The Lady Nizam – an Image of Love and Knowledge

I would like to introduce my paper, which is so to speak a meditation on the sophianic manifestation of love and knowledge, with a quotation from that aboriginal text of the sophianie tradition in Abrahamic religion, the book of Ecclesiasticus in the Apocrypha where the divine Wisdom, speaking with a female voice, says of herself:

I am the word which was spoken by the most High:
It was I who covered the earth like a mist.
My dwelling place was in high heaven;
My throne was in a pillar of cloud.
Alone I made a circuit of the sky
and traversed the depth of the Abyss.
The waves of the sea. the whole earth.
every people and nation were under my sway. . .
Before time began He created me.
and I shall remain forever
In the sacred tent I ministered in his presence. [1]

Here is introduced a theme, curious, but persistent in the three great monotheisms, of the secret consort of the High God. whether in human or angelic form, who seems to be an essential part of the scheme of creation and salvation and who constantly, especially in mysticism, manifests the deepest desires and dreams of the Godhead. Thus, in Judaism we meet the powerfully feminine Shekinah, Cherubim and Matronit who, according to R. Patai in his very interesting book The Hebrew Goddess, personify and symbolise the maternal and feminine aspects of the divinity. [2] In Christianity, one need only point to the overwhelmingly influential cult of the Virgin Mary with its myriad ramifications in Christian culture. Even Islam, that bastion of patriarchal ascendancy, expresses, albeit enigmatically and cryptically, subtle but pervasive images of the “eternal feminine”, especially in Sufism and Shi’ism, as has been so well elaborated in H. Corbin’s fine work on Ibn Al-‘Arabi. [3] Man, we are taught, is created in the image of God, his Creator, so that we may expect to find the hieros gamos, or sacred marriage of heaven reflected in human experience. Of course, men and women relate to each other in many ways, and their mutual and elemental attraction serves many quite ordinary and mundane purposes, not the least of which are the procreation of the species and the proper ordering of society. They also, however, serve as powerful images and archetypes of suprahuman forces and realities, thus opening up to each other visions and insights, mysteries and secrets which greatly transcend the ordinary and every-day concerns and experiences of the mundane world; indeed, by virtue of Man’s special intermediary and linking function in the Divine—human—universe scheme of things, both sexes serve to manifest transforming forces which may, in certain circumstances, as Rumi says, “transfigure the dustbin of this world into a rose garden”, or give flesh and substance to spiritual realities. In all of this we enter, unavoidably, into that area of human experience which is still, even in our own cerebral culture, a sphere of magic and mystery.

This is even more the case with the image and experience of the feminine in a religious culture which, outwardly at least, lends an aura of divinity to the male function while humanising that of woman. Thus, the use of female images and symbols in such a context is always regarded by many of the faithful as dangerous, fascinating and confusing. Ibn ‘Arabi certainly felt the disapproval of his fellow Muslims in this matter. [4] For the male aspirant particularly, the mythical and archetypal power of the female image may either threaten madness and death or reveal to his innermost depths visions of sublime truth. In speaking today of Ibn ‘Arabi’s meeting with and experience of the Lady Nizam, it is with the female image as a revealer of Divine mysteries that I am concerned.

The way in which such an image and presence serves in such cases to inspire and enrich is very well described by a recent writer on the life and work of Dante, whose own experience of Beatrice is so remarkably close to that of Ibn ‘Arabi. William Anderson writes towards the end of his book, Dante, The Maker.

Through his love of her on Earth he formed an indissoluble union of love with her that transcended the incident of her death. She mirrored to him the Incarnation of Christ, and, in purifying his individual nature as a Christian, he found that the only way to the sight of God was through her as the revelation of his soul… so she, as his illuminated soul represents the search for unity and contains in herself the still causes of history and of creation. Through the love of her his love expands to become the love of God… she is in him the gateway to ecstatic joy. the source both of his inspiration and his salvation, the maker of him as a torch of living flame and his guide towards the peace which his difficult temperament and the sorrows of his bitter political life so long denied him. Through her guidance he achieved a total transformation in his emotional and intellectual being. [5]

Although the circumstances and extent of the relationship in each case was very different, Dante had known Beatrice in a distant way for nearly fifteen years and she had become a major feature of his writing, while Ibn ‘Arabi probably knew Nizam much better, albeit for a much shorter period; nevertheless, the two relationships are in essence the same, in that Beatrice for Dante and Nizam for Ibn ‘Arabi manifest a universal archetypal image, not only of the Divine Sophia in her creational and latent modes, but, as we shall see more importantly in some ways, of the very quintessence of human selfhood, of the very mystery of Lordship. It is then this universal archetypal image and presence as manifesting the double theme of our Symposium today and their fusion in the dominical mystery that we will attempt to unfold.

