Emotion in Christian and Islamic Contemplative Texts, 1100–1250: Cry of the Turtledove 9783030599232, 9783030599249

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THE NEW MIDDLE AGES

Emotion in Christian and Islamic Contemplative Texts, 1100–1250 Cry of the Turtledove A. S. Lazikani

The New Middle Ages Series Editor Bonnie Wheeler English and Medieval Studies Southern Methodist University Dallas, TX, USA

The New Middle Ages is a series dedicated to pluridisciplinary studies of medieval cultures, with particular emphasis on recuperating women’s history and on feminist and gender analyses. This peer-reviewed series includes both scholarly monographs and essay collections. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14239

A. S. Lazikani

Emotion in Christian and Islamic Contemplative Texts, 1100–1250 Cry of the Turtledove

A. S. Lazikani University of Oxford Oxford, UK

The New Middle Ages ISBN 978-3-030-59923-2    ISBN 978-3-030-59924-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59924-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

There are so many people without whom this project would simply not have been possible—though all errors, of course, remain my own. I am so much indebted to Dr Annie Sutherland and Professor Helen Barr, whom I have been lucky enough to have as mentors; thank you so much to both of them for teaching me so much and for their endless encouragement, kindness, and inspiration. I am also ever so grateful for the great kindness and support of Professor Vincent Gillespie. Thank you so much to Professor Liz Herbert McAvoy, who has always shown me so much kindness and patience; to Dr Cate Gunn, for all her support and friendliness; to Professor Elizabeth Robertson for all her feedback and encouragement; and to Professor Catherine Innes-Parker, for all her generosity and time. Very sadly, Professor Innes-Parker passed away while I was working on this project. I will always be immensely grateful to have known her and to know all these scholars. I am so much indebted to the anonymous reviewers of this manuscript, whose suggestions and corrections have been truly invaluable. I am so grateful to Professor Peter Davidson and Professor Jane Stevenson for all the immense kindness and generosity they have shown me. I am also so grateful to Dr Anne Mouron for all her time, patience, and encouragement. Thank you very much also to Professor  Michael Sargent,  Professor Denis Renevey and Professor Christiania Whitehead for all their kind support. I very much wish to thank Raphaela Rohrhofer, my dear friend and colleague, for all her kindness and for her insights; and Dr Maria Pavlova for all her kind friendship over so many years and for everything she has taught me about the Italian Renaissance. Thank you also to Sabina Hill for her v

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

friendship and support over so many years. Many thanks are also due to Ufuk Ozturk for sharing his knowledge on Aṭṭār’s The Conference of the Birds with me. I also wish to thank several kind and supportive colleagues, particularly Professor Charlotte Brewer, Professor Marion Turner, Dr Nick Perkins, Dr Siân Gronlie, Dr Laura Varnam, Dr Francis Leneghan, Professor Emma Smith, Professor David Dwan, Professor Peter McDonald, Professor Paulina Kewes, Professor Laura Ashe, Professor Mishtooni Bose, and Dr Daniel Sawyer. I have been so fortunate to teach many students. Thank you to them all; I wish I could mention them each individually. For reasons of space, I will just here refer to the cohort of students at Hertford College (University of Oxford) who finished their degree in the difficult summer of 2020; thank you to them for being so nice. Thank you so much additionally to Harry Carter, Beth Potter, and Fenella Sentance for always being so inspiring and thoughtful. Thank you so much to Viola Cozzio for her immense kindness and inspiration, and thank you so much to Peter Buchanan for his unfailingly caring and warm friendship. Thank you so much to Bertie Overington for being so wonderful, and to his mother Bissan. Finally, I owe immense gratitude to each of my parents: My father, Muhydin, has supported me so much with this project. Thank you so much to him for all his guidance with the Arabic language, for his generous interest in my work, and for taking the time to discuss it with me—but most of all for his immense support and love. I am so grateful to my late mother, Amal, too. I could not tell her about this project, but she is the person who first taught me about Sufism and the person who gave me my love of studying literature and religion. I hope that she would have approved of this book. And the acknowledgements would not be complete without an honourable mention of Emily, my feline companion, who has been by my side through the whole thing.

Note on Transliteration, Translation, and Quotation

Transliteration of Arabic There are a number of methodological difficulties posed by transliteration or romanization of Arabic material. Whilst there are some extended passages of transliteration, I have limited such material, especially given that a significant part of the audience for this book may not be familiar with the Arabic language. Instead of extensive transliteration, I have romanized individual words or phrases, both within the text and at the end of this book, in the ‘Glossary of Key Arabic Terms’. I have employed standard practice in the transliteration of Arabic quotations.1 My transliteration of Shushtarı ̄’s poetry is based on the following edition and the following transliteration; references are to page numbers: ʿAlı ̄ Sāmı ̄ al-Nashshār, ed., Dı ̄wān Abı ̄al-Ḥasan Shushtarı ̄: sha ̄ʿir al-ṣu ̄f ı ̄yah al-kabı ̄r f ı ̄ al-Andalus wa-al-Maghrib / ḥaqqaqah wa-  ʿallaqa ʿalahy (Alexandria: Manshaʾat al-Maʿārif, 1960). F. Corriente, ed., Poesía Estrófica (Cejeles Y/O Muwassahāt) Atribuida Al Místico Granadino As-Sustarı ̄ (Siglo XIII. d. C., (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, Instituto de Filologia, Departamento De Estudios Arabes, 1988). 1  See further Leonard Lewisohn, ed., ‘System of Transliteration’, in Classical Persian Sufism: From Its Origins to Ru ̄mı ̄ (London: Khaniqah Nimatullahi, 1993), p. xi; and the IJME’s Transliteration Chart, online [accessed 30th December 2020].

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Note on Transliteration, Translation, and Quotation

My transliteration of Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s poetry is based on the following edition, used alongside the following published transliteration; references are to line numbers: ʿAbd al-Khāliq Mahmūd, ed., Dı ̄wān Ibn al-Fāriḍ: tahqı ̄q wa-dira ̄sah naqdı ̄yah (al-Haram [Jı ̄zah]: ‘Ayn lil-Dirāsāt wa-al-Buḥūth al-Insānı ̄yah wa-al-Ijtimāʿı ̄yah, 1995). J. Arberry, ed., The Mystical Poems of Ibn al-Fa ̄riḍ: Edited in Transcription from the Oldest Extant Manuscript in the Chester Beatty Collection (London: Emery Walker, 1952), Chester Beatty Monographs 5. My transliteration of Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s Tarjuma ̄n al-ashwāq is based on The Tarjuma ̄n al-ashwa ̄q: A Collection of Mystical Odes, ed. R. A. Nicholson (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1911). References to the Tarjuma ̄n are to poem and line number. I have made silently some small alterations to the published transliterations by Corriente and Arberry in order to maintain consistency throughout.

Translation of Arabic Most translations of the central Arabic texts (particularly of Ibn al-Fāriḍ and Shushtarı ̄) are my own, although I have also drawn on authoritative published translations, as will be specified. These sources include: For Ibn ʿArabı ̄: R. A. Nicholson, ed. and trans., The Tarjuma ̄n al-ashwāq: A Collection of Mystical Odes (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1911), which is available in the public domain; and R. W. J. Austin, trans., The Bezels of Wisdom (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1980). For Ibn al-Fāriḍ: Th. Emil Homerin, trans., ʿUmar Ibn al-Fāriḍ: Sufi Verse, Saintly Life (Mahwah, NJ: 2001); and A. J. Arberry, trans., The Mystical Poems of Ibn al-Fa ̄riḍ (Dublin: E.  Walker, 1956), Chester Beatty Monographs 6. For Shushtarı ̄: Lourdes María Alvarez, trans., Abu ̄ al-Ḥasan Shushtarı ̄: Songs of Love and Devotion (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2009).2 2  When possible, I have referred to Shushtarı ̄’s poems with their titles in Alvarez’s work, so that non-Arabic specialists can find these texts in her accessible translation.

  Note on Transliteration, Translation, and Quotation 

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Due to its wide availability to readers, I have also at times consulted and quoted from Martin Lings, ed. and trans., Sufi Poems: A Mediaeval [sic] Anthology (Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 2004), as specified at various points in this book.

Quotation and Translation of Early English Quotations from Ancrene Wisse, the Wooing Group, and Thomas of Hales’ Love Rune are taken from the following editions respectively: Ancrene Wisse, ed. Bella Millett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005–2006), 2 Vols, Early English Text Society O.S. 325 and 326. References are to page and line number.  The Wooing of Our Lord and the Wooing Group Prayers, ed. and trans. Catherine Innes-Parker (Peterborough, Ontario, 2015). References are to page number. Moral Love Songs and Laments, ed. Susanna Greer Fein (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1998). References are to line number. Translations of these and other texts in English are my own, unless otherwise specified.

Translations of Scripture Due to considerations of space, quotations from scripture will be taken from authoritative translations, rather than the original Arabic or Latin Vulgate. In the case of the Qur’an, quotations within the text body itself will be based on The Qur’an, trans. Abdel Haleem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). However, for copyright reasons, my more extensive quotation in footnotes will be taken from a translation in the public domain: The Meaning of the Glorious Qur’an, trans. M.  M. Pickthall (Hyderabad-­ Deccan: Government Central Press, 1938). Pickthall’s translation is generally accurate, but its language is archaic.3 Readers are directed instead towards more recent scholarly translations like Haleem’s.4  On the strengths and the limitations of Pickthall’s translation, see further A. R. Kidwai, ‘Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall’s English Translation of the Quran [sic] (1930): An Assessment’, in Marmaduke Pickthall: Islam and the Modern World, ed. Geoffrey P.  Nash (Leiden: Brill, 2016), pp. 231–248. 4  For an overview of English-language translations of the Qur’an, see further Abdel Haleem, trans., The Qur’an (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. ix–xxxvi. 3

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Note on Transliteration, Translation, and Quotation

In the case of the Bible, quotations are from the Douay-Rheims translation of the Latin Vulgate (1580–1610). The biblical text itself is in the public domain, but it is also available in, for example, The Holy Bible, Douay Version: Translated from the Latin Vulgate (Douay, A.  D. 1609: Rheims, A.D. 1582) (London: Catholic Truth Society, 1956).5

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 See also ‘Douay-Rheims Bible’ Online .

Contents

Part I Introduction   1 1 Birds Beneath the Eaves: An Introduction  3 The Bird’s Cry: Avian Emotion   3 Introducing the Texts   9 ‘Contemplative’   9 Summary of Texts and Audiences/Readers  11 Lyrics  20 Gender, Vocation, and These Texts  21 Language and These Texts  22 Language-Lovers: The Case for a Comparative Reading  24 Barthes and Irigaray  24 Cross-cultural Encounters  27 Love and Sufism  32 Sufism: Brief Outline of Key Beliefs and Practices  32 ‘Love’  36 This Book  41 Part II Paradigms of Love  45 2 Jesus the Beloved, Jesus the Lover 47 Brief Background to Islamic Christology  48 Jesus of the Qur’an  48 Jesus of the Sufis  52 xi

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Contents

Jesus the Lover for Rūmı ̄ and ʿAṭṭār  54 Jesus for Ibn ʿArabı ̄  57 The Bezels of Wisdom  57 Jesus in the Tarjumā n al-ashwā q  61 Jesus for Shushtarı ̄  63 Jesus of Ancrene Wisse and Wohunge  66 Enclosure-Lover  69 3 The Many Shapes of the Heart 75 The Qalb  77 The Heart and the ‘Mind’  79 The Heart and the ‘Spirit’  81 Discovering Within the Heart  82 The ‘Heorte’  92 The Heart and the ‘Mind’  94 The Heart and the ‘Soul’  96 Discovery Within the Heart  97 Part III Embodied Affect 103 4 Flesh105 The Affective-Ascetic Body 106 Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s Tarjumā n al-ashwā q 110 Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s Poetry (Excluding Naẓm al-sulū k and al-Khamriyya) 112 Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s Naẓm al-sulū k 114 Ancrene Wisse 119 Lofsong of ure Louerde 123 5 Blood and Wine131 Blood and Sweetness in the Poetry of Ibn ʿArabı ̄ and Ibn al-Fāriḍ 133 Divine Intoxication: The Wine of Shushtarı ̄ and Ibn al-Fāriḍ 137 The al-Khamriyya Tradition 137 Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s al-Khamriyya 139 Shushtarı ̄ 144

 Contents 

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The Wooing Group as Eucharistic Tools 146 On God Ureisun of ure Lefdi 148 Wohunge 149 Ureisun of God  152 Lofsong of ure Lefdi  153 Lofsong of ure Louerde  154 Part IV Affective Semiotics 157 6 Absence159 Shushtarı ̄ 161 Ibn ʿArabı ̄ 164 Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam 164 Tarjumān 165 Ibn al-Fāriḍ, Naẓm 169 Ancrene Wisse 172 Ureisun of God 177 Wohunge 180 7 Secrecy185 Ibn ʿArabı ̄ 189 Ibn al-Fāriḍ 194 Shushtarı ̄ 198 Ancrene Wisse 203 Hales’ Love Rune in Dialogue with Ancrene Wisse and Wohunge 206 Part V Conclusions 213 8 Birds’ Ascent: Conclusions215 Birds Among the Lovers 215 This Book 217 Future Work 221 Terminologies and Temporalities 221 Divine Maternity 223 Another Collared Dove 227

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Contents

Glossary of Key Arabic Terms231 Bibliography235 Index263

Abbreviations

EETS: The Early English Text Society (1864–) O. S. Original Series (1864–) E. S. Extra Series (1867–1920) S. S. Supplementary Series (1970–) IJMES: International Journal of Middle East Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970–) LCL: Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989–) MED: Middle English Dictionary, ed. by Hans Kurath and S.  M. Kuhn (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1952–) Online version (Michigan, 18 December 2001)

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Abbreviations

OED: Oxford English Dictionary (Online) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010–)

PL: Patrologiae cursus completus: series Latina, ed. by J.  P. Migne, 221 vols (Paris: Migne, 1844–55 and 1862–65)

List of Tables

Table 3.1 Table 3.2

Qur’anic terms for “heart” Definitions of Middle English “heorte”

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PART I

Introduction

CHAPTER 1

Birds Beneath the Eaves: An Introduction

The Bird’s Cry: Avian Emotion We can ache from the cry of a turtledove. In the thirteenth-century collection of Arabic poems known as Tarjuma ̄n al-ashwāq (The Interpreter of Desires), the doves reside in the wisps of the ba ̄n and the fragrant branches of the arāk, and their song is of painful love.1 A wanderer traverses this desert wilderness, and at the moment of hearing the turtledove’s cry remembers their beloved: O sarh tree of the valley and O bān tree of the thicket, deliver to us of your perfume, by means of the zephyr, A musky odour which exhales its fragrance to us from the flowers of thy lowlands or the flowers of the hills. O ba ̄n tree of the valley, show us a branch or some twigs that can be compared with her tenderness! The zephyr’s breeze tells of the time of youth spent at Hājir or Minā or Qubā, Or at the sand-hills and where the vale bends beside the guarded pasture or at La’la’, where the gazelles come to browse. Do not wonder, do not wonder, do not wonder at an Arab passionately fond of the coy beauties, 1

 See further Glossary of Key Arabic Terms at the end of this book.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. S. Lazikani, Emotion in Christian and Islamic Contemplative Texts, 1100–1250, The New Middle Ages, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59924-9_1

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Who, whenever a turtle-dove moans, is thrilled by the remembrance of his beloved and passes away.2 (XXV: 14–20)

The Tarjuma ̄n al-ashwa ̄q was in fact composed by an Islamic contemplative, a Sufi: the famous Muhyddin Ibn ʿArabı ̄ (1165–1240).3 As he explains in his own commentary on the poems, the qumri (turtledove) here represents ‘the soul of a gnostic [ʿārif]’ whose ‘sublime utterance excited in him [the speaker] a longing for God’.4 Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s doves embody the soul’s relentless desire for oneness with the Divine. Of course, many kinds of bird in the Columbidae family have acted as love-symbols across the centuries. More familiar to some readers may be the lover-doves in Dante Alighieri’s (d. 1321) Inferno, or the mourning dove of Roberto Bellarmino’s (1542–1621) De Gemitu columbae.5 But as is clear from the quoted passage of Tarjumān al-ashwa ̄q, Dante’s desiring, wilful birds—as Bellarmino’s penitential creature—resonate with works far outside ‘the West’. Another Arabic writer, ʿAlı ̄ Ibn Aḥmad Ibn Ḥ azm (994–1064), is best known for his treatise on the nature of love, Al-Ṭ awq al-ḥama ̄ma (The Collar of the Dove or The Ring of the Dove), a text which has striking 2  The Tarjumān al-ashwa ̄q: Collection of Mystical Odes, ed. and trans. R.A.  Nicholson (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1911); all subsequent references are to this edition and translation, to poem and line numbers respectively. Although very dated now, this is still the most comprehensive translation into English currently available. For a translation into French, see L’interprète des désirs (Turjuma ̄n [sic] al-ashwāq), trans. Maurice Gloton (Paris: Albin Michel, 1996). The specified locations in the quotation are all places associated with the Islamic holy lands, especially Mecca and Medina. 3  For ease of reference for English-language readers, I give centuries in the Common Era rather than the Hijri system. 4  XXV: comm. 4. 5  ‘Quali colombe dal disio chiamate | con l’ali alzate e ferme al dolce nido | vegnon per l’aere, dal voler portate; | cotali uscir de la schiera ov’ è Dido, | a noi venendo per l’aere maligno, sì forte fu l’affettüoso grido.’ (‘Even as doves when summoned by desire, | borne forward by their will, move through the air, | with wings uplifted, still, to their sweet nest, | those spirits left the ranks where Dido suffers | approaching us through the malignant air; | so powerful had been my loving cry.’) (Inferno 5: 82–87: ‘Digital Dante’, Columbia University, https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/divine-comedy/inferno/inferno-5/ [accessed 23rd July 2020]). For discussion, see Elena Lombardi, The Wings of the Dove: Love and Desire in Dante and Medieval Culture (Montreal; Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012), especially pp. 3, 12, 18. For Roberto Bellarmino, see his De Gemitu columbae (Germany: apud. Cornel. ab Egmond, 1626). I am indebted to Professor Peter Davidson for sharing his knowledge of this text with me. For additional examples of the loving turtledove in European texts, see further note 166 in this chapter.

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parallels with later fin’ amor discourses.6 Ibn Ḥ azm has even been defined as the ‘Andalusian counterpart’ to Andreas Capellanus (1150–1220).7 For both Andalusian writers, Ibn Ḥ azm as for Ibn ʿArabı ̄, doves encode the loving soul. Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s doves also perform the fraught potencies and failures of language when it comes to love; these birds pressurize words to the point of breakage. Within the same decades as Ibn ʿArabı ̄, an author in England—most probably on the border between Herefordshire and Shropshire—images the soul of a religious recluse as a dove.8 The dove takes shelter in Christ’s wounded body, based on Canticles 2: 149: He him seolf cleopeð þe toward teose wunden. Columba mea, in foraminibus petre, in cauernis macerie: ‘Mi culure,’ he seið, ‘cum hud te i mine limen þurles, i þe hole of mi side.’ (111: 1639–1642) (He himself calls you towards these wounds. My dove, in the cleft of the rock, in the hollows of the wall. ‘My dove’, he says, ‘come hide yourself in my body’s openings, in the hole of my side.’)

This follows the Ancrene Wisse-author’s broader discussion of the recluses as birds. Anchorite-birds ascend, joyfully, to the sky: Treowe ancres beoð ariht briddes of heovene, þe fleoð on heh ant sitteð singinde murie o the grene bohes (þet is, þencheð uppart of þe blisse of heouene, þe neauer ne faleweð, ah is aa grene), ant sitteð o this grene singinde murie (þet is, resteð ham i þulli þoht, ant ase þeo þe singeð, habbeð murhðe of heorte). (53: 201–205) (True anchorites are rightly [termed] birds of heaven, who fly on high and sit singing happily on the green boughs—that is, they think upwards on 6  The title of his treatise is usually translated as The Ring of the Dove, but it can be more accurately rendered The Collar of the Dove, or perhaps The Necklace of the Dove. The Ṭ awq refers to the marking around the bird’s neck—hence its translation into English ‘ringdove’. For a full translation of the text, see The Ring of the Dove: A Treatise on the Art and Practice of Arab Love, trans. A. J. Arberry (London: Luzac & Company, 1953). 7  María Rosa Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literature: A Forgotten Heritage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p. 110. 8  On the localization of Ancrene Wisse and the ‘AB Group’ more broadly, see especially Millett, ed., Ancrene Wisse volume, II, x and xiii–xvi; and Richard Dance, ‘The AB Language: the Recluse, the Gossip and the Language Historian’, in A Companion to Ancrene Wisse, ed. Yoko Wada (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), pp. 57–82. 9  ‘My dove in the clefts of the rock, in the hollow places of the wall’ (Canticles 2: 14).

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the bliss of Heaven, which never becomes barren but is always green—and sit on this greenery singing happily—that is, rest themselves in such a thought, and as those who sing, have happiness of heart.)

With a basis in Psalm 101: 7, the author of Ancrene Wisse images the anchorites specifically as night-birds sheltering beneath the eaves (‘evesunges’) of a church, in turn fortifying this sacred edifice (‘halden hire [her] up’, 56).10 For both authors, birds sing the languages of divine love—languages that transcend cultures whilst also being rooted in cultural codes. Across geo-cultural divides, contemplative birds embody the soul’s sensitive shifts and the felt ways of approaching the Divine. Like the Ancrene Wisse-­ author, the later John of the Cross (1542–1591) employs Psalm 101: 7 to image the contemplative soul as a solitary sparrow.11 Closer to the temporal framework of this book, John of Howden (fl. 1268/9–1275) has the nightingale sing contemplatively in Rossignos (The Nightingale), an Anglo-­ Norman reworking of his own Latin Philomena.12 And the Sufi ‘At ̣t ̣ār of Nishapur (c. 1145–1220) is known for his Persian poem Mant ̣iq-ut-ṭair (The Conference of the Birds or The Speech of the Birds), an intricate narrative with many diegetic levels involving hikāyāt (exempla, stories).13 In The 10  Psalms 101: 7–8. (‘I am become like to a pelican of the wilderness: I am like a night raven in the house. I have watched, and am become as a sparrow all alone on the housetop.’) The image of the anchorites as birds of heaven is an elaboration of Psalm 101. The image of the singing birds on the evergreen branches (‘aa grene’, ‘sitteth o this grene singinde murie’) derives from Gregory the Great (Homiliae in Euangelia, Book I) and Augustine of Hippo (Confessiones, Book 9). See further Millett, trans., Guide for Anchoresses, p. 200 n. 3/40. 11  ‘The traits of the solitary bird are five: first, it seeks the highest place; second, it withstands no company; third, it holds its beak in the air; fourth, it has no definite colour; fifth, it sings sweetly. These traits must be possessed by the contemplative soul.’ Quoted from Kieran Kavanaugh’s translation of John of the Cross’ ‘Sayings of Light and Love’, as provided in ‘The Matheson Trust: For the Study of Comparative Religion’, https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/solitary-bird [accessed 23rd July 2020]. 12  John of Howden, Rossignos, ed. Glynn Hesketh (London: Anglo-Norma Text Society, 2006): see, for example, p. 36 ll. 101–p. 37 l.144. For a discussion of this text, see Denis Renevey, ‘1215–1349: Texts’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Mysticism, ed. Samuel Fanous and Vincent Gillespie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 91–112. For a discussion of the nightingale as contemplative in this text, see also Daniel Reeve, ‘Romance and the Literature of Religious Instruction, c. 1170-c. 1330’ (unpublished dissertation, University of Oxford, 2014), p. 171. 13  Its frame narrative has been compared with the work of Geoffrey Chaucer: see Maryam Khoshbakht, Moussa Ahmadian, and Shahrukh Hekmat, ‘A Comparative Study of Chaucer’s

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Speech of the Birds, a host of birds are led by a hoopoe (hodhod) in a journey to seek the Simorgh, their legendary king14: There is for us a King indisputable, Behind a mountain that is the Mount of Qāf. His name is Sı ̄murgh, Sultan of Birds; He to us close but we from Him distant far. In the Sanctuary of Glory is His nest. Not within the compass of every tongue is His name. Hundreds of thousands of veils He has and more, Both of light and of darkness in front of Him.15

The birds are overcome with longing for the Simorgh; they undertake a devastating journey to reach this King of the Birds and are ultimately annihilated by his radiance (ll. 744–747, 4231–4232). The Speech of the Birds is, of course, an allegory of the soul’s search to be united with the Divine. The quest for love language, like the quest for bird language, can be exhausting and seemingly hopeless. But it is this bird-song that we attempt The Canterbury Tales and ʿAt ̣t ̣ār’s The Conference of the Birds’, International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature 2.1 (2013), 90–97. 14  ʿAṭt ̣ār’s ultimate source is surah 27, ‘An Naml’ (The Ants): ‘And Solomon was David’s heir. And he said: O mankind! Lo! we have been taught the language of birds, and have been given (abundance) of all things. This surely is evident favour’ (27: 16); ‘Till, when they reached the Valley of the Ants, an ant exclaimed: O ants! Enter your dwellings lest Solomon and his armies crush you, unperceiving’ (27: 18); ‘But he [the hoopoe] was not long in coming, and he said: I have found out (a thing) that you apprehend not, and I come to you from Sheba with sure tidings’ (27: 22). Parallel passages in the Bible include the Third Book of Kings 4: 29 and 32–34: ‘And God gave to Solomon wisdom and understanding exceeding much, and largeness of heart as the sand that is on the sea shore. […] Solomon also spoke three thousand parables: and his poems were a thousand and five. And he treated about trees from the cedar that is in Libanus, unto the hyssop that cometh out of the wall: and he discoursed of beasts, and of fowls, and of creeping things, and of fishes. And they came from all nations to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and from all the kings of the earth, who heard of his wisdom.’ 15  Farı ̄d ud-Dı ̄n ʿAṭṭār, The Speech of the Birds, trans. Peter Avery, p. 67, ll. 711–714; all subsequent references are to this translation, incorporated in the body of the text. Another translation is available as The Conference of the Birds, trans. Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis (London: Penguin Books, 2011). For the original Persian text, see Kadkani’s critical edition: Mant ̣iq al-t ̣ayr, ed. Muhammad Rida Shafi’i-Kadkani (Tehran: Sukhan, 2004).

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to hear in this book. This monograph seeks to contribute to the growing interest in ‘globalization’ in medieval studies, as epitomized in, for example, María Rose Menocal’s work on the Arabic heritage of European literary history and Sahar Amer’s work on the love between women across Arabic and French texts.16 I argue for the necessity of placing medieval English devotional texts in their broader, more global, context, and this study seeks to modify influential narratives on the ‘history of emotions’ to enable this more wide-ranging critical outlook. It examines ‘feeling’ and ‘emotion’ (particularly in the form of love, related closely to compassion) in contemplative Islamic and Christian texts written by and for those embracing the solitary/semi-solitary life. As yet, there has been no book-­ length study that assesses English and Arabic contemplative texts from the period c. 1100–1250 comparatively. Despite the scholarly shifts towards globalization, there has been no sustained work of this nature, and the present monograph aims to meet this need. Through this kind of comparative work, I hope that we can continue to critique and revise isolationist mindsets. To capture such work in cross-cultural histories of emotion, I would like to suggest the term ‘avian emotion’. Apart from alluding to the soul-­ as-­bird image at the heart of these texts, this term also encapsulates the workings of such a comparative approach. In Rossignos, John of Howden likens the act of creative assimilation or compilation to the varied song of a nightingale: ‘sicome li rossignos feit de diverses notes une melodie, auci feit cest livres de diverses matires une acoraunce’ (as the nightingale makes a melody from diverse notes, so does this book make one agreement from diverse subjects).17 I borrow this image to aid in our understanding of 16  Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literature: for an outline of the study’s premises, see ‘The Myth of Westernness in Medieval Literary Historiography’, pp. 1–25; Sahar Amer, Crossing Borders: Love Between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013): for an outline of this study’s premises, see ‘Crossing Disciplinary Boundaries: A Cross-Cultural Approach to Same-Sex Love Between Women’, pp.  1–28. See also Amer’s earlier article: ‘Medieval Arab Lesbians and Lesbian-Like Women’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 18.2 (2009), 215–236. 17  Rossignos, ed. Hasketh, p. 33. On compilation strategies in late medieval texts, see Diana Denissen, Middle English Devotional Compilations: Composing Imaginative Variations in Late Medieval England (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2019), especially pp. 1–20; and Marleen Cré, Diana Denissen, and Denis Renevey, ‘Introduction’, in Late Medieval Devotional Compilations in England, ed. Marleen Cré, Diana Denissen, and Denis Renevey (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2020), pp. 1–24.

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comparative strategies, which seek to harmonize diverse traditions whilst not cancelling out one by the other. An avian perspective of emotion asks us to look across cultures as well as within them, migrating from one to the other with sensitivity. As a bird shifts across multiple regions, a comparative study seeks to become a kind of flight, a cyclical movement that is sensitive to the rhythms of the surrounding environment. It embraces similarity as well as difference; it moves from one to the other with the same flight, but with subtle modulations depending on the region it traverses.

Introducing the Texts ‘Contemplative’ The Arabic and English texts studied in this book are collectively labelled with the shorthand term ‘contemplative’. Whilst there are problems with referring to Ancrene Wisse and the Wooing Group (c. 1225) as ‘contemplative’, the terms ‘devotional’ and ‘meditative’ alone would also be insufficient. The term ‘contemplative’ will thus be employed for a variety of texts with a meditative function, in preference to the more nebulous term ‘mystical’. The term ‘mystical’ is suffused with Christian connotations that makes its application to non-Christian texts difficult.18 This is not to say that ‘contemplative’ does not have its own biases, but there is some precedent for addressing ‘contemplative’ texts across cultures.19 The term ‘mystical’ has also been challenged for its lack of authority in medieval Christian texts.20 Furthermore, the term ‘contemplative’ enables greater  expansiveness and inclusivity than ‘mystical’, discriminating less against audience and practice.21 In particular, it is important not to disassociate penitence and contemplation too starkly. Despite the long-­standing 18   See further Lloyd Ridgeon, ‘Mysticism in Medieval Sufism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Sufism, ed. Lloyd Ridgeon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 125–149. 19  See, for example, Contemplative Literature: A Comparative Sourcebook on Meditation and Contemplative Prayer, ed. Louis Komjathy (New York: State University of New York Press, 2015); for a discussion of terminology, see especially pp. 4–9. 20  See further Vincent Gillespie and Samuel Fanous, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 294. 21  See further Eleanor Johnson, Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), especially p. 3.

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tendency for scholarship to polarize ‘mysticism’ and ‘asceticism’, the two are inextricably connected.22 The bird-anchorite of Ancrene Wisse flourishes in penitential terms. Their penitential labour is partly expressed in a long section on the ‘birds of the air’, an elaboration of Luke 9: 58 (52–53).23 For Mary Agnes Edsall, the birds of Ancrene Wisse express an alternative contemplative practice, beyond Pseudo-Dionysian models. Edsall defines this as a contemplation which ‘privileges a Passion-centred penitential asceticism focused on experiencing Christ’.24 The author’s contemplative insights are ‘emblematized in the image of the cross-bearing anchoress as cruciform bird’:25 The anchoress is the contemplative eagle, perhaps not gazing into the sun, but engaged in a deeply inward quest for total attachment to the transformative and salvific person of Christ.26

Ancrene Wisse, and alongside it the group of meditations known as the Wooing Group, centre on penitential labour, but this does not cancel out an attendant emphasis on union with the Divine. Equally, as will be addressed particularly in Part III of this book, the emphasis on transcendent union with the Divine in the Sufi texts does not erase their attendant emphasis on self-mortification or asceticism (zuhd).

