Ibn al-'Arabi

O marvel! a garden among the flames... My heart has become capable of all forms. It is a meadow for gazelles and a monastery for Christian monks, A temple for idols and the pilgrim's Ka'aba, The Tables of the Law and the book of the Koran. I profess the religion of Love, and whatever direction Its steed may take, Love is my religion and my faith.

The Beloved becomes a mirror reflecting the secret face of the mystic lover, while the lover, purified of the opacity of his ego, becomes in turn a mirror of the attributes and actions of the Beloved.

The mystic Ka'aba is the heart of being. It has been said to him: "The Temple which contains Me is in your heart." The mystery of the Divine Essence is no other than the Temple of the heart, and it is around the heart that the spiritual pilgrim circumambulates.

Everything we call other than God, everything we call the universe, is related to the Divine Being as the shadow to the person. The world is God's shadow. . . . The shadow is at once God and something other than God. Everything we perceive is the Divine Being in the eternal hexeities of the possibles.

His creation springs, not from nothingness, from something other than Himself, from a not-Him, but from His fundamental being, from the potencies and virtualities latent in His own unrevealed being.

. . . the "Sigh of Compassion" flows through the things of the world like the waters of a river and is unceasingly renewed.

When Sufism was at loggerheads with the legalitarian Islam embodied by the doctors of the Law, known as the fuqaha', according to Henry Corbin: . . . Ibn 'Arabi made no secret of his disgust at their stupidity, ignorance, and depravity, and such an attitude was not calculated to win their favor. The tension rose, giving rise to denunciations and arrests; our shaikh was in mortal peril. At this critical moment the irreducible antagonism between the spiritual Islam of Sufism and legalitarian Islam became patent. Saved by the intervention of a friendly shaikh, Ibn 'Arabi had but one concern, to flee far from Cairo and its hateful, bigoted canonists. Where was he to seek refuge? He returned to Meca (1207).

The divine Names are shared by the Lord and His vassal. The Lord is the vassal's higher self; it is the Lord who acts in him and through him: "When you see the creature, you see the First and the Last, the Manifested and the Hidden."

The Image is not outside him, but within his being; better still, it is his very being, the form of the divine Name which he himself brought with him in coming into being. And the circle of the dialectic of love closes on this fundamental experience: "Love is closer to the lover than is his jugular vein." So excessive is this nearness that it acts at first as a veil. That is why the inexperienced novice, though dominated by the Image which invests his whole inner being, goes looking for it outside of himself, in a desperate search from form to form of the sensible world, until he returns to the sanctuary of his soul and perceives that the real Beloved is deep within his own being; and, from that moment on, he seeks the Beloved only through the Beloved . . . the active subject within him remains the inner image of unreal Beauty, a vestige of the transcendent or celestial counterpart of his being. . . .

Every servant professes a special belief in his Lord, of whom he asks assistance according to the knowledge he has of himself. Thus the faiths differ with the Lords, just as the Lords differ, although all the faiths are forms of the one faith, just as all the Lords are forms in the mirror of the Lord of Lords. . . .