Before proceeding to examine that manifestation of Love and Knowledge, it would, I think, be useful to hear once again the way in which our Shaykh relates his encounters with the sublime Nizam. Of his first meetings with her, the daughter of a Persian scholar of Isphahan. he says:

Now this shaykh had a daughter, a lissome young girl who captivated the gaze of all those who saw her, whose mere presence was the ornament of our gatherings and startled all those who contemplated it to the point of stupefaction. Her name was Nizam (Harmonia) and her surname “Eye of the Sun and of Beauty”. Learned and pious, with an experience of spiritual and mystic life, she personified the venerable antiquity of the entire Holy Land and the candid youth of the great city faithful to the Prophet. Her glance, the grace of her conversation were such an enchantment… If not for the paltry souls who are over ready for scandal and predisposed to malice, I should comment here on the beauties of her body as well as her soul, which was a garden of generosity… And I took her as a model for the inspiration of the poems… although I was unable to express so much as a part of the emotion which my soul experienced and which the company of this young girl awakened in my heart, or of the generous love I felt… since she is the object of my quest and my hope, the Virgin most pure… [6]

Here Ibn ‘Arabi is describing his encounter with a very beautiful and spiritual young woman whose physical as well as her spiritual charms affected him greatly. Here we are in the presence of a wonderful human being of flesh and blood whose memory will torment him down through the years.

However, at the Ka’abah in the sanctuary at Mecca, he has a very different sort of meeting with a transfigured and ethereal Nizam, who proves to be a stern initiatrix into the rigours of the divine mysteries. He says:

One night I was performing the ritual circumambulations of the Ka’abah… suddenly a few lines of verse came to my mind. I recited them loudly enough to be heard… No sooner had I recited these verses than I felt on my shoulder the touch of a hand softer than silk. I turned around and found myself in the presence of a young girl, a princess from among the daughters of the Greeks. Never had I seen a woman more beautiful of face, softer of speech, more tender of heart. [7]

He goes on to describe how this presence upbraids and reproves him for his verses and reveals the defects of his approach. Thus he describes this woman as being of Iranian birth, living in Arabia in the Holy City of Mecca and also as being like a princess of the Greeks, showing herself at the Ka’abah, the very centre of Islam. The two different encounters and the place of their happening arc very significant for our purpose in considering the Lady Nizam as an image of Love and Knowledge, in that she partakcs of both the Iranian and Greek spirits while dwelling in an Arab land; the Iranian spirit of spiritual and mythical drama and divine sacrifice, the Greek spirit of intellect and philosophy coming together in Arabia, the home of Islam. Thus, the imagery of the Lady Nizam is one both of polarity and triplicity in unity; and it is fitting that much of I want to say about that imagery will be inspired by and based upon that supreme exposition of Ibn ‘Arabi’s teachings on triplicity, the superb commentary on the saying of the Prophet in the final chapter of his Bezels of Wisdom,[8] illustrated, I hope clearly, with the material from the book of poems dedicated to our Lady of Mecca, the celebrated Interpreter of Desires, the Tarjumân al-Ashwâq. [9] What I shall have to say about the imagery of the Lady Nizam is even more firmly based in the teachings of Fass 27 in that it is there that Ibn ‘Arabi makes the very startling statement, from the point of view of exoteric religion, that God may best be contemplated in the image of woman which, as he points out, fuses in its symbolism both the active aspect of the Creator and the passive aspect of the created. [10] Also, as always, I would wish to consider my subject within the context of what I see as the two great polarising movements of creation and recreation eternally proceeding within the Reality (al-Haqq), the great complementary forces of being and becoming which lie at the heart of Ibn ‘Arabi’s vision of Reality, those divine interplaying and simultaneous forces which integrate actuality and virtually into the whole experience of Reality. Naturally, within the sphere of Ibn ‘Arabi’s teachings many things will elude us, since enigma and paradox surround our effort on every side.