22  See further M. Dakake, ‘Guest of the Inmost Heart: Conceptions of the Divine Beloved Among Early Sufi Women’, Comparative Islamic Studies 3, no. 1 (2007), 72–97; and Olga Solovieva, ‘“Veiled with a Special Veil”: Rabi’a of Basra and the Ascetic Reconfiguration of Identity’, Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality 49.2 (2014): 4–28. 23  ‘The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air nests’ (Luke 9: 58). 24  Mary Agnes Edsall, ‘“True Anchoresses Are Called Birds”: Asceticism as Ascent and the Purgative Mysticism of the Ancrene Wisse’, Viator 34 (2003), 157–186 (158). 25  Edsall ‘“True Anchoresses Are Called Birds”’, 157. 26  Edsall, ‘“True Anchoresses Are Called Birds”’, 180. For a more recent discussion of the birds of Ancrene Wisse, see further Iva Jevtic, ‘Becoming-Birds: The Destabilizing Use of Gendered Animal Imagery in Ancrene Wisse’, in Animal Languages in the Middle Ages: Representations of Interspecies Communication, ed. Alison Langdon (New  York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 13–30.

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Summary of Texts and Audiences/Readers27 With an avian outlook, I examine the dialogic encounters generated by comparative readings of Ibn ʿArabı ̄, ʿUmar Ibn al-Fāriḍ (1181–1235), Abu al-Ḥ asan Shushtarı ̄ (d. 1269), Ancrene Wisse, and the Wooing Group. There will also be some discussion of other works, including Thomas of Hales’ Love Rune (c. 1234–1272) and Muhammad Ibn ʿAbd al-Malik Ibn Tufail’s (1105–1185) Ḥayy Ibn Yaqzān, alongside Persian, Latin, and Anglo-Norman analogues. I hope for this study to demonstrate the rich potential for comparative work across English and Arabic contemplative texts, c. 1100–1250, revealing a wealth of interrelations. For this reason, focus will be restricted neither to only one author or one textual unit, nor solely to more canonical texts; instead, the study ranges across contemplative authors and texts in Arabic and English. The scope must inevitably remain selective, however. I have been unable to include discussion of the Persian Sufi poet Fakhr al-din ‘Iraqı ̄ (1213–1289).28 I have also only touched briefly on perhaps the most famous Sufi in the ‘West’, Jalāl ad-Dı ̄n Muhammad Rūmı ̄ (1207–1273), who likewise composed primarily in Persian. Furthermore, as hagiography is not the main focus of this study, the life of ʿAishah al-Manubiyya (d. 1267) will not feature in the coming pages.29 Ibn ʿArabı ̄ Although Ibn ʿArabı ̄ was born and nurtured in Murcia, in ‘Al-Andalus’ (Islamic Iberia), he travelled widely, particularly in Mecca and Medina in the Islamic holy lands.30 Ibn ʿArabı ̄ is unparalleled in his output; he was a 27  I use the term ‘audiences’ alongside ‘readers’ to account for a range of literacies and reading practices. See further Konrad Hirschler, The Written Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands: A Social and Cultural History of Reading Practices (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), especially ‘Reading and  Writerly Culture’, pp.  11–31; and  Mark Amsler, Affective Literacies: Writing and Multilingualism in the Late Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), especially ‘Theorizing Medieval Literacy’, pp. 1–46. 28  For a reading of ‘Iraqı ̄ alongside Ibn ʿArabı ̄, see Cyrus Ali Zargar, Sufi Aesthetics: Beauty, Love, and the Human Form in the Writings of Ibn ʿArabı ̄ and ‘Iraqi (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2011); for an overview of this study’s focus on vision and beauty, see especially pp. 1–10. 29  The subject of ʿAishah al-Manubiyya’s love for the Divine has been addressed by Minlib Dallh, ‘ʿAishah al Manubiyya (d. 1267): La Ravie en Dieu’ (unpublished seminar paper, University of Oxford, 5th November 2020). 30  On Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s life and work, see further Claude Addas, Quest for the Red Sulphur: the Life of Ibn ʿArabı ̄, trans. Peter Kingsley (Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1993): on his

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prolific writer of verse and prose. His corpus is densely theosophical, and he developed a highly complex cosmogony. His works include extensive treatises, such as his magnificent summa, Futūḥa ̄t al-Makkı ̄yya (The Meccan Revelations or The Meccan Openings). Another of his summative works is Al-Ittiḥa ̄d al-kawnı ̄ fi ḥaḍrat al-ishhād al-ʿaynı ̄ bi-mahdūr al-­ shajara al-insāniyya wa-l-tuyu ̄r al-arbaʿa al-ruḥa ̄niyya. This can be translated as Cosmic Unification in the Presence of the Eye-Witnessing Through the Assembly of the Human Tree and the Four Spiritual Birds, but it is also known in English more simply as the Universal Tree and Four Birds. In this text, each bird represents distinct faculties: in the simplest terms, the four birds represent the Intellect (Eagle), Soul (Ringdove), ‘Prime Matter’ (ʿAnqā, a legendary bird), and the Body (crow).31 Tarjuma ̄n al-ashwa ̄q (The Interpreter of Desires) will be the principal of Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s works to be studied in the following pages. In this collection of poems, Ibn ʿArabı ̄ operates within the dazzling traditions of pre-Islamic poetry: shiʿr al-jāhili, literally ‘poetry of the time of ignorance’—so named because it precedes the emergence of Islam and not because of any lack on its part.32 In particular, Ibn ʿArabı ̄ is working within the tradition of the nası ̄b (prelude to a poetic ode), in which a lover searches desperately for their beloved in abandoned ruins, lamenting their loss. This is especially associated with the ‘Udhra tribe. As summarized by Michael Sells: The ʿUdhri love poem would portray the poet-lover as driven mad (majnūn, literally ‘Jinned’ or possessed by Jinn) out of love for the beloved, as ha’̄ im (wandering aimlessly), as perishing (ha ̄lik). […] In the ʿUdhri tradition the conjunction within the classical nası ̄b of eros, madness, and inspiration (all symbolized by the Jinn by whom the poets were said to be inspired) is intensified.33

nurturance in Andalusia, see especially pp. 11–33; on the development of his contemplative vocation, see especially pp. 33–73. See also William Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-Arabı ̄’s Metaphysics of Imagination (New York: State University of New York Press, 1989), especially pp. x–xx. 31  See further Angela Jaffray, trans., Universal Tree and the Four Birds (Oxford: Anqa Publications, 2006), especially pp. 18, 83, 88, 94–95, 89–90, and 99. 32  For a brief introduction, see further ‘Pagan Poets (A.D. 500–622)’, in The Penguin Anthology of Classical Arab Literature, ed. and trans. Robert Irwin (London, 1999), pp. 1–29. 33  Michael Sells, ‘Bewildered Tongue: The Semantics of Mystical Union in Islam’, in Mystical Union in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: An Ecumenical Dialogue, ed. Moshe

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According to Ibn ʿArabı ̄, his Tarjuma ̄n al-ashwa ̄q was inspired by a special encounter with a Persian woman, Niẓām of Isfahan.34 The world of the Tarjumān is primarily that of the desert, populated by its plants and wildlife—the bān, ara ̄k, ghada, the doves, the ravens, the gazelles, and the ridden camels who suffer with the Lover.35 ‘Ibn ʿArabı ̄ also localizes this landscape in the Islamic holy lands, specifying, in particular, places in Mecca and Medina. All the Tarjumān poems centre on a longing to find a lost Beloved. As the Lover cries out in Poem XV: ‘Who will compose my distracted thoughts? Who will relieve my pain? Guide me to him! Who will ease my sorrow! Who will help a passionate lover?’ (XV: 5). The desert is filled with ruinous, empty campsites, the Beloved nowhere to be found, as in Poem XIX, where the Lover calls out: ‘O mouldering remains (of the encampment) at al-Uthayl, where I played with friendly maidens!’ Or as is said in Poem XXIV: ‘Halt by thy dwelling-places and call to them, wondering at their loneliness, with exquisite lamentation’ (XXIV: 2). The loss of the Beloved is entirely consuming: ‘I have plunged into places of destruction and death’ (XXXIV: 16–17). The poems of the Tarjuman̄ are inescapably sensual and erotic. It is important to bear in mind here that the dynamics of gender performance are complex in Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s work. In addition, as will be discussed, there is a rich tradition of Arabic homoerotic poetry—a tradition inherited by our Sufi poets. But in the Tarjuman̄ , the Lover is primarily given masculine attributes, and the Beloved feminine attributes. If we take Poem XXIX, for example, it opens with swaying boughs which evoke supple bodies that are in turn decorated with ‘tresses’ and ‘plaited locks of hair; soft in their joints and bends’ (1–2). The beloved ones are in embroidered clothing (3) but are nonetheless modest (4); they have mouths that laugh and smile and ‘whose lips are sweet to kiss’ (5). The bodies are uncovered for the gazer, revealing ‘bare limbs’ that are ‘dainty’, along with ‘swelling breasts’; they ‘offer choice presents’ (6). They are enchanters in their speech (7), even while ‘[c]overing their faces for shame’ (8). Their teeth Idel and Bernard McGinn (1996; repr. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016), pp. 87–124 (p. 91). 34  See further Sa’diyya Shaikh, Sufi Narratives of Intimacy: Ibn ‘Arabı ̄, Gender, and Sexuality (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), pp.  61–62; and Henry Corbin, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ʿArabı ̄ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 136–145. 35  See, for example, XXVII: 4–6.

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are ‘pearly’, and their saliva heals (9). These bodies are also dangerous: their glances ‘pierce’ even a battle-scarred heart that is ‘used to combat’, and their breasts bring forth moons ‘which suffer no eclipse on becoming full’ (12). The speaker then turns to his ‘comrades’, a camaraderie of manhood gazing on this female form—they refer to a ‘slender girl who bestowed on me favours and bounties’, and again to her gazes that are ‘trenchant swords’, with ‘her front teeth […] a dazzling levin’ (15). Such was the backlash against the erotic quality of the verse that Ibn ʿArabı ̄ later produced an exegetical commentary explaining its devotional meanings. Manuscripts of the Tarjuma ̄n include versions both with and without the authorial commentary.36 Denis E. McAuley is perhaps right that the commentary is unappealing to literary scholars, as, when set against the richly polyvalent poems, it can have a reductive and oppressive effect.37 Equally, however, Ibn ʿArabı ̄ himself is profoundly concerned with linguistic and hermeneutic process; the poems of the Tarjumān force audiences into linguistic otherworlds that distort ‘reality’ as much as they parallel it. In Poem XXXI of the Tarjuma ̄n, for example, the woman is identified in the commentary as ‘a Divine attribute which manifested itself in the world of similitude’ (XXXI: comm 5, emphasis mine). Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s exegesis of the poems is thus a treasure-trove for his own philosophy of language, enriching readings of the poems themselves. Another of Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s texts that will feature prominently in this book is his Fuṣu ̄ṣ al-ḥikam (The Bezels of Wisdom), formed from both prose and verse. Fuṣu ̄ṣ al-ḥikam has a chapter dedicated to each of the main prophets of Islam: Adam, Seth, Noah, Enoch, Abraham, Isaac, Ishmael, Jacob, Joseph, Hūd, Sālih, Shuʿaib, Lot, Ezra, Jesus, Solomon, David, Jonah, Job, John, Zakariah, Elias, Luqmān, Aaron, Moses, Khālid, and finally Muhammad. In each chapter, Ibn ʿArabı ̄ reflects on a facet of God’s wisdom embodied in each prophet. R. W. J. Austin explains the significance of the title Fus ̣u ̄ṣ al-ḥikam, with each prophet being the setting in which a gemstone of wisdom is placed: 36  See further Nicholson, ed. and trans., The Tarjumān al-ashwa ̄q: Collection of Mystical Odes, pp. 1–2. Nicholson identifies three recensions in the manuscript tradition: poems without commentary; the poems with a commentary and a new preface; and the poems with a commentary and added note on authorial composition. 37  McAuley suggests that Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s commentary has ‘caused frustration and dismay among literary critics’: Denis E.  McAuley, Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s Mystical Poetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 22.

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The Arabic word faṣṣ, which is the singular form of fuṣūṣ, means the bezel or setting in which the gem, engraved with a name, will be set to make a seal ring. […] By calling his work Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam, Ibn al-ʿArabı ̄ [sic] means that each prophet, after whom each chapter is entitled, is the human setting in which the gemstone of each kind of wisdom is set, thus making of each prophet the signet or sign, by selection, of a particular aspect of God’s wisdom.38

This then resonates with Muhammad as the ‘seal of the prophets’ (kha ̄tim an-nabı ̄yı ̄n or khātim al-anbiyā), a phrase used in surah 33: 40 of the Qur’an and signifying Muhammad as the final, most perfect carrier of God’s message.39 Ibn al-Fāriḍ Ibn al-Fāriḍ (1181–1235) lived primarily in his birthplace of Cairo in Egypt and was possibly so named because his father was said to be a women’s advocate (fāriḍ).40 Unlike the other two Arabic poets at the core of this book, Ibn al-Fāriḍ was not nourished in Al-Andalus. However, one of his devotees and students was Andalusian and wrote an account of his life.41 Like Ibn ʿArabı ̄, Ibn al-Fāriḍ also travelled widely, especially in the Islamic holy lands, in Mecca and Medina. There is evidence that Ibn al-Fāriḍ avoided the royal court, dedicating himself to a life of contemplation, the teaching of poetry, and the teaching of the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad, the ḥadı ̄th.42 The poetic corpus attributed to Ibn al-Fāriḍ comprises different forms, including the qaṣı ̄da (traditional poem), the ghazal (love poem), and the khamriyya (wine poem). He wrote many poems ultimately collected by his grandson, ‘Alı ̄; his Dı ̄wān is preserved in multiple manuscripts.43 Ibn al-Fāriḍ likely had a more varied, popular audience than Ibn ʿArabı ̄. But like Ibn ʿArabı ̄, Ibn al-Fāriḍ worked within the 38  See further R.  W. J.  Austin, trans., The Bezels of Wisdom (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1980), p. 16. 39  ‘Muhammad is not the father of any man among you, but he is the messenger of Allah and the Seal of the Prophets; and Allah is ever Aware of all things’ (surah 33: 40). 40  See Homerin, trans., ʿUmar Ibn al-Fa ̄riḍ: Sufi Verse, Saintly Life (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press), p. 10. 41  See Homerin, trans., ʿUmar Ibn al-Fāriḍ: Sufi Verse, Saintly Life, pp. 10–11. 42  For biographical accounts of Ibn al-Fāriḍ, see further Homerin, trans. ʿUmar Ibn al-Fāriḍ: Sufi Verse, Saintly Life, pp.  10–11; and, more briefly, Lings, ed. and trans., Sufi Poems, pp. 66–67. 43  See especially Th. Emil Homerin, Passion Before Me, My Fate Behind: Ibn al-Fāriḍ and the Poetry of Recollection (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011), pp. 249–250. On manuscript versions of the Dı ̄wa ̄n, see further Homerin, ʿUmar Ibn al-Fa ̄riḍ, p. 4.

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pre- and early Islamic poetic tradition of the nası ̄b, influenced by the ‘Udhra tribe, with a lover pining for the lost Beloved. This is evident throughout his Dı ̄wān, and the poet himself even became known as the ‘sultan of lovers’ (sultan al-ʿashiqı ̄n).44 Of particular note is his ‘wine poem’, Al-Khamriyya, on divine intoxication, and his lengthy qaṣı ̄da known as Naẓm al-sulūk (Poem of the Sufi Way)/Ta’iyah al-kubra (literally, ‘Great Poem Rhyming in Ta’). Naẓm al-sulūk crystallizes and synthesizes his contemplative thought. In this work, the speaker undergoes an anguished process to attain union with the Divine. The work handles the pain of separation, deprivation, and subjugation of the will—the annihilation of the nafs (self, ego) to secure true union with the Beloved.45 Shushtarı ̄ Like Ibn ʿArabı ̄, Shushtarı ̄ (d. 1269) flourished in the region of Al-Andalus, born and raised in Guadix. He too seems to have travelled widely, including areas in the Muslim East, in modern-day Tunisia, Egypt, and Mecca in Saudi Arabia.46 Whilst there are multiple manuscripts of his poetry, there is no autograph version.47 A significant number of poems have also been falsely attributed to him; these poems were more likely composed by later imitators.48 Again like Ibn ʿArabı ̄ and Ibn al-Fāriḍ, Shushtarı ̄ responds to pre-Islamic poetic traditions. But, unlike these poets, Shushtarı ̄ is powerfully associated with that ‘quintessentially Andalusian creation’, the muwashshaḥ, a term which possibly derives from a kind of belt or girdle embroidered with alternating, interlocking colours.49 This is a form of strophic poetry with a complex rhyme scheme: its main thrust is in classical Arabic or Hebrew; the final stanza, known as 44  Th. Emil Homerin, ‘Ibn al-Fāriḍ: Ruba’iyat, Ghazal, Qasida’, in Windows on the House of Islam: Muslim Sources on Spirituality and Religious Life, ed. John Renard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 194–202 (p. 194). He has been briefly compared to John Donne and John of the Cross (Homerin, trans., ʿUmar Ibn al-Fāriḍ: Sufi Verse, Saintly Life, p. 1). 45  On vocabulary of union, see further Sells, ‘Bewildered Tongue’, in Mystical Union in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, ed. Idel and McGinn, pp. 87–124. 46  Alvarez, trans., Shushtarı ̄: Songs of Love and Devotion, p. 17. 47  See further Alvarez, trans., Shushtarı ̄: Songs of Love and Devotion, p. 7. 48  See further Alvarez, trans., Shushtarı ̄: Songs of Love and Devotion p. 8. 49  See further Tova Rosen, ‘The muwashshaḥ’, in The Literature of Al-Andalus, ed. Maria Rosa Menocal, Raymond P.  Scheindlin, Michael Anthony Sells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 165–189 (p. 167).

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the kharja or ‘exit’, is most often in vernacular Arabic or in a Romance dialect, particularly Mozarabic.50 As affirmed by Tova Rosen, this form ‘exemplifies a pluralistic cultural politics that allowed for difference and plurality, clashes and juxtapositions’.51 Shushtarı ̄ composed many muwashshaḥat̄ and azjal̄ (singular zajal)—a form akin to the muwashshaḥ, though composed fully in vernacular Arabic.52 He also composed poems in the more classical qası̣ ̄da form. Shushtarı ̄ clearly knew of Ibn ʿArabı ̄, as he cites the ‘Great Sheikh’ in his Nun̄ iyya (‘Poem Rhyming in “N”’) (lines 60–61). It is more difficult to ascertain whether Shushtarı ̄ knew of Ibn al-Fāriḍ, however.53 Ibn Tufail Ibn Tufail (1105–1185) is not one of the primary authors covered in the present book, but as he will continue to appear in the following chapters, a brief introduction is in order. Like Shushtarı ̄ and Ibn ʿArabı ̄, Ibn Tufail was nurtured in Al-Andalus, having been born in Guadix. He embraced many different disciplines and in fact acted as physician to caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf.54 Ḥ ayy Ibn Yaqzān is his most famous work: a treatise that narrates the story of a feral child on an island. The child is Ḥ ayy Ibn Yaqzān, a name which translates literally to ‘Alive, Son of Awake’.55 This treatise is marked by Ibn Tufail’s reading of the foundational work on Islamic contemplation by Abu Hamid Muhammad Ibn Muhammad Al-Ghazāli (d. 1111), although Sufism is not the sole influence on Ibn

50  Marlé Hammond, Dictionary of Arabic Literary Terms and Devices (Oxford, 2018), online [accessed 26th December 2019]; see also The Penguin Anthology of Classical Arab Literature, ed. and trans. Robert Irwin (London, 1999), p.  276. An especially influential description of muwashshaḥa ̄t was provided by the fourteenth-century writer Ibn Khaldun: see further The Penguin Anthology of Classical Arab Literature, ed. and trans. Robert Irwin (London, 1999), p. 276. 51  See Rosen, ‘The muwashshaḥ’, in The Literature of Al-Andalus, ed. Menocal, Scheindlin, and Sells, pp. 165 and 166. 52  See further Marlé Hammond, Dictionary of Arabic Literary Terms and Devices (Oxford, 2018), online [accessed 27th September 2020]. 53  See further Alvarez, trans., Shushtarı ̄: Songs of Love and Devotion, pp. 20–21 and 134. 54  On Ibn Tufail’s life, see further Aaron W. Hughes, Texture of the Divine: Imagination in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), p. 23. 55  For a summary of the text, see Avner Ben-Zaken, Reading Ḥ ayy Ibn-Yaqzān: A CrossCultural History of Autodidacticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), pp. 3–4.

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Tufail’s writing.56 In Ḥayy Ibn Yaqzān, Ḥ ayy is protected and raised by a doe who has lost her own fawn and who hears the infant crying. After raising Ḥ ayy tenderly, the doe inevitably grows old and dies. In a pivotal passage, the young Ḥ ayy dissects her body to find the source of her life, in order to revive her. On finding her heart, he concludes that the life-force has departed to somewhere he cannot see. As he matures, Ḥ ayy continues to teach himself about creation through observation. This brings him to a realization of a plurality in creation that is nonetheless indicative of one ‘spirit’ or ‘being’—echoic of Sufi thought. On discerning great similarity across the animal kingdom, he concludes that ‘the spirit present throughout the species must be a single entity, undifferentiated except through its division among numerous hearts’.57 He ultimately retreats to live a contemplative life of solitude: he becomes ‘deeply immersed in his supernal ecstasies, emerging from his cave no more than once a week for whatever food came to hand’.58  ncrene Wisse A Ancrene Wisse is a prose anchoritic guidance text written originally for three biological sisters who each, at a young age, embraced the life of an enclosed religious recluse. But the text as represented in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 402, was a heavily revised version intended for a wider audience than the original three sisters.59 The text is divided into eight ‘dales’ or parts. As the author outlines in his preface, Parts I and VIII form the ‘Outer Rule’—outer observances of prayer and day-to-day necessities. Parts II–VII form the rich kernel of the ‘Inner Rule’, the cognitiveaffective processes involved in anchoritic devotion, centring on love. In its complex textual history, Ancrene Wisse survives in seventeen manuscripts, in its original English as well as in French and Latin translations. It was adapted over time to accommodate an expanding audience, including male contemplatives and the laity. In fact, when it comes to the material

56  On Ibn Tufail’s link with Sufi traditions, see Ben-Zaken, Reading Ḥ ayy Ibn-Yaqzān, especially ‘Taming the Mystic: Marrakesh, 1160s’, pp. 15–41. 57  Ibn Tufail, Ḥ ayy Ibn Yaqza ̄n, trans. Lenn Evan Goodman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 121. 58  Ḥ ayy Ibn Yaqza ̄n, trans. Goodman, p.157. 59  For the audiences and composition history of Ancrene Wisse, see further Millett, trans., Guide for Anchoresses, pp. ix-xvi.

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on confession, the author seems to have recognized a wide audience from the earliest stages of the text’s transmission (129: 595–597).60 Wooing Group The designation ‘Wooing Group’ refers to five lyrical meditations in English—four prose, one verse—spoken to Christ and the Virgin Mary. ‘Wooing Group’ is an artificial and malleable category. The original designation was coined by W. Meredith Thompson in 1958, to cover four texts, identified in his edition as On god ureisun of swiðe god almihti, Lofsong of ure Lefdi, Lofsong of ure Louede, and Þe Wohunge of ure Lauerde.61 To these we must add On God Ureisun of ure Lefdi. The inclusion of this text in the Wooing Group is now more broadly accepted, especially since its incorporation in Catherine Innes-Parker’s edition and translation of the Wooing Group texts (2015). Differently from the other texts, On God Ureisun of ure Lefdi is in verse and appears to be spoken by a man; the speaker is identified as a ‘munuch’ (monk) at the end of the poem (p. 160). However, On God Ureisun of ure Lefdi is found in the same manuscript as a number of the Wooing Group texts (London, British Library, Cotton MS Nero A. xiv), and as Caroline Cole shows, there is a codicological and conceptual closeness between the texts.62 The Wooing Group texts are associated with Ancrene Wisse in linguistic and manuscript traditions, and it is likely that part of their audiences would have included female anchorites. But the audience was also more wide-­ ranging. Ureisun of God and Wohunge were later adapted as part of the fourteenth-century devotional compilation A Talkyng of the Loue of God, which had a male monastic audience in part. Like Ancrene Wisse, all the Wooing Group meditations are anonymous; Ureisun of God and Wohunge may have shared the same author.63 There has been consideration of a 60  See further Bella Millett, ‘Ancrene Wisse and the Conditions of Confession’, English Studies, 80 (1999), 193–215 (193); and Clare Kirchberger, ‘Some Notes on the Ancrene Riwle’, Dominican Studies 7 (1954), 215–238 (231). 61  Þe Wohunge of ure Lauerd, etc., ed. W. Meredith Thompson. EETS O.S. 241 (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. xi–xiii. 62  Caroline Cole, ‘The Integrity of Text and Context in the Prayers of British Library Cotton MS Nero A. XIV’, Neophilologisches Mitteilungen 104 (2003), 85–94. Wohunge is not preserved in this manuscript; it is found, instead, in London, British Library, MS Cotton Titus D. xviii. 63  Denis Renevey suggests a ‘close authorial relationship’ between the two meditations (Renevey, ‘The Moving of the Soul: the Functions of Metaphors of Love in the Writings of

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potential female authorship: this would be an exciting possibility, though there has not yet been a strong case made for it.64 The sources behind the four ‘canonical’ Wooing Group texts include Anselm of Canterbury’s (1033–1109) Orationes sive meditations (Prayers and Meditations).65 Lyrics As is clear from the preceding discussion of On God Ureisun of ure Lefdi, the Wooing Group texts have affinities with lyrical modes. It is difficult to find a unifying definition for ‘lyrics’, as the poems that might come under this category are so varied in context, subject matter, and form; they are also frequently found embedded in longer treatises.66 Middle English lyrics have an important multilingual context that has been foregrounded by Ardis Butterfield, among others.67 Whilst there will not be substantial focus on lyrics beyond the Wooing Group, Chap. 7 examines Thomas of Hales’ Love Rune. Thomas was a Franciscan friar, and there are three surviving works attributed to him in English, Latin, and Anglo-Norman.68 The English Love Rune was composed c. 1234–1272; it is extant in one Richard Rolle and Antecedent Texts of the Mediaeval Mystical Tradition’ [unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Oxford, 1993], p. 84). 64  The argument was proposed in the nineteenth century: E.  Einenkel, ‘Eine englische Schriftstellerin aus dem Anfange des 12. Jahrhunderts’, Anglia 5 (1882), 265–282; see further Thompson, ed. Wohunge, pp. xxiii–xxiv. Eric. J.  Dobson rejects the idea of female authorship as ‘merely fanciful’: see Eric J. Dobson, The Origins of Ancrene Wisse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 154, n. 2. See also Bella Millett, ‘Women in No Man’s Land: English Recluses and the Development of Vernacular Literature in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries’, in Women and Literature in Britain 1150–1500, ed. Carol M. Meale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 86–103 (pp. 98–99). 65  See William Vollhardt, Einfluss der Lateinischen Geistlichen Litteratur (Leipzig: Druck von Hesse & Becker, 1888), pp.  48–52, 53–65: it is important to note that some of Vollhardt’s correspondences refer to pseudo-Anselmian, rather than authentic Anselmian, prayers. 66  See further Julia Boffey and Christiania Whitehead, ‘Introduction’, in Middle English Lyrics: New Readings of Short Poems, ed. Julia Boffey and Christiania Whitehead (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2018), pp. 1–11. 67  Ardis Butterfield, ‘The Construction of Textual Form: Cross-Lingual Citation in the Medieval Insular Lyric’, in Yolanda Plumley, Giuliano Di Bacco and Stefano Jossa (eds), Citation, Intertextuality and Memory in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Text, Music and Image from Machaut to Ariosto (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2011), pp. 41–57. 68  See further Susanna Greer Fein, ed., Moral Love Songs and Laments (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1998), accessed online, https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/ publication/fein-moral-love-songs-and-laments [29th July 2020].

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copy, in Oxford, Jesus College MS 29 (late thirteenth century).69 The speaker of this lyric identifies a female and ‘virginal’ speaker, a ‘mayde Cristes’, as the intended recipient.70 Gender, Vocation, and These Texts All the English and Arabic texts were either certainly or most probably written by men: the Arabic texts have identified male authors (Ibn ʿArabı ̄, Ibn al-Fāriḍ, and Shushtarı ̄); Ancrene Wisse has an anonymous male author; and the Wooing Group meditations are generally assumed to have been composed by men, although, as mentioned previously, the possibility of female authorship has been put forward. In no case, however, does male authorship erase the possibility of women’s involvement in the creative process. It is possible that the original sisters for whom Ancrene Wisse was written had an active role in its composition.71 By Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s own account, his Tarjuma ̄n al-ashwa ̄q was both inspired and shaped by the enigmatic woman known as Niẓām of Isfahan.72 Moreover, contemplative Islamic men were often taught by Sufi masters who were women. Ibn ʿArabı ̄ himself received his formative education as a Sufi from two women: Fāt ̣ima bint Ibn al-Muthannā and Yasmı ̄na Umm al-Fuqarā.73 Additionally, the gendered dynamics of love in all texts are complex and fluid. In Chapter XXVII of Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s Bezels of Wisdom, for instance, there is emphasis on a male God seeking union with a man through a woman’s body. If one loves falsely, says the author, one only loves the ‘repository’—as in ‘woman’—with the ‘real truth and meaning of the act 69  See further Fein, ed., Moral Love Songs and Laments, accessed online, https://d.lib. rochester.edu/teams/publication/fein-moral-love-songs-and-laments [accessed 29th July 2020]. For a study of this manuscript, see further Susanna Fein, ‘Designing English: Early Middle English Verse on the Page in Oxford, Jesus College, MS 29 (II)’, Journal of the Early Book Society for the Study of Manuscripts and Printing History 22 (2019), 43–71. 70  Fein, ed., ‘Thomas of Hales, Love Rune: Text’, in Moral Love Songs and Laments, line 1 accessed online https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/fein-moral-love-songs-andlaments-thomas-hales-love-rune [accessed 2nd December 2020]. 71  This argument is put forward by Anne Savage, ‘The Communal Authorship of Ancrene Wisse’, in A Companion to Ancrene Wisse, ed. Yoko Wada (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), pp.  45–56. See also Michelle Sauer, ‘“Prei for me mi leue suster”: The Paradox of the Anchoritic “Community” in Late Medieval England’, Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism 26 (2003), 153–175. 72  See further Shaikh, Sufi Narratives of Intimacy, pp. 61–62. 73  See further Shaikh, Sufi Narratives of Intimacy, pp. 100–101, 107.

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being lost on him’: ‘If he knew the truth, he would know Whom it is he is enjoying and Who it is Who is the enjoyer; then he would be perfected’ (Austin, p. 276).74 Our Sufi writers inherited a deep-rooted tradition of homoerotic poetry, as epitomized by one of the most influential poets in Arabic, Abu Nuwās (d. 814). With regard to the Wooing Group, Sarah Salih highlights the need for scholars to adopt a triangular model, in which the male author, (originally) female reader, and Christ all participate in a mesh of desire.75 Such a triangular dynamic is also very much in evidence in Thomas of Hales’ Love Rune. The gender-neutral pronoun ‘they/ their/them’ will be used throughout this book in relation to the speakers of the Arabic and the English texts; this is to acknowledge and account for the range of potential medieval audiences for all the works and the fluid dynamics of love in these texts. I also refer to the speakers of all the texts with general vocational positions, again to allow for the varied medieval audiences. The speakers will be identified primarily as ‘contemplatives’, ‘devotees’, and ‘lovers’. I will also, however, make reference to the audiences as specified in the texts themselves, as with ‘anchorite’ (especially in the case of Ancrene Wisse) and ʿa ̄rif, ‘gnostic’ (especially in the case of Ibn ʿArabı ̄). Language and These Texts The politics of language choice are felt especially keenly in a study of this nature. The risk with any study that ‘looks outwards’ is that it posits the English texts as the norm, and this is exacerbated by the fact that I am using English to discuss Arabic texts. My language of writing immediately brings with it many limitations—not least because of the painful history of European imperialism. Egypt was under some form of British occupation from 1882 to at least 1922.76 With the partition of the Ottoman Empire 74  References to Fus ̣u ̄s ̣ al-ḥikam are from The Bezels of Wisdom, trans. R.  W. J. Austin (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1980). 75  Sarah Salih, ‘Transvestism in the Anchorhold’, in The Milieu and Context of the Wohunge Group, ed. Susannah Mary Chewning (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), pp. 148–164 (especially pp. 152, 156–158). See also Sarah Salih, ‘Queering Sponsalia Christi: Virginity, Gender and Desire in the Early Middle English Anchoritic Texts’, in New Medieval Literatures, V, ed. Rita Copeland, David Lawton and Wendy Scase (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 155–175. 76  M. W. Daly, ‘The British Occupation, 1882–1922’, in The Cambridge History of Egypt: Volume Two, Modern Egypt: From 1517 to the End of the Twentieth Century, ed. M. W. Daly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 239–251.

