The Lucid Work of Love and Helpfulness

AS IF WITH some strange gravity, the art of Islamic tile work draws us into a unity. If we can accept that this tile work is a medieval art rooted in the sacred, then it is reasonable to ask how might it be related to the spiritual practice of the people of the time. Of course we know the basic tenets of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. But beyond that, is there, within the practice of those faiths, a calling to a unity, a convivencia of the soul, that summons us with the claim that we might look to the origin and core of religion? To answer this question, we might start with an old woman playing a tambourine in Córdoba in the twelfth century. Her music will lead us to the world of the Sufis.

The tambourine is in the hands of a woman named Fatima, and she is 95 years old. She lives in a hut made of reeds. She has a deep and useful understanding of the world. She teaches students she selects. Among them is a young man whose name is Ibn El-Arabi. It is he who has built Fatima’s house for her. And it is he who will one day be known as one of the great mystics, writers, and teachers of the world.

Ibn El-Arabi was born in 1165, in Murcia, a town in the southeast corner of the Iberian peninsula. He would live in Seville and study throughout southern Spain. Later, in his travels to seek learning, and as a teacher, he would have time in Morocco, in Tunisia, in the cities of Mecca and Cairo, in the city of Konya in present-day Turkey, finally to settle in Damascus. Some two hundred fifty-one books of his survive, some of them revealed to him in dreams, some of them written in an hour, and many of them set down as if he were “taking dictation from God.” The English mystic and romantic poet William Blake, centuries later, would use the same phrase for his visionary writings.

Within Islam he is known as “the Greatest Shaikh,” and in the West by the wonderful name “Doctor Maximus.” I can hardly think of a life story that holds more wild variety. When young, Ibn El-Arabi met Averroes, who was a friend of his father. The philosopher was renowned, the budding mystic a mere teenager. They immediately fell into one of those conversations that had questions like this one, asked by Averroes: “What solution have you found as a result of mystical illumination and divine inspiration? Does it correspond with what it arrived at by speculative thought?” It’s just the kind of question we ask of teenagers these days. Ibn El-Arabi, who despite his tender years sought out such conversations, replied: “Yes and no. Between the yes and the no the spirits take their flight from matter . . .” And so on. One would have liked to be present for an afternoon of musing with those two gentlemen.

But even Averroes was mild company compared with some of his other acquaintances. Take this encounter, for example, from Ibn El-Arabi’s own account:

On another occasion, I was in a boat in a port of Tunis. I had a pain in my stomach, but the people were sleeping so I went to the side of the boat and looked out over the sea. Suddenly I saw by the light of the moon, which was full that night, someone coming towards me on the surface of the water. Finally he came up to me and stood with me . . . After talking to me awhile, he greeted me and went off, making for a lighthouse on top of a hill over two miles distant from us. This distance he covered in two or three steps . . .

This water-walking, moonlit visitor turns out to be a character named Khidr, who in Mediterranean accounts is a mysterious and immortal guide who wanders the earth, giving physical and spiritual help to those who are worthy of such help. He is identified with the Biblical figure of Elias and the storied figure of St. George.

So it went with Ibn El-Arabi, whose life was full of encounters with teachers, visible and invisible, and whose accounts of his dealings with the divine fill hundreds of matter-of-fact pages. His poems may be received directly into the minds of other people in faraway places; he communicates telepathically with saints of his own day. He was capable, according to one of his students, of getting in touch with any of the saints and prophets of any period in history. He did this by calling them back to earth, where they assumed a form like that they had in life; by encountering them in dreams; or by absenting himself from his own body so that he could venture off to see them. It would be a nice adventure some afternoon, I say, if one had the need and the means of travel.

The fame of this Andalusian poet and theologian shone throughout the world of the Mediterranean. Kings, sultans, emirs, all competed to have him grace their courts. When he was in Konya, in Anatolia, as a tribute to him the king built a sumptuous palace, on the idea that the famous teacher would move in and make a home in Konya. Not long afterward, a beggar approached Ibn El-Arabi, asking him for alms. But Ibn Arabi had nothing of his own to give away at that moment. So he made the beggar a gift of his new palace.