The secret of the Lady Nizam as an image of Love lies primordially in the eternal yearning of God to know Himself, to reveal the hidden treasure of Himself to Himself, to release Himself from the alonencss of His uniqueness and to experience the bliss of enjoying Himself in in all His infinite possibility, to release the potentialities of His latent Being into the becoming of actuality. Now, since love requires for its proper expression and experience a lover and a beloved, a subject and an object, love itself is precisely the relationship of desire, need and adoration set up between the two, with all its tensions and contradictions of wishing to possess and be possessed, to merge with and be merged with. Thus, the secret revealed by the Lady as an image of love is the wonderful secret and mystery of otherness, since unless God creates Himself as an other and makes His treasure an object He can know and experience for Himself, His yearning can never be assuaged. However, the secret of the secret is that since His treasure, His “other” to know and experience, can never be really other and alien to Himself, that necessary otherness is inevitably suffused with Himself; as Ibn ‘Arabi says in one of his poems, “She is both Arab and foreign”.[11] Love, therefore, is about duality, separateness and relationship, about divine creation and the phenomenon of the Cosmos. As we have already observed, love has also to do with procreation as creation and therefore with multiplicity and infinity.

Thus in the hadith so brilliantly commented on by Ibn ‘Arabi in the 27th Fass, the creational pole is denoted by the word nisa’ or women in the plural. [12] It follows from what I have said about the divine Love that it has much to do with manifestation and, more particularly with the manifestation of the divine Beauty which is precisely that divine reality rendered knowable and lovable by otherness and the distance of relationship. In the great 112th chapter of the Qur’an which so succinctly sums up the quintessential teachings of Islam on God, the term samad, usually translated “the Eternal One”, comes from an Arabic root which also denotes the beauty of a bride in all her finery, or the exposition of the consecrated host in the monstrance. It is curious to note here that the Arabic root habba, apart from denoting love, may also be used to mean the pupil of the eye, and beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. Another aspect one might mention here is also the materiality and receptive substantiality of creation which is required by the loving movement of creation as the substratum of its otherness.

Thus, Nizam, the lovely warm Persian girl, is for Ibn ‘Arabi a wonderful image of the divine treasure, the divine need to know and love that treasure, the creational beauty which elicits and attracts that love and the innate identity which promises re-union and bliss. In other terms, she is the personification of the very mercy of becoming and actuality which promotes and fulfills the divine love, just as again it might be said that she manifests the “garden” in which the Names might sow themselves and realise their potentialities. [13] On both the Cosmic and the human level, the delightful lady of Isphahan is an image of the divine Love and of that human love which is its reflection. As our Shaykh says in a poem: “The sun rises when she smiles”. [14]

The secret of the Lady Nizam as an image of Knowledge lies just as primordially in the eternal complementary need of God to be Himself with no other or like, to fuse once again His divine consciousness with the divine essence that is Himself, to withdraw the treasure of Himself back within Himself, to brook no otherness of likeness. Knowledge is the path of return to the stark, simple reality of the divine uniqueness, to the unrelenting rigour of truth’s majesty in which all other is latent, non-existent, hidden, dark. Here the divine One returns from His creational imaginations, from the vivid, warm scintillating beauty of His Love’s object, to hide once more in the dark tresses of the perfection of the Essence, the dhat, the supreme mistress of the truth of Being, “… a pearl hidden in a shell of hair as black as jet” [15] This is the truth the knowledge and recognition of which allows the aspirant no alternative but to mount his riding beast and “cross the desert (of non-being) in haste” [16] to her “who when she gazes her looks are drawn swords”. [17]

This knowledge which reveals the illusion of all but the essential being is manifested for Ibn ‘Arabi in his night meeting with the ethereal Hellenised Nizam by the Ka’abah. This is no longer the warm discoursing with the Iranian Nizam in the hospitable, cultured company of her parents and their friends, arousing his love and fond affection, but rather a terrifying encounter with the exacting personification of the Divine Sophia, a lady of spirit and intellect demanding unswerving dedication and unambiguous sincerity. Here Nizam manifests in her nocturnal visitation, not the infinite possibility attracting love, but rather the absolute necessity requiring unflinching recognition of the truth of the inevitable destiny (masir) of all creatures. This lady is “aloof in earnest and only plays at loving in jest”, [18] “whose diadem is beyond the spheres”, [19] one might almost say la belle dame sans merci. Here the divine Essence broods, so to speak, over her nest of latent essences holding her kingly consciousness in close and undiverted thrall.

