American and European fascination with the sensuality of the afterlife as depicted in the Qur’an. Asín’s view is important here, however , because it springs from his attempt to understand the poetically revered beloved in Islamic literature through what he deems to be the historical development of Islamic mystical thought: We are thus still far from the Platonic conception of woman, idealised as an angel and a symbol of philosophy. The origin of this strange conception would seem to be due to an attempt to idealise the sensual coarseness of the Koranic paradise. The houris of the Koran, although celestial, are intended solely to be instruments of carnal delight. This idea was incompatible with the spiritual longings of the later Moslem mystics, who had been profoundly influenced by the asceticism preached and practiced by the Christian monks. But it was impossible to eliminate from the Koran the verses proclaiming these sensual joys. The mystics therefore, in their legends of the afterlife, replaced the houris by one celestial bride, a spiritual being whose love is chaste and whom God has appointed to each of the blessed.4 Clearly, Asín sees Islamic mystics as sharing almost completely the outlook of classical Christian asceticism and being forced to reconcile passages in the Qur’an with a religious temperament that instinctively...