Chapter III. The Odes of Ibnu ’l-Fáriḍ: Introduction

174:2 Material beauty is not worthy to be loved except in so far as it is one of the ideas (attributes and manifestations) of Absolute Beauty. 174:3 When God withdraws Himself (from the inward eye of the mystic), He still lays His commands on the soul, so that it performs its predestined good and evil works. 174:4 Divine Love sweeps away the conventional standards of truth and right and honour. 176:1 Díwán, p. 331 foll. 176:2 Ibid. p. 347, 1. 6 foll. Cf. Shelley, Epipsychidion: In solitudes Her voice came to me through the whispering woods, And from the fountains, and the odours deep Of flowers… And from the breezes whether low or loud, And from the rain of every passing cloud, And from the singing of the summer birds, And from all sounds, all silence. 177:1 Ibid. p. 173. It is true, as Prof. Nallino has observed (op. cit. p. 16), that some odes are less artificial in style than others. 177:2 Ibid. p. 467. 177:3 Ibid. p. 165. 177:4 Ibid. p. 108. 177:5 Ibid. p. 278. 178:1 Díwán, p. 410. 178:2 Ibid. p. 384. 178:3 Ibid. p. 391 foll. 178:4 "Patience without you," i.e. in bearing your separation from me; "patience with you," i.e. in bearing the pain which you, as the object of my love, cause me to suffer. 178:5 Díwán, p. 402. 179:1 The poet was rapt in contemplation of the Beloved and could not bandy words with his critic. 179:2 I.e. by convincing my "blamer" of the error of his ways I acquired as much religious merit as by making the pilgrimage to Mecca. It is meritorious to combine the greater pilgrimage (ḥajj) with the lesser pilgrimage (‘umra).

179:2 I.e. by convincing my "blamer" of the error of his ways I acquired as much religious merit as by making the pilgrimage to Mecca. It is meritorious to combine the greater pilgrimage (ḥajj) with the lesser pilgrimage (‘umra). 179:3 Rajab is the seventh and al-Muḥarram the first month of the Mohammedan year. 179:4 I.e. inconstancy. 179:5 Díwán, p. 179 foll. The last verse alludes to the manna and quails which dropped from heaven upon the Israelites (Kor. 2, 54). In the original there is a double word-play: mann (separation), mann (manna), salwat (forgetfulness), salwá (quails). 180:1 Díwán, p. 443 foll. 180:2 I.e. the image or vision of the Beloved which appears when his name is pronounced by the "blamer." 180:3 As camels bring the beloved to the lover's eye, so reproof brings him to the lover's ear. 180:4 Díwán, p. 275 foll. Cf. p. 346, l. 5, and p. 429, l. 27—p. 420, l. 6. 181:1 Ibid. p. 370, 1. 22. 181:2 The Arabic word for rocks (ṣafá) is also the name of a peak near Mecca, and this may be its meaning here. 182:1 Reading with the commentator ḥayá instead of ḥibá. 182:2 Díwán, p. 297 foll. 182:3 This is quite different, of course, from the pictorial treatment of desert life and scenery which we find in the pre-Islamic odes. 182:4 Reading . 183:1 Díwán, pp. 429-441. 183:2 Ibid. p. 6. 183:3 Ibid. p. 70. "The two least parts" are the heart and the tongue. 183:4 Ibid. p. 160, l. 24 foll.

183:4 Ibid. p. 160, l. 24 foll. 184:1 Díwán, p. 472 foll. 184:2. The soul was intoxicated with the wine of Divine Love (i.e. was rapt in contemplation of God) during its pre-existence in the eternal knowledge of God before the body was created. 184:3 The full-moon is the Perfect Man, i.e. the gnostic or saint in whom God reveals Himself completely and who is, as it were, filled with Divine Love. The new moon is the gnostic veiled by his individuality, so that he manifests only a part of the Divine Light, not the whole; he causes the wine of Love to circle, i.e. he displays and makes known to others the Names and Attributes of God. When the wine is watered, i.e. when pure contemplation is blended with the element of religion, the seeker of God obtains spiritual direction and is like a traveller guided by the stars in his night-journey. 184:4 N.'s commentary on this verse is characteristically recondite. He interprets "its perfume" as the sphere of the Primal Intelligence, whence emanate all created things; "its taverns" as the Divine Names and Attributes; "its resplendence" as the human intellect, which is a flash of the Primal Intelligence. Divine Love, being of the essence of God, has no form except in the imagination. 185:1 "Time," i.e. the world of change. The second hemistich may be rendered literally: "’tis as though its occultation were a concealment in the breasts of (human) minds."