Thus far in trying to show how the Lady Nizam is an image of Love and Knowledge, we have been dealing with an apparent duality and polarity. She, however, is not only Persian and Greek, creation and essence, but also Arab, belonging to the mother of cities, to the land of Arabia here symbolic of home, of the uniting element in which the poles meet, prefigure each other and intereact. Thus, to modify what I have been saying about the poles of being and becoming, each pole has innate within it the hint of the other. This is nicely suggested by the Arabic roots for Love and Knowledge, habba and ‘arafa, since a habb is a seed, like the seeds of latent beings in the divine essence waiting for Love to give them birth in existence, and ‘arf is perfume, like the perfume of truth which suffuses real beauty in creation. In the beautiful face of Nizam, all the multiple beauty of creation is summed up for Ibn ‘Arabi, prefiguring the Essence, while in the initiating gaze of the Greek princess is reflected the lissome form of the daughter of Isphahan. In the former, the multiplicity of creation seeks again the refuge of unity, while, deep within the Essence of the latter image, unity in the essences forever seeks the multiplicity of existential experience. Thus the love which is the primordial spur to divine self-revelation and creation carries with it into the farthest reaches of cosmic unfolding, into every corner of its multiple complexity, a profound nostalgia and sense of exile, which nostalgia radiates in the mystery of our Lady’s physical beauty and charm for Ibn ‘Arabi. Similarly, the knowledge which eternally recalls all consciousness back to the ineluctable truth of being carries with it deep into the uttermost depths of latency and essence the ultimately irresistible ache of yearning for new release and self-revelation which wonderfully suffuses the awesome majesty of she “of the scorpion like tresscs.” [20] Thus both Love and Knowledge are really aspects of the divine Mercy (rahmah), whether of that mercy which is inherent in the Will to become, or of that mercy which is in the divine Wish to be Himself again.

Thus, as we have indicated above, the seeming tensions and conflicts as between the Love and Knowledge which the Lady Nizam images and manifests in her Persian and Greek modes are resolved and truly fulfilled in her Arab home, which symbolism will reveal for us the real mystery of her appearance of beauty and truth, and that is the mystery of selfhood, of Lordship and of true humanity. Here, in the third and resolving and synthetic aspect, the Lady Nizam will revcal her most elusive and quintessential secret which is the Grail secret of the Ka’abah of the heart. It is here that the inspirations and expirations of creation and return fuse in what H. Corbin has so succinctly called the Con-spiration, the Unio Sympathetica. [21] This is the greatest test for the lover, the aspirant, faced as he is “at that moment by both a loveliness and a splendour which affrighted me” [22] so that he risks “suffering two deaths” [23] both the death of creational illusion and that of essential annihilation. Here “she melts away when we try to think of her, and she is too subtle for the eye to see her”. [24] Here in his bewilderment, the lover’s “night is radiant with her face, my day dark with her hair”[25] since she is “a sun and a night together”. [26]

Here, then, we are in the inexpressible realm of the coincidentia oppositorum which unfolds to the initiated both the mystery of Lordship and the mystery of Divinity in Ibn ‘Arabi’s special sense, just as for Dante Beatrice mirrored the very Incarnation of Christ. Our Lady here in this Grail-land of the Arab Ka’abah presents us with a most succinct image of the double-in-unity conscience of the human viceregent, in that the creational movement of the divine Love charges him with a great responsibility towards the rest of the creation, while the spiritual knowledge reminds him of his profound debt to God. Thus Nizam manifests to Ibn ‘Arabi, both as individual person and as Man, ultimately as Perfect Man, the mystery of the bi-polar trusteeship without which, or some inkling of which, no man can be truly human. One hears the despairing words of this Mystery of Nizam, an image of Love and Knowledge in union, saying of her lover, “Is it not enough for him that I am in his heart and that he beholds me at every moment? Is it not enough?” [27] Is it not enough, she is saying, that I am his innermost essence and all that he could possibly experience of himself? Is she not for him his unique and deepest sense of self and awareness, the very picture of his soul in whom “Beauty has reached its uttermost limit; another like thee is impossible” [28] That is to say, that for each of us the uttermost beauty, unique and unrepeatable, is, in aeternis, nothing but the beauty which is our whole and real selves.