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at the end of the First World War, Britain and France divided up various regions of the Middle East between them.77 Although Egypt, Syria, and other countries in the Middle East gained their independence from the colonists, the colonial legacy still deeply impacts the region. There will inevitably remain numerous Eurocentric and colonialist undercurrents to my terminology—even with the use of such words as ‘theology’.78 Further to this are the complex fluctuations of language dominance across the centuries. In the thirteenth century, English was not nearly the high-status, ‘global’ language it is today.79 In turn, Arabic, during the period under investigation, was a language of colonialist dominance in a number of regions, including Al-Andalus. Even before this period, Arabic held a tense prominence. As observed by Lourdes María Alvarez: Given the revered status of Arabic in Islam and the centrality of the language in Qur’anic exegesis, the issue of linguistic pluralism was particularly charged during the early centuries of Islam. Debates over the value and merits of languages such as Persian, endowed with a wealth of pre-Islamic literature, lasted into the twelfth century.80

It is also very important to acknowledge that whilst Al-Andalus could be a society marked by tolerant plurality, it was also marked by suppression and marginalization, including of Christian and Jewish communities.81 As 77  See further John Slight, ‘Anglo-French Connections and Cooperation Against “Islamic” Resistance, 1914–1917’, in British and French Colonialism in Africa, Asia and the Middle East: Connected Empires Across the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Centuries, ed. James R. Fitcher (NY: Palgrave, 2019), pp. 67–88; David Motadel, ‘Introduction’, and John Slight, ‘British Imperial Rule and the Hajj’, in Islam and the European Empires, ed. David Motadel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 1–32 and pp. 53–72. 78  See further William Chittick, ‘Rūmı ̄ and wahdāt al-wujūd’, in Poetry and Mysticism in Islam: The Heritage of Rūmı ̄, ed. Amin Banani, Richard G.  Hovannisian, and Georges Sabagh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 70–111 (p. 88). 79  See especially Ruth Evans, Andrew Taylor, Nicholas Watson, and Jocelyn WoganBrowne, ‘The Notion of Vernacular Theory’, in The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999), pp. 314–330. 80  Lourdes María Alvarez, ‘The Mystical Language of Daily Life: Vernacular Sufi Poetry and the Songs of Abu Al-Hasan Shushtarı ̄’, Exemplaria 17 (2005), 1–32 (3). 81  See further Addas, Quest for the Red Sulphur, especially p. 14. Janina M. Safran, ‘The Politics of Book Burning in Al-Andalus’, Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 6.2 (2014), 148–168.

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noted by Ross Brann in his study on the representations of Jewish and Muslim people in this region: ‘Despite its reputation as a singularly tolerant premodern society and its romanticized popular image as an interfaith utopia shared by the three monotheistic religious communities, al-­Andalus […] was torn repeatedly by tribal and ethnic social cleavages, and socioeconomic struggles and factional rivalries’.82 These ranges of tensions must be kept in mind, even as I seek to emphasize dialogic exchange.

Language-Lovers: The Case for a Comparative Reading Barthes and Irigaray Writing on the influence of Arabic on medieval Italian poetry, Samar ʿAṭṭār asks of the two cultures through history: ‘One wonders whether they are really enemies, or lovers?’83 I wonder, in turn, if we might speak of the Arabic and English literatures in this book as lovers in an ongoing attempt to communicate. For in studying the language of love, we need to adopt a loving scholarly language. Such a language of love allows an openness to these distinct traditions, Arabic and English together, in dialogue. Two fundamental voices who can help us in this search for a scholar’s own language of love are Roland Barthes (1915–1980) and Luce Irigaray (b. 1930). Luce Irigaray’s work is a meditation on freeing ourselves from a language that subjugates and stifles. Roland Barthes structures his musings around various postures or gestures of lovers, performed through verbs, adjectives, or nouns. Throughout these works, Barthes and Irigaray are again and again drawn into the Self-Other complex generated by any lover’s discourse and any discourse on love. In feeling with the Other, we are in the realm of compassion, which in Barthes’ articulation is the ‘Other-ache’.84 Barthes is here describing suffering with the loved object, but I wonder if it might be possible to read comparative study itself as a healing ‘ache’ from the Other. An awareness of Other-worlds disturbs and pains isolationist discourses. The Other 82  Ross Brann, Power in the Portrayal: Representations of Jews and Muslims in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Islamic Spain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 1. 83  Samar ʿAṭṭār, ‘Divided Mediterranean, Divided World: The Influence of Arabic on Medieval Italian Poetry’, Arabic Studies Quarterly 40.3 (2018), 197–212. 84  Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, p. 57.

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causes us to ache until we look upon it, until we attempt to speak with it, until we bring it into our own air.85 On the utterance je-t’-aime/I-love-you, Barthes also remarks on the grammatical impossibility of love without subject or object: ‘To love does not exist in the infinitive (except by a metalinguistic artifice): the subject and the object come to the word even as it is uttered’.86 It is best understood, he says, with reference to an agglutinative language like Hungarian: ‘for Hungarian uses a single word, szeretlek, as if French, renouncing its splendid analytical quality, were an agglutinative language’.87 This is not simply synthesis in the fusional form; rather, this is a case of agglutination, where each morpheme remains unchanged in its relation to other. This linguistic term might also be expressive of the comparative approach. Comparative study requires an agglutinative quality in order to facilitate a collaborative dialogue—a response to the ‘Other-ache’. Irigaray elaborates on a language of love as an ideal, luminescent, tactile speech between self and other: ‘In this world otherwise lived and illuminated, the language of communication is different, and necessarily poetic: a language that creates, that safeguards its sensible qualities so as to address the body and the soul, a language that lives’.88 Irigaray writes of a speech where one does not dominate the other—she writes, instead, of a speech that allows their comingling. It is not even a ‘speaking’ as such; it is, rather, a ‘touching with words’.89 Irigaray calls for ‘a different way of speaking than the one that we currently know’.90 The gap between self and other must be hollowed out, carved and emptied from within, ‘freed from prescribed or solipsistic certitudes’; it must be a ‘reserve of silence appropriate neither simply to me nor simply to the other, space between us where we are going our way toward one another through the gesture (of) speaking’.91 To erase all contextual difference is not an act of voicing; it can be an act of oppressive silencing. Irigaray herself draws attention to the need to maintain awareness of diversity and dialogue:

85  On Irigaray and air, discussed further in the conclusion, see her The Ways of Love, pp. 66–67. 86  A Lover’s Discourse, p. 147. 87  A Lover’s Discourse, p. 147. 88  The Way of Love, p. 12. 89  The Way of Love, p. 18. 90  Irigaray, The Way of Love, p. 57. 91  Irigaray, The Way of Love, p. 66.

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Being placed side by side does not suffice for reaching nearness. This local, cultural, national proximity can even prevent the approach because the forgetting of the fact that going the path toward the other is never achieved, requires an unceasing effort and not a standing in the same.92

Constant striving is the only possibility for any approach to nearness; it cannot engender or perpetuate itself without effort. The circular process is one of creation.93 Limitations have been put in place by ‘the Western conception of identity as unity’; for, she reminds us: ‘the human is not one but two’.94 The self cannot entirely be lost; we must return, back and back again, to see the ways in which it has allowed an opening of its being.95 Irigaray uses a striking Christocentric image to evoke this continual return to the beginning: ‘The task would be to climb little by little the calvary of the spirit without asking this to transubstantiate, in return, the flesh that has been devoted to its service’.96 A comparative study needs to return to its own point of origins, however limiting, in its constant search for the other. A writer is limited by their own training and background, a point of origins to which we always have to remain conscious. As Barthes also puts it, the ‘amorous relation’ is, after all, an ‘endlessly glossed form’, where translation must recur, where the process is ongoing and ever imperfect.97 Whilst the multiple issues of language, terminology, and scope are far from resolved in this monograph, this book does nonetheless seek to facilitate a lovers’ dialogue between the English and Arabic texts. In this way, this project could be said to work within a ‘decolonial’ rather than a ‘postcolonial’ approach.98 It seeks to allow the Arabic Islamic and English Christian texts to be equal partners in a collaborative dialogue.99 The present book thus also has affinities with the mode of ‘comparative philology’  Irigaray, The Way of Love, p. 68.  Irigaray, The Way of Love, p. 78. 94  Irigaray, The Way of Love, p. 89. 95  Irigaray, The Way of Love, p. 94. 96  Irigaray, The Way of Love, pp. 94–95. 97  Irigaray, The Way of Love, p. 73. 98  The term ‘decolonial’ is especially associated with Latin American studies. For an introduction, see further César Domínguez, Haun Saussy, and Darío Villanueva, Introducing Comparative Literature: New Trends and Applications (Milton Park, Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), especially chapter 3, pp. 41–55. On the postcolonial as ‘embedded’ in the decolonial, see p. 53. 99  This further contributes to a growing critique of Edward Said’s foundational work, Orientalism. For a discussion of critiques of Said, see further Faisal Devji, ‘Islam and British 92 93

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nurtured by scholars Menocal, Karla Mallette, and Suzanne Conklin Akbari, among others.100 Cross-cultural Encounters The term ‘comparative’ needs clarification. This study does not look for genetic relationships between the Christian and Islamic texts. It does, however, argue for a deep interconnection between both religious traditions; this responds to the globalizing turn in medieval studies of recent years. It is a turn that has its roots in earlier scholarship, such as that of Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941) and Peter Dronke (1934–2020); John C. Hirsh also wrote on ‘Eastern’ sources for medieval English spirituality in the 1990s.101 More directly, the globalizing turn has roots in twenty-­ first-­century research that engages in postcolonial approaches to European medieval texts or in approaches that are adjacent to and conversant with postcolonialism.102 Of particular relevance is the work of Menocal and

Imperial Thought’, in Islam and the European Empires, ed. David Motadel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 254–268. 100  Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literature: A Forgotten Heritage, especially pp. 1–25; Karla Mallette, European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean: Toward a New Philology and a Counter-Orientalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), especially pp.  198–233; and Suzanne Conklin Akbari, ‘The Persistence of Philology: Language and Connectivity in the Mediterranean’, in A Sea of Languages: Rethinking the Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History, ed. Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Karla Mallette (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), pp. 3–22: see especially Akbari’s identification of three broad approaches inspired by Menocal’s pioneering work (pp. 6–10). 101  See Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness, 12th edition, revised (London: Methuen, 1930), especially pp.  127–352; Peter Dronke, Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love-Lyric (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), especially p. 50; and John C. Hirsh, The Boundaries of Faith: The Development and Transmission of Medieval English Spirituality (Leiden: Brill, 1996), especially ‘Buddhism and Spirituality in Medieval England’, pp. 31–46. 102  These include: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed., The Postcolonial Middle Ages (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000; repr. 2001); Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100–1450 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009); Jerold C. Frakes, Vernacular and Latin Literary Discourses of the Muslim Other in Medieval Germany (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); and Jerold C.  Frakes, ed. Contextualizing the Muslim Other in Medieval Christian Discourse (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). See further Marion Turner, ed., A Handbook to Middle English Studies (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, imprint of John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2013): the chap-

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Shazia Jagot, among others, on Arabic influences.103 Navid Kermani also situates ʿAṭt ̣ār of Nishapur in the context of Augustine, among other ‘Western’ thinkers, and N. Hermes has placed a spotlight on the ‘European Other’ in medieval Arabic texts.104 But there remains, unfortunately, the risk of Roger Boase’s words from 1992 ringing true today: ‘There is still a reluctance on the part of many medievalists to recognize that Arab culture had an impact on medieval Europe which went far beyond the acquisition of certain luxury goods’.105 The influence of colonialism on ‘Western’ scholarship across the ages has been addressed by Boase, Menocal, and others.106 Scholarship on Sufism has itself suffered a history of colonialist dominance.107 Over the past three decades, however, the scholarly climate has become more amenable to acknowledging rich cultural interrelation. As Louis Dupré remarks on the composite influences on the three most famous monotheistic faiths: Christian mystics consistently wrote and spoke in Neo-platonic language. Judaic spirituality borrowed much of its intellectual apparatus from Neoplatonic (occasionally through Christian writings) and Gnostic sources. Much of Islam’s mysticism remains unintelligible without the impact of Aristotelian philosophy.108

ters by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (pp.  109–122), Kathy Lavezzo (pp.  363–378), Laura Ashe (pp. 379–395), John M. Ganim (pp. 397–411), and Geraldine Heng (pp. 413–429). 103  Shazia Jagot, ‘Arabic Mathematics, Divination, and Geomancy in The Knight’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde’ (unpublished seminar paper, University of Oxford, 16 October 2019); and Marion Turner, Chaucer: A European Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), p. 437. 104  Navid Kermani, The Terror of God: ʿAṭṭa ̄r, Job, and the Metaphysical Revolt, trans. Wieland Heban (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), especially pp.  108–111; N.  Hermes, The [European] Other in Medieval Arabic Literature, Ninth-Twelfth Century AD (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 105  Roger Boase, ‘Arab Influences on European Love-Poetry’, in The Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. S. K. Jayyusi (Leiden: Brill, 1992), pp. 457–482 (p. 457). 106  See, for example, Boase, ‘Arab Influences’, p. 457; and Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literature: A Forgotten Heritage, p. 83. 107  See further Linda Sijbrand, ‘Orientalism and Sufism: An Overview’, in Orientalism Revisited: Art, Land, and Voyage, ed. Ian Richard Netton (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 98–114; and Atif Khalil and Shiraz Sheikh, ‘Editorial Introduction: Sufism in Western Scholarship, A Brief Overview’, Studies in Religion 43 (2014), 355–70. 108  Louis Dupré, ‘Unio Mystica: The State and the Experience’, in Mystical Union in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: An Ecumenical Dialogue, ed. Moshe Idel and Bernard McGinn (1996; repr. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016), pp. 3–24 (p. 4).

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There is an abundance of cultural exchange in both Christian and Islamic contemplative histories. It is widely accepted that Arabic medical and philosophical treatises had a significant impact on the Latin West, particularly by Averroes/Ibn Rushḍ (d. 1198), Avicenna/Ibn Sı ̄nā (d. 1037), and Abu Nasr al-Fārābı ̄ (d. 950).109 Recently, Lydia Schumacher has also revealed the pervasive influence of Avicenna/Ibn Sı ̄nā on Franciscan writing.110 It is also now generally accepted that ‘courtly love’ or fin’amor likely had some input from Arabic sources, including an influence among the Provençal troubadours.111 As mentioned at the start of this introduction, Ibn Ḥ azm’s Ṭ awq al-ḥamāma has many of the features that would come to be associated with fin’amor discourses in Europe, with Menocal referring to Ibn Ḥ azm as Andreas Capellanus’ ‘Andalusian counterpart’.112 Early Syrian Christian writers also had significant influence on the church in the West, including Ephrem of Syria (d. 373), as studied by Jane Stevenson.113 Others include John of Chrysostom (d. 407) and Pseudo-­ Macarius (fourth century), among others.114

109  See further Charles Burnett, ‘Arabic into Latin’, in The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 370–404; Burnett, ‘The Coherence of the Arabic-Latin Translation Program in Toledo in the Twelfth Century’, Science in Context 14: 1–2 (2001), 249–288, especially pp.  257, 260–263; Shazia Jagot, ‘Averroes, Islam, and Heterodoxy in the Spanish Chapel “Triumph of St Thomas Aquinas”’, Interfaces: A Journal of Medieval European Literature 6 (2019), 7–32, especially pp. 23 and 28–29; and Peter King, ‘Emotions in Medieval Thought’, in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion, ed. Peter Goldie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 167–187. 110  Lydia Schumacher, ‘The Early Franciscan Doctrine of Divine Immensity: Towards a Middle Way Between Classical Theism and Panentheism’, Scottish Journal of Theology 70.3 (2017), 278–94. 111  See further Boase, ‘Arab Influences on European Love-Poetry’, in The Legacy of Muslim Spain, p. 473. See further Khaled S. Khalafat, ‘The Influence of the Andalusi Muashah on the Troubadour Poetry’, International Journal of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies 5.4 (2017), 19–23; A.R. Nykl, Hispano-Arabic Poetry and its Relations with the Old Provençal Troubadours (Baltimore: J.H.  Furst Company, 1946); and J.  A. Abu-Haidar, Hispano-Arabic Literature and the Early Provençal Lyrics (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2001). 112  Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage, p. 110. 113  Jane Stevenson, ‘Ephraim the Syrian in Anglo-Saxon England’, Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 1.2 (1998 [2010]), 253–272. 114  See further Robert Romanchuk, ‘The Idea of the Heart in Byzantium and the History of the Book’, in Textual Cultures: Cultural Texts, ed. Orietta Da Rold and Elaine M. Treharne (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010), pp. 163–86 (p. 177).

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The grounds for a comparative reading also radiate beyond these accepted nuclei of influence. First of all, an overly rigid distinction between ‘East’ and ‘West’ needs to be interrogated, as had been clarified by Joseph Norment Bell back in 1979. Bell affirms the fact that ‘East’ and ‘West’ ‘shared the same Neoplatonic heritage’: Research which takes as a point of departure the essential unity of medieval Europe and the Islamic East, I believe, promises to reveal more about the kinship between the two, and about the distinctive characteristics of each, than the attempts to uncover isolated and later examples of filiation or mutual dependence.115

Neoplatonic influence on Sufism has been studied thoroughly.116 Whilst scholars have critiqued the impulse to find Neoplatonic roots to Sufism— stressing that Sufism is generated from within Islam itself—the two positions need not be mutually exclusive.117 Furthermore, there is the deep two-way influence between early Christianity and Proto-Sufism in the Middle East. It is very likely that Christianity influenced early Islamic asceticism and contemplation.118 In fact, one compelling theory for the root of the word tasawwuf (Sufism) is the woollen (sūf ) garment worn by devotees, perhaps inspired by Christian hermits.119 As observed by Annemarie Schimmel: Christian ascetics and hermits who inhabited places in Iraq and the mountains of Lebanon are mentioned frequently in Sufi stories—and in pre-­ Islamic poetry there were already allusions to the light shining forth from the Christian hermit’s cell.120

 Bell, Love Theory, p. 6.  See further Hughes, Texture of the Divine, pp.  15–17; Mark J.  Sedgwick, Western Sufism: From the Abbasids to the New Age (Oxford: Oxford  University  Press, 2016), ‘Neoplatonism and Emanationism’ and ‘Islamic Emationism’, pp. 16–49. 117  See further Binyamin Abrahamov, Divine Love in Islamic Mysticism: The Teachings of al-Ghazāli and al-Dabbagh (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 26. 118  On links between Christian and Islamic asceticism, see further Christopher Melchert, ‘Origins and Early Sufism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Sufism, ed. Lloyd Ridgeon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 3–23. 119  Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), p. 35. 120  Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, p. 34. 115 116

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And, in the words of Th. Emil Homerin: in the seventh century Islam came to light and flourished in an environment saturated with religious beliefs and practices flowing from a number of sources, including Judaism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism, and fed by a variety of Hellenistic religious currents.121

Inevitably, there was a clear influence of Greek philosophy and Judeo-­ Christian traditions on Sufism’s conception of divine love, as examined by Binyamin Abrahamov.122 Within the temporal scope of this book, there are also the unique regions of Andalusia and Sicily. Whilst Sicily will not form a focal point in the following pages, its vibrant pluri-culturalism and multilingualism must be acknowledged. Of particular note is the twelfth-century Harley Trilingual Psalter (London, British Library, Harley MS 5786), which hosts parallel Psalms in Greek, Latin, and Arabic.123 Ibn ʿArabı ̄ and Shushtarı ̄ both flourished in Al-Andalus, a region which also nurtured Averroes/Ibn Rushḍ, Ibn Tufail, and Ibn Ḥ azm. Arab and Berber forces conquered the majority of the Iberian Peninsula in the eighth century, and by c. 720 they controlled nearly the entirety of the Iberian Peninsula.124 Over the centuries, Muslim Caliphates’ dominance continued to diminish until the final surrender of Granada to the Reconquista in 1492. Of particular relevance to the time frame of this study are two dynasties: the Almoravids (eleventh and twelfth centuries) and the Almohads (twelfth and thirteenth centuries). These dynasties were impacted by growing Christian control in the region. Throughout its history, Al-Andalus was a cosmopolitan space that 121  Homerin, trans., ʿUmar Ibn al-Fa ̄riḍ: Sufi Verse, Saintly Life, p. 19. On Christian influence, see also Karunakara Sastry Meesala, ‘Christian Influence on Sufism as a Methodology for Reaching Sufis in India’, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, unpublished dissertation (2019), especially pp. 133, 136, 139–140, and 147. 122  Abrahamov, Divine Love in Islamic Mysticism: for the quote, see p. 5; on the influence, see introduction, pp. 1–13. It is nonetheless an overstatement to claim that ‘divine love is mainly the product of the Judeo-Christian tradition’ (p. 5). 123  For facsimile images and a description of the manuscript, see further ‘Harley Trilingual Psalter’, British Library Collection https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-harley-trilingual-psalter [accessed 10th December 2020]. I am indebted to Dr Annie Sutherland for bringing this manuscript to my attention. 124  See further ‘The Lost Kingdom of the Arabs’, in Robert Irwin, The Penguin Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature, p.  244; and Alvarez, trans., Shushtarı ̄: Songs of Love and Devotion, p. 16.

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fostered learning across languages and cultures. Cordoba itself is said to have had more than seventy libraries.125 Despite the fact that it was ruled by Muslim conquerors, its flourishing culture was nurtured by continuous, fertile exchange between its Jewish, Muslim, and Christian populations.126

Love and Sufism Sufism: Brief Outline of Key Beliefs and Practices Islamic ‘mysticism’ emerged soon after the inception of Islam.127 As noted in the previous section, the word tasawwuf (Sufism) may derive from the woollen garment (su ̄f ) worn by devotees—a practice perhaps inspired by Christian ascetics.128 Proto-Sufis include Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya (d. 801), who has several influential poems and sayings attributed to her.129 Later works codified and systematized Sufi thought, especially Abu Talib al-­ Makki’s (d. 996) Qut al-qulu ̄b (The Nourishment of Hearts), and the pioneering writing of Sufi master Al-Ghazāli.130 At Sufism’s heart is a doctrine that came to be known as waḥdat al-wuju ̄d, or the ‘Oneness of Being’. It is a phrase that became associated with Ibn ʿArabı ̄, although it was never actually used by him.131 The full complexity of this doctrine—and its  See Aaron W. Hughes, Texture of the Divine, p. 10.  See further Janina M. Safran, Defining Boundaries in Al-Andalus: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Islamic Iberia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), pp. 1–34. 127  For a history of the ‘astounding diversity of religious and intellectual attitudes that falls under the rubric of “Sufism”’, see Alexander Knysh, ‘Sufism’, in The New Cambridge History of Islam, Volume 4: Islamic Cultures and Societies to the Eighteenth Century, ed. Robert Irwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 60–104 (quotation on p. 104). 128  Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), p. 35. 129  For an overview of her life and work, see further Margaret Smith, Muslim Women Mystics: the Life and Work of Rabi’a and Other Women Mystics in Islam (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2001), pp. 2–68. 130  For a discussion of al-Ghazāli’s Ihya’ ‘Ulu ̄m al-Dı ̄n (The Revival of the Religious Sciences), see further Kenneth Garden, The Fist Islamic Reviver: Abu Hamid al-Ghaza ̄li and His Revival of the Religious Sciences (Oxford: OUP, 2013): for his clarification that Ihya ‘is not a work of Sufism’, see p. 10. 131  See further William Chittick, ‘Rūmı ̄ and wahdāt al-wujūd’, in Poetry and Mysticism in Islam: The Heritage of Rūmı ̄, ed. Amin Banani, Richard G.  Hovannisian, and Georges Sabagh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 70–111 (p. 72). 125 126

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connections with notions of Divine immanence and transcendence— would require an entire book of its own, and thus my discussion is necessarily simplified. In the doctrine of the Oneness of Being, Creator and Creation form one ‘soul’.132 The union of God and creation is termed ittiḥa ̄d. God is the Reality, and the entirety of Creation is but a shadow of this Reality. The Sufi’s ultimate goal is to dissolve into this Reality, this Oneness that is God. The Sufi Mansūr al-Ḥ allāj (d. 922) famously cried ‘Ana al-Ḥ aqq’, with the sense of ‘I am the Truth’, or ‘I am the Reality’—ultimately, ‘I am God’. He would not retract this extraordinary statement, and he was eventually executed.133 God desires to make himself known in Creation, and there are clear indications of divine self-­ manifestation or self-disclosure, defined by the Qur’anic term tajalli.134 One striking expression of the Oneness of Being is found in ʿAt ̣ṭār of Nishapur’s The Speech of the Birds. When the wearied, surviving birds are finally allowed to gaze on the Simorgh, they see only a reflection of themselves. The multitude sees its reflection as one, singular form; the thirty birds (si morgh in Persian) are the Simorgh itself: When upon the Simurgh they looked, These si murgh were He, that One in that place; But if upon themselves they looked, These thirty birds, they were that Other. And if they looked at both together, Both were the One Simurgh in every way. These were that One, and that One was these; In all the world nobody has heard this! (pp. 377–378; ll. 4233–4239)

The birds are astounded and request ‘the solution of You being us and being You’. The reply is as follows: ‘A mirror is this sun-like Majesty. || 132  For a detailed summary of this doctrine, see further Alexander Knysh, ‘Wahdat al-Wujūd’, in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Science, and Technology in Islam, ed. Ibrahim Kalin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), online [accessed 27th December 2020]. 133  See further Amira Shamma Abdin, ‘Love in Islam’, European Judaism: A Journal for the New Europe 37.1 (2004) 92–102 (especially 95). 134  The Qur’anic sources for this term will be discussed further in Chap. 6, ‘Absence’.

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Whoever comes to it sees himself’ (p. 378; ll. 4242–4244). The Creator and created are one; in gazing upon the creator, we gaze into a looking-­ glass. In his Bezels, Ibn ʿArabı ̄ turns to the material of wool to reify this notion of Oneness, perhaps alluding to one of the etymological theories for ‘Sufi’ as one who wears wool: ‘Know that whenever something permeates another it is assumed into the other. That which permeates, the agent, is disguised by that which is permeated, the object of permeation’ (p. 92). The Creator is subsumed within, becoming disguised within, the Creation. To convey the way in which the agent is unmanifest and the object manifest, he uses the images of the agent as ‘nourishment’ of the object, as ‘a piece of wool’ that ‘swells and expands because of the water that permeates it’ (p. 92).135 But perhaps the most delightful expression of waḥdat al-wuju ̄d may be found in Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s Naẓm al-sulu ̄k (Poem of the Sufi Way). Ibn al-Fāriḍ turns to shadow puppet theatre to explain it (Naẓm, 679–706).136 He imagines the entirety of Creation as a shadow puppet play, with myriad manifestations of the Divine. The play is a riot of multiplicity: You see the shapes of things in every display disclosed before you from behind the veil’s disguise. […] On land, camels cleave the desert night; on sea, ships race amid the heaving deep; […]

135  This passage on permeation has parallels with the passage in Ancrene Wisse on Love subsuming all to itself (153: 325–335). The Ancrene Wisse-author is here influenced by Deuteronomy 11: 24: ‘Every place, that your foot shall tread upon, shall be yours. From the desert, and from Libanus, from the great river Euphrates unto the western sea shall be your borders.’ 136  For a discussion of this passage, see Th. Emil Homerin, Passion Before Me, My Fate Behind: Ibn al-Fa ̄riḍ and the Poetry of Recollection (Albany: State University of New  York Press, 2011), pp. 221–226. As Homerin observes, this invocation of a shadow puppet play is not unique to Ibn al-Fāriḍ.

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You glimpse spectres, like disembodied souls, lying in stealth within their genie land; […] You will see other shapes I have not mentioned, but I will trust In these choice few.137

Yet, when the screen is removed, there is only one figure behind such animated plurality (704–705). With this Oneness of Being at the heart of their devotion, a Sufi follows a tarı ̄qa: a ‘route’ or ‘way’—loosely comparable with Christian ‘orders’.138 Regardless of the route chosen, the Sufi will experience aḥla ̄l, ‘states’ (singular ḥal) and stations, maqāma ̄t. In order to dissolve into union with the One, there is a continual struggle against the nafs—the lower soul, also loosely translatable as ‘ego’ or ‘carnal soul’.139 The goal of the seeker is annihilation, the emptying of the self in fanāʾ, which allows a dissolution into God, a remaining or enduring in God (baqāʾ). Poem XXII of Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s Tarjuma ̄n al-ashwa ̄q, for instance, speaks of the Beloved’s ‘killing magic’ (8).140 In Poem V, the speaker has reached a state beyond ‘the sensible world’, as explained in the commentary: ‘he says, “When the lofty thoughts ascend to their goal I remain in the state of passing away from passing away, for I have gained the life imperishable which is not followed by any opposite”. Accordingly, he bids farewell to patience and to the mortal life, because he has quitted the sensible world’ (V: comm 6; see also poem vii). This is an indication of fana ̄ʾ, a complete destruction of the 137  This is Homerin’s translation: ‘Umar Ibn al-Fa ̄riḍ: Sufi Verse, Saintly Life, pp. 269–275 (Naẓm, 680–702). 138  On the difficulties of this translation, see further Scott Kugle, Sufis and Saints’ Bodies: Mysticism, Corporeality, and Sacred Power in Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), pp. 5–6. 139  See further Hellmut Ritter, The Ocean of the Soul: Man, the World, and God in the Stories of Farı ̄d al-Dı ̄n ʿAṭt ̣a ̄r, trans. John O’Kane with editorial assistance of Bernd Radtke (Leiden: Brill, 2003), p. 112. 140  See also Tarjumān XXXIV.