185:1 "Time," i.e. the world of change. The second hemistich may be rendered literally: "’tis as though its occultation were a concealment in the breasts of (human) minds." 185:2 "The tribesmen," i.e. mystics capable of receiving illumination. 185:3 This verse describes the gradual fading of ecstasy from the heart of the mystic. 185:4 I need not trouble my readers with the detailed allegorical analysis to which the commentator subjects this and the next nine verses. They explain themselves, if taken as a fanciful description of the miracles wrought by Divine Love. 186:1 The fidám is a strainer placed over the mouth of the bottle, so that the wine may run clear. 186:2 Vv. 23-30 are wanting in the commentary of Búríní and may have been inserted in the poem by a copyist. See Nallino, op. cit. p. 31, note I. Divine Love, as the eternal source of all created things, is logically prior to them, although it does not precede them in time, which itself is created. 186:3 Inasmuch as real being belongs to God alone, mystical union cannot be likened to the permeation of one body by another, as when water is absorbed by a sponge. 186:4 This enigmatic verse refers to Being under its two aspects. Wine signifies pure being, vine phenomenal being. In so far as man is related to the Divine Spirit (here identified with Adam, whom God "created in His own p. 187 image"), he is pure reality; but in so far as he belongs to Nature, he is unreal. "Its mother" is the mother of wine, i.e. the vine, which is a symbol for the material world.

187:1 The "vessels" are the phenomenal forms by which real being is manifested. They are "subtle," i.e. spiritual, because every such form is the veil of a reality. These realities "increase," i.e. appear as the Many, by means of the forms which our senses perceive. 187:2 Absolute Being or God or Divine Love—all these terms are the same in essence—is not conditioned by time. 187:3 I.e. it was an orphan before the beginning of fatherhood. This, I think, is merely a paradox indicating the timeless nature of reality. The word "orphanhood" (yutm) may allude to Mohammed (cf. note on the Tá’iyya, vv. 288-9). In this case the meaning will be that Mohammed (as the Logos) existed before the creation of Adam. According to N., Absolute Being is made an " orphan " by the passing-away (faná) of the spirit in man. Universal Spirit or Reason, the first emanation, may be said to "die" when its essence (the human spirit) is mystically re-united with the Absolute; and its "death" leaves the Absolute, i.e. the phenomenal world regarded as the other self of the Absolute, "an orphan in the bosom of its mother Nature." 187:4 Moslems associate with Christianity the beverage forbidden by their own religion. When their poets describe a wine-party, the scene is often laid in the neighbourhood of a Christian monastery (dayr). Ibnu ’l-Fáriḍ says that the Christians became intoxicated without having drunk, i.e. their doctrine that God reveals Himself in Christ is only a glimpse of the truth, p. 188 which is fully realised by Moslem saints, that God reveals Himself in every atom of existence. Cf. the Tá’iyya, v. 730 foll. and p. 140 supra.

188:1 I.e. seek to contemplate the Divine Essence alone, or if you must seek anything besides, let it be the first and highest manifestation of that Essence, namely, the Spirit or Light of Mohammed, which is figuratively called "the water of the Beloved's teeth." 188:2 The Ṣúfís have always known the value of music as a means of inducing ecstasy. Cf. The Mystics of Islam, p. 63 foll.; D. B. Macdonald, Emotional Religion in Islam as affected by Music and Singing in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1901, pp. 195 foll. and 748 foll., and 1902, p. 1 foll. 188:3 P. 165, note 2. 189:1 See v. 679 of the prose translation infra. 190:1 "The forms of things," i.e. the puppets, typify phenomena, which in themselves are lifeless and passive: all their life and activity is the effect of the manifestation in them of the actions and attributes of Reality. 190:2 The Greek fire to which Von Hammer finds an allusion here is, I think, an ignis fatuus. 190:3 The genies (Jinn) are described as ethereal creatures, endowed with speech, transparent (so that they are normally invisible), and capable of assuming various shapes. 191:1 Tá’iyya, vv. 680-706. 192:1 W. Y. Sellar, The Roman poets of the Republic, p. 403. I give Munro's translation: "Again when mighty legions fill with their movements all parts of the plains, waging the mimicry of war, the glitter then lifts itself up to the sky, and the whole earth round gleams with brass, and beneath a noise is raised by the mighty trampling of men, and the mountains stricken by the shouting re-echo the voices to the stars of heaven, and horsemen fly about and suddenly wheeling scour across the middle of the plains, shaking them with the vehemence of their charge. And yet there is some place on the high hills, seen from which they appear to stand still and to rest on the plains as a bright spot."

192:2 Tá’iyya, v. 489. 193:1 Tá’iyya, vv. 395-6. 193:2 E.g. emanation (fayḍ) in vv. 403-5. The spiritual and sensible worlds derive their life from Universal Spirit and Universal Soul (v. 405; cf. v. 492). In v. 455 the Ḥallájian terms, láhút (divinity) and násút (humanity) are used in the same way as by Ibnu ’l-‘Arabí, to denote the inward and outward aspects of the Being with whom the "unified" mystic is one (cf. Massignon, Kitáb al-Ṭawásín, p. 139). Allusions to the pre-existence of the soul occur in vv. 41, 257-8, 428, 670 and 759. Unlike Jílí, Ibnu ’l-Fáriḍ shows no sign of acquaintance with Ibnu ’l-‘Arabí's philosophical terminology or, so far as I have observed, of being directly influenced by him in any considerable degree.