Poem XI by Ibn 'Arabi
Tarjumān al-Ashwāq (The Interpreter of Desires), poem XI
by Ibn 'Arabi, trans. Reynold A. Nicholson (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1911)
My heart has become capable of every form: it is a
pasture for gazelles and a convent for Christian monks,
And a temple for idols and the pilgrim’s Kaaba and the
Tables of the Torah and the book of the Qur’an.
I follow the religion of Love: whatever way Love’s
Camels take, that is my religion and my faith.
This was read to me in the last phone call I had with my friend Suleiman Bakhit as he was dying, and dying opened him to love. He read it for me in beautiful Arabic, and then translated it for me. Ibn 'Arabi (1165–1240, Andalusia and the eastern Mediterranean) is al-Shaykh al-Akbar, the Greatest Master, one of the towering figures in Islamic intellectual history, whose theological-philosophical synthesis (waḥdat al-wujūd, the unity of being) shaped Sufi thought for centuries afterward and remains foundational reading. The Tarjumān al-Ashwāq is a collection of sixty-one mystical love poems composed after a deeply transformative encounter with Niẓām, the daughter of a Persian scholar, in Mecca. The poems were so erotically charged in their language that Ibn 'Arabi was accused of writing mere love poetry, prompting him to write his own theological commentary on them — Dhakhā'ir al-A'lāq — defending the poems as fully mystical despite their human-love idiom.