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self in merging with the Divine. All that is of the sensual world has fallen away; this is the perfect death of the Lover. It follows that solitude and reclusion are important in Sufism, in order to allow unbroken focus on the Divine.141 Solitariness is termed khalwa, which stems from the verb khalā (to be alone).142 Ibn al-Fāriḍ was known to retreat ‘on the Muqattam hills and in the desert beyond’.143 There is evidence that comparison was made between one who practises khalwa and one who resides in a grave, which will be a familiar comparison for readers accustomed to traditions of Christian anchoritism.144 Furthermore, samaʿ (listening, hearing), signifying spiritual audition, was essential to Sufi practice. Such spiritual audition could involve a musical concert. Samaʿ should stir the heart away from the world, allowing rapturous encounter with the Divine. In Naẓm, the Lover imagines their heart dancing (‘yarqusu qalbi’) with musical accompaniment (414). But there is also the suggestion of moving beyond the ‘outer’ senses: the soul is strengthened by desire (‘nafsı ̄ taqauwatu bi-l-munā’), removing the potency of the weaker faculties (415). In this effacement, the Lover seeks utter union (417–418). Samaʿ converges with Sufi dhikr, or remembrance. This refers to remembrance of the Beloved, enshrined in ceremonies involving invocation of the Divine Names. The Divine must be present in every moment, and remembrance of the Divine is a vehicle for an enduring intimacy. ‘Love’ The ‘history of emotions’ is now a vast critical terrain, traversing many disciplines.145 There has also been a continuing dialogue between this field and that of affect theory.146 But it has also been claimed that ‘both the  See especially the Tarjumān, XIII: comm 5–6.  Alexander D. Knysh, Islamic Mysticism: A Short History (Leiden: Brill, 2000), p. 314. 143  Lings, ed., and trans., Sufi Poems, p. 67. 144  Knysh, Islamic Mysticism: A Short History, p. 316. See Ancrene Wisse 46: 1034–35. On the elements of Extreme Unction and the Requiem Mass in anchorites’ rites of enclosure, see further E. A. Jones, ‘Ceremonies of Enclosure: Rite, Rhetoric and Reality’, in Rhetoric of the Anchorhold: Space, Place and Body within the Discourses of Enclosure, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008), pp. 34–49. See also E. A. Jones, ed., Hermits and Anchorites in England, 1200–1550 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), p. 17. 145  For one outline of the field, specifically with a medieval focus, see the introduction to Emotion and Textual Media, ed. Mary Catherine Flannery (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), pp. 1–18. 146  See further Stephanie Trigg, ‘Afterword: Reading Historical Emotions’, in Affective and Emotional Economies in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Andreea Marculescu 141 142

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history of emotions and contemporary affect theory are insufficient for dealing with the complexity and nuance of medieval renderings’.147 As will be seen, the history of emotions has a decidedly ‘Western’ bias.148 This field is also hampered by the potential rigidity of its own methodologies and by its predisposition, perhaps, to diachronic narrative rather than synchronic immersion.149 Whilst the ‘history of emotions’ certainly has its limitations, in the present study I continue to employ its critical benefits. The sensitivity to context—and contextual difference—allowed by a nuanced ‘history of emotions’ is important for the comparative, crosscultural work attempted here. In thinking of multiple histories of emotion, we can listen to the ‘stories’ of its attempted shaping and expression within particular languages and regions. These are not inevitably linear stories; ‘histories’ of emotion can listen synchronously to the complexity of particular affective moments. Emotion has been theorized both within and beyond the somatic. Its site has shifted away from the body while simultaneously being located within it: there has been an efflorescence of emotion theory, philosophy, and history highlighting emotion as embodied, and yet also culturally produced and reproduced. In this purview, emotion has been understood as inseparable from language. Yet emotions-based studies tend to focus primarily on a particular language or a particular conglomerate of languages. What happens, then, when we try to ‘read’ emotion across religious cultures and languages—when we listen to emotion in not only languages of the Christian culture of Western Europe (primarily English in this book) but languages of Islamic cultural traditions (primarily Arabic in this study) as well? What happens when we attempt to take in both, covering both grounds with a kind of avian perspective? In Robert C. Solomon’s True to Our Feelings, he affirms that problems emerge on both poles of the and Charles-Louis Morand Métivier (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 247–251 (especially p. 249). 147  Glenn D. Burger and Holly A. Crocker, ‘Introduction’, in Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion, ed. Glenn D.  Burger and Holly A.  Crocker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 1–24 (for quotation see p. 12). 148  This bias has been addressed in a special issue of Samyukta: A Journal of Women’s Studies: Decolonizing Theories of the Emotions, ed. Suneja Gunew 16.1 (2016): see especially Carolyn Pedwall, ‘De-colonising Empathy: Thinking Affect Transnationally’ in this issue (27–49). See also Suneja Gunew, ‘Decolonising Theories of Emotions’ in ‘The History of Emotions Blog’, Queen Mary’s University, https://emotionsblog.history.qmul.ac. uk/2016/07/decolonising-theories-of-the-emotions/ [accessed 22nd December 2020]. 149  See further the discussion by Burger and Crocker, ‘Introduction’, especially pp. 9–12.

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spectrum. There are difficulties with embracing the essentialist view that emotions are entirely embodied and with embracing the strong social constructionist view that emotions are culturally formed in their entirety.150 But there is a limit to what we can do when we speak in generalizations. It is necessary to look deeper, to listen closely to the texts themselves with a finer, more closely attuned focus. This present study’s prioritization of close analysis is thus deliberate. Work in the ‘history of emotions’ has been generated primarily by institutions in Europe and North America, and as such there is the inherent problem of applying this research uncritically to the Arabic material. As yet, there has been little substantial research within the ‘history of emotions’ as applied to Arabic medieval texts—though the work of Julia Bray and Pernilla Myrne are two notable exceptions.151 Despite the methodological difficulties, I would like to contend that Barbara Rosenwein’s ‘emotional communities’ (2006) and Mark Amsler’s ‘affective literacies’ (2011) are two critical narratives that could be put in productive dialogue with the Sufi texts.152 There is an impulse in both the Islamic and Christian texts to imagine Creation as one sensitive being, formed by a mass co-­ feeling. In the Christian texts, this concern is focalized onto the body of Christ—his Incarnation and torment stemming from and reflecting back onto all Creation. In the Islamic texts, there is plurality within a unified cosmos, what has been termed the Oneness of Being (waḥdat al-wujūd); the fractured multiplicity of Creation conceals the One Universal Soul. Emotional communities are fostered in this framework of shared feeling in both traditions, but in the Sufi texts, there is also the sense of these communities being disrupted by the painful plurality of Creation. Affective literacies engage readers in a ‘hide-and seek’ semiotics with the Divine in 150  Robert C. Solomon, True to Our Feelings: What Our Emotions Are Really Telling Us (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 262. 151  Julia Bray, ‘Toward an Abbasid History of Emotions: The Case of Slavery’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 49.1 (2017), 143–147; and Pernilla Myrne, ‘Discussing Ghayra in Abbasid Literature: Jealousy as a Manly Virtue or Sign of Mutual Affection’, Journal of Abbasid Studies 1.1 (2014), 46–65. 152  Damien Boquet and Piroska Nagy have also revised Rosenwein’s conception to emphasize these communities’ susceptibility to alteration and rupture. See further Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), especially pp. 10, 13, and 26; and Damien Boquet and Piroska Nagy, Medieval Sensibilities: A History of Emotions in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), p. 49. For ‘affective literacies’, see Mark Amsler, Affective Literacies: Writing and Multilingualism in the Late Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), especially pp. 103, 113.

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both the Christian and Islamic texts; but again, Amsler’s terms cannot fully account for the hermeneutic breakdown performed in the Sufi texts. ‘Emotion’ and ‘affect’ are employed interchangeably in the present study, both informed by the cognitive and physiological nuances to the complex Latin term affectus—the way the soul moves or the way the soul is touched.153 The Latin root of affect itself generates parallels with the Sufi texts, given these texts’ emphasis on the desirous interdependency and inter-penetration that permeates Creation. All of existence is a thirsty desire from one to another. In the commentary to poem XVI of the Tarjuma ̄n, the exegete draws attention to the Divine’s longing: ‘Inasmuch as thy substance only exists through and in me, and I am diverted from thee by the dark world of phenomena which keeps me in bondage, for this cause thou art lamenting thy separation from me’ (XVI: comm 7). In Universal Tree and the Four Birds, the origins of the legendary ʿAnqā lie in ‘God’s desire to bring the Cosmos into existence’.154 With such affective reciprocity, there is emphasis in both the Islamic and Christian traditions on intimacy with the divine. The Chapter on Abraham (V) in The Bezels of Wisdom reveals the wisdom of ‘Rapturous Love’. Here, Ibn ʿArabı ̄ examines the permeation/penetration of the Divine within the Loved Soul: ‘Abraham was called the Intimate [khalı ̄l] [of God] because he had embraced [takhallala] and penetrated all the Attributes of the Divine Essence’ (p. 91). Ibn ʿArabı ̄ plays on the words for intimate and for ‘penetration’ or ‘permeation’, khalı ̄l and takhallala, as the Proto-Sufi Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya did in verses attributed to her.155 In interrogating this affective intimacy and inter-penetration, particular emotion terms will continue to dominate in this study, especially ‘love’ and ‘compassion’. When used in an expansive and fluid way, these English terms can be useful shorthands for a range of devotional affective shifts registered in the texts. Love and compassion shade into one another, and it is important to remain conscious of the multifaceted nature of affective states.156 There is no single word for love or compassion in the Arabic texts of this book. Many will continue to surface: maḥabba, ʿishq, hawa, and others. 153  See further A. S. Lazikani, Cultivating the Heart: Feeling and Emotion in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Religious Texts (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2015), pp. 12–14. 154  Angela Jaffray, trans., Universal Tree and the Four Birds (Oxford: Anqa Publications, 2006), p. 95. See also Bezels, Chapter XXII: Elias, p. 231. 155  See further Lings, ed. and trans., Sufi Poems, p. 5 and p. 93 n. 6. 156  On affective states as multifaceted, see further Daniel McCann Soul-Health: Therapeutic Reading in Later Medieval England (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2018), especially pp. 3, 15, 26, and 83–92.

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Sufism’s theories of love have been investigated in depth in the scholarship of Louis Massignon, Annemarie Schimmel, Margaret Smith, Leonard Lewisohn, Carl W. Ernst, William Chittick, Joseph Lumbard, and Binyamin Abrahamov.157 This wealth of research has emphasized the need to differentiate specific periods in Islamic history. Especially important to note is Ḥ allaj’s influential classification of spiritual states, which include love (maḥabba), yearning or longing (shawq), and ravishing (walah). Muhammad al-Daylami’s Treatise on Mystical Love (d. 1197), building on Ḥ allaj’s writing, found ten ‘stations’ (maqāmāt; singular maqām) of love.158 By the thirteenth century, the word ʿishq became especially dominant in Sufi discourses of love.159 The erotic tones of ʿishq find a parallel—perhaps even a source—in the merging of eros and agape, as encapsulated in the writings of Augustine of Hippo (354–430).160 Responding to his Neoplatonic influences, Augustine famously understands caritas as a fusion of eros and agape.161 As with caritas, the erotic hue of ʿishq does not dispel its potential as a compassionate love. There is also another term in Islamic thought that should be placed in dialogue with caritas, and that is 157  Louis Massignon, Essay on the Origins, especially lexicon and analysis on pp.  13–72; Annemarie Schimmel, ‘Eros—Heavenly and Not So Heavenly’, in Society and the Sexes in Medieval Islam, ed. Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid-Marsot (Malibu, Calif: Undena Publications, 1979), pp.  119–41; Carl W.  Ernst, ‘Stages of Love’, in Classical Persian Sufism, ed. Lewisohn, pp.  435–455; William Chittick, ‘Divine and Human Love in Islam’, in Divine Love: Perspectives from the World’s Religious Traditions, ed. Jeff Levin and Stephen G. Post (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press, 2010), pp. 163–200; Joseph Lumbard ‘From Ḥ ubb to ‘Ishq: The Development of Love in Early Sufism’, Journal of Islamic Studies, 18.3 (2007), 345–85; and Binyamin Abrahamov, Divine Love in Islamic Mysticism: The Teachings of al-Ghazāli and al-Dabbagh (London: Routledge, 2003). 158  For a general overview of ‘love’ in Sufism, see Lewisohn, ‘Sufism’s Religion of Love’, pp. 150–80. 159  See further Sakkakini, First Among Sufis, p. 71, note on this page. 160  On eros as the source of ‘ishq, see further Rkia Elaroui Cornell, Rabi’a from Narrative to Myth: the Many Faces of Islam’s Most Famous Woman Saint, Rabi’a al-‘Adawiyya (London: Oneworld Academic, 2019), pp.  156–158 and 182–183. See also Cornell, ‘Rabi’a from Narrative to Myth: the Tropics of Identity of a Muslim Woman Saint’ (unpublished dissertation, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, 2013), p. 114. 161  See, for example, Augustine’s Confessions: 7.10.16 (LCL 26: 328–329), 7.20.26 (LCL 26: 346–347), 10.3.5 (LCL 27: 74–75), 12.18.27 (LCL 27: 298–299), 13.7.8 (LCL 27: 346–347); and Augustine’s Letters (LCL 239: especially 324–325, 374–375, 258–259, 212–213, 292–293, 36–37, and 394–395). On his education in Neo-Platonism, see, for example, his Confessions, 7.20.26. See further, Abrahamov, Divine Love, p. 13; and Matthew Drever, ‘Loving God in and Through the Self: Trinitarian Love in St Augustine’, International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 78 (2017), 7–22.

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raḥma, traditionally rendered ‘mercy’ or ‘compassion’ in English, found in the opening of every chapter (surah) of the Qur’an: Bismillāhi al-raḥmāni al-raḥı ̄m. As Reza Shah-Kazemi postulates, ‘this quality is understood as combining both mercy and love’: ‘the word is close to the meaning of caritas in Latin and agape in Greek, and can be translated as “charity” in the strictly etymological sense of the word, and not in the reduced sense that has become conventional today’.162

This Book With its approach of avian emotion, the present book is divided into three main parts following this introduction (Chap. 1), each with two chapters: Part II, ‘Paradigms of Love’, establishes key paradigms for reading love in these texts. These paradigms are twofold: the figure of Jesus (ʿIsa in the Qur’an) as paradigmatic lover, gnostic, and solitary ascetic (Chap. 2); and the ‘heart’ as an encryption for various models of feeling (Chap. 3). For the Sufi poets, Jesus is the paradigmatic solitary ascetic, teaching the ways of self-abnegation and of love. Shushtarı ̄ and Ibn ʿArabı ̄ engage with Jesus as a wandering, ascetic lover. In Ancrene Wisse, Jesus is the Beloved. But as one who is enclosed—as well as being an enclosure himself, that infinite dovecote—Christ becomes a paradigmatic lover. Through an avian perspective, we can become more attuned to the fluid movements and multiple directions of divine love, which can in turn suggest more fluid ‘affective literacies’ and ‘emotional communities’. In both traditions, the contemplative reader/listener of the texts can map affective processes onto the heart. The heart thus also becomes a locus for attempting to express and categorize the complexity of devotional affect, including its interrelations with cognition and physiology. In turn, the heart becomes a malleable image, ready for handling by readers: in its handling, devotees stimulate and nurture feeling. Part III, ‘Embodied Affect’, examines the language of affect as embodied in both religious traditions. It takes as its starting point the very divergent theological bases for such embodiment. In the Christian texts, this embodied affect radiates from the central body of Christ, that ultimate and relentless signifier. In the Islamic texts, the Flesh of Christ does not 162  Reza Shah-Kazemi, ‘God, “The Loving”’, in A Common Word: Muslims and Christians on Loving God and Neighbour, ed. Miroslav Volf, Ghazi bin Muhammad, and Melissa Yarrington (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans, 2010), pp. 88–109.

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have the same theological import, and in fact there is an active distancing from incarnationist theologies (ḥulūl). Yet despite such differences, in both traditions, emotion is inscribed on the human body and is constituted by bodily processes.163 Chapter 4 examines the Lover as anguished body, whilst Chap. 5 concentrates on the signifying powers of blood and wine. The Lover’s embodiment reveals the unique devotional affect cultivated by solitary ascetics in both traditions—a unique affective drive that I have chosen to call ‘death-affect’ (Chap. 4). These solitaries perform a paradox of living death: they are imaged as dead to the world and yet as acutely sensitive. They are curiously sentient, reactive corpses—vehicles of an affective death, or a deathly affect. Such death-affect fractures the divide between literal and figurative modes in reading practices. In fact, intimacy with a text intersects powerfully with a growing intimacy with the divine, and in this intimacy reside blood and wine as complex hermeneutic tools (Chap. 5).164 Across both corpora, Eucharistic nourishment and the khamr (wine) of divine intoxication are tied with remembrance/dhikr of the Beloved. Part IV, ‘Affective Semiotics’, addresses the semiotics of absence and secrecy evident in both traditions. Both traditions are troubled by the failures of their own hermeneutic processes and by the paradoxes of their own epistemologies. From this difficulty arises a deep interest in how the semiotics of the ‘not-there’ and the ‘there-but-hidden’ can help in approaching an ineffable love. An avian perspective enables us to read the semiotics of absence across traditions and to unearth shared strategies of dealing with absence-presence in distinct languages (Chap. 6). The audiences of the Christian and Islamic texts seek constantly a spiritual treasure hidden in the process of meaning-making itself (Chap. 7). It is in a dialectic of secrecy and disclosure that affective literacies are nurtured, which challenges tradition terminology in the history of emotions. In addition to affective ‘literacies’ and ‘scripts’ for performance (Sarah McNamer), we 163  Sensory mediation across the traditions is a related and fecund area of enquiry, but beyond the scope of the present book. See especially Vincent Gillespie, ‘The Senses in Literature: The Textures of Perception’, in A Cultural History of the Senses in the Middle Ages, ed. Richard G. Newhauser (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 153–73. On Ancrene Wisse specifically, see Alexandra Barratt, ‘The Five Wits and Their Structural Significance in Part II of Ancrene Wisse’, Medium Ævum 56 (1987), 12–24. 164  On the many facets of textual intimacy, see further Jessica Barr, Intimate Reading: Textual Encounters in Medieval Women’s Visions and Vitae (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020), especially pp. 1–23.

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should perhaps also emphasize affective reading practices predicated on illiteracies and on de-scripting.165 Possible future avenues of research might include divine maternity and an expansion of the temporal limits of this study (Chap. 8 in Part V). I opened this chapter by referring to the turtledove’s cry, which is foremost a lover’s cry.166 The cross-mapping of dove and Lover is further foregrounded in Tarjumān XLIX: ‘In a garden of my body’s country is a dove perched on a ba ̄n bough, | Dying of desire, melting with passion, because that which befell me hath befallen her’ (XLIX: 4–5). And as the speaker voices in XX: ‘The grey doves fluttered in the meadows and wailed: the grief of these doves is from that which grieved me’ (XX: 2). The dove intertwines with the Lover, desiring and struggling painfully with them, in an interlace of bird language and love language. For the Ancrene Wisse-­ author, the anchorite must be alone beneath the eaves, a solitary sparrow—because, he tells us solemnly, sparrows are chatty birds (59–60: 470–78). But I hope that the Ancrene Wisse-author might have forgiven talkative birds, like ʿAt ̣t ̣ār’s hodhod, who try to bring audiences closer to God. The speech of birds—mant ̣iq ut-t ̣ayr—encodes complex affective shifts in approaching the divine. In the words of Shushtarı ̄, the birds can be our guides, speaking from their own mana ̄bir: ‘From the pulpits in the trees, the birds declaim among us’ (Corriente, p. 40).167

165  On medieval affective meditations as ‘scripts for the performance of feeling’, see Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), p. 26. 166  Especially familiar to some readers may be Chaucer’s characterization of the ‘wedded turtel with hir herte trewe’ in The Parliament of Fowls; this ‘wedded turtledove with her heart true’ defends fidelity while blushing in shame: see The Riverside Chaucer, Third Edition, ed. Larry D. Benson and F. N. Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 390 and 393 (ll. 355, 582–588). In Aelred of Rievaulx’s (d. 1167) sermon for the purification of Saint Mary, the turtledoves are more definitively associated with shame, but they are still defined as lover-birds: see Aelred of Rievaulx, The Liturgical Sermons: the First Clairvaux Collection, Sermons One-Twenty-Eight, Advent-All Saints, trans. Theodore Berkeley and M. Basil Pennington (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 2001), p. 126. 167  As clarified in the Glossary of Key Arabic Terms, a minbar (plural manābir) refers to the pulpit in a mosque.

PART II

Paradigms of Love

CHAPTER 2

Jesus the Beloved, Jesus the Lover

The Catholic priest and scholar Louis Massignon (1883–1962) famously held deep affection for the tenth-century Sufi he studied. In fact, in the figure of Mansūr Al-Ḥ allāj (d. 922), Massignon found the epitome of Jesus Christ. For Massignon, Al-Ḥ allāj was a model of Christ in a multitude of ways, enshrined in his patient submission to a painful torture.1 Throughout Sufi and Proto-Sufi histories, Jesus is a profoundly important paradigm: a model for asceticism, a model for gnosis, a model for reclusion—and, always, a model for love. In the words of Javad Nurbakhsh, ‘in attaining the station of human perfection, [Jesus] achieved complete union with the Divine, and they [the Sufis] understand his ascension as the passage to a more exalted realm of being’.2 And as observed by Jaume Flaquer, since Jesus is the Word of God, the embodied form of the Merciful 1  See further Roger Arnaldez, ‘Hallaj et Jésus dans la pensée de Louis Massignon’, Horizons Maghrébins—Le droit à la mémoire 14–15 (1989), 171–178; and Herbert W. Mason, ‘Louis Massignon, Catholicism and Islam: A Memoir Reflection’, Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 8.2 (2008), 202–206. Louis Massignon’s magisterial four-volume study has been abridged by Herbert Mason: The Passion of Al-Hallaj: Mystic and Martyr of Islam, ed. and trans. Herbert Mason (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982); for Massignon’s preface, see pp. xvii-xxxi, and on Hallaj’s torture and execution, see pp. 280–290. 2  Javad Nurbakhsh, Jesus in the Eyes of the Sufis, Jesus in the Eyes of the Sufis, trans. Terry Graham, Leonard Lewisohn, and Hamid Mashkuri (London: Khaniqahi-Nimatullahi Publications, 1992), p. 31.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. S. Lazikani, Emotion in Christian and Islamic Contemplative Texts, 1100–1250, The New Middle Ages, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59924-9_2

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Breath transferred to Mary by Gabriel, he ‘becomes a paradigm of all Creation’.3 Through avian emotion, the affective centrality and fluidity of Jesus can be detected in a range of English Christian and Arabic Islamic contemplative texts from c. 1100 to c. 1250. Jesus the Son of God, the Divine Incarnate, is the exalted Beloved in Ancrene Wisse and the Wooing Group, whether in the guise of the Lover-­ Knight or the Breastfeeding Mother. As an esteemed prophet according to Islamic Christology, Jesus remains a crucial model of solitary-affective asceticism (zuhd) in the Sufi texts—reminding us of the Anchorite-Christ insulated in the anchorholds of his mother’s womb and stone-tomb in Ancrene Wisse. Ibn ʿArabı ̄ was inspired by Jesus to become a Sufi, and ʿAt ̣t ̣ār found in Jesus the quintessential model of the contemplative. Rather than being the Divine Beloved, Jesus becomes a paradigmatic Lover for these poets. Such comparative work—using an avian lens to look across as well as within texts—allows a more nuanced view of Jesus’ role in the formation of ‘emotional communities’. He becomes both Object and Subject of love, recalling Barthes’ synthesis. This allows a more fluid, creative understanding of affective reading practices in this period—more attuned to the many directions in which love may move. From a basis in Islamic Christology and in the role of Jesus in the work of Persian Sufis ʿAṭṭār and Rūmı ̄, I trace Jesus’ valences in the work of Ibn ʿArabı ̄ and Shushtarı ̄, turning subsequently to Christ as Beloved and as Lover-ascetic in Ancrene Wisse and Wohunge.4

Brief Background to Islamic Christology Jesus of the Qur’an ʿIsa ibn Maryam (Jesus the son of Mary) has a dominant presence in the Qur’an, particularly in surah 3 (‘Al Imran’, the family of Imran) and surah 19 (‘Maryam’, Mary). ‘Imran’ is identified as the father of Mary in surah 3—the equivalent of Joachim in Christian traditions. Mary is imaged as a solitary, existing alone in a ‘sanctuary’ and provided with continual 3  Jaume Flaquer, ‘God’s Creative Breath According to Ibn ʿArabı ̄: An Andalusian Example of Harmony Between Faith, Mysticism and Philosophy’, Pensamiento 67 (2011), 887–99. 4  I use the singular ‘Christology’ for clarity, but it is worth noting that Oddbjørn Leirvik helpfully employs the plural, ‘Islamic Christologies’ (Oddbjørn Leirvik, Images of Jesus Christ in Islam, 2nd edn (London: Continuum, 2010), p. x.

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sustenance by God (3: 37). This is confirmed in surah 19: ‘She withdrew from her family to a place to the east and secluded herself away; We sent Our Spirit to appear before her in the form of a perfected man.’ (19: 16–17).5 After the conception of Jesus, she also departs into the wilderness, where she is continually provided for by the Divine. In her withdrawal, she maintains her silence—much like the reticent Mary exalted in Ancrene Wisse (31–32: 442–63): She withdrew to a distant place and, when the pains of childbirth drove her to [cling to] the trunk of a palm tree, she exclaimed, ‘I wish I had been dead and forgotten long before all this!’ but a voice cried to her from below, ‘Do not worry: your Lord has provided a stream at your feet and, if you shake the trunk of the palm tree towards you, it will deliver fresh ripe dates for you, so eat, drink, be glad, and say to anyone you may see: ‘I have vowed to the Lord of Mercy to abstain from conversation, and I will not talk to anyone today.’ (surah 19: 23–26)

In the interaction that ensues between Mary and angels, the angels reveal Jesus’ learning and his future teaching: ‘He will teach him [Jesus] the Scripture and wisdom, the Torah and the Gospel, He will send him as a messenger to the Children of Israel’ (surah 3: 48–49). They quote Jesus’ later words: I have come to you with a sign from your Lord: I will make the shape of a bird for you out of clay, then breathe into it and, with God’s permission, it will become a real bird; I will heal the blind and the leper, and bring the dead back to life with God’s permission; I will tell you what you may eat and what you may store up in your houses. There truly is a sign for you in this, if you are believers. I have come to confirm the truth of the Torah which preceded me, and to make some things lawful to you which used to be forbidden. I have come to you with a sign from your Lord. (surah 3: 49–51)

Jesus’ animation of a bird of clay becomes an important expression in Sufi poetry of his embodiment of the Divine Spirit, as will be seen—his emanating the Breath of Life. Jesus’ eloquent learning confirmed in this passage also becomes a major part of the Sufi imaginary of Jesus. After 5  As outlined in the ‘Note on Transliteration, Translation and Quotation’, I quote from Haleem’s translation of the Qur’an in the text body, but from Pickthall’s translation in the footnotes.

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kinsfolk see the born child and criticize Mary for her apparent unchasteness, she remains silent, simply pointing at the infant: They said, ‘How can we converse with an infant?’ [But] he said: ‘I am a servant of God. He has granted me the Scripture; made me a prophet; made me blessed wherever I may be. He commanded me to pray, to give alms as long as I live, to cherish my mother. He did not make me domineering or graceless. Peace was on me the day I was born, and will be on me the day I die and the day I am raised to life again.’ Such was Jesus, son of Mary. (19: 29–34)

Jesus fulfils a life as the servant of God, and his apparent ‘death’ is but an illusion formed by God. His ascension to Heaven is the work of God, even as Jesus’ detractors plotted to destroy him: ‘The [disbelievers] schemed but God also schemed; God is the Best of Schemers. God said, “Jesus, I will take you back and raise you up to Me: I will purify you of the disbelievers.”’ (3: 54–55).6 Jesus is a revered prophet (nabı ̄) and messenger (rasūl) in Islamic Christology—he confirms the Torah preceding him, and just precedes ‘the seal of the prophets’, Muhammad, who is the vehicle of the ultimate truth.7 But crucially, from an Islamic perspective, Jesus is not the Son of God. In this resides a fundamental theological difference in Christian and Islamic understanding of the Messiah. At the heart of Christian doctrine is Jesus as the Divine Incarnate, the Word made Flesh: ‘And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we saw his glory, the glory as it were of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth’ (John 1: 14). Jesus is the incarnate, enfleshed Son of God, formed in Mary’s womb: ‘God sent his Son, made of a woman’ (Galatians 4: 4). As the Archangel Gabriel tells Mary: ‘The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the most High shall overshadow thee. And therefore also the Holy 6  See further surah 5: 117 (‘I spake unto them only that which Thou commandedst me, (saying): Worship Allah, my Lord and your Lord. I was a witness of them while I dwelt among them, and when Thou tookest me Thou wast the Watcher over them. Thou art Witness over all things.’). 7  See surah 5: 46–48: ‘And We caused Jesus, son of Mary, to follow in their footsteps, confirming that which was (revealed) before him in the Torah, and We bestowed on him the Gospel wherein is guidance and a light, confirming that which was (revealed) before it in the Torah – a guidance and an admonition unto those who ward off (evil). […] And unto thee have We revealed the Scripture with the truth, confirming whatever Scripture was before it, and a watcher over it. So judge between them by that which Allah hath revealed’.

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which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God’ (Luke 1: 35).8 At the heart of Islamic doctrine is the oneness of the Divine (tawḥı ̄d).9 In this oneness, God cannot be equated with what is not God; this would be a heresy termed shirk. According to Islamic scripture, Jesus is not the Son of God, and there can be no Trinity. As stated in surah 12: ‘Say, “He is God the One, God the eternal. He begot no one nor was He begotten. No-one is comparable to Him”’ (112: 1–4), and in surah 4: ‘believe in God and His messengers and do not speak of a “Trinity”’ (4: 171). In surah 5, Jesus himself denies any divine status: When God says, ‘Jesus, son of Mary, did you say to people, Take me and my mother as two gods alongside God?’ he will say, ‘May You be exalted! I would never say what I had no right to say’. (surah 5: 116–117).10,11 8  See further the following biblical references: Luke 17: 24 (‘so shall the Son of man be in his day’); 1 John 4: 2 (‘By this is the spirit of God known. Every spirit which confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh, is of God’); Isaiah 9: 6 (‘For a child is born to us, and a son is given to us, and the government is upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called, Wonderful, Counsellor, God the Mighty, the Father of the world to come, the Prince of Peace.’); and Isaiah 7: 14 (‘Behold a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel’). 9  On Islam as ‘the most austerely monotheistic faith’, see further Louis Dupré, ‘Unio Mystica: The State and the Experience’, in Mystical Union in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: An Ecumenical Dialogue, ed. Moshe Idel and Bernard McGinn (1996; repr. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016), pp. 3–24 (p. 6). 10  See also, for example, the following Qur’anic references: ‘They indeed have disbelieved who say: Lo! Allah is the Messiah, son of Mary.’ (5: 17); and ‘The Messiah, son of Mary, was no other than a messenger, messengers (the like of whom) had passed away before him.’ (5: 75); 19: 35 (‘It befitteth not (the Majesty of) Allah that He should take unto Himself a son); 6: 101 (‘How can He have a child, when there is for Him no consort, when He created all things and is Aware of all things?); 21: 26–27 (‘And they say: The Beneficent hath taken unto Himself a son. Be He Glorified! Nay, but (those whom they call sons) are honoured slaves; | They speak not until He hath spoken, and they act by His command.’) 11  ‘O Jesus, son of Mary! Remember My favour unto thee and unto thy mother; how I strengthened thee with the holy Spirit, so that thou spakest unto mankind in the cradle as in maturity; and how I taught thee the Scripture and Wisdom and the Torah and the Gospel; and how thou didst shape of clay as it were the likeness of a bird by My permission, and didst blow upon it and it was a bird by My permission, and thou didst heal him who was born

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Jesus of the Sufis With this scriptural basis, Jesus had immense significance in Sufi traditions. As summarized by Oddbjørn Leirvik: Generally, Jesus is seen by the Sufis as a model wayfaring ascetic and wisdom teacher. As a ‘proto-Sufi’, he is reported to have worn woollen clothing. Sufi traditions about Jesus’ self-denial abound. […] [I]n later Sufi poetry and theology, the name of Jesus stands not only for asceticism and ˙detachment from the world, but also for the breath of life, and for love.12

The definition of Jesus as a ‘proto-Sufi’ is apt—just as he is a paradigmatic anchorite in our English texts. He is a model of asceticism but also of meditative practice and boundless love. ʿAbdullah Al-Ansāri of Herāt (d. 1089) writes on Jesus’ self-abnegation and destitution, and Ghazāli discusses Jesus’ retreat from the world.13 In Ghazāli’s Ihya ʿulūm al-dı ̄n (The Revival of the Religious Sciences), there is the image of Jesus having a soft heart, a heart that is fertile ground for cultivation, in a striking resonance with Ancrene Wisse’s central image of the tilled heart.14 There are thus three principal elements that emerge in Sufi engagements with the son of Mary: Jesus the ascetic, Jesus who breathes life, and Jesus who loves—all of which correlate relatively straightforwardly with Christian doctrines. But one of the more significant divergences between Christian and Islamic Christology is the role of the Crucifixion. For Christian theologians, the Crucifixion is of unparalleled importance in salvation history. In Islamic scripture, the Crucifixion is less dominant. This is partly because, in the Qur’anic version, the Crucifixion only appears to take place: Jesus is not actually crucified.15 It remains, however, an over-statement to suggest that ‘the notion of a redemptive passion is a concept entirely foreign to the Muslim mentality’.16 Even apart from the issues with defining the blind and the leper by My permission; and how thou didst raise the dead by My permission’ (surah 5: 110). 12  Leirvik, Images of Jesus Christ in Islam, pp. 84–85. 13  See Nurbakhsh, Jesus in the Eyes of the Sufis, pp. 106, 95. 14  On Jesus in Ghazāli’s Ihya ulu ̄n al-din, see Leirvik, Images of Jesus Christ in Islam, p. 87. For the image in Ancrene Wisse, see 145. 15  See further Zeki Saritoprak, Islam’s Jesus (Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 2014), pp. 16–19. 16  Faouzi Skali, Jésus dans la tradition soufie (Paris: A. Michel, 2004), p. 96. I am translating ‘la notion d’une passion rédemptrice est une conception tout à fait étrangère à la mentalité musulmane’.