In Mecca, he came across a brilliant young girl, and his description of her survives:

a slender child who captivated all who looked upon her, whose presence gave luster to gatherings, who amazed all she was with and ravished the senses of all who beheld her. Her name was Nizam (Harmony) and her surname Ain as-Shams (Eye of the Sun). She was religious, learned, ascetic, a sage among the sages of the Holy Places.

Nizam was the inspiration of another poem of his, called “The Interpreter of Desires.” It takes up a theme that he will return to in other writings: that we come to the truth through our love for Divine Beauty as revealed on earth, and that the most perfect revelation of beauty is in a woman. Now, this attitude scandalized some of the more dogmatic clergy in Cairo, and he was accused there and in Aleppo of having, in his verse, an indecent and blasphemous revel in sensuality. The verdict of the offended clergy had the exalted moral sensibility we associate with fundamentalists everywhere: they decreed that Ibn El-Arabi should be killed. But he wisely took refuge from Cairo in Mecca. Later in Aleppo, he wrote a full interpretation of his earlier work, demonstrating in exhaustive detail how each of the lines lead us to perceive divine content in earthly reality, and by means of love find our way to what endures. His interpretation was called “The Treasures of Lovers”; so did he escape by use of his pen being killed for use of his pen. He was not about to stand down and let the bigots have their way. And he could fight against them, since he kept company with kings and sultans, as well as with the leading religious lights of the time. He said directly to the King of Aleppo:

know that when worldly desires get the better of men’s souls and scholars seek positions at the courts of kings, they forsake the true way and resort to far-fetched interpretations of the Law to satisfy the whims of their masters who require legal support for their selfish purposes . . .

One reads this and thinks that Ibn El-Arabi might have been executed on the spot for speaking the truth about so many clerics. We recognize the type he refers to, from history and from the present time—those who pervert religion to build their own power. But such was Ibn El-Arabi’s authority that the king replied:

You have often voiced your disapproval of the oppression and wrongs which occur in this kingdom of mine, and I agree with you that these things are indeed reprehensible; but know, Sir, that each of these things is done by the authority of a jurist who draws up the decree which justifies it, may God curse them . . .

This is but one example of Ibn El-Arabi’s courage, where he did the rare, indispensable thing: bearing truth to the heart of power. Over eight hundred years later, it is still the dream of many of us that such an exchange might occur between such a person and the ruler of a country.

In his later years, Ibn El-Arabi settled, again at the invitation of a king, in Damascus, where he wrote summary treatises on his teaching, more cycles of mystical poetry; where he carried on his teaching; and where he died in a characteristic way. One day he was in his doorway, and a group of pious clerics and followers were passing, and Ibn El-Arabi called out: “Your God is under my foot!” Offended in public and righteous in their fury, the clerics confronted the teacher, loudly accused him of sacrilege, and assaulted him together. He died soon after the beating. When his body was undressed for burial, in his shoe was found a coin, and thus his last declaration became clear: a simple observation about the greed of the clerics, who worshiped money and the material world, rather than God.

Can the life and teachings of Ibn El-Arabi help us understand the tiles in the Alhambra, with their unreservedly beautiful teaching of unity? And can they help us to understand the uncanny current of mysticism that runs through the centuries of Al-Andalus? They can, because of one of the books written by Ibn El-Arabi, and because he was a Sufi.

The book is The Sufis of Andalusia, and it recounts the travels and companions of Ibn El-Arabi during the first half of his life. Throughout Andalusia he finds companions on the path of learning, and we should meet some of them and learn about their lives.

