Ibn 'Arabi's Mystical Poetics.

• Author: Lawson, Todd
• Position: Book review

Ibn 'Arabi's Mystical Poetics. By Denis E. McAuley. Oxford Oriental Monographs. Oxford: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2012. Pp. xii + 255. 70[pounds sterling], $135.

The topic of this welcome study could not be more important: the relation between language, experience, and truth in religious discourse, specifically in the discourse of one of the incomparable titans of the islamicate "existential" tradition, Muhyiddin Ibn al-Arabi (d. 1240). Readers will perhaps be most familiar with Ibn al-Arabi through his two best-known works: the late and relatively concise Fusiis al-hikam (The Bezels of Wisdom) and the multivolume log-book of his experiences and insights written down and edited over the last thirty years or so of his life, al-Futuhnt al-makkiyya (Meccan Illuminations).

This book is divided into ten chapters (pp. 1-222) and offers an appendix of the poems discussed in Arabic typography (pp. 223-36). In addition, there is a substantial bibliography (pp. 237-49) and an index (pp. 251-55). The volume begins with an introduction in which it is argued that the poetry (diwan) of Ibn al-Arabi has been wrongly ignored and in which manner the author will redress this omission. This does not include a detailed discussion of the sources where the poetry ascribed to Ibn al-Arabi may be found. Rather, the author wishes to proceed directly to a close reading of a few of the existing 3,500 poems. Chapter one surveys the symmetries and discontinuities between the ideas of Ibn al-Arabi and the form and content of some of the poetry. Here, the famous "oneness of being" and its attendant generative, perspectival shifts serve as a critical touchstone. Chapter two discusses three "prose" texts by Ibn al-'Arabi on the nature and composition of poetry. Why the word prose is put in inverted commas here will be apparent to anyone who has read the second of these texts, the introduction to Diwan al-macarif, which was the object of a brilliant article some years ago by Claude Addas entitled "The Ship of Stone" (http://www.ibnarabisociety.org/articles/shipofstone.html). Chapter three is a highly interesting discussion of a particular genre of Ibn al-Arabi's poetry that seeks to "rewrite" or "reflect" several original quranic suras. One is reminded here of the poems composed by 'Abdullah Yusuf 'All as introductions to the suras of his Quran translation. Chapter four surveys the problem of Ibn al-'Arabl as a poet of his time, standing at the end of a tradition and...