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­ roblematic phrase ‘Muslim mentality’, it is clear that the Crucifixion does p appear in doctrinally fundamental moments in Sufi works, particularly in Persian Sufi texts. Crucially, it is also an event that signifies Jesus’ love, in a way that is deeply resonant with Christian theology. A key case of this— the Crucifixion as the ultimate disclosure of love—is evident in a text by Rukn al-Dı ̄n Awḥādi (b. 1274), a Persian poet:17 One day the Messiah was with his friends, His disciples, the repositories of his secrets. He made his exposition to them the subject of love, Declared the matter openly and then concealed it. In the midst of his discourse, his companions saw He was weary, with tears streaming from his eyes. So they asked him for a sign and proof of love. He said: ‘Tomorrow is the day of Abraham’s fire.’ Upon the next day, when he proceeded to his task And set his foot upon the plank of the gallows, He said: ‘If there be any man present here, This surely is a sufficient proof of love. Whoever turns his countenance to God He must press his back against the Cross. Until his body has been tied to the gallows His soul cannot mount up to heaven.’18

This passage would not be out of place in a text like Ancrene Wisse or Wohunge. For Awḥādi, Jesus is a sensitive sufferer, wearied and anguished as in the Garden of Gethsemane, even while in ‘the midst of his discourse’. The Crucifixion is esteemed as the ultimate signifier of love: ‘This surely is a sufficient proof of love’. No soul can reach Heaven without feeling rough torture on earth, as Jesus, in all his sensitivity, did. Awḥādi’s conveyance of Jesus’ words at the end of the quoted passage resonate so closely to those uttered by the speaker of Ureisun of God: weneð ei to beon bi clupped bitweonen þine blisfulle ermes in heouene. bute he worpe er him her; bi tweonen þine rewðful ermes o ðe rode? (p. 178)

 See further Leirvik, Images of Jesus Christ in Islam, p. 100.  Quoted from Leirvik, Images of Jesus Christ in Islam, p. 100 and p. 105 n. 92.

17 18

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(does anyone believe to be embraced within your blissful arms in heaven, without having first thrown oneself here within your pitiful arms on the Cross?)

The embraces are paralleled in the shifting adjectives for Christ’s arms (‘blisfulle’ to ‘rewðful’), resonant of the parallel in Awḥādi’s words of restriction on the gallows granting an ascent to Heaven.

Jesus the Lover for Rūmı ̄ and ʿAtṭ ạ ̄r Before turning to the Arabic material, I will pause on the prominence of Jesus in the poetry of two thirteenth-century Persian Sufis: Rūmı ̄ and ʿAṭt ̣ār, the author of The Speech of the Birds discussed in the introduction. Jesus is of paramount importance to ʿAt ̣t ̣ār. As put by Navid Kermani, Jesus is ʿAṭt ̣ār’s ultimate paradigm.19 For Rūmı ̄, Jesus is Love.20 He is ‘an ecstatic, a man intoxicated by God, as an individual filled with divine knowledge (gnosis)’.21 Jesus is also an intercessory figure.22 As Leirvik observes, from Rūmı ̄’s perspective, Jesus is the ‘ideal ascetic’, ‘a homeless desert-wanderer’ who ‘by severe spiritual regime […] sought release from the body and the world’.23 Rūmı ̄ himself reflects on the ‘hermitage of Jesus’ (Mathnawi III: 298), and Jesus clearly calls for withdrawal and seclusion in Rūmı ̄’s world.24 In ʿAṭṭār’s The Speech of the Birds, Jesus is the model ascetic-lover, with the contemplative castigating the self as Jesus rode his beast of burden: The carnal soul like Jesus’s ass burn, Then like Jesus become soul and set the soul afire.|| Burn the ass and release the bird of the soul, That God’s Spirit will come forward to welcome you.(The Speech of the Birds, ll. 643–644)25 19  Kermani, The Terror of God: ʿAt ̣ṭa ̄r, Job, and the Metaphysical Revolt, trans. Wieland Heban (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), pp. 108–111. 20  See further Leirvik, Images of Jesus Christ in Islam, p. 92. 21  King, ‘Jesus and Joseph’, 82. 22  Rūmı ̄, Spiritual Verses: the First Book of the Masnavi-ye Maʿnavi, trans. Alan Williams (London: Penguin, 2006), p. 14 l. 83. 23  Leirvik, Images of Jesus Christ in Islam, p. 92. 24  See further Nurbakhsh, Jesus in the Eyes of the Sufis, p.  7; and Rūmı ̄, Spiritual Verses, trans. Williams, p. 65, ll. 649–53. 25  The Speech of the Birds, trans. Avery, p. 61.

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Jesus’ association with asceticism is found elsewhere in The Speech of the Birds in its exemplum of Jesus drinking from a stream. At first drinking from the stream itself, Jesus finds it to be ‘more pleasant than rose-water’ (2370). A companion fills a jug from the same stream. On drinking from the jug, Jesus is astonished to find that ‘his mouth turned sour’ (2372); the jug itself begins to speak and explains that with its form, it turns the sweet water bitter, representing the bitterness of death that mars all (2375–2378). The hoopoe uses this narrative to compel the devotee to seek the One before facing death: ‘If you do not while living refind yourself, | When you die, how will you know the mystery?’ (2381), with invocation of surah 41: 53.26 Thus, in addition to casting Jesus as a wanderer, a pilgrim, this narrative associates him explicitly with the core of the devotee’s search for Truth. Jesus is again associated with the obliteration of the ‘self’ required in this search at a later stage of The Speech of the Birds. There is the tale of Jesus found with a needle in the Fourth Heaven: When nothing is left you, take no thought for a shroud: Naked throw yourself on the fire. When you and your effects have turned to ashes, The smallest thought of you will become even smaller. But if, as with Jesus, a needle remains, Know that in your way remain a hundred waylayers. Although Jesus chattels strewed on the path, A needle nonetheless exposed him to shame. (The Speech of the Birds, 4012–4015)27

This echoes the statement in the prologue: ‘When He saw a needle attached to Jesus, | Inevitably He exposed the shame’ (87).28 Both passages work within a tradition that spoke of Jesus being searched by angels in the Fourth Heaven for any remnants of the material world still on his person. Because of the presence of the needle and a broken bowl, he could not progress any further through the heavens.29 The idea of a shamed 26  Avery, trans., The Speech of the Birds, p. 213; and for discussion see p. 506 n. 236. Surah 41: 53: ‘We shall show them Our portents on the horizons and within themselves until it will be manifest unto them that it is the Truth’. 27  Avery, trans., The Speech of the Birds, p. 359. 28  Avery, trans., The Speech of the Birds, p. 10. 29  See discussion in Avery, trans., The Speech of the Birds, p. 424 n. 31.

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Jesus immediately reminds us of the stark theological difference across Islamic and Christian texts. But in his powerful association with the destruction of the self, Jesus becomes a model to emulate for Sufis. Furthermore, the Crucifixion itself has a compelling presence in the works of ʿAṭt ̣ār and Rūmı ̄. Alluding to the Crucifixion, a speaker of Rūmı ̄’s Mathnawi affirms: ‘Jesus leapt to escape his enemies, | which took him to the fourth estate of heaven’.30 As clarified above, in Islamic scripture Jesus did not suffer death; it only appeared this way, and he then ascended to God.31 In The Speech of the Birds, ʿAt ̣ṭār emphasises Jesus as an ostracized figure at the point of his execution (34).32 This further problematizes the claim that the Crucifixion is entirely ‘foreign’ to Islamic doctrine. In The Speech of the Birds as in the poetry of Rukn al-Dı ̄n Awḥādi, Jesus’ status as lover is enshrined in the Crucifixion. For both ʿAṭt ̣ār and Rūmı ̄, Jesus is an indispensable model for ascetic reclusion and for love—but we must also not forget the significance of his breath. The life-giving breath identified in surah 3 is the fundamental ‘reflection’ of Jesus’ inner, contemplative core.33 To quote Faouzi Skali: ‘Jesus is considered to be the Word of God, in the sense that he comes to re-breathe the Spirit to the letter’.34 Jesus’ vivifying breath is expressly defined by Rūmı ̄ as having medicinal properties: ‘The hundred thousand medicines of Galen | were laughable compared to Jesus’ breath’.35 Elsewhere it is said: ‘I’ve seen a universe | where every atom has the breath of Jesus’.36 Furthermore, Rūmı ̄ also employs the Qur’anic image (surah 3)—also in Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s corpus, discussed below—of the clay bird given life: ‘The clay and water, fed on Jesus’ breath, | could spread out wings, become a bird, and fly’.37 The human soul is not far from this clay and water: ‘Our souls have Jesus’ breath at their foundation’.38 In ʿAṭṭār, the 30  Rūmı ̄, Spiritual Verses, trans. Williams, p.  259  l. 2801. For further discussion of the Crucifixion in Rūmı’̄  s thought, see James Roy King, ‘Jesus and Joseph in Rūmı ̄’s Mathnawı ̄’, The Muslim World 80.2 (1990), 81–95 (especially 95). 31  See further discussion in Avery, trans., pp. 423–424 n. 25. 32  See further Avery, trans., The Speech of the Birds, p. 5. 33  King, ‘Jesus and Joseph’, 87. King’s words are the ‘inner, mystical dimension of Jesus’ personality’. 34  Skali, Jésus dans la tradition soufie, p. 91; here I translate ‘Jésus est considéré comme étant le Verbe de Dieu, dans le sens où il vient réinsuffler l’Esprit à la lettre’. 35  Rūmı ̄, Spiritual Verses, trans. Williams, p. 54 l. 532 36  Rūmı ̄̄, Spiritual Verses, trans. Williams, p. 79, l. 798. 37  Rūmı ̄, Spiritual Verses, trans. Williams, p. 84, l. 869. 38  Rūmı ̄, Spiritual Verses, trans. Williams, p. 152, l. 1608.

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vivifying breath is observed in the story of Sheik Samʾān’s desperate love for a Christian girl in Rome. Her mouth ‘[l]ike Jesus in words, something special it had’ (1223).39 In the translation by Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis, this is more expansively translated as her having a ‘breath as quickening as Jesus’ sigh’, which is the essential meaning here.40

Jesus for Ibn ʿArabı ̄ The Bezels of Wisdom Like ʿAṭt ̣ār, Ibn ʿArabı ̄ was deeply influenced by Jesus from the earliest stages of his spiritual vocation.41 In the words of Gerald T. Elmore, Ibn ʿArabı ̄ had a ‘special devotion to the spirituality (rūḥa ̄niyah) of Jesus’.42 One of the most detailed considerations of Jesus/ʿIsa in Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s corpus is found in Fus ̣ūs ̣ al-ḥikam. As described in Chap. 1, this text transmits the wisdom represented by each prophet—they are the ‘bezels’ or gemstone-­settings (fus ̣ūs ̣) of wisdom (ḥikam), adding force to the image of Muhammad as the ‘seal of prophets’. Each prophet is a groove in a ring that carries wisdom, and Muhammad becomes the seal of them all. There is a chapter for each prophet, and it is Chapter XV that is dedicated to Jesus. Jesus takes on a pre-eminent paradigmatic role in the Bezels.43 A parallel may be drawn with Rūmı ̄’s verse, in which Jesus is emblematic of the beautiful, complete oneness of Creation. Imaging a dyeing vat that would produce a hue of Jesus’ nature, Rūmı ̄’s speaker remarks: ‘In that pure vat, clothes of a hundred colours | turned pure and single-hued as little children’.44 He clarifies that this is not a dullness, but rather a return to what is needed: ‘It’s not the monochrome that brings fatigue | more like a fish in water crystal clear. || A thousand colours there may be on land,  Avery, trans., The Speech of the Birds, p. 112.  The Conference of the Birds, trans. Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis (London: Penguin Books, 2011), p. 69. 41  See further Addas, Quest for the Red Sulphur, pp. 39–44 and pp. 78–80. See also Cecilia Twinch and Pablo Beneito, trans., Contemplation of the Holy Mysteries and the Rising of the Divine Lights (Masha ̄hid al-asrār al-qudsiyya wa matāli’ al-anwār al-ilāhiyya) (Oxford: Anqa Publishing, 2001), p. 7. 42  Gerald T. Elmore, Islamic Sainthood in the Fullness of Time: Ibn al-Arabı ̄’s Book of the Fabulous Gryphon (Leiden: Brill, 1999), p. 3. 43  See further Austin, trans., p. 272. 44  Rūmı ̄, Spiritual Verses, trans. Williams, p. 52 ll. 504–505. 39 40

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| but for the fishes there is war on dryness’ (506–507). It is this position of Jesus in the Bezels—a unique paradigm for all of humanity—that also invites fertile comparative study with English contemplative texts. The opening verse of Chapter XV of the Bezels encapsulates Qur’anic teaching on Jesus: From the water of Mary or from the breath of Gabriel, In the form of a mortal fashioned of clay, The Spirit came into existence in an essence […] A spirit from none other than God So that he might raise the dead and bring forth birds from clay And become worthy to be associated with his Lord, By which he exerted great influence, both high and low. God purified him in body and made him transcendent In the Spirit, making him like Himself in creating. (Austin, p. 175)

Jesus is a unique combination of Mary’s ‘water’ and the ‘breath’ of Gabriel which carries the seed of God’s Word (pp. 176, 220).45 While not Divine himself, he is a ‘spirit from none other than God’, endowed through God’s power with animating breath.46 His breath vivifies clay birds, as further appearing in Rūmı ̄, discussed earlier. As Ali Hussain affirms, Jesus thus has a potent liminality in the Bezels, ‘as a barzakh between the realms of body and spirit’.47 Hussain links Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s Jesus with the barzakh, referenced in the Qur’an in surah 23: 100, 25: 53, and 55: 20.48 The barzakh signifies the liminal space that forms a barrier between earthly life and the Hereafter. The entirety of this chapter of the Bezels is then invested with this barzakh-Jesus’ powerful breath—in him is 45  For an investigation of the ‘ambivalent and contradictory valences of gender’ in Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s corpus, see further Sa’diyya Shaikh, Sufi Narratives of Intimacy, especially pp. 196–199 (quote on p. 197). 46  See further King, ‘Jesus and Joseph’, 88 47  Ali Hussain, ‘Sainthood Between the Ineffable and Social Practice: Jesus Christ in the Writings of Muhyi al-Din Ibn al-Arabı ̄ and Later Sufism’ (unpublished dissertation, University of Michigan, 2019), p. 194. 48  ‘It is but a word that he speaketh; and behind them is a barrier until the day when they are raised’ (surah 23: 100); ‘And He it is Who hath given independence to the two seas […] and hath set a bar and a forbidding ban between them’ (surah 25: 53); ‘There is a barrier between them. They encroach not (one upon the other)’ (surah 55: 20).

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the potency of the Giver of Life. God’s permission underlines all of Jesus’ miracles (p. 176). Jesus’ vivifying powers are said to ‘derive from the blowing of Gabriel in human form’, and hence Jesus brings to life in such a form (p. 177). Jesus as bestower of life is prominent in the Christian corpus too, of course. There, the power is often associated with a liquid form—the pierced side that emits life-giving blood and water, as will be studied in Chap. 5 of the present book. For the Islamic writers—Ibn ʿArabı ̄, ʿAṭt ̣ār, Rūmı ̄—his life-giving force is in his breath, enabled through God’s power. In Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s discussion of the conception, Jesus’ mother Mary herself takes on the role of the paradigmatic contemplative, again echoic of the Qur’anic account.49 Seeing Gabriel in human form, Ibn ʿArabı ̄ elucidates, ‘she sought refuge from him in God, totally, so that He might rid her of his attentions, knowing that to be forbidden’ (p. 175).50 As is then explained, ‘she attained to perfect presence with God, which is the [pervasion of] the unseen spirit’ (p. 175). This is deeply resonant with Mary’s portrayal in Ancrene Wisse, where she is the near-silent, withdrawn anchorite, embracing a solitary life—as will be seen. Mary’s self-imposed enclosure allows the blowing of God’s word within her, and the formation of a being who traverses the spirit and bodily worlds, this barzakh. As Ibn ʿArabı ̄ explicates, ‘Gabriel was, in fact, transmitting God’s word to Mary, just as an apostle transmits His word to his community’, echoing Christian praxis (Austin, p. 175). It is notable that Mary is said to be pervaded with desire, suggesting that the conception was an act of desire—the longing for unity with Creation from a desiring Creator. But Ibn ʿArabı ̄ is careful to distance himself from incarnationist theologies. On the Islamic heresy of ḥulu ̄l, Ibn ʿArabı ̄ proclaims: ‘they are called unbelievers [concealers], being a form of concealment, since they conceal God, Who in reality revives the dead, in the human form of Jesus’ (p. 177). Incarnation is an act of heretical concealment in Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s eyes—where for the Christian counterparts, it is a theological foundation. One can call Jesus, according to Ibn ʿArabı ̄, ‘the Spirit of God, which is to say that life is manifest into whomsoever he blows’ (p.  178). And he has a ‘[triple] manifestation’ as follows: ‘the Word of God, the Spirit of God, and the slave of God’; ‘such a [triple] manifestation in sensible form belongs to no 49  ‘And make mention of Mary in the Scripture, when she had withdrawn from her people to a chamber looking East, And had chosen seclusion from them.’ (surah 19: 16–17). 50  ‘She said: Lo! I seek refuge in the Beneficent One from thee’ (surah 19: 18).

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other’ (p.  178). Such a triplicity is of an entirely different order to the Holy Trinity. The divine Breath can be sought through the Cosmos, ‘for “Who knows himself, knows his Lord”, Who is manifest in him’ (p. 181). As Hussain asserts, ‘three related terms: nafas, nafs and tanfı ̄s enter a celestial marriage in order to reveal the intimate relationship between the divine breath, human soul and expansive movement of creation, whereby the divine names continuously manifest their traces throughout the far reaches of the universe’.51 Ibn ʿArabı ̄ delves into surah 5: 116–117, attempting to speak of the unity of creation whilst resisting the attribution of Divine status to Jesus (p. 182). Through God’s permission, Jesus vivifies with his breath—and his words are weighted with wisdom and with prayerful potency. The discussion of Jesus’ words in surah 5: 116 (p. 182) establishes his position as gnostic. There is a ‘witnessing of God in the substance of Jesus, having confirmed that He was his tongue, hearing, and sight’ (p. 184). In Chapter XX on John the Baptist, the following is remarked on Jesus’ speech as an infant: ‘in making him articulate, God made his intelligence perfect and effective’ (XX, ‘John’: p. 220).52 The emphasis on Jesus’ words are also associated deeply with the praying voice, and here it is important to keep in mind the various forms of prayer in Islam. In addition to the Islamic ritual prayer, the salāt, there is beseeching prayer given freely (duʿaʾ). But deeper than both is prayer as loving communication with the Beloved, muna ̄ja ̄t.53 Minlib Dallh has recently written on the various resonances of muna ̄ja ̄t as intimate conversation or communion, with a focus on the Munāja ̄t of Ansārı ̄ of Herāt.54 The word muna ̄jāt is related to na ̄jā, ‘to whisper to, talk confidentially with someone’, a term that can convey speech between lovers.55 There is the intriguing suggestion near the end of chapter XV of the Bezels that God is pleasured by the praying voice: ‘It is said that when God likes the voice of His servant in his supplication to Him, He postpones the response, so that he might repeat it, not out of  Hussain, ‘Sainthood Between the Ineffable and Social Practice’, p. 166.  See further chapter XXIV, where Ibn ʿArabı ̄ discusses Jesus’ words to the ‘Children of Israel’, for which he cites Matthew 6: 21 (‘For where thy treasure is, there is thy heart also’) (Bezels, trans. Austin, p. 244). 53  See further Smith, Muslim Women Mystics, p. 45. 54  Minlib Dallh, The Sufi and the Friar: A Mystical Encounter of Two Men of God in the Abode of Islam (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2017), p. 90. 55  See further Aftandil Erkinov, ‘Muna ̄ja ̄t or Free “Religion”: A Ritualistic Shamanistic Song or Spiritual Literature?’, Oriente Moderno 87 (2007), 85–102 (85). 51 52

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any aversion, but out of love for him’ (p. 186). Repeated prayer can give pleasure to God, as a Lover ever wishes to listen to the Beloved’s voice. This suggests the profound, loving communion of muna ̄jāt. That this statement on prayer comes in the chapter dedicated to Jesus is noteworthy. Jesus becomes associated with the delighting of God through the voice of prayer. He exemplifies how a true lover can form a vehicle in which to relay words to God. In the Bezels, Jesus is a unique encapsulation of each human soul—an exalted model for emulation, a paradigmatic lover with words and breath that are replete with the One Soul. Jesus in the Tarjumān al-ashwāq Before turning to the figure of Jesus in the Tarjuma ̄n, it is important to briefly consider its broader thematic structure, touched on in the previous chapter. There is a ‘Beloved’ in Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s corpus, but this Beloved is not Jesus—this is a necessary distinction to keep in mind. Both the Tarjuman and Wohunge concern themselves with lovability, with ‘eligibility’ for love in a bridal context; the image-vocabularies of both texts are suffused with bridal foci. But whereas in Wohunge, these ‘conditions’ are concentrated on the figure of Jesus for Ibn ʿArabı ̄ this Beloved is the Divine, entirely distinct from Jesus. In the Tarjuma ̄n, the Beloved is primarily gendered female. ‘She’ is apprehended in the form of maidens with unsurpassable beauty, frequently likened in form to gazelles (XI; XXVIII; XLVIII; LIX). This beauty is defined in terms of soft and supple flesh (IX; XXII; XXXXI; XXXIV; XLI), a slender frame with substantial hips (XXXIII: 13–14), and swelling breasts (XX; XXVI; XLIX). She is characterized by large, dark eyes, with a gaze that wounds to the point of death (IX; XIII; XX; XXII; XXX; XLVI; LIX), and by hair that is dark and long (XXIX; XXX; XXXIX). The Beloved is dyed with henna (XI; XVI), as well as being adorned in jewels (XXV; LIX) and embroidered garments (XXIX). She is luxuriously fragrant, leaving musky, aromatic scents all around her (VII; IX; XXIII; XXV; XXVI; XXXIX; LVI; LXI). Her teeth are blindingly white (XXI; XXVI; XXXIX; XLII; LVI), and her saliva sweet (XXV; XXX; XLVI). She is also necessarily playful—often swaying her hips in an apparent dance, and smiling or laughing (XX; XXIX; XXXIII). Her perfection is also often underscored by her noble birth (XX; XXXIV). Meditation on beauty in the form of the Beloved instigates an anguished, longing heart: ‘Alight here and abide, for I love one who is with you, | A woman, slender, lissom, of fresh beauty, for whom the heart of the sad lover is longing’ (XXXI: 4–5).

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This Beloved is not Christ, but Jesus the ascetic is central to Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s Tarjuma ̄n, where his position as solitary and as lover is emphasized. Jesus’ animating breath and his position as a source of wisdom both emerge powerfully in Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s collection of love poems. Jesus’ multivalent, energizing position becomes clear. He inhabits the realm between spirit and body, as evident also in the Bezels, allowing a deep connection between modes of speaking of the Divine in Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s poetics. In Poem II of the Tarjuma ̄n, the ‘Divine Attributes’ (though defined only as the Beloved ones in the poem itself) are described as a peacock riding luxuriously on camels: ‘thou wouldst fancy that each of them was a Bilqı ̄s on her throne of pearls’—referring here to the Queen of Sheba (II: 2), in invocation of surah 27: 23.56 She murders with her gaze in her sovereignty, but ‘her speech restores to life, as tho’ she, in giving life thereby, were Jesus’ (II: 4). The gaze of the Beloved kills but her speech gives life, and the specific parallel made is with Jesus’ breath. The commentary enriches this verse by citation of surah 38: 72 and surah 16 (comm II: 4).57 Ibn ʿArabı ̄ also crafts Jesus as a figure of wisdom, of gnosis. In Poem III, the speaker calls to the camel driver, imploring the driver to pause and relay a message to the Beloved ones: O camel-driver, if though comest to Hajir, stop the beasts a little while and give a greeting, And address to the red tents on the side of the guarded pasture the salutation of one who longs for you and is distraught. And if they return thy greeting, once more let the East wind bring thy salaam to them; and if they are silent, journey on with thy camels and advance To the river of Jesus, where their riding-camels halted and where the white tents lie beside the river-mouth (Tarjuman̄ , III: 5–8)

The red tents form a pointedly bridal image, reinforced in Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s commentary for this line (III: comm. 6). What is most relevant, however, is the pause beside the ‘river of Jesus’. As the commentary supplies, this 56  ‘I found a woman ruling over them, and she hath been given (abundance) of all things, and hers is a mighty throne.’ (surah 27: 23). 57  ‘When thy Lord said unto the angels: Lo! I am about to create a mortal out of mire, And when I have fashioned him and breathed into him of My Spirit, then fall down before him prostrate, The angels fell down prostrate, every one, Saving Iblis; he was scornful and became one of the disbelievers.’ (surah 38: 71–74); ‘Our word unto a thing, when We intend it, is only that We say unto it: Be! and it is.’ (surah 16: 40).

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indicates ‘the ample knowledge manifested in Jesus’ (III: comm. 8). As seen earlier, Jesus’ wisdom through the bounty of God features prominently in the Qur’an. Further poems in the Tarjuma ̄n reaffirm Jesus as gnostic, and the scriptures associated with him as sources of wisdom. In the commentary for Poem II, Ibn ʿArabı ̄ explains that the statement ‘“One of the daughters of Rome”’ signifies a wisdom that is ‘of the race of Jesus’ and ‘is described as belonging to the Roman Empire’ (II: comm. 6). The Beloved is unfathomable: ‘She has baffled […] every student of the Psalms of David, every Jewish doctor, and every Christian priest’ (II: 8). And, if ‘she demands the Gospel’ with a ‘gesture’, ‘thou wouldst deem us to be priests and patriarchs and deacons’. This line again underscores her potency; the commentary explains the line as a humbling and devotion akin to that of the ‘heads of the Church’, on account of ‘her majesty and sovereign might’ (II: comm. 9). In XXXVIII, the ‘daughter of Persia’ at 3 is explained in the commentary as ‘a form of foreign wisdom, connected with Moses, Jesus, Abraham, and other foreigners of the same class’. It suggests an exalted, though partly alien, wisdom. The commentary for II also explains that the knowledge of the Qur’an, Psalms, Tora and Gospel ‘point only to the Divine Names and are incapable of solving a question that concerns the Divine Essence’. Scripture is gestural, and not the solution. Notably, however, the Qur’an is combined with the Old and New Testaments to form one body of received knowledge. This is perhaps indicative of Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s own training in a multitude of disciplines—and it certainly highlights Jesus’ role as the wellspring of wisdom and knowledge, confirming him as a paradigmatic gnostic.58

Jesus for Shushtarı ̄

Jesus is found within the deepest textures of Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s work, and this is  also true for Shushtarı ̄’s two ‘monastery poems’, where Jesus-theparadigm becomes the core of a rich dialogic encounter.59 Both monastery poems have at their base a dialogue between Christianity and Islam. The qaṣı ̄da identified as ‘The monastery door’ by Alvarez is replete with 58  On Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s exposure to Christian teaching, among other influences, see further Shaikh, Sufi Narratives of Intimacy, p. 13. 59  This term ‘monastery poems’ is Alvarez’s: Alvarez, trans., Shushtarı ̄: Songs of Love and Devotion, p. 111; see further pp. 113 and 116.

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Christian symbolism: crucifixes, deacons, the chanting of liturgy. As the poem opens, the speaker guides the listeners through appropriate conduct at a monastery: ta’adab bi bāb al-dayr (Nashshār, p.  59: education [or acculturation] at the monastery door). The speaker instructs those entering the dayr, the monastery, to greet the monks (rāhibı ̄n) and remove their footwear, and includes the commands to ‘glorify the priest [quss] if you seek grace and praise its sacristan if you wish to rise’.60 The speaker warns the listener to be careful not to fall under the spell of the priests, who are said to be like glowing suns (shumu ̄s) with their crosses (sulba ̄n: Nashshār, p. 60): Before you: the voices of the deacons. Listen to their melodies and be careful lest they steal your reason. They appear like suns rising in procession with crosses. Beware of being bewitched.61

In this cautionary moment, the speaker clearly distances themselves and their listeners from Christian ritual. Yet it is also clear that the Shushtarı ̄-­ speaker respects the formidable power of the rāhibı ̄n. The speaker then brings the listeners deeper into the monastery. Should the listener follow the guidance, ‘[they will] give you the key [miftāḥ] to the church [kanı ̄sa] in which there is the image of Jesus in the form [shakl] of the monks’ (Nashshār, p. 60). Given the iconoclastic tendencies in Islamic doctrine, it is remarkable that such a line should be included.62 The Jesus-image becomes a decisive, enigmatic signifier at the core of the poem. The image stands still, silent. On the one hand, its stasis may be indicative of the deep difference between the two religions: from an Islamic perspective, the making of any image is very fraught, and the monastery’s Jesus-image here teeters dangerously close to idolatry in Islamic terms. On the other hand, the presence of the Jesus-image acts as a bridge, facilitating a conversation between the Sufi wayfarer and one monk. Jesus’ presence captures the

60  I have used Alvarez’s translation in this quotation (Alvarez, trans., Shushtarı ̄: Songs of Love and Devotion, p. 122) and at one other instance. All other translations of this poem are my own. 61  I have used Alvarez’s translation at this instance and in the previous quotation, beginning ‘glorify the priest’ (Alvarez, trans., Shushtarı ̄: Songs of Love and Devotion, p. 122–123). All other translations of this poem are my own. 62  See further Alvarez, trans., Shushtarı ̄: Songs of Love and Devotion, p. 181.