How did they live? They were capmakers, tailors, potters, cobblers; caulkers of ships and gatherers of chamomile; weavers, a slave girl, a doctor; rich or poor, literate or not. All of them had work, lived outwardly normal lives, but with a select few, like the young Ibn El-Arabi, they shared other capacities. One Abu Abdallah was on a trip through the desert with a group in need of water, but only bitter, salty water could be found. Abdallah made it sweet water through his touch. He could also, in such journeys, contract the earth so that extraordinary distances could be covered in the single step. The gatherer of chamomile, an illiterate named Al-Rundi, was a solitary who spent long years in the mountains and along the coast. Sometimes, when he stood on mountains at prayer, a column of light from the sky illuminated him, as in the transfiguration of Jesus. Al-Rundi could collect grass and, if need be, strike it with his finger to set in on fire; and this, of course, to be able to light the lamps of the house. Another companion, by the name of Abu Imran, was a man of considerable riches, who renounced them all. He was granted a special knowledge that permitted him to be anywhere on earth, according to his wishes. Once he was captured on trumped-up charges and taken away in chains to Fez and locked in a room. In the morning, the guards found only the chains; Abu Imran was safely and comfortably in the house of a friend. There are yet more companions: a slave girl, who when not in forced labor would walk in the mountains and had the capacity to converse with rocks and trees. The doctor, who lived in Córdoba and cared for the desperately ill. When Ibn El-Arabi asked him how he could live among such people, he replied that to him the sick had the odor of musk.

To come full circle, let us relate what Ibn El-Arabi tells us of the old woman Fatima. She was a weaver who was married for twenty years to a man who contracted leprosy. She cared for him until he died. Later, too crippled to make her living, she lived on the scraps of food left by her door. It was in this period of her life that Ibn El-Arabi built her a hut of reeds. Though full of years, she was so lovely that Ibn El-Arabi confessed to being shy around her. As well he might have been, for she could change the world with her prayers, meet with the jinn, and perform miracles, including practical ones: once she was out of fuel to light her lamps, and she changed the water in a bucket into oil by dunking her hand into it.

Such were the friends and teachers of Ibn El-Arabi in medieval Andalusia. They combine the ordinary and the preternatural. They work and pray alongside their neighbors, yet they have potent, uncommon spirits. They are of earth yet are entrusted with extraordinary powers: they can see into the minds of other people, travel through the air, heal the sick, see into the future, engage in telepathy. Their lives are often simple and helpful, and their miracles, for the most part, are hidden; they are natural, practical efforts. Who were these people, and what is Sufism?

This is a question whose answer is held by the reader. But we can say something in general about the Sufis, and about Ibn El-Arabi and his teaching, for his teaching bears a direct and irresistible relation to what we learn when we study the tile work of the Alhambra. As the tiles bring together a host of forms into a finely connected, beautiful unity, so does Ibn El-Arabi bring together the faiths of the convivencia by means of a teaching called the Unity of Revelation. It is a simple idea: that the revelation of the divine, such as those of Abraham, Jesus, or Mohammad, is always and everywhere the same. From the revelation of any important teacher, a religious institution may develop, as in the case of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and these institutions are different according to the history, culture, and language of the society in which they are found. In the case of the founders of religions, the revelation is that of a public teacher. In all other cases, such revelation—the same revelation—may be earned privately by anyone with the interest and the capacity.

It is important to note that this central teaching of Ibn El-Arabi does not invalidate the religious customs and theologies of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. It maintains, instead, that such practices and ideas can be conceived of as the place we begin, so as to work our way to the inner content of faith, the proof, end point, and validation of faith: the experience of the divine, as we live, here on earth.

What might be the teaching that dedicates itself to helping a person find a way to just such an experience? This is just what Sufism claims to possess, a knowledge of the inner content of religion expressed in a teaching with a heritage of centuries. In some times and places, this work of teaching was especially strong and vital, and the eight centuries of Al-Andalus produced distinguished teachers, stunning mystical poetry, and splendid craftsmanship. And it produced Ibn El-Arabi, who along with Jalaludin Rumi, the Sufi poet of Anatolia, is one of the central figures in the religious life of the Mediterranean and the world.