Here I refer you to my lecture to the first Symposium where I pointed out the meaning associations of the Arabic word for beauty, jamal, which are summing up, fusing, melting: so that the beauty of the Nizam of each of us is the mystery and secret of our whole and eternal reality in which otherness and identity are enigmatically fused. [29] As someone has said: “Beauty is the reflection of reality in the mirror of illusion”. It is in the light of this mystery of selfhood and Lordship that Ibn ‘Arabi writes in one of the poems dedicated to thc Lady Nizam, “I intend by it only Her… the word ‘her’ is my only aim, and for her sake I am not fond of bartering except I exchange her for her”. [30] That is to say, that without knowing one’s Lord by knowing one’s true self, all other gains are pure vanity, as Jesus said: ‘”What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” Thus, it is illusion to imagine with the eye that the fair and lovely Nizam of Isphahan is really out there, or to think with the mind and intellect that the awesome princess of the Greeks is only deep inside, since ultimately, as with the path to God or the “flying birds looking for air”, the vision that delights and perplexes is now, here and nothing other than my true self, attracting, cajoling, trying ever to make me face my truth and dominical beauty. These things, however, are really matters of dhawq or experience and initiation, as our Master would be the first to tell us.

To return for a few moments, to the words about Dante, so that we might see the Lady Nizam in yet another light and revealing to us further insights. William Anderson says a very revealing thing about Beatrice’s relationship with Dante; he speaks of her as “the maker of him as a torch of living flame”. [31] The choice of the word “maker” is very appropriate and profound, in that it connects very immediately to the original meaning of both the Greek word sophia and the Sanskrit word shakti, both words being used in their separate traditions of the female consorts and associates of God or of gods. Both words mean to do or make. Sophia is wisdom, originally in the sense of subtlety, craft, skill in fashioning things; shakti is action in the sense of motivating, animating, as Kali with Siva. Thus, the lovely Nizam is not just a passive image, but rather a spur to radical reappraisal and transformation of soul and spirit, that experience of beauty and power which shocks the lover and aspirant into plunging into the tremendous toil and torture of the great Quest for the self which is “his Lord”, the universal Grail Quest for which she is also psychopomp, guide and initiatrix, being herself ultimately not only the Grail bearer, but also the very Grail itself, the “garden of generosity”, [32] that fecund source inspiring in her devotees the energy to create great works of culture. This aspect of the Sophia image and experience is best summed up in Rumi’s immortal words, from the Mathnawi

Woman is a beam of the divine light
She is not the being whom-sensual desire takes as its object.
She is Creator, it should be said.
She is not a creature.[33]

In this regard, one might also touch upon a further observation regarding the experience of Nizam/Beatrice. Many have supposed that both Nizam and Beatrice were not real physical women of flesh and blood, but rather ethereal abstractions of the imagination, spiritual devices as aids on the inner path. These suppositions completely miss the point of the mystery here enunciated, in that, as for God, so for man in his image, not only is the flesh of our ladies transformed by the inner essence, but also is the inner vision substantiated by the living flesh, both flesh and spirit being essential aspects of the whole mystery. As our Shaykh says in the 27th Fass: “Contemplation of God without formal support is not possible… Since therefore some form of support is necessary, the best and most perfect kind is the contemplation of God in women”. [34]

After all, without the material and separative experience of this world’s life, the mystery of otherness, whether individual or cosmic, is fatally incomplete. It is, I think, significant that the great patriarchal religious traditions, despite their natural aversion to things of the flesh and the world, nevertheless insist on the validity and symbolic significance of the material pole; certainly for Christianity the doctrine of the Incarnation underscores the necessity of the flesh and blood of biological life.

Before finishing what I hope has been a comprehensible if not comprehensive exploration of one of the most important archetypes of religious and mystical experience. I cannot resist, like Ibn ‘Arabi himself, having a closer look at the name of our Lady, Nizam, and trying to tease from its letters and their values something of significance for our purpose today. I was happy to find that her Arabic name did indeed have a certain symbolic symmetry. The first letter nun is the letter of birth and rebirth having the numerical value 50, while the last letter mim is the letter of death, having the numerical value 40. The second letter as transcribed into English letters is an “i”, which is related to ya” which is the last letter of the Arabic alphabet, while the penultimate letter of the name is the alif which is the first letter of the alphabet. Thus we might say that in the first half of the name the last is contained within birth, while in the second half the first, the beginning is contained within death. In the centre of the name we have the letter za whose numerical value is 900. As Ihn ‘Arabi says in his great work the Meccan Revelations, the letter za is full of hidden mysteries.[35] Thus, the name Nizam might be interpreted as having within its letters a symmetry which manifests the coming together of opposites, quite in keeping with the meaning of her name, Harmonia.