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viewer’s gaze, redolent of the ‘link’ or ‘meeting’ (wasu ̄l) to which the monk will finally allude (Nashshār, p. 62). The ensuing dialogue is one that is full of difference, each interlocutor claiming that their ‘truth’ is the higher. But it is also a dialogue full of exchange and the potential for connection, wasu ̄l. ‘I asked for the winemaker’, declares the speaker, and the monk or priest in turn asks: ‘What do you want from him?’. The speaker explains: ‘I wish for wine’; but the priest refuses such a request, swearing by his head, and by Jesus, and by his religion (dı ̄n) that he will not grant the speaker’s desire (p. 61). Regardless of the speaker’s offerings (which include jewels, their book, their footwear, their trusty staff), the monk maintains that the wine’s preciousness surpasses such treasure, and in fact surpasses anything the speaker could provide: ‘my drink is beyond what you have described’ (p.  61). The speaker insists that their khirqa, their Sufi garment, is of greater value, and the priest finally takes it after agreeing to purify himself (p.  62). The Shushtarı ̄-speaker is then allowed to taste the wine: ‘He gave the wine to me: “I have shown you its secret”. He gave it to me in a jug’. And yet, after all this, the Sufi speaker finds it is not their goal: ‘So I said to him: ‘This is not the wine I have been looking for, and I do not want this wine.’ (p.  62). The speaker nonetheless acknowledges the wine’s profundity: ‘Nevertheless, this wine is very old; it has not been described and it has not previously been known [ʿarafa]’ (p.  62). The poem ends with the Shushtarı ̄-speaker requesting the priest to convert to Islam. Jesus has acted as a pivotal site for dialogic exchange—even if not resolution. In fact, this longing for exchange re-appears in the work of an early-­ modern commentator on Shushtarı ̄, ʿAbd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi (1641–1731). The commentary is not one of happy tolerance. Nabulusi is concerned primarily with explaining away the Christian terminology and symbolism, severing each item from its Christian underpinning.63 However, the issue remains a linguistic one—the difficulties of translating from Suryaniyya (Syriac), ‘a language whose spiritual secrets were rendered unintelligible when its evangelical vocabulary was translated into Arabic’.64 As Alvarez summarises: ‘Nabulusi claims that Shushtarı ̄, although a devoutly “Muhammadan Muslim”, is a disciple of Jesus’.65 Like ʿAṭṭār, like  Alvarez, trans., Shushtarı ̄: Songs of Love and Devotion, p. 118.  Alvarez, trans., Shushtarı ̄: Songs of Love and Devotion, p. 119. 65  Alvarez, trans., Shushtarı ̄: Songs of Love and Devotion, p. 119; see also Omaima Abou-­ Bakr, ‘The Symbolic Function of Metaphor in Medieval Sufi Poetry: The Case of Shushtarı ̄’, 63 64

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Ibn ʿArabı ̄, like Rūmı ̄, Shushtarı ̄ does find a paradigm in Jesus. The image he encounters in the monastery becomes a vessel for expressing this bond. Shushtarı ̄’s position as a ‘disciple of Jesus’—steeped in Jesus’ teaching and practice, and in a vibrant Christian symbolism—allows a fruitful, dialogic interaction between these Sufi texts and those for Christian contemplatives in English.

Jesus of Ancrene Wisse and Wohunge It would be impossible to summarize representations of Jesus in thirteenth-­ century Christian texts in English—let alone those texts in Latin and Anglo-Norman, and in the other vernaculars of Europe.66 Such an exercise would be futile even for Ancrene Wisse and Wohunge alone. Focus will rest specifically on Jesus’ dual role as Beloved and as Lover. Jesus Christ himself is the Beloved in these texts, as both Lover-Knight and Nurturing Mother. But in associating Christ with enclosure and reclusion, the texts also promote Christ as the paradigmatic solitary, resonating powerfully with our Sufi texts. In these English texts, Jesus is both Beloved and Lover, removing the impasse between Subject and Object, and in so doing forming an important dialogue with the Lover-Jesus of the Islamic texts. As is well known, the most direct articulation of the sponsa Christi theme in Ancrene Wisse comes in Part VII, in the ‘wrihe forbisne’ (parable with a hidden meaning—literally, ‘concealed’ or ‘covered’ parable) of Christ the Lover-Knight. This exemplum could be said to act as the affective heart of Ancrene Wisse; it encapsulates the basic relationship between anchorite and the Lord. The passage has been studied exhaustively in existing scholarship, but for clarity a brief discussion of it will be given here.67 The author describes the efforts of a selfless knight in wooing an Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 12 (Metaphor and Allegory in the Middle Ages) (1992), 40–57 (49). 66  The most famous studies relevant to this subject include: Sarah Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings (New York: Routledge, 1996); Ellen M. Ross, The Grief of God: Images of the Suffering Jesus in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). 67  See especially Catherine Innes-Parker, ‘Ancrene Wisse and Þe Wohunge of Ure Lauerd: The Thirteenth-Century Female Reader and the Lover Knight’, in Women, the Book and the Godly: Selected Proceedings of the St. Hilda’s Conference, 1993, ed. Lesley Smith and Jane

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ungrateful lady, who is besieged in her castle. When his messengers (‘sonden’) and ornate gifts (‘beawbelez’) are rejected, he comes himself. He speaks ‘se swiðe swoteliche’ (so very sweetly) that he could resurrect the dead and perform other miracles (147: 76–78). Yet the lady remains unimpressed. The dedicated lover eventually dies as he fights her enemies, and is brought back to life—how ridiculous if the lady still does not love him, declares the author. The ‘covering’ of the parable is then removed: ‘Þes king is Iesu, Godes Sune, þet al o þisse wise wohede ure sawle, þe deoflen hefden biset’ (147: 95–96) (This king is Jesus, God’s son, who in this way wooed our soul, which the devils had besieged). This exemplum of Christ as Lover-Knight is also found in Anglo-Norman lyrics, in a range of other vernaculars, and in Latin sermons.68 As Millett observes, the presence of the topos in thirteenth-century Parisian sermons indicates ‘a common Continental origin’.69 A related textual tradition is that of the ‘conditions of eligibility’—a collection of qualities that make one worthy of love, and all contained to perfection within Jesus Christ. It is a tradition expressed in Wohunge, and again, a brief summary here will be useful.70 In Wohunge, the Beloved is crystallized in the figure of Jesus Christ. All his attributes, his conditions of eligibility, are based on his acceptability as a suitor. He is the perfect suitor, ‘For inwið þe ane arn alle þe þinges igedered þat eauer muhen maken ani mon luuewurðe to oðer’ (p. 80: for within you alone are gathered all the things that may ever make a human being worthy of love to another). The conditions listed in Wohunge are: fairness; wealth, status; generosity; wit/wisdom; strength, boldness; nobility in birth; virtue and courtesy; honour; mildness; gentleness; kinship or ‘nature’. They are each expounded in detail. The sun is dim compared to his brightness, and he is H. M. Taylor (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995), pp. 137–148; Catherine Innes-Parker, ‘The Lady and the King: Ancrene Wisse’s Parable of the Royal Wooing Re-Examined’, English Studies, 75 (1994), 509–522; Denis Rygiel, ‘The Allegory of Christ the Lover-Knight in Ancrene Wisse: An Experiment in Stylistic Analysis’, Studies in Philology, 73.4 (1976), 343–364; and Rosemary Woolf, ‘The Theme of Christ the Lover-Knight in Medieval English Literature’, in Arts and Doctrine: Essays on Medieval Literature, ed. Heather O’Donoghue (London: Hambledon Press, 1986). 68  See further Douglas Gray, From the Norman Conquest to the Black Death: An Anthology of Writings from England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 69  Millett, trans., Guide for Anchoresses, p. 259, 7/18. 70  On this tradition, see further Bella Millett, ‘The “Conditions of Eligibility” in Þe Wohunge of ure Lauerd’, in The Milieu and Context of the Wohunge Group, ed. Susannah Mary Chewning (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), pp. 26–47.

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the richest through possession of Creation (p.  82). All of Creation is placed under his lovers’ feet, but more than this, he gave his ‘ahne heorte blod’ (own heart’s blood): a more precious jewel (‘derre’) was never given to another (p. 84). His very name is wisdom. His strength and boldness are exemplified by his fight with the devils and his Harrowing of Hell (p. 86). On his nobility in birth, his lineage is of King of kings, with Mary as kin to David the King, offspring of Abraham (p. 88). His gentleness is captured in Isaiah 53: 1, the lamb that does not speak.71 On nature, the speaker declares that Christ brought himself in absolute proximity to his creation in taking on human flesh, and ‘nam wið þat ilke flesch fulliche monnes cunde to þolen al þat mon mai þole’ (p. 90: took with that same flesh, fully of humankind, to suffer all that humanity may suffer). As synopsized by the speaker: Þenne þu wið þi fairnesse, þu wið richesce, þu wið largesce, þu wið wit ant wisdom, þu wið maht ant strengðe, þu wið noblesce ant hendeleic, þu wið meknesse ant mildeschipe ant mikel debonairte, þu wið sibnesse, þu wið alle þe þinges þet man mai luue wið bugge; haues mi luue chepet. (p. 92) (Then you with your fairness, you with richness, you with generosity, you with wit and wisdom, you with might and strength, you with nobility and courtesy, you with meekness and mildness and great gentility, you with kinship, you, with all things with which a man may buy love, have bought my love).

And finally, all possible virtues are superseded by the greatest virtue of all: the suffering that Christ experiences on the Cross for the creation he so loves: Ah ouer alle oðre þinges makes te luuewurði to me þa harde atele hurtes, þa schomeliche wohes þat tu þoldes for me, þi bittre pine ant passion, þi derue deað o rode, telles riht in al mi luue, calenges al mi heorte. (p. 92) (But over all other things, those hard, terrible hurts make you loveworthy to me, those shameful pains that you suffered for me; your bitter pain and passion, your cruel death on the Cross, rightly claims all my love, challenges all my heart.)

71  ‘He was offered because it was his own will, and he opened not his mouth: he shall be led as a sheep to the slaughter, and shall be dumb as a lamb before his shearer, and he shall not open his mouth.’ (Isaiah 53: 7).

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This statement is not so different from that witnessed in the poetry of ʿAt ̣ṭār, Rūmı ̄, and Awḥādi, as discussed above: the Crucifixion is the definitive sign of love; it communicates the Lord’s love like nothing else. In Wohunge, this is encapsulated in the speaker’s climactic cry: ‘A hu schal i nu liue for nu deies mi lef for me up o þe deore rode?’ (p. 104: Ah, how shall I now live, for now my beloved dies for me on the precious Cross?). As Awḥādi would have put it: ‘This surely is a sufficient proof of love’. Moreover, whilst Jesus’ status as Beloved distinguishes him from the ʿIsa of the Islamic texts, the crafting of his position as Beloved has powerful resonances with the Islamic material. The Sufi texts also cast the Beloved as entirely and exquisitely lovable, replete with all possible qualities of love-worthiness. Enclosure-Lover But crucially, beyond the Beloved Christ is Christ as lover. In the Christian texts, Jesus the Beloved is also a model for lovers to emulate, creating rich dialogic possibilities with the Islamic material. Jesus’ paradigmatic status is tied fundamentally with the imaging of enclosure. First, the reader is themselves an enclosure in which Christ is kept safe, and nurtured. Whilst Christ remains here the ‘Beloved’ rather than a ‘Lover’, it does immediately parallel Christ with the devotee’s own enclosed existence. In Part II, the author uses the image of a chamber, in which the Beloved is sheltered, the anchorite acting as God’s chamber in their love labour:72 Ne þunche hire neauer wunder, ȝef ha nis muchel ane, þah he hire schunie— ant swa ane þet ha putte euch worldlich þrung, ant euch nurð eorðlich ut of hire heorte, for heo is Godes chambre. (36: 646–49) (She should not be surprised if he shuns her if she is not much alone— and alone in such a way that she puts each worldly throng, and each earthly noise, out of her heart, for she [i.e. the heart] is God’s chamber.)

The anchoritic heart becomes a receptable for the Divine, as the anchorite is themselves encompassed by the anchorhold; the image of the heart as chamber is repeated (41). As will be seen, this image parallels the Sufi 72  This is echoic of the Canticles: ‘When I had a little passed by them, I found him whom my soul loveth: I held him: and I will not let him go, till I bring him into my mother’s house, and into the chamber of her that bore me.’ (Song of Songs 3: 4)

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conception of jalwa (the moment of a bride’s unveiling in a bridal chamber).73 The reader-as-enclosure then finds acute expression in Part III’s overall reflection on anchorites as birds. There, the nest is put forward as a space of enclosure, with a basis in Luke 9: 58.74 The author identifies the qualities of a functional nest as ‘heard utewið of prikinde þornes, inwið nesche ant softe’ (53: 216–17: hard outside with pricking thorns, tender and soft inside) to explain self-mortification in conjunction with a soft, sweet heart.75 Such mortification allows the anchoritic reader to affiliate themselves with the voice of Psalm 58: 10.76 The author mocks those creators of a nest made inside-out, ‘softe wiðuten ant þorni wiðinnen’ (soft without and thorny within), which is ultimately a sterile space (53: 224). As is characteristic of the Ancrene Wisse-author’s imagistic-associative approach, the nest is then aligned with the anchorhold itself, with citation and translation of Job 29: 18 (53: 229–33).77 With this basis, the focus then returns to the heart-as-nest, with the analogy of an eagle who shelters the gem agate (‘achate’) as protection within the nest.78 The agate is identified as Jesus, enclosed in the heart-nest. Such preciousness can only be found in a safe enclosure (54: 234–47). Again, the emphasis is on Jesus as enclosed, allowing him to act as a lover-model for the anchoritic readers. Then in Part IV, the reader is paralleled with the Virgin Mary in the Annunciation as vessel of Christ: Hardiliche ileueð, þet al the deofles strengðe mealteð þurh the grace of þet hali sacrement, hest over oðre, þet ȝe seoð as ofte as the preost measseð: the meidene bearn, Jesu Godd, Godes sune, þe licomliche lihteð other-hwiles to ower in, ant inwið ow eadmodliche nimeð his herbearhe. (102: 1290–94) (Believe firmly that all the devil’s strength melts away through the grace of that holy sacrament, highest above the others, which you see as often as 73  See further Homerin, trans., ‘Umar Ibn al-Fāriḍ: Sufi Verse, Saintly Life, p. 74 n. 6; and Cecilia Twinch, ‘The Beauty of Oneness Witnessed in the Emptiness of the Heart’, Ibn ‘Arabi Society Online, [accessed 30th December 2020]. 74  See further Millett, Guide to Anchoresses, n. 29. 75  Self-mortification is dealt with in more detail in Part VI of Ancrene Wisse, and will be examined in Section II of the present book. 76  ‘I will keep my strength to thee: for thou art my protector’ (Psalm 58: 10). 77  ‘And I said: I shall die in my nest’ (Job 29: 18). 78  The significances of gemstones in Ancrene Wisse, Hales’ Love Rune, and Shushtarı ̄’s verse will be addressed in Chap. 6.

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the priest performs mass: the Maiden’s Son, Jesus God, God’s Son, who sometimes descends bodily to your inn, and humbly takes his dwelling inside you.)

The anchorite as dove then finds enclosure in Christ’s body, with a basis in Canticles 2: 14 (111: 1631–34), as discussed in Chap. 1.79 Each enclosure mirrors the other: Beloved and Lover become enclosures for one another.80 Christ may be the enclosed Beloved, but he is also paradigmatic for the Lover who abides within an enclosure. He is an anchorite, accompanying his secluded anchoritic lover. This Anchorite-Christ resonates powerfully with Jesus the solitary ascetic expounded in such depth by Ibn ʿArabı ̄, Shushtarı ̄, ʿAṭt ̣ār, and Rūmı ̄. The parallel between the anchorite’s enclosure and Christ’s encasement within the ‘ancre-huses’ of his mother’s womb and stone tomb positions him as the perfect paradigm for lovers. As the author declares, ‘nes he him seolf reclus i Maries womb?’ (was he himself not a recluse in Mary’s womb?). Bitterness and narrowness are key features of this enclosure, and thus in Jesus the anchorite finds a ‘fellow’ or ‘companion’ (‘feolahe’): wombe is nearow wununge, þer ure Lauerd wes reclus, ant tis word “Marie”, as Ich ofte habbe iseid, spealeð “bitternesse”. Ȝef ȝe þenne i nearow stude þolieð bitternesse, ȝe beoð his feolahes, reclus as he wes i Marie wombe. Be ȝe ibunden inwið fowr large wahes? Ant he in nearow cader, ineilet o rode, i stanine þruh bicluset hetefeste. (142: 417–424) (A womb is a narrow dwelling, where our Lord was a recluse, and this word ‘Marie’, as I have often said, means ‘bitterness’. If, then, you suffer bitterness in a narrow place, you are his companions, a recluse as he was in Mary’s womb. Are you bound within four large walls? So was he in a narrow cradle, nailed on the cross, tightly enclosed in a stone tomb.)

The enclosures here are extended to the cross and the tomb. The parallel could not be clearer: ‘Marie wombe ant þis þruh weren his ancre-huses’ (142: 424–425: Mary’s womb and this tomb were his anchor-houses).  ‘My dove in the clefts of the rock, in the hollow places of the wall’ (Song of Songs 2: 14).  See further Liz Herbert McAvoy and Mari Hughes-Edwards, ‘Introduction: Intersections of Time and Space in Gender and Enclosure’, and Alexandra Barratt, ‘Context: Some Reflections on Wombs and Tombs and Inclusive Language’, in Anchorites, Wombs and Tombs, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy and Mari Hughes Edwards (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005), pp. 6–26 and 27–38. 79 80

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Jesus acts as companion, as model, as the greatest of all paradigms for the anchorite (142: 425–427). Other examples of paradigmatic solitary ascetics given by the author are John the Baptist and the Holy Mother Mary herself (62: 562–83). This reinforces the position of Christ as the nucleus of a wider network of solitaries, a network of which the anchoritic readers are themselves now part. With a foundation in Matthew 11: 11, Isaiah 6: 5, and Paul the Deacon’s hymn for the Feast of St John the Baptist, the author casts John the Baptist as the ultimate Desert Father who retreated into the wilderness (61–62: 538–74).81 John the Baptist fled (‘fleh’) the ‘feolahschipe of fule men, leste he were ifulet’ (62: 562–63: fellowship of foul men, lest he be befouled [himself]). In this withdrawal for purity’s sake, he takes the first stage of a retreat into the wilderness; but for exemplary purposes, he takes it further: forte schawin us þet me ne mei þe uuele fleon bute me fleo þe gode, he fleh his hali cun, icoren of ure Lauerd, ant wende into anli stude ant wunede i þe wildernesse. (62: 563–65) (in order to show us that one cannot flee the evil unless one [also] flees the good, he [John] fled from his holy kin, chosen of our Lord, and departed to a solitary place and dwelled in the wilderness.)

This description imbues John’s subsequent baptism of Christ with a kind of anchoritic residue: the wild anchorite baptises a solitary who has emerged from the enclosure of the womb. For with John the Baptist as anchorite also comes Mary the anchorite. As the author asks, soon after the discussion of John the Baptist, ‘Vre leoue Leafdi, ne leaded ha anlich lif?’ (62: 575, Did our dear Lady not lead a solitary life?). To provide proof for this ‘anlich lif’, the author remarks on the angel Gabriel finding her ‘in anli stude al ane’ (in a solitary place all alone), and from citation and translation of Luke 1: 28 deduces that ‘wes heo inne in anli stude hire ane’ (62: 575–79 she was inside in a solitary place alone), which mirrors the Qur’anic account, further expounded in Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s Bezels. This density of solitude, of the Holy Mother herself as ‘anlich’, enriches the sense of Christ’s own 81  ‘Amen I say to you, there hath not risen among them that are born of women a greater than John the Baptist: yet he that is the lesser in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.’ (Matthew 11: 11); ‘And I said: Woe is me, because I have held my peace; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people that hath unclean lips, and I have seen with my eyes the King the Lord of hosts.’ (Isaiah 6: 5). On Ancrene Wisse’s sources at this instance, see further Hasenfratz, ed., Ancrene Wisse, ns 439–41, 448–51, 452–53, 454–55.

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anchorhold within her womb. We have a case of an anchorhold within an anchorhold: Mary is found by Gabriel within her own solitary enclosure, and her womb itself becomes a solitary enclosure in which her Son dwells as a foetal anchorite. There is an anchoritic network formed in which Jesus Christ is the central solitary. Delivered from the anchorhold of his solitary mother’s womb, he is baptised by the hands of another solitary; and at the end of his life, he is re-enclosed in a stone tomb, alone for his rising on the third day. In configuring Jesus as a paradigmatic anchorite, the Ancrene Wisse-­ author parallels the Islamic texts powerfully. For the Sufi poets, Jesus is the archetypal solitary ascetic, who teaches the devotee the ways of self-­ abnegation and of love. He is said to do the same in Ancrene Wisse. In the English anchoritic guidance text, he is both Beloved and Lover, merging the two positions into one being. He is a synthesis, an agglutination of the object of love and its pursuer. In the Christian texts, his being encodes both postures—and in doing so, enables a more agglutinative, synthesised comparative dialogue. Shushtarı ̄ and Ibn ʿArabı ̄, like their Persian counterparts ʿAṭt ̣ār and Rūmı ̄, engage with Jesus as a wandering, ascetic lover. In Ancrene Wisse, Jesus is the Beloved. But as one who is enclosed—as well as being an enclosure himself, that infinite dovecote—Christ becomes a paradigmatic lover. Through an avian perspective, we become more alert to the multiple directions in which divine love moves. This avian stance also enriches understanding of how Jesus works as an adhesive within and between the ‘emotional communities’ of Sufis and Christian contemplatives. As embodied in the Jesus-icon of Shushtarı ̄’s monastery poem, Jesus becomes an interface for dialogue, for the manifold ways in which the Beloved and Lover may interact in the realm of the heart.

CHAPTER 3

The Many Shapes of the Heart

The shapes of the heart are too numerous to be imagined or spoken. But to touch that supreme shape-shifter, to grasp at its manifold forms, is in many ways the core of the solitary spiritual life. For Fiona Somerset, contemplatives are ‘emotion-artists’; this is also an apt term to describe Ibn ʿArabı ̄, Ibn al-Fāriḍ, Shushtarı ̄, the author of Ancrene Wisse, and their respective audiences/readers.1 The speaker of Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s Naẓm al-sulūk seems to self-define as an ‘emotion-artist’ of sorts: ‘The realm of love’s high places is mine’ (293). Or, as put by Shushtarı ̄’s speaker in one of his azja ̄l: ‘loving the handsome one is my art’ (Corriente, p. 124).2 For the Ancrene Wisse-author, the entire vocation of the anchorite is predicated on love (145–46: 1–47). In such emotion-artistry, the ‘heart’ is the essential raw material, continuously re-moulded in myriad forms. The heart is an image used with flexibility but also with precision for encoding complex affective stirrings. An avian perspective reveals this to be the case across the Islamic and Christian contemplative material, which puts pressure on the narrative of ‘emotional communities’ and ‘affective literacies’, forcing 1   Fiona Somerset, ‘Excitative Speech: Theories of Emotive Response from Richard Fitzralph to Margery Kempe’, in The Vernacular Spirit: Essays on Medieval Religious Literature, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Duncan Robertson and Nancy Bradley Warren (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 59–79. 2  The term for love in both these instances is ʿishq.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. S. Lazikani, Emotion in Christian and Islamic Contemplative Texts, 1100–1250, The New Middle Ages, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59924-9_3

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them to expand their geographical boundaries. In all its forms, the heart is a cross-cultural image; the shifting heart is fundamental doctrinally, and necessary in devotional reading practices, in both traditions.3 As mentioned in the introduction to this book, one of the first codifications of Sufism was in the work by Abū Ṭ ālib al-Makkı ̄ known as Qūt al-qulūb (The Nourishment of Hearts).4 The heart may be understood in these texts as a site of cognitive-­ affective activity that is also linked inextricably with the eternal life-force (sawle/ru ̄ḥ) of the human being. In the realm of affective reading practices, there is a vast constellation of terms in which ‘heart’ is only one interlocutor. Its relationship with terms such as ‘soul’, ‘mind’, or ‘conscience’ is shifting and often unclear. ‘Heart’ is not a static term, concept, or image in these texts. The heart is not divorced from the ‘mind’, as it is a site of cognitive and rational activity—which cannot, in any case, be straightforwardly distinguished from ‘emotion’ in these texts.5 For the Arabic qalb (heart) and for the English ‘heorte’, I will address three elements: the heart’s relationship to cognition and rationality; the heart’s relationship to the life-force or ‘soul’; and the heart as a site of affective discovery. The unique power of the heart means that it is also the terrain in which emotion-artists perform, the space of exciting intimacy between Lover and Beloved. For writers, readers, and audiences of these texts, the heart is a site of encounter with the Divine, of nurturance of intimacy with the Divine, of assimilation of the Divine’s wisdom—all coalescing here in the shorthand ‘discovery’. The heart as dwelling-place—a chamber, an enclosure, a home, a temple, even a howdah on a camel’s back—is a central image in both Sufi and Christian contemplative texts. As such a dwelling-­place, the heart becomes a space in which discovery can occur and flourish.

3  On Christian devotional reading practices, see especially Brian Stock, Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 1–19. 4  On this text and other tenth-century systematizations of Sufism, see further Atif Khalil, ‘Abū Tālib al-Makkı ̄ and the Nourishment of Hearts (Qu ̄t al-qulu ̄b) in the Context of Early Sufism’, The Muslim World 102.2 (2012), 335–356. 5  See further Bernard McGinn, ‘Love, Knowledge and Unio Mystica in the Western Christian Tradition’, in Mystical Union in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: An Ecumenical Dialogue, ed. Moshe Idel and Bernard McGinn (1996; repr. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016), pp. 59–86.

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The Qalb A key Arabic term for heart is qalb. In the Arabic lexical root system, qalb is related to in-qilāb, meaning ‘to overthrow’: this is a relation discussed famously in Ahdaf Soueif’s (b. 1950) novel The Map of Love (1999).6 Such a relation has particular pertinence to Islamic contemplatives, whose hearts are conquered, even supplanted, by the Beloved. Qalb is employed frequently in the Qur’an, though the Qur’an does contain numerous other terms that could be translated as ‘heart’, as evident in Table 3.1.7 The qalb’s relationship with other central terms in the realm of affect is complex, particularly in the case of rūḥ (spirit, soul) and nafs (self, ‘ego’). Nafs has a multifaceted history in Sufi writings. It is frequently used to Table 3.1  Qur’anic terms for “heart” Qur’anic term

Possible translations and associations

qalb

Heart; intuition; ‘[c]entral concept of Sufi epistemology and psychology, based on frequent Qur’anic references to it as an intuitive faculty by which the inner reality of things is perceived’a Chest; breast; heart; intuition Heart; intuition; ‘[c]entral concept of Sufi epistemology and psychology, based on frequent Qur’anic references to it as an intuitive faculty by which the inner reality of things is perceived’b Heart; intuition. Cognate with biblical Hebrew Lëv, Lëvav.c ‘Central concept of Sufi epistemology and psychology, based on frequent Qur’anic references to it as an intuitive faculty by which the inner reality of things is perceived’b

sadr fu’ād

lubb

a The Oxford Dictionary of Islam, ed. John L.  Esposito (Oxford: OUP, 2003) [accessed online 31st December 2020].

The Oxford Dictionary of Islam, ed. John L. Esposito (Oxford: OUP, 2003).

b

See entry by Rémi Brague, Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, ed. Barbara Cassin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). See also Morris, ‘Opening the Heart’ (n. 4). c

6  Ahdaf Soueif, The Map of Love (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), chapter 8. See further G. Willow Wilson, ‘The Lost Jihad: Love in Islam’, Islamica 20 (2007), 105–106, https:// www.theislamicmonthly.com/the-lost-jihad-love-in-islam/ [accessed 25th July 2020]. 7  See further James Winston Morris, ‘Opening the Heart: Ibn ʿArabı ̄ on Suffering, Compassion and Atonement’, Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn Arabı ̄ Society 51 (2012), https://ibnarabisociety.org/suffering-compassion-and-atonement-james-morris/ [accessed 25th July 2020]. As Morris remarks, ‘In many passages of the Qur’an, sadr is used side-byside and virtually synonymous with qalb within the same verse’, n. 3; see also n. 4. See further Morris’ The Reflective Heart: Discovering Spiritual Intelligence in Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s Meccan Illuminations (Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 2005); for an overview of the study, see pp. 1–10.

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denote the negative burden of the ‘ego’, which hobbles the soul’s progress and its capacity to ascend to divine union.8 The nafs must be crushed, obliterated, for the soul to truly ‘one’ itself with the Divine. But nafs may also have a more positive meaning, associated with the mind and related firmly to qalb.9 Another term used by Sufi poets and translatable as either ‘heart’ or ‘soul’ is muhja (see Ibn al-Fāriḍ, Naẓm, 340). Cognitive-­ affective function is also ascribed more generally to entrails (Tarjumān XLVI) or the liver (Tarjuma ̄n XVII; LXI): ‘The core of my heart, when the Cleaver shot it through with her arrows, | Was cloven by eyes which are accustomed to aim at the entrails, and none of their shafts misses the mark’ (XXXI: 12–13). This line invokes Qur’an 6: 95–96, as clarified in the commentary (comm 12).10 Ibn al-Fāriḍ also refers to the liver (kibd) fracturing in anguish (Naẓm, 344). In considering the shapes of the heart in Islamic writings, there is one heart that has particular significance: the qalb of the Prophet Muhammad, the vehicle of Qur’anic revelation.11 Writing on the Sufi Sahl At-Tutsarı ̄ (d. 896), Gerhard Böwering identifies Muhammad’s heart as ‘the seat and source of scriptural revelation and mystical union’.12 As he explains: ‘The root of this richness is the confident abandonment of Muhammad’s heart to God from Whom he directly receives, in Whom he abides, and with Whom his name is linked up’.13 Muhammad’s heart thus becomes an 8  See further Erik S. Ohlander, ‘Early Sufi Rituals, Beliefs, and Hermeneutics’, and Saeko Yazaki, ‘Morality in Early Sufi Literature’, in The Cambridge Companion to Sufism, ed. Lloyd Ridgeon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp.  53–73 (pp.  61, 67) and pp. 74–98 (pp. 78, 92). 9  See further Elmore, Islamic Sainthood in the Fullness of Time, p.  311; and Gerhard Böwering, The Mystical Vision of Existence in Classical Islam: Qur’anic Hermeneutics of Sufi Sahl At-Tutsarı ̄ (d. 283/896) (Berlin, NY: Walter de Gruyter, 1979), p. 186. 10  ‘Lo! Allah (it is) Who splitteth the grain of corn and the date-stone (for sprouting). He bringeth forth the living from the dead, and is the bringer-forth of the dead from the living. Such is Allah. How then are ye perverted? He is the Cleaver of the Daybreak, and He hath appointed the night for stillness, and the sun and the moon for reckoning. That is the measuring of the Mighty, the Wise’ (surah 6: 95–96). 11  See especially surah 2: 2–4: ‘This is the Scripture whereof there is no doubt, a guidance unto those who ward off (evil). Who believe in the Unseen, and establish worship, and spend of that We have bestowed upon them; And who believe in that which is revealed unto thee (Muhammad) and that which was revealed before thee, and are certain of the Hereafter.’ For an introductory summary of Qur’anic composition, see further Robert Irwin, The Penguin Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature, pp. 30–41. 12  Gerhard Böwering, The Mystical Vision of Existence in Classical Islam, p. 157. 13  Böwering, The Mystical Vision of Existence in Classical Islam, p. 159.