Yet the Sufis did not build institutions, and they did not teach anyone who happened to claim interest. They taught, and teach, only those who have the capacity to learn. For such people, studies are individually prescribed. All the same, it is useful to try to sketch the general form of such a teaching, insofar as it can be addressed in language and from the outside. First, since at its core is an experience of revelation (rather than a notion, text, or set of rituals), the Sufis have no institution; they have no dogma, fixed theology, inflexible rules, holy scriptures, system of reward and punishments, clerics, or claims of a right to punish others for their beliefs. In place of all this, they have a teaching, and the teaching is carried out by any way that works; say, by stories, proverbs, conversation, the making of art or the design of a wall of tiles, an essay or an ecstatic utterance. It is even carried out by means of specially crafted jokes, which teach us something about the way our minds work.

The aim of the teaching is to transform the self, by means of love, so as to know a living reality present on earth in its full beauty and permanence. In such a transformation, love and knowledge come together, and a person can thereafter be of the most timely, secret, and fabulous help to others, and to life itself.

If the aim is self-transformation, then a student should have an idea of whether his mind, or her mind, is contaminated by pride, greed, or self-esteem. And so one straightforward approach of Sufi teaching is to provide the means to assess the state of one’s mind.

But rather than offer summary statements, it makes sense to offer some real examples of this teaching, so let’s begin with the jokes. How about this one, from the collection of stories about the legendary Nasrudin:

The king sent a private mission around the countryside to find a modest man who could be appointed as a judge. Nasrudin got wind of it.

When the delegation, posing as travelers, called on him, they found that he had a fishing net draped over his shoulders.

“Why, pray,” one of the them asked, “do you wear that net?”

“Merely to remind myself of my humble origins, for I was once a fisherman.”

Nasrudin was appointed judge on the strength of this noble sentiment.

Visiting his court one day, one of the officials who had first seen him asked, “What happened to your net, Nasrudin?”

“There is no need of a net, surely,” he replied, “once the fish has been caught.”

Many of the jokes in this tradition are like this, always ready to point out hypocrisy or manipulation, always ready to show events and people for what they are, rather than how they are imagined to be, and, especially, how they imagine themselves to be.

The history of Sufi proverbs and short declarations is the most surprising and useful that I have ever come across. These sayings are easily retained in the mind. Their range is remarkable. They delight us but also make us think by, for example, recommending virtues, like gratitude, that we take for granted, as in:

Call yourself unlucky only if you take up coffin making and people stop dying.

Or they refer with bemusement to something permanent in us, to a potential to do work which is at once practical and transcendent:

If you do not want to be dismissed, do not take over a post that will not always be yours.

Light is often a metaphor in this tradition: both the light of the earth, and another, animating light that sustains us beyond all explanations:

There is a light deposited in hearts that is nourished by the light coming from the treasuries of invisible realms.

And all such labors are meant to find what is essential in us, to turn back from our common idiocies, so that we may be ready for a living reality. It’s as if the world answers us to exactly the extent that we are prepared. When we are ready to understand, and only then, may our perceptions deepen and progress, and that reality show itself on earth:

How can the laws of nature be ruptured for you, so that miracles result, while you, for your part, have yet to rupture your bad habits?

But in the meantime, as we are learning, we can understand only with correct preparation and with the right timing and company. Without such advantages, we may focus only on ourselves, on reward and expectation, on our own gain. This need for another way of work is the subject of a beautiful declaration of an eighth-century Sufi, a woman named Rabia:

I will not serve God like a laborer, in expectation of my wages.

And if we do not learn, then what we seem to be, what we make of ourselves in this life, with all its adornments, customs, and demands, will take us over, until there is little left of us:

If you do not shave the beard, it will not be long before it is pretending to be your head.

This is a short tour of Sufi proverbs and is meant to give the merest savor of the rich materials on offer in the writings of this accomplished group.