I cannot do better than end by reading to you the wonderful poem on the theme of the “Creative Feminine” translated by H. Corbin in his Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi, from the as yet unpublished Book of Theophanies by Ibn ‘Arabi who writes:

Listen, O dearly beloved!
I am the reality of the world, the centre of the circumference,
I am the parts and the whole.
I am the will established between Heaven and Earth,
I have created perception in you only in order to be the
object of my perception.
If then you perceive me, you perceive yourself.
But you cannot perceive me through yourself,
It is through my eyes that you see me and see yourself,
Through your eyes you cannot see me.
Dearly beloved!
I have called you so often and you have not heard me
I have shown myself to you so often and you have not
seen me.
I have made myself fragrance so often, and you have
not smelled me.
Savorous food, and you have not tasted me.
Why can you not reach me through the object you touch
Or breathe me through sweet perfumes?
Why do you not see me? Why do you not hear me?
Why? Why? Why?

For you my delights surpass all other delights.
And the pleasure I procure you surpasses all other
pleasures.
For you I am preferable to all other good things,
I am Beauty. I am Grace.
Love me, love me alone.
Love yourself in me, in me alone.
Attach yourself to me,
No one is more inward than I.
Others love you for their own sakes,
I love you for yourself.
And you, you flee from me.
Dearly beloved!
You cannot treat me fairly
For if you approach me,
It is because I have approached you.
I am nearer to you than yourself,
Than your soul, than your breath.
Who among creatures
Would treat you as I do?
I am jealous of you over you.
I want you to belong to no other,
Not even to yourself.
Be mine, be for me as you are in me.
Though you are not even aware of it.
Dearly beloved!
Let us go toward Union.
And if we find the road
That leads to separation,
We will destroy separation.
Let us go hand in hand.
Let us enter the presence of Truth.
Let it be our judge
And imprint its seal upon our union
For ever.[36]

This paper was first presented at an annual symposium of the Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society and published in Volume VII of the Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society.

[1] The Apocrypha, Ecclesiasticus, XXIV, vv. 3-6. 9-10.

[2] The Hebrew Goddess, R. Patai. Avon, 1978.

[3] Creative Imagination in the Sufism of ‘Ibn ‘Arabi, H. Corbin. London, 1970.

[4] The Tarjumân al-Ashwâq, Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi, ed. and trans. R.A. Nicholson, London, 1911, p. 7.

[5] Dante, The Maker, W. Anderson, London, 1980. p. 416.

[6] Creative Imagination, pp. 136-137.

[7] Ibid., p. 148.

[8] Bezels of Wisdom, Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi, trans. R.W.J. Austin, New York. 1980, pp. 269 284.

[9] The Tarjumân al-Ashwâq, Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi, ed. and trans. R.A. Nicholson, London, 1911, p. 7.

[10] Bezels of Wisdom, p. 275.

[11] Tarjumân al-Ashwâq, XXIV, v, 14

[12] Bezels of Wisdom, p. 275.

[13] Creative Imagination, p. 137.

[14] Tarjumân al-Ashwâq, XXX, v. 23.

[15] Ibid., XLVIIl, v. 5.

[16] Ibid., XXX. v. 31.

[17] Ibid., XXX. v. 26.

[18] Ibid., XLVI. v. 5.

[19] Ibid., XL1V, v. II.

[20] Ibid., XXX. v 22

[21] Creative Imagination, pp. 144 145.

[22] Tarjumân ai-Ashwâq, XLII, v. 6.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid., XLIV, v. 3.

[25] Ibid., XXXI, v. 11.

[26] Ibid., XXXIX, vv. 7-8.

[27] Ibid., IV, v. 6.

[28] Ibid., XL, v 6

[29] Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society, Vol. Ill, “Meditations on the Vocabulary of Love and Union in Ibn ‘Arabi’s Thought”, Oxford. 1984, pp. 12ff.

[30] Tarjumân at-Ashwâq, XLII, vv. 10-11.

[31] Dante, The Maker, p. 416.

[32] Creative Imagination, p. 137.

[33] Mathnawi. Jelaluddin Rumi, ed. and trans. R.A. Nicholson, Book I. v. 2437.

[34] Bezels of Wisdom, p. 275.

[35] Futuhat al-Makkiyva, Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi, ed. O. Yahya, Cairo. 1972, I, p. 317.

[36] Creative Imagination, pp. 174 175.