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essential paradigm for the devout. In Böwering’s words, the Prophet’s qalb is ‘fortified by divine knowledge and saturated with divine love’; it becomes the ‘well-spring for the illumination of the hearts’ of humanity and ‘a treasure mine of God’s revelation’.14 Muhammad’s heart is ‘the organ of spiritual vision which absorbs the divine manifestation’ and ‘the root and source of man’s [sic] mystical union with the divine Reality as it manifests Itself’.15 As articulated in Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s Ittiḥa ̄d al-kawni, the universal tree signifies the perfect human being, as epitomized in the Prophet Muhammad. As such, it is the likeness—a copy (nuskha)—of the divine.16 We may especially think of Muhammad’s qalb as a nuskha of the Divine, acting as a crucial paradigm for contemplatives. The Heart and the ‘Mind’ Affective and cognitive processes cannot be severed too starkly in thirteenth-­century Arabic texts—just as with their English counterparts.17 For Ibn ʿArabı ̄ the heart is the locus of desire, but it is also the vehicle for discernment.18 In the chapter on Lot of the Bezels (XIII), Ibn ʿArabı ̄ cites 2: 88 of the Qur’an, ‘Our hearts are enveloped’, though here not referring to an encompassment in love, but rather to ‘a covering that prevents them from grasping the matter as it is in reality’: ‘These and similar things restrain the gnostic from acting freely in the world’ (p. 159).19 The verse for Ibn ʿArabı ̄ indicates limitation and a certain distance from the truth, a

 Böwering, The Mystical Vision, p. 161.  Böwering, The Mystical Vision, pp. 161–162. 16  See further Jaffray, trans., Universal Tree and the Four Birds, p. 83. 17  Alexander Treiger argues that al-Ghazāli defines qalb ‘as the non-bodily and immortal locus of human cognition’, ‘identical to what the philosophers call the rational soul’; it is ‘the locus of cognition peculiar to humans, which differentiates them from non-rational animals’: Treiger, Inspired Knowledge in Islamic Thought: Al-Ghaza ̄li’s Theory of Mystical Cognition and its Avicennan Foundation (London: Routledge, 2011; repr. 2012), pp. 9 and 17. It is important to revise the older assumption of a clear severance between emotion and ‘mind’ (e.g. see Gustave E. von Grunebaum’s comment: ‘The heart is to the Muslim not the seat of emotions but the seat of the mind’: Medieval Islam: A Study in Cultural Orientation [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953], p. 116). 18  On the heart and discernment, see especially Poem XXV and the commentary of Poem XLVIII, of the Tarjuma ̄n. 19  ‘And they say: Our hearts are hardened. Nay, but Allah hath cursed them for their unbelief. Little is that which they believe’ (surah 2: 88). 14

15

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muddying of perception.20 He refers later in the chapter to one ‘whose heart had been illumined by God with the light of faith’ (p. 161). Shushtarı ̄ more than once refers to the ‘eye of the heart’ (‘ʿayni qalbi’)—indicative either of the Beloved themselves or of a perceiving, ocular faculty of the heart.21 The latter is suggestive of cognitive process. Reason or intellect (ʿaql) is not always a negative failure: Ibn al-Fāriḍ speaks of those who are stripped of their reason (Naẓm, 676). Reason has its place; it has its uses and should not be discarded. It is linked intimately with ludic encounter. Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s speaker declares immediately after this defence of reason that play should not be forgotten completely (677), and this leads onto the passage of the shadow-play of Creation, as discussed in Chap. 1. However, it is also the case that these Sufi writers envisage some difference between the intellect (ʿaql) and more intuitive ways of knowing. This more intuitive process is frequently termed dhawq (‘taste’), resonating with Latin sapere and this term’s links with knowledge.22 In the Ezra chapter of Bezels (XIV), there is a crucial distinction made between divine revelation and intellect: Since […] the prophets derive their knowledge only from a particular divine revelation, their Hearts are simple from the intellectual point of view, knowing as they do the deficiency of the intellect, in its discursive aspect, when it comes to the understanding of things as they really are [essentially] [.] (p. 166)

For all its incisiveness, the intellect has its limitations, blinkering the eyes from true penetration of the essence of all things. Those exalted messengers, the prophets themselves, had hearts with simple intellects—and this does not in any way diminish the power of their knowledge. For Ibn ʿArabı ̄, ‘perfect knowledge is to be had only through a divine Self-­ revelation or when God draws back the veils from Hearts and eyes’ (Bezels, p. 166). The speaker of Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s Naẓm likewise says that the devotee need not look too much to books, to the lumbering ways of reason; the  He earlier observes ‘the veil that obscures the eyes of men’ (p. 159).  See, for example, Corriente, p. 68; see also Ibn al-Fāriḍ in the Naẓm (‘ayni qalbihi’, 318). 22  On dhawq, see further William Chittick, Divine Love: Islamic Literature and the Path to God (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), p.  311. On sapere, see further, Mary Carruthers, ‘Sweetness’, Speculum 81.4 (2006), 999–1013; and Rachel Fulton, ‘“Taste and see that the Lord is sweet” (Ps.33: 9): the Flavour of God in the Monastic West’, The Journal of Religion 86.2 (2006), 169–204. 20 21

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soul has been marked by its Beloved, and thus it is in the ‘world of remembrance’ (‘ālami t-tadhkāri’) that the soul has its ‘knowledge’ or ‘wisdom’ (ʿilm) (759). In fact, the poets actively play out strategies to confound the reason/ intellect, enabling more powerful forms of knowing; this all contributes to the Sufi state of bewilderment, ḥayra. As remarked in the exegesis of Poem XXXVII of the Tarjumān, ‘seek delight in the knowledge that bewilders the intellect and is exempt from all limitation’ (XXXVII: comm 2). The Beloved is a melange of opposites, brought into alluring unity: ‘The whiteness of her forehead is the sun’s, the blackness of the hair on her brow is the night’s: most wondrous of forms is she—a sun and a night together!’ (XXXIX: 6–7). She allows opposites to co-exist and pleasurably so: ‘Through her we are in daylight during the night and in a night of hair at noon’ (XXXIX: 8). This is attainable only with a surrender of reason (ʿaql). As the commentator declares: ‘God’s invisibility is His invisibility, and His visibility is His invisibility, if we regard Him and not our own reason’ (XXXIX: comm 8).23 The Heart and the ‘Spirit’ How do the Sufi writers distinguish the heart—in all its physical, volitional, psychological here-ness—with the eternal, ethereal soul? Across both the Islamic and Christian corpora, there is a complex, versatile relationship between the ‘heart’ and the eternal ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’. They are evidently not the same entity, but exactly how they differ and how they overlap is an intricate issue in terminology. Writing on Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s Naẓm al-sulu ̄k, Giuseppe Scattolini observes that whilst nafs and dhāt (‘essence’) are ‘constantly correlated to the term ana ̄ (I, my-self)’, the term ru ̄ḥ ‘usually denotes only some qualities of ana ̄, the spiritual ones as opposed to the sensible ones, understood as nafs’.24 There remains a close relationship between these terms and the sentient qalb (see especially lines 133–137, 350, and 405 of Naẓm al-sulu ̄k). An important parallel may also be found in a coeval text by a writer influenced by Sufi philosophy. That is Ḥayy Ibn 23  On oppositional balance, see further William Chittick, ‘Rūmı ̄ and wahdāt al-wujūd’, in Poetry and Mysticism in Islam: The Heritage of Rūmı ̄, ed. Amin Banani, Richard G.  Hovannisian, and Georges Sabagh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 70–111. 24  Giuseppe Scattolini, ‘The Mystical Experience of ʿUmar Ibn al-Fāriḍ or the Realization of Self (Ana ̄, I): The Poet and His Mystery’, The Muslim World 82.3–4 (1992), 274–286 (282).

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Yaqzān, by Ibn Tufail (1105–1185). As described in Chap. 1, in this treatise, the feral child Ḥ ayy is alone in the wilderness and raised by a doe. The doe hears the infant crying in hunger and, having lost her own fawn, nurtures Ḥ ayy. There is an affecting passage on the bond between them: The baby grew so fond of her he would cry if she were late, and then she would come rushing back. […] She treated him gently and tenderly, taking him where fruit trees grew and feeding him the sweet, ripe fruits that fell from them. […] She brought him to water when he was thirsty; and when the sun beat down she shaded him. When he was cold she warmed him[.]25

Sadly, the doe dies of old age, and confronted with this new phenomenon, Ḥ ayy is devastated. Seeing her without movement, he concludes that her members need an unseen part. He considers further that the ‘vital organ’ must be ‘centrally located’, and ‘he could feel what must be such an organ in his breast’.26 As a result, he dissects the doe’s body, finding her heart: He cut open the heart and inside found two chambers, a left and a right. The right ventricle was clogged with a thick clot of blood, but the left was empty and clear. ‘What I’m looking for’, he said to himself, ‘must live in one of these two chambers’.

After this dissection, he decides that the body itself must be ‘low and worthless’.27 His focus and devotion are thus ‘transferred now from the body to the being that was its master and mover’. Ḥ ayy realizes that the eternal life-force is contained within the anatomical heart, disappearing upon death.28 Discovering Within the Heart Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam The qalb is tied intimately with both the intellectual faculty (ʿaql) and the eternal rūḥ, though it is never quite synonymous with either. This  Ḥ ayy Ibn Yaqza ̄n, trans. Goodman, p. 109.  Ḥ ayy Ibn Yaqza ̄n, trans. Goodman, p. 112. 27  Ḥ ayy Ibn Yaqza ̄n, trans. Goodman, pp. 113–114. 28  Ḥ ayy Ibn Yaqza ̄n, trans. Goodman, p. 115. 25 26

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multivalent qalb becomes a site of spiritual discovery: of encounter and intimacy with the Divine, and assimilation of Divine wisdom. In Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s Fus ̣ūs ̣ al-ḥikam, the heart becomes the place of manifestation of the Divine: ‘the Heart encompasses the Reality’, and it continues to thirst (Isaac VI, Bezels, pp. 101–102). The gnostic heart is a rich, active terrain, with God maintaining the attentiveness of gnostic hearts, so that they are not distracted by worldly diversions (Bezels, Chapter X, ‘Hud’, p. 137). The heart is generated by God’s mercy, and within the heart is found the ‘Reality’ of the Divine (Bezels, Chapter XII: ‘Shuʿaib’, p. 147). This Heart can expand and contract (‘the Heart is necessarily wide or restricted according to the form in which God manifests Himself’), but ‘can comprise no more than the form in which the Self-manifestation occurs’. In harmony with the title of the whole work, the Heart of the ‘Perfect Man’ (insa ̄n al-ka ̄mil) is a bezel, ‘the setting of the stone of the ring, conforming to it in every way, being circular, square, or any other shape according to the shape of the stone’ (p. 149). As such, the shapes of the heart are formed by God’s movements within it.29 Such manifestation is contingent upon the gnostic’s own belief. Whilst the Heart is allowed clear sight through God’s grace, this disclosure remains predicated on ‘the form of its belief’ (p.  149). Chapter XXV (Moses) refers to God’s guidance being ‘deposited in his inmost heart, although he himself did not know it’ (p. 256). Our knowledge must remain imperfect, as encapsulated in the summation of the bezels in Muhammad, the seal of the prophets; we can only encounter the God whom we can contain in our hearts. Only a certain, delimited, God can be known, a ‘God of beliefs’: ‘it is this God Who is contained in His servant’s Heart, since the Absolute God cannot be contained by anything’ (Bezels XXVII, ‘Muhammad’, p.  284). The Unknown Other is too absolute, too pervasive, too free from any enclosure. Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s Tarjumān The Tarjuma ̄n further engages with the heart as container (however imperfect) of the Divine, as the site of the Self-manifestation or Self-­ disclosure (tajalli). In the final line of Poem IV, the Beloved’s voice asserts this containment: ‘And she said, “Is it not enough for him that I am in his 29  In ‘Noah’ (Bezels III), the heart is also mapped onto the ‘house’ of surah 71: 28. Noah says the following in the Qur’anic account: ‘My Lord! Forgive me and my parents and him who entereth my house believing, and believing men and believing women, and increase not the wrong-doers in aught save ruin’ (surah 71: 28).

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heart and that he beholds me at every moment? Is it not enough?”’ (IV: 6). The Divine is ever-present, in-dwelling in the heart of the gnostic. As the commentary to this line puts it, ‘let him not seek me from without and let it satisfy him that I have descended into his heart, so that he beholds me in his essence and through his essence at every moment’ (IV: comm 6). The omnipresence of the Divine is to be found within the versatile heart. On the Beloved in Poem II, the speaker remarks: ‘Wild is she, none can make her his friend; she has gotten in her solitary chamber a mausoleum of remembrance’ (7). The commentary offers rich exegesis on this ‘solitary chamber’, which is glossed as the qalb. The solitude is necessary because she is ‘looking on herself, for God says, “Neither My earth nor My heaven contains Me, but I am contained by the heart of My servant who is a believer”’ (II: comm 7). Continual in-dwelling is further evident in Poem VI, an indwelling that co-exists with separation: ‘When they departed, endurance and patience departed. They departed, although they were dwelling in the core of my heart’ (VI: 1). As the commentary elaborates: ‘God dwells in the heart, according to the Tradition “Neither My earth nor My heaven contains Me, but I am contained in the heart of My servant who believes”’ (VI: comm 1). The manifestation of the Divine in the heart requires attentiveness, echoing the statement in Chapter X of the Bezels, quoted earlier: ‘For lo, my heart is attached to them and listens silently whenever the camel-driver urges them on with his chant’ (LII: 3). This indicates a responsive heart—but it is also dependent on the responsiveness of the Beloved. The notion of a listening heart also has powerful correspondence with the Sufi practice of samaʿ, spiritual audition. The heart is endlessly malleable in the Tarjumān, and the activity within and to the heart is testament to its versatility as such a site of discovery. Common is its illumination (IX; XX; XXVII) and burning (VIII; XLI: 3) or melting (XVI). It is also said to be split (XXVIII) or to be tender (XX). The heart is also its own landscape, with a horizon (XX) and rising moon (LVIII). Scents blow on it (commentary of XVI). The heart is also a felt entity. The heart can be frenzied (XXII) and grieving (XXV); it has palpitations (XLI) and it throbs (XLIII). The hands of love are said to play with it (XLVIII). Most famously, in Poem XI, the heart is ‘capable of every form’, with important explanation given in the commentary (XI: 13–14). In this poem, the Lover yearns in the desert landscape, with its arāk, bān, and ghada trees and its mourning doves: ‘O doves that haunt the ara ̄k and bān trees, have pity! Do not double my woes by your lamentation!’ (XI: 1). The lover cries: ‘The spirits faced one another in the thicket of the ghadā

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trees and bent their branches towards me, and it (the bending) annihilated me’ (XI: 4). The Beloved is a ‘gazelle whose pasture is between the breast-­ bones and the bowels’ (XI: 12). Following this image of an internalized, anatomized pasture, the speaker imagines their heart assuming a multitude of forms: ‘My heart has become capable of every form: it is a pasture for gazelles and a convent for Christian monks, | And a temple for idols and the pilgrim’s Kaʿba and tables of the Tora and the book of the Koran [sic]’ (XI: 13–14). The heart becomes a place of nurture, a place of devotion, a place of learning or wisdom. This resonates with other points in the Tarjumān, with the heart as an ‘ancient temple’ (XXVII: comm. 1) or a desert (XXXI: 9). In all these dwelling or reading places, there is the potential for an encounter with the Divine, a nurturance of Divine love. They are all places of discovery. The shape-shifting heart allows an inclusivity of love, with Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s famous proclamation of a ‘religion of love’ (dı ̄n al-ḥubb): ‘I follow the religion of Love: whatever way Love’s camels take, that is my religion and my faith’ (XI: 15). Schimmel and more recently Gregory Lipton have cautioned readers not to overstate Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s religious tolerance, however. As Lipton observes in Rethinking Ibn ʿArabı ̄: While Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s claim to a ‘heart capable of every form’ is arguably synonymous with a claim to be capable of every ‘belief’ (iʿtiqad̄ ), it is not tantamount—as is often interpreted—to accepting the Perennialist notion of the ‘universal validity’ of every religion.30

But an inclusivity certainly remains. In this inclusivity, Ibn ʿArabı ̄ imagines paradigms of famous, legendary lovers in Arabic tradition: ‘We have a pattern in Bishr, the Lover of Hind and her sister, and in Qays and Lubnām and in Mayya and Ghaylān’ (XI: 16). The commentary highlights the difference between these lovers and the Lover of this poem: ‘Love, quâ love, is one and the same reality to those Arab lovers and to me, but the objects of our love are different, for they loved a phenomenon, whereas I love the Essential’ (XI: comm 16).31 30  Gregory Lipton, Rethinking Ibn ʿArabı ̄ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 21; and Annemarie Schimmel, As Through a Veil: Mystical Poetry in Islam (NY: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 28–39. 31  See further Leonard Lewisohn, ‘Sufism’s Religion of Love, from Rabi’a to Ibn ʿArabı ̄’, in The Cambridge Companion to Sufism, ed. Lloyd Ridgeon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 150–80.

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The shape-shifting heart does have its limitations, which become ever clearer through the speaker’s meditation on the uniqueness of Divine Beauty in Poem XXX. The speaker imagines the feathery tamarisk trees at an-Naqa with their ‘qatā birds’, and they gaze upon camels and gazelles in ‘the deserts of Idam’ (XXX: 1–2). In this position, the Lover is overcome by sorrowful love (XXX: 4, 7). In the search for their absent Beloved, the heart becomes a treasure-seeker: ‘My heart is the Sāmirı ̄ of the time: as often as it sees the footprints it seeks the golden one that was turned to gold’ (32). The ‘Sāmirı ̄’ refers to the follower of Moses who tempted the Israelites into idolatry, the one who made the golden calf.32 At first glance, ‘the Sāmirı ̄’ thus seems an odd choice as a descriptor for the gnostic’s heart. But in Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s verse, the image takes on an arresting polyvalency.33 Not unlike the Sāmirı ̄, the heart is tormented by the phantoms of their journey; in this world of similitudes, the heart can only find the glittering, misleading reflection of what is true gold. Taken further, the reference also highlights how the heart can be tainted by a restiveness to find the Divine—a restiveness that can lead to spiritual difficulty. Writing on Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s Kita ̄b al-ifsār ʿan nata ̄’ij afsa ̄r (The Book of the Unveiling of the Effects of the Voyage), Michel Chodkiewicz explains that in more than one of his writings, Ibn ʿArabı ̄ understands the Sāmirı ̄ to have been granted a vision of the angels that hold up God’s throne, one of whom takes the form of a bull. The Sāmirı ̄ thus thought he could craft Moses’ God in the calf-idol: ‘Via a premature interpretation of an incomplete spiritual experience he […] attempted to anticipate divine acts’. Chodkiewicz further reminds readers that ‘the calf, ‘ijl in Arabic, is actually related to the same root as ‘ajal, haste’.34 As it seeks, the heart carries within itself the risk of the Sāmirı ̄’s restlessness. This adds an edge 32  ‘Lo! We have tried thy folk in thine absence, and As-Samiri hath misled them. Then Moses went back unto his folk, angry and sad. […] They said: We broke not tryst with thee of our own will, but we were laden with burdens of ornaments of the folk, then cast them (in the fire), for thus As-Samiri proposed. Then he produced for them a calf, of saffron hue, which gave forth a lowing sound. And they cried: This is your god and the god of Moses […]. (Moses) said: And what hast thou to say, O Samiri? He said: I perceived what they perceive not, so I seized a handful from the footsteps of the messenger, and then threw it in. Thus my soul commended to me’ (surah 20: 85–96). 33  See further Omar Edaibat on how Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s work ‘seeks to uphold the rich polysemy of the Qur’an’: Edaibat, ‘Muhyi l-Din Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s Personalist Theory of the Shari’a: An Examination of His Legal Doctrine’, Journal of Sufi Studies 6.1 (2017), 1–46. 34  Michel Chodkiewicz, ‘The Endless Voyage’, Journal of the Muhyiddin ‘Ibn Arabı ̄ Society 19 (1996), online, https://ibnarabisociety.org/the-endless-voyage-michel-chodkiewicz/

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of caution to the remarks in the commentary on the heart as container for Divine knowledge and love. The speaker identifies ‘diverse sorts of evidentiary knowledge poured into the gardens of the Divine hearts’ (XXX: comm 20); the Beloved ‘reveals to the hearts of gnostics mysterious love’ (comm 24); and the exegete also notes ‘those whose hearts are prepared to receive the overflowing grace of the spirit’ (XXX: comm 32). With the Sāmirı ̄ narrative kept in mind, the heart remembers that even as it is a receptacle for such outpouring, it must continue to act with care. In the closing line of the poem, the youth is ‘made to vanish’ when ‘a dove warbles’ (XXX: 37). In the commentary, the exegete explains that it is the heart of the gnostic which vanishes, with the doves signifying ‘the spirits of the intermediate world’ (XXX: comm 37). Disappearance of the heart is possibly an expression of fana’ (annihilation)—the heart is the site of discovery, but itself must dissolve in the higher stages of contemplative ascent.35 Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s Naẓm al-Sulūk In Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s Naẓm, the heart, and with it the soul, is a site of plentiful discovery.36 They become the spaces of potential enrichment. The speaker describes their emaciation as a form of disclosure, even a kind of ‘spy’ (raqı ̄b) that reveals all through the collusion of the soul (here, nafs); this suggests that the soul is a site of self-knowledge: ‘My tongue did not tell, but to his [the spy’s] hearing the murmurings of my soul [nafs] showed the secret it had hidden. | […] So he informed the neighbourhood of me, making manifest that my situation was hidden, and he was of those who were knowledgeable’ (Naẓm, 22–24). It is as though, the speaker says, their ‘spy’ was informed by recording angels who have descended from heaven (‘al-kirāma al-kātibı ̄na tanazzalū’, 25), in invocation of surah

[accessed 31st December 2020]. See further Shari L. Lowin, Arabic and Hebrew Love Poems in Al-Andalus (London: Routledge, 2014), especially p. 101. 35  See also the poem attributed to Rābiʾa al-ʿAdawiyya known as In My Soul: ‘In my soul there is a temple, a shrine, a mosque, a church that dissolve, that dissolve in God’. Daniel Ladinsky, trans., In My Soul, reprinted in Mahmood Jamal, ed., Islamic Mystical Poetry: Sufi Verse from the Early Mystics to Rūmı ̄ (London: Penguin, 2009), p. 12. 36  On Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s poetic craft, see further Th. Emil Homerin, ‘Ibn al-Fāriḍ: Ruba’iyat, Ghazal, Qasida’, in Windows on the House of Islam: Muslim Sources on Spirituality and Religious Life, ed. John Renard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 194–202.

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82:  10–12.37 As with Ibn ʿArabı ̄, the heart and soul are associated with fana’: the killing of the self (‘qatli nafsiya’, 112) brings relief and fulfilment (112). And again, like Ibn ʿArabı ̄, the soul and heart become linked with solitary enclosure, a bridal chamber of witness and discovery (202–214). The heart is associated even with the prophetic revelations to both Moses and Muhammad: I have the ear of Moses, and my heart [qalb] knows the wonderful vision seen by the eye of Muhammad. My soul [rūḥ] is the soul [rūḥ] of all that spirits [arwah̄ ] are, and all the beauty one sees in creation flows from my clay. (Naẓm, 312–313)

As Moses heard from the Burning Bush, as Muhammad saw in revelation, so does the Lover’s heart receive exceptional insight. The Lover’s spirit is inseparable from all spirits, for all is a glowing Oneness of Being, all creation flows from the Lover as creative source. The heart and soul are integral to the Lover’s ascent. The Lover imagines: ‘If she unfurled my body, she would have seen all essences, with all hearts in which is all love’ (387). The term for ‘essence’ (jawhar) is linked to the heart (qalb) and its containment of love (maḥabba). The heart is explicitly termed a ‘house’ (‘bayt’), containing a marker for the direction of prayer (qiblah) like a mosque and becoming a ‘sanctuary’ (ḥaram) (448–451). The Lover speaks of their secret interiority (sirr) taking part of a night journey (isrāʾ), echoing that of the Prophet Muhammad; the speaker’s heart embarks on unparalleled adventures of revelation.38 The heart is also especially associated with sentient responses to sound (414, 727–29), as in Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s Tarjumān Poem LII quoted earlier, evoking the Sufi practice of sama’. Sama’ is a Sufi strategy of dhikr (remembrance), and through this, attaining heightened intimacy with the Divine (see further Naẓm, line 560).39 The knowing heart becomes an interface of memory and sensing through 37  ‘Lo! there are above you guardians, Generous and recording, Who know (all) that ye do’ (surah 82: 10–12). 38  According to Islamic teaching, ‘Isra is the first part of a night journey undertaken by Muhammad: ‘Glorified be He Who carried His servant by night from the Inviolable Place of Worship to the Far distant place of worship the neighbourhood whereof We have blessed, that We might show him of Our tokens!’ (surah 17: 1). 39  See further Knysh, Islamic Mysticism: A Short History, pp. 317–325.

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‘what the messenger senses brought from outside’ (424). The Lover enters into the complexities of the process of subjugating the self. Differently from Ancrene Wisse, the senses are not figured as gatekeepers, but as messengers (‘rusūl’). The stimuli they relay to the heart are beneficial and not dangerous. Later in the poem, with the speaker ever closer to oneness, they cry joyfully: I dove into the seas of union, dove deeper still for solitude, and so recovered the pearl without equal, That I could hear my acts with a seeing ear and witness my words with a hearing eye. […] [T]he flutist’s notes quiver in accord with the string’s plucked by a singing girl’s hand As she sings poetry whose every note moves hearts to fly to their lote tree [sidrah]. (Homerin, 725–729)40

The speaker is approaching that Oneness, the state where no distinction between the One and the Many, between Creator and Creation, remains. In this joyful union, senses coalesce as with the ‘seeing ear’ and ‘hearing eye’. Their ‘within’ becomes a site of astonishing unity, discoveries enmeshed within the speaker’s own processes of audition. It is also, crucially, the site of revelation: the ‘sidrah’ or ‘lote tree’ indicates the place of Muhammad’s vision (Qur’an, surah 53: 13–18).41 Hearts moving to the lote tree are moving to places of wondrous discovery. Shushtarı ̄ For Shushtarı ̄, the heart of the Divine, and the heart of the Lover, is the outermost sphere of the Cosmos (al-fala ̄k al-atlās): altitudinous and pregnant with mystery.42 The practices of dhikr must involve the heart in all its fullness. As said in one monorhyme song or chant, possibly 40  This is Homerin’s translation: ‘Umar Ibn al-Fāriḍ: Sufi Verse, Saintly Life, pp. 281–283. All other translations of Naẓm in this chapter are my own. 41  These Qur’anic verses will be quoted and discussed further in Chap. 8 (‘Birds’ Ascent: Conclusions’). 42  My translation of al-fala ̄k al-atlās (Corriente, p. 77) differs from Alvarez’s translation, ‘the Atlas mountains’ (p. 45). Mohamed Haj Yousef translates Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s use of al-falak̄ al-atla ̄s as ‘Isotropic Orb’ (Ibn ʿArabı ̄: Time and Cosmology [London: Routledge, 2008], p. 11). Frank Griffel also observes that the outermost sphere was known by Arab astrono-

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pseudo-­Shushtarı ̄an: ‘You must be present in your heart [“ḥudūran biqālbin”] when you invoke God’ (Corriente, p. 153).43 On the heart is inscribed the intense determination of a Lover in their quest (Corriente, pp. 79–80). The heart is a space of written wisdom, the carrier of deep covenants. It pulses with weighty inscription: ‘In the religion of love [dı ̄n al-hawa] there are firm commitments, covenants held without deviation, established through the conscience, written and engraved in the inner depths’ (Corriente, p.  80). The Arabic word  I have translated as ‘conscience’ here is ḍamı ̄r, which has the sense of inner self, heart, or conscience.44 In particular, in one qas ̣ı ̄da, the heart (here, fuʾa ̄d) is associated with luminescence, with the heart being the ‘east’: ‘Everything you say is in the west, but my heart is in the east’ (Nashshār, p. 56). As explained by Alvarez: The Arabic word for ‘east’, mashriq, is derived from the verb sharaqa, ‘to rise’ (sun) or ‘to shine’, ‘radiate’. The word for the west, maghrib, is derived from the verb gharaba, ‘to depart, withdraw’, or in the case of the sun, ‘to set’. Thus, the opposition here between east and west is one between illumination and darkness.45

A purified heart is a worthy abode for the Beloved, as it is in Ancrene Wisse and the Wooing Group. This is evident in a short monorhyme qaṣı ̄da: Strip away the others in word and in deed; unite the separated branches in their roots. Do not turn yourself to family, and tell them to remain; in order to bring fire, family must be left where they are. Purify the houses of God of all images, as his house is your heart, if you have reason [or wisdom]. (Nashshār, p. 57)46 mers as the ‘sphere of Atlas’ (Al-Ghazāli’s Philosophical Theology [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009], p. 137). 43  On the form of this song or chant and its potentially false attribution to Shushtarı ̄, see further Alvarez, trans., Shushtarı ̄: Songs of Love and Devotion, p. 165, note for ‘Remembrance of God’. 44  See further Corriente, ed., p. 245. 45  Alvarez, trans., Shushtarı ̄: Songs of Love and Devotion, p. 57, note for ‘My heart resides in the east’. 46  The phrase ‘strip away’ is Alvarez’s rendition, which I have adopted here in my own translation (see Alvarez, trans., Shushtarı ̄: Songs of Love and Devotion, p. 68).

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As a tree is stripped bare, so is the contemplative heart, with the ruined remains united at the very source. The line on collecting fire without family is an invocation of Qur’an 20: 10 and 28: 29, with Moses leaving his kin behind to collect the flame on the mountain.47 Shushtarı ̄’s speaker uses this narrative to capture the ascetic quest. The Lover unites with the Beloved, but only through severing ties with family and avoiding dependence on external images. It may even remind us of the opening of Hali Meiðhad (Holy Maidenhood), another text associated with Ancrene Wisse; the opening is itself based on Psalm 44: 11.48 The rejection of images may also remind us of Aelred of Rievaulx’s (d. 1167) denouncement of those who rely too much on such outward icons.49 In the process of purification, the heart for Shushtarı ̄ becomes a home for the Beloved—resonant with the home cleansed for the Lord’s entrance in Ancrene Wisse, as will be seen. And, as will be seen in the Wooing Group, there is a reciprocity between the hearts of Lover and Beloved. In one muwashshaḥ of Shushtarı ̄’s, there is a suggested intimate communication between hearts of the Beloved and the Lover: ‘preserve my secret in your heart’ (Corriente, p. 146).50 The word ‘janana’ is translated by Alvarez as ‘heart’, which I adopt here (p. 66). In another muwashshaḥ by Shushtarı ̄, the dual abodes are brought to light. It is said to the Beloved: ‘ja’altā kūll alqulūb mahāllak’ 47  ‘Hath there come unto thee the story of Moses? When he saw a fire and said unto his folk: Lo! Wait! I see a fire afar off. Peradventure I may bring you a brand therefrom or may find guidance at the fire’ (surah 20: 9–10); ‘Then, when Moses had fulfilled the term, and was travelling with his housefolk, he saw in the distance a fire and said unto his housefolk: Bide ye (here). Lo! I see in the distance a fire; peradventure I shall bring you tidings thence, or a brand from the fire that ye may warm yourselves’ (surah 28: 29). 48  ‘Hearken, O daughter, and see, and incline thy ear: and forget thy people and thy father’s house’ (Psalm 44: 11). See the opening of Hali Meiðhad in The Katherine Group MS Bodley 34, ed. Emily Rebeka Huber and Elizabeth Robertson (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2016), https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/hali-meithhad [accessed 25th July 2020]. See also the ‘Introduction’ to this edition, as well as the editorial introduction in Hali Meiðhad, ed. Bella Millett. EETS O.S. 284 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. xiii–lvi. 49  ‘Sint haec illorum qui nihil intus in quo glorientur habentes, exterius sibi comparant in quo delectantur’ (De institutione inclusarum, in Aelredi Rievallensis Opera Omnia: 1 Opera Ascetica, ed. A. Hoste and C. H. Talbot. Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis, i. Turnhout: Brepols, 1971, 657). (Leave be [visual images] to those who have nothing within themselves in which to glory, and so acquire things outside themselves in which to take pleasure.) 50  In London, British Library MS 9255, this poem is attributed to Ibn Khatı ̄b (fourteenth century). See further Alvarez, trans., Shushtarı ̄: Songs of Love and Devotion, p. 160.

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(You made all hearts your abode), and then ‘ja’āltu qālbi ilāyka sūknā’ (I made in you my heart’s abode) (Corriente, p. 80). This parallels the activity of the readers of the English texts, who dwell in the Heart of the Lord while crafting their own hearts into dwelling-places for Him.