Let’s finish this sampling by quoting one of the most famous stories of the Sufis, one that turns up throughout Western culture, so that it has become a shorthand way to refer to a problem in thinking, and its solution. It is the story of the elephant in the dark, here quoted in the version published by the extraordinary Sufi scholar and writer Idries Shah.

THE BLIND ONES AND THE MATTER OF THE ELEPHANT

Beyond Ghor there was city. All its inhabitants were blind. A king with his entourage arrived nearby; he brought his army and camped in the desert. He had a mighty elephant, which he used in attack and to increase the people’s awe.

The populace became anxious to see the elephant, and some sightless from among this blind community ran like fools to find it.

As they did not even know the form or shape of the elephant, they groped sightlessly, gathering information by touching some part of it.

Each thought he knew something, because he could feel a part.

When they returned to their fellow citizens, eager groups clustered around them. Each of these was anxious, misguidedly, to learn the truth from those who were themselves astray.

They were asked about the form, the shape of the elephant, and listened to all they were told.

The man whose hand had reached an ear was asked about the elephant’s nature. He said: “It is a large, rough thing, wide and broad, like a rug.”

And the one who had felt the trunk said: “It is mighty and firm, like a pillar.”

Each had felt one part out of many. Each had perceived it wrongly. No mind knew all: Knowledge is not the companion of the blind. All imagined something, something incorrect.

The created is not informed about divinity. There is no Way in this science by means of the ordinary intellect.

This beautiful story, taken from a twelfth-century version by the Afghan poet Hakim Sanai, one finds in all kinds of forums today: in newspapers, in university studies, in books about the brain. It portrays the way we deal with the parts of a problem, rather than seeing it as an integrated whole, for what it really is. And the story has whole other ranges of meaning, like most of the stories in the Sufi tradition.

Once a person has completed the studies prescribed as being most useful to her, then she may go forth into a life that may be apparently unchanged but is fundamentally transformed. Any so-called school she might have attended as part of her learning is then disbanded: “The workshop is dismantled when the work is done.”

One central aim of Sufi work, then, as taught by Ibn El-Arabi, Idries Shah, and other men and women through the centuries, is to lead a student to meet herself, or himself, as in the saying: “He who knows himself knows his God.” Or as said one of Ibn El-Arabi’s teachers, a man who was accompanied by an angel: “Reckon with yourself before you are brought to the Reckoning.”

In all this, the Sufis insist, throughout the centuries, on the distinction between the literal and the figurative, between container and content, appearance and reality. It is a spiritual practice that sees literal-mindedness as a mortal failing akin to idolatry. Closely allied is their idea of virtue: rather than being the end point of spiritual development, the development of personal virtues such as honesty, generosity, or humility is seen as the bare, modest beginning, the essential baby steps. Virtues are not valuable in themselves, and they are a mortal handicap when they become a basis for pride. Instead, they are instrumental, a means of traveling to the next stage of knowledge.

The same is true with beauty: it is not thought to be reality, but the beginning of reality, an experience meant as a pathway we follow to prepare ourselves for a much more powerful experience.

THIS BRIEF EXCURSION among the writings of the Sufis and their Andalusian champion Ibn El-Arabi takes us back to the walls of tiles in the Alhambra. For the work of the Sufis and the work of the tile design are at once practical and transcendental. They bring beauty into our days but open for us a way to another life that is, in the ancient phrase, “Undone from self but alive to love.” That is, we are called to a life in which treasures of understanding are offered to our hands the moment we can be entrusted with them. We live in a world today when such possibilities are discredited when they are not ridiculed, or just wholly dismissed out of hand. Love is sentiment now, and not a resurgence of soul that remakes a life.

But like Al-Andalus, the beauty and power of the ceramic tiles is being rediscovered. And so is the work of the Sufis. It makes one think that even in the darkness of our times, any of us might have a chance to discover that a secret and powerful labor of helpfulness and goodwill goes on all around us. It is a labor that speaks to us of light as a preternatural offering to life. It is a teaching that holds transfiguration to be a natural heritage of the mind.