The ‘Heorte’ Ancrene Wisse is heart-shaped. Its texture, its structure, its very composition—all is dependent on the image of the heart. When the author outlines the origins of his compositional process in the preface, he observes that he will select two rules from a range of possibilities (1: 11–12). Of these two, the dominant rule is defined as that which ‘riwleð þe heorte’ (1: 13: rules the heart). Such a rule has transformative potential, rendering the heart ‘efne ant smeðe wiðute cnost ant dolc of woh inwit’ (1: even and smooth, without the lumps and sores of a troubled conscience). So, from the first stages in the text, the ‘heorte’ becomes a malleable object that metamorphoses as it encodes various cognitive-affective processes. As Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s heart is capable of every form, so does the heart in Ancrene Wisse mutate into a myriad of objects and beings. At its start, the author says that the genuine anchorite must be ‘swete and swote iheortet’ (48: 3: sweet and sweet-hearted). This is attained by expelling anger from the heart. Those readers who fill their hearts with anger grow a rough skin around it (49: 47): instead of being sweet and soft, the heart becomes a spiky, bristling creature. It is, in fact, directly compared to a wild animal that is dangerously on the move. As the author remarks, with a basis in Gregory the Great’s (d. 604) Regula pastoralis and Psalm 37: 1151: þe heorte is a ful wilde beast, ant makeð moni liht lupe, as seint Gregoire seið: Niichil corde fugatius, ‘Na þing ne etflið mon sonre þen his ahne heorte.’ Dauið, Godes prophete, meande i sum time þet he wes etsteart him: Cor meum dereliquit me: þet is, ‘Min heorte is edflohe me.’ (20: 8–13) (The heart is a very wild beast, and makes many easy leaps, as Saint Gregory says: Nothing is more prone to flee than the heart. ‘No thing may sooner take flight than his own heart’. David, God’s prophet, complained one time that it started away from him: My heart has left me: that is ‘my heart has fled from me’.) 51  ‘My heart is troubled, my strength hath left me, and the light of my eyes itself is not with me’ (Psalm 37: 11). See also Millett, trans., Guide for Anchoresses, p. 182 n. 2/3.

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Table 3.2  Definitions of Middle English “heorte” The Heart as associated with …

Definitions as given and cited in the MED

Physiology, anatomy

‘the human heart considered medically or scientifically’; ‘The region of the body about the heart; the stomach’; ‘Something resembling a heart’, ‘The heart viewed as the centre of life, vitality, or energy; the heart as physically affected by emotion’ ‘the Christian soul, the centre of spiritual life and moral virtues’ ‘The conscious self’ ‘the true self as opposed to the outward persona’; ‘Character, disposition, temperament’ ‘the centre of psychic and sensitive functions’; ‘The centre or seat of human emotion, love, etc.’; ‘The mind, understanding, imagination’; ‘memory, remembrance’; ‘instinct, premonition’ ‘the centre of spiritual life and moral virtues’; ‘moral consciousness, moral sensitivity, conscience’ ‘Purpose, will, intention’

Soul Consciousness ‘Self’, ‘selfhood’ Affective and cognitive faculties Moral faculty; site of spiritual guidance Will and intent

The heart here becomes a living organism, an animal that cannot be easily tamed. It is an insecure home.52 The Middle English term ‘heorte’ pervades Ancrene Wisse and the Wooing Group.53 As Ancrene Wisse progresses, its precise meaning becomes steadily more expansive and uncertain—a semantic fluidity evident throughout the Middle English corpus. ‘Heorte’ has an array of anatomical, affective, cognitive, and consciousness-based meanings, as demonstrated in Table 3.2.54 The ‘heart’ becomes a cornerstone image in the attempts to express a wealth of cognitive-affective stirrings. As observed by Linda Georgianna: Moral theological concepts, such as intention, contrition, consent and temptation, entered the popular literature as discussions of the ‘heart’,

 See also Ancrene Wisse, 30: 398–404.  See further Concordance to Ancrene Wisse MS Corpus Christi College Cambridge 402, ed. Jennifer Potts, Lorna Stevenson and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (Cambridge: D.  S. Brewer, 1993), pp. 335–338, 399; and Concordances to the Katherine Group and the Wooing Group, ed. Lorna Stevenson and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (Cambridge: D.  S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 835–837. 54  See further entry ‘herte (n.)’ in the Middle English Dictionary. 52 53

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which could be torn by indecision, wounded by sin, broken by remorse, and smoothed and healed in confession.55

Eric Jager has further examined the heart as the basis of inscription and written disclosure.56 There is fluidity with the Latin terms cor, anima, and mens, and this is reflected in their English counterparts.57 In Anglo-Saxon Psychologies in the Vernacular and Latin Traditions, Leslie Lockett observes a complex plurality in the terminology for human psychology in Old English.58 In the Early Middle English texts studied in the present book, a plurality and fluidity remains in place.59 As with the Arabic texts, the ‘heart’ of Ancrene Wisse remains in complex interplay with bodily organs, ratiocentric faculties, and the eternal ‘soul’. The Heart and the ‘Mind’ There is the representation of the heart as both part of the anatomy useful in prayer—as the rest of the body bends in genuflection—and a figurative encoding of all cognitive-affective stirring. In outlining the devotions in Part I, the author tells the anchorite to beat their ‘heorte’, akin to beating their ‘breoste’: the heart is here a part of the body, carrying potent shows of remorse (8: 58). In this instance, the heart becomes both  physical site and encoder of all cognitive-affective stirring. The anchorite must be sensitive to this heart, for it holds the indication of their capacity to pray.60 The prayers for their most beloved saints must be

55  Linda Georgianna, The Solitary Self: Individuality in the Ancrene Wisse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 142, 101. 56  See Eric Jager, The Book of the Heart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), especially pp. 91 and 108–111; and Eric Jager, ‘The Book of the Heart: Reading and Writing the Medieval Subject’, Speculum 71 (1996), 1–26. Heart inscriptions will be addressed in Chap. 6 (‘Absence’). 57  On the Latin terms, see further Carruthers, The Book of Memory, p. 59. 58  Leslie Lockett, Anglo-Saxon Psychologies in the Vernacular and Latin Traditions (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), especially pp. 17–53. 59  See further Lazikani, Cultivating the Heart, p. 15. 60  On Part I, see further: Bella Millett, ‘Ancrene Wisse and the Book of Hours’, in Writing Religious Women: Female Spiritual and Textual Practices in Late Mediaeval England, ed. Denis Renevey and Christiania Whitehead (Cardiff, 2000), pp. 21–40; Barbara Raw, ‘The Prayers and Devotions in the Ancrene Wisse’, in Chaucer and Middle English: Studies in Honour of Rossell Hope Robbins, ed. Beryl Rowland (London: Allen & Unwin, 1974),

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according to how they ‘bereð on heorte’ (12: 181). The phrase ‘bereð on heorte’ reappears later in the Part: Al þet ȝe eauer seggeð of þulliche oþre bonen, as Pater Nostres ant Auez on ower ahne wise, salmes ant ureisuns, Ich am wel ipaiet. Euchan segge ase best bereð hire on heorte. (18: 391–393) (All that you ever say in your own way of other such prayers, as the ‘Our Fathers’ and ‘Hail Marys’, psalms and orisons, I am well pleased. Say each as you best bear it in heart.)

The phrase ‘bereð on heorte’ has been translated as the following: ‘as the spirit moves you’ and ‘as seems best to her’.61 If translated more literally, however, the anchoritic reader says their prayers according to how they ‘bear it on heart’. The heart is an indicator of the capacity to recall, desire, and voice those central devotions of the Pater Noster, the Aves, and the psalms and prayers.62 Again, it is important not to sever emotion from ‘intellect’ and/or ‘reason’ too sharply in Ancrene Wisse. Whilst the focus can be on the heart as site of embodied affect—for instance, the heart having pain (‘sar’) or becoming ‘heui’ (heavy) in sorrow (77: 356)—there is also clear association with cognitive insight, as an anchorite can be ‘blind iheortet’ (68: 14, blind-hearted); like Ibn ʿArabı ̄, the heart is associated with cognitive discernment. In particular, the heart is the cradle of two significant affective shifts for anchoritic readers: hope and compassion. In both cases, it is not possible to read these affective shifts as being empty of cognitive and ratiocentric processes. Part I elaborates on the heart as the seat of compassion, in a significant passage that places emphasis on the readers ‘imprinting’ humanity onto the heart, immediately redolent of the mechanisms for remembrance and imagination.63 The readers also attempt to catch the pp. 260–271; and Roger Dahood, ‘Design in Part I of the Ancrene Riwle’, Medium Ævumn 56 (1987), 1–11. 61  See further Millett, trans. Guide for Anchoresses, pp. 12 and 18. 62  See further Annie Sutherland, English Psalms in the Middle Ages, 1300–1450 (Oxford, 2015), p. 20. 63  See further Carruthers, The Book of Memory, pp.  65–68; Alastair Minnis, ‘Medieval Imagination and Memory’ in Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson (eds), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, 9 Vols, II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp.  239–274; and Stock, The Integrated Self: Augustine, the Bible, and Ancient Thought (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), especially chapter 2 (‘The Contemplative Imagination’), pp.  47–97. For comparative passages on the imprinting of

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Lord’s own compassion through ‘þe ehe of his are’ (the eye of his mercy [or grace])—the ocular image in this instance also evocative of cognitive process (12: 197–204).64 Part II shows the heart as the seat of ‘hope’, and the process of its nurturance is indicative of the reading process. ‘Hope is a swete spice inwið þe heorte, þet sweteð al þet bitter þet te bodi drinkeð’ (32: 482–483: Hope is a sweet spice within the heart, which sweetens all the bitterness that the body drinks). Hope preserves the heart in its whole form, a concept buttressed by the quotation of a proverb: ‘Hope halt te heorte hal, hwet-se þe flesch drehe; ase me seið, “ȝef hope nere, heorte tobreke”’ (32: 490–491: Hope preserves the heart whole, whatever the flesh endures; as one says, ‘If there were no hope, the heart would break’).65 The author invokes the unusual image of chewing hope in the heart: ‘For-þi, as ȝe wulleð halden inwið ow hope, ant te swete breað of hire þe geueð sawle mihte, wið muð itunet cheoweð hire inwið ower heorte’ (32–33: 493–495: Therefore, as you will preserve hope inside you, and her sweet breath that gives the soul strength, with shut mouth chew her in your heart). This is suggestive of ruminatio, a mode of reading that cannot be reduced to either a ‘cognitive’ or an ‘affective’ process; it is a melange of the two. The anchoritic readers ruminate in this instance on the contents of their own hearts, the heart becoming a text for mastication and consumption. The Heart and the ‘Soul’ Ancrene Wisse alludes repeatedly to the heart as an enclosure which contains the soul. In the author’s synopsis of Part II in the preface, the heart is defined as the home of the soul (‘ower heorte, þet ordre ant religiun ant sawle lif is inne’) (5: 162–163: your heart, in which is order and religion

remembrance, see also Aelred, De institutione inclusarum, 642; translated Macpherson (p. 52); and the Vita of Christina of Markyate, ed. Talbot, pp. 46–47. 64  On the association between ocular faculties and cognition or intellect, see further Gregory F.  Lanave, ‘Bonaventure’, in The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity, ed. Sarah Coakley and Paul L. Gavrilyuk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 159–173 (p. 165). I mention Bonaventure (c. 1217–1224) here not as a direct source for Ancrene Wisse; rather, Bonaventure’s relevance is in his broader influence on the devotional cultures of the period. 65  Millett, Ancrene Wisse, vol. II, notes that the statement ‘ȝef hope nere, heorte tobreke’ is ‘apparently a native alliterative proverb’, 7, 2/491.

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and the soul’s life). This is made all the more explicit at the opening of Part II, based on citation of Proverbs 4: 23: Omni custodia serua cor tuum, quia ex ipso uita procedit. ‘Wið alles cunnes warde, dohter,’ seið Salomon, “wite wel þin heorte; for sawle lif is in hire, ȝef ha is wel iloket.’ þe heorte wardeins beoð þe fif wittes: sihðe ant herunge, smechunge ant smeallunge, ant euch limes felunge. Ant we schulen speoken of alle. For hwa-se wit þeose wel, he deð Salomones bode: he wit wel his heorte ant his sawle heale. (20: 1–8). (With all watchfulness guard your heart, for from it comes life. ‘With all kinds of watchfulness, daughter’, says Solomon, ‘protect well your heart; for the soul’s life is in her [i.e. the heart], if she is well looked after’. The heart’s gatekeepers are the five senses: sight and hearing, tasting and smelling, and each limb’s feeling. And we shall speak of them all. For whosoever protects these well, he does Solomon’s commandment: he protects well his heart and his soul’s health.)

The concept of the heart as housing the life of the soul is stated twice again in Part III: first with the anchorite, like the pelican, drawing out blood from their breast, ‘þet is, of þe heorte, þet sawle lif is inne’ (48: 17) (that is, from the heart, in which is the soul’s life); second with the anchorite needing to seal themselves inside, most urgently the heart in which ‘sawle lif is’ (67: 757–60). As such, the author does seem to understand a difference between ‘heorte’ and ‘soul’, but the two terms exist so intimately that it becomes difficult to extricate one from the other. Discovery Within the Heart Evidently, there is no single way to define the ‘heart’ of Ancrene Wisse. But like the Arabic texts, in its shape-shifting form, it is a chamber that pulses with discovery, echoic of the Song of Songs—and reminding us of the bride’s unveiling in a chamber in the Sufi texts, the jalwa. As noted in the previous chapter, the anchoritic reader is described as God’s silent chamber (36: 646–649). The heart is the point at which the devotee can achieve highest intimacy with Christ, immersing the heart in Christ’s blood (‘biblod[g]e þin heorte’) when entering his side (see 111: 1629–1631). The heart can also be a nest, with the gemstone of Christ cradled and nurtured within it. Holding Christ as a gemstone by meditating upon his pains discharges all bitterness from the heart and body alike (‘swa þu schalt

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driuen ut euch atter of þin heorte ant bitternesse of þi bodi’, 54: 242). The heart is thus a space of nurture—it is a nest of birth and also land that can be tilled to allow the efflorescence of new life (145: 12–15). As a chamber that nurtures intimacy, the heart is also a crucial faculty in penitential processes. The ‘heorte’ in Parts V and VI becomes entangled with the many dimensions to auricular confession. Contrition is termed ‘schrift on heorte’ (confession in heart) in the narrative of Judith’s decapitation of Holofernes early in Part V (114: 13–20). This is in the same vein as Peter Lombard’s (d. 1160) differentiation of confessio cordis from confessio oris, though the Latin is never quoted.66 The Ancrene Wisse-author never uses the term contritio, but the frequent term ‘heorte bireowsunge’ appears to be his equivalent, and it is translated by Millett thus.67 The heart can be shed as ‘weater’ in confessional performance, leaving no residue, odour, or colour (see 122: 306–311). Further, as in Part III, the heart remains a restricted space, despite its expansiveness; the author proclaims that the confessant must search ‘alle þe hurnen of his heorte’ (120: 236: all the corners of his heart). This reference to the heart’s ‘corners’ endows the heart with dimensions, and it is in fact likened to a room cleaned thoroughly by a widow (119: 211–16). To give the heart corners is also to demarcate its limits. The image thus becomes one of empowerment: a complete examination of the ‘heorte’ is possible; it can be purged of all filth as a room can be immaculately cleaned. This spatialization also echoes a reference in Part III to God’s threats filling the heart so that there does not remain any ‘empti stude i þe heorte to underfon fleschliche lahtren’ (60: 506–508: empty space in the heart to receive fleshly laughter). In particular, ‘heorte’ is aligned with conscience—with ‘inwit’. However, exactly how it relates to conscience is a more complex question: at times heart and conscience seem to be interchangeable; at other points, the two are distinct faculties. In the preface, a marginal annotation by the C2 scribe in London, British Library, Cotton Cleopatra C.vi employs the term ‘conscience’: Ȝef þe con[s]cience—þet is, þe inwit of þi þoht ant of þin heorte—bereð witnesse i þe seolfe te ȝeines þe seoluen þet tu art i sunne unscriuen ant þet 66  Peter Lombard, Sententiae in IV libris distinctae, 2 Vols, i (Grottaferrata, Rome: Editiones Collegii S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas, 1981), 345. 67  See, for instance, ‘heorte bireowsunge’, 139: 303, translated by Millett as ‘contrition of heart’ (Guide for Anchoresses, p. 139).

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tu misdest þet ant þet, ant hauest þet unþeaw ant þet, þulli conscience, þullic inwit is woh ant unefne ant cnosti ant dolki; ah þeos riwle efneð hire ant makeð hire smeðe and softe. (1: n. 1) (If the conscience—that is, the inward-knowledge of your thought and of your heart—bears witness within the self against the self that you are in sin not confessed, that you did wrongly in such and such, and have this and that vice, that conscience, that inward-knowledge, is perverse, uneven, lumpy, and wounded; this rule evens it out, and makes it smooth and soft.)

Given C2’s status as a likely candidate for the author himself, his marginal annotations can shed light on authorial cardiocentric terminology. In the above instance, on the one hand, ‘conscience’ seems to equate ‘heorte’: as the rule smooths the heart, so it smooths the conscience.68 On the other hand, C2’s definition casts the ‘heorte’ as only one dimension of what forms ‘conscience’, and it is, curiously and inexplicably, separated from ‘þoht’.69 Subsequent to this marginal annotation, the author then enumerates three elements to the rule of the heart, based on 1 Timothy 1: 5, in which ‘heorte’ is explicitly separated from ‘conscience’70: Et hec est caritas quam describit Apostolus, de corde puro et consciencia bona et fide non ficta. Þeos riwle is chearite of schir heorte ant cleane inwit ant treowe bileaue. (1: 16–18) (And this is the charity that the Apostle describes, of pure heart and good conscience and faith not feigned. This rule is charity of a pure heart and clean conscience and true belief.)

Now, ‘heorte’ is separated from ‘inwit’, which, given C2’s annotation, signifies ‘conscience’.71 This shifting relationship between ‘heart’ and ‘conscience’—identification alongside distinction—is further evident. In stressing that the anchorite must follow the inner rule without wavering, the author states: Nu þenne is hit swa þet alle ancren mahen wel halden an riwle quantum ad puritatem cordis, circa quam uersatur tota religio; þet is, alle mahen aht ahen  On C as the author, see further Millett, trans., Guide for Anchoresses, p. xxxviii.  The significance of the author’s usage of the term ‘conscience’ will be dealt with later in this section. 70  ‘Now the end of the commandment is charity, from a pure heart, and a good conscience, and an unfeigned faith’ (1 Timothy 1: 5). 71  Millett also translates ‘inwit’ thus: Millett, trans., Guide for Anchoresses, p. 1. 68 69

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halden a riwle onont purte of heorte, þet is cleane ant schir inwit (consciencia) wiðuten weote of sunne þet ne beo þurh schrift ibet. (2: 37–42) (Now, then, it is so that all anchorites can well hold one rule concerning purity of heart, about which orbits all religion; that is, all can and ought to have a rule concerning purity of heart, that is a clean and purified conscience (conscience), without the knowledge of sin that is not atoned for through confession.)

Whereas the unidentified Latin text alludes to a general ‘puritatem cordis’, the author specifically grounds this purity of heart in the workings of conscience: ‘þet is cleane ant schir [pure] inwit (consciencia)’.72 The term ‘consciencia’ is a later addition.73 Almost immediately after this alignment of ‘heorte’ and ‘conscience’, the two are cast as distinct functions: þis makeð þe leafdi riwle, þe riwleð ant rihteð ant smeðeð þe heorte ant te inwit of sunne; for nawt ne makeð hire woh bute sunne ane. (2: 42–44) (This the lady rule performs, who rules and corrects and smooths the heart and the conscience of sin; for nothing makes it perverse except sin alone.)

‘Heorte’ and ‘inwit of sunne’ are separated. But in the following clause, the author uses singular pronoun ‘her’ or ‘it’, seeming to re-join the two as a single entity. As the heart has a multifaceted relationship with ‘þoht’ and ‘sawol’, so too does it engage in complex terminological interplay with ‘inwit’—an essential facet of the heart’s centrality to penitential process. For a pure heart (‘schir heorte’) remains the anchorite’s most precious, most sought-after tool. Accordingly, the author is compelled to define it, twice: Schir heorte, as Seint Bernard seið, makieð twa þinges: þet tu al þet tu dest, do hit oðer for luue ane of Godd, oðer for oþres god ant for his biheue. Haue in al þet tu dest an of þes twa ententes—oðer ba togederes, for þe 72  On the author’s source, Millett, Ancrene Wisse, volume II, notes that it is ‘untraced, but probably based ultimately on Cassian’s definition of purity of heart in the Collationes’, 6, P/38–9. 73  Found on f. 1v, the term is included in the text body (not the margins), and it is not differentiated by ink colour or hand (observed from the Parker Web facsimile). See further Millett (2005), Vol I, lxiii. On the source of the Latin, see Millett, trans., Guide for Anchoresses, p. 168 n. P.14.

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leatere falleð into þe earre. Haue eauer schir heorte þus, ant do al þet tu wult; haue wori heorte, al þe sit uuele. Omnia munda mundis, coinquinatis uero nichil est mundam, Apostolus. Item. Augustinus: Habe caritatem, et fac quicquid uis (uoluntate uidelicet rationis). (145: 23–29) (A pure heart, as St Bernard says, is made of two things: that you, in all that you do, do it either for love of God alone, or for another’s good and for his benefit. In all that you do, have one of these two intents—or both together, for the latter falls into the former. Always have a pure heart and thus do all that you will; have a troubled heart, and all will sit badly with you. All is clean to the clean; truly nothing is clean to the polluted. Apostle. Also, Augustine: Have love, and do what you will (namely, with the will of the reason).)

And later in this part: Hwet is schir heorte? Ich hit habbe iseid ear: þet is, þet ȝe na þing ne wilnin ne ne luuien bute Godd ane, ant te ilke þinges for Godd þe helpeð ow toward him[.] (145) (What is a pure heart? I said it earlier: that is, that you do not will nor love anything but God alone, and those same things for God which help you towards him.)

The attainment of a clean heart is love: a statement lent force by the Bernardine and Augustinian citations and that from Titus 1: 15.74 The use of the Augustinian reference also connects the pure heart explicitly with the workings of reason and the will. With a love-cleansed heart, the anchoritic reader bonds themselves, in turn, to Christ’s Heart. To attain this Heart, the anchorite must decontaminate their own, through love. As Ibn ʿArabı ̄ remarked, sublimity can only find safe refuge in a purified heart. It is no wonder, then, that the heart is such a sought-after territory. The devil engages in ever-ingenious ways to conquer it. In Part VI, it is said that an anchorite can have ‘se luueful ant se reowðful […] heorte’ (so loving and compassionate heart) that the devil cannot render it uncharitable, though he can attempt to make it overly charitable (see 85: 641–645).

74  ‘All things are clean to the clean: but to them that are defiled, and to unbelievers, nothing is clean: but both their mind and their conscience are defiled’ (Titus 1: 15). The other references are from Bernard of Clairvaux’s letter on the behaviour and duty of bishops and from Augustine’s treatise on the first epistle of John. See further Millett, trans., Guide for Anchoresses, pp. 258–259/7.4 and 7.5.

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Later in this part of the text, the Lord becomes a piece of armoury that the anchorite uses in protecting their heart from the devil’s attack: Me schal halden scheld i feht up abuuen heaued, oðer a ȝein þe breoste, nawt ne drahen hit bihinden. Al riht swa, ȝef þu wult þet te rode scheld ant Godes stronge Passiun falsi þe deofles wepnen, ne dragse þu hit nawt efter þe, ah hef hit on heh buue þin heorte heaued, i þine breoste ehnen. (111: 1649–1653) (In battle one holds a shield up above the head, or against the breast, not dragged behind. In just the same way, if you want the shield of the Cross and of and God’s harsh Passion to cause the devil’s weapons to fail, do not drag it after you, but rather have it on high in your heart’s head, in your chest’s eyes [or, in sight of your chest].)

There is a battle for the anchorite’s heart, the devil attempting to claim it, and the Lord becoming a shield to protect the anchorite from the devil’s advances. Within this war, the heart is not a static territory: it has a head and eyes (‘breoste’ equating ‘heorte’ here). The heart continues to metamorphose in the turbulent spiritual demands of the anchoritic life. From the vantage point of avian emotion, it becomes clear that the Arabic qalb and the English heorte are fundamental paradigms for contemplatives, with the ‘heart’ ever on the move and always changing form. The heart can be illuminated, purified, burnt, and ruptured; the heart is a reader, seeking footsteps; angels and God himself even descend into it when it has been suitably prepared. In both Christian and Islamic contemplative traditions, the heart is a fluid site encoding complex affective shifts. The heart becomes a site of encryption, linking with cognitive, embodied, and spiritual process. The heart is a site on which the cultivation of specific affective states becomes imaginatively possible. In turn, the heart becomes a malleable image, ready for handling by audiences: in its handling, devotees stimulate feeling, nurture their affective literacies. The heart-image enables such nurturance; it is a fluid paradigm, even as it seems to be encased in flesh and blood.

PART III

Embodied Affect

CHAPTER 4

Flesh

The Beloved of the Canticles has breasts likened to ‘clusters of grapes’ and ‘clusters of vine’, a mouth that emits a fragrance akin to fresh apples, and a throat that is the choicest of wines.1 In contemplative traditions of both Christianity and Islam, divine love is a sumptuous feast laid out for the Lover’s enjoyment, each morsel infused with delight. But the means of reaching the Beloved are briary and sharp, even bitter. After all, the Lover’s hands also overflow with myrrh—a word which itself possibly derives from a Semitic base meaning ‘bitter’, as further evidenced in modern Hebrew and Arabic.2 Should the Lover’s body be pleasured or pained? And why should love be signalled in a language that is so deeply embodied at all? Such a complexly embodied affect pervades the language of both the Islamic and Christian medieval texts studied in the present book, as evidenced through an avian outlook. There remain, of course, inescapable 1  ‘Thy stature is like to a palm tree, and thy breasts to clusters of grapes. I said: I will go up into the palm tree, and will take hold of the fruit thereof: and thy breasts shall be as the clusters of the vine: and the odour of thy mouth like apples. Thy throat like the best wine, worthy for my beloved to drink, and for his lips and his teeth to ruminate’ (Canticles 7: 7–9). 2  ‘Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat the fruit of his apple trees. I am come into my garden, O my sister, my spouse, I have gathered my myrrh, with my aromatical spices […]’ (Canticles 5: 1), and ‘I arose up to open to my beloved: my hands dropped with myrrh, and my fingers were full of the choicest myrrh’ (Canticles 5: 5). For etymology of ‘myrrh’, see further OED entry (online) [accessed 27th December 2019].

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. S. Lazikani, Emotion in Christian and Islamic Contemplative Texts, 1100–1250, The New Middle Ages, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59924-9_4

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theological differences that are clarified rather than obscured by this avian approach. In the Christian texts, this embodied affect radiates from the central body of Christ, the ultimate and relentless signifier. In the Islamic texts, the Flesh of Christ does not have the same theological import, and in fact there is an active distancing from incarnationist theologies (ḥulūl). Yet despite such differences, affect is inscribed on the human body and is constituted by bodily process in both traditions. Crucial to embodied affect in Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s work, Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s work, Ancrene Wisse, and the Wooing Group is the figuration of the Lover as ill, wounded, and emaciated. The central image of the Lover as suffering body has a complex interaction with ascetic practices in both traditions. Such an approach highlights the need to cultivate a sensitivity to asceticism-­ oriented affective literacies. The mortified body is inseparable, at times perhaps even indistinguishable, from the affective body. This kind of ‘embodied affect’—the painful process of love expressed and shaped by body-based language, itself inseparable from the asceticism of authors/ audiences—disturbs the boundary between the literal and the figurative in readers’ affective literacies. Through an avian lens, I wish to highlight especially the somatic bases and emissions of love, and the paradoxical death-life of the Lover, who is imaged as dead to the world yet intensely susceptible to feeling. I would like to suggest the term ‘death-affect’ to encapsulate this unique devotional affect cultivated by solitary ascetics, those most impressionable of corpses.

The Affective-Ascetic Body The term ‘affective body’ acts as shorthand for the body as a site of texts’ attempted expression, stimulation, and negotiation of devotional affect. The body becomes a surface on which feeling is inscribed and through which feeling is constituted. That affect is embodied is a near-­commonplace in both affect theory and medieval histories.3 The embodied nature of affect continues to be an enduring facet of studies into medieval emotion, as in notable essay collections of the past four years.4 In Affective and 3  For a helpful summary from a theoretical lens, see Jean-Michel Rabaté, ‘Literature and Affect’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, ed. David Hillman and Ulrika Maude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 230–244. 4  See, for example, Juanita Ruys, Michael W.  Champion, and Kirk Essary, eds, Before Emotion: the Language of Feeling, 400–1800 (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2019).

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Emotional Economies, for example, Andreea Marculescu and Charles-Louis Morand Métivier dedicate an entire section to ‘the somatization and the embodiment of emotions’, which is then developed into a consideration of the ‘ways in which emotions, both as discourses and as somatic experiences, are embedded in the fabric of the text’.5 Awareness of embodied emotion is inseparable from the continued sensitivity to emotion as ‘an acculturated ensemble of multilayered norms, interventions, and hybrid practices’. This multifaceted awareness has been encapsulated in terms such as ‘emotionologies’, ‘emotional practices’, ‘emotional communities’, and ‘affective literacies’.6 These terms have immense potential when applied to non-Christian medieval texts in languages other than Latin or European vernaculars, but this potential is yet to be fully tapped in scholarship. In studying embodied emotion in texts across religions, I seek to embrace but also expand these pervading critical narratives. The medieval bodies of European texts have been thoroughly dissected in the scholarly arena. At the heart of this effort is Caroline Walker Bynum.7 The work of other feminist scholars—including Sarah Salih, Karma Lochrie, Sarah Kay, and Miri Rubin—has also been vital in interpreting medieval bodies.8 Just as it would not be possible to generalize about ‘modern’ bodies, it is not possible to find a totalizing narrative for

5  Andreea Marculescu and Charles-Louis Morand Métivier, ‘Introduction’, in Affective and Emotional Economies in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Andreea Marculescu and Charles-Louis Morand Métivier (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 1–16 (pp. 4–6). 6  Marculescu and Métivier, eds, Affective and Emotional Economies, especially p.  3. For ‘emotional practices’, see Monique Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and is that what makes them have a history)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion’, History and Theory 51.2 (2012), 193–220. 7  See especially her Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991); The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); and Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 8  See especially Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991); Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin, eds. Framing Medieval Bodies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994); Sarah Salih, ‘When is a Bosom Not a Bosom? Problems with “Erotic Mysticism”’, in Medieval Virginities, ed. Anke Bernau, Ruth Evans and Sarah Salih (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), pp. 14–32; and Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury, eds, Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993).

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medieval bodies.9 One dominant medieval conceptualization especially relevant to this chapter, however, is the ascetic, mortified body. The ascetic body in medieval Christian traditions shares a profound closeness to the body of Christ, with its concurrent penetrability and impenetrability. The ascetic body can be miraculously strong, yet always failing; it is forever in flux as it attempts to perfect its own embodiment of love.10 Self-­ mortification cannot be read simply as a deadening process, in spite of its etymology—it is also an enlivening, a quickening of the sensitive devotee.11 On English anchoritic traditions specifically, Cate Gunn and Robert Hasenfratz have both highlighted the heuristic core of mortifying practices in Ancrene Wisse: ‘education, and not literal mortification or deadening is the goal’.12 Whilst Christ’s body does not have the same significance in Islamic theology, the human body retains a prominent position in Islamic contemplative texts.13 As will be seen, the body is essential in the Sufi poets’ attempts to express love, longing, and sorrow, and this has a clear—if not easily delineated—link with asceticism. Islam has a rich history of ascetic literature, nourished by the asceticism of the Prophet Muhammad—as indicated, for instance, in surah 73 (Al-Muzzammil, ‘The Enfolded’).14 Asceticism (zuhd) has a central role in Sufi histories, and it is important

9  For a helpful summary of the many ways in which medieval bodies may be interpreted, see Bill Burgwinkle, ‘Medieval Somatics’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, ed. David Hillman and Ulrika Maude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 10–23. 10  For a discussion of the history of ascetic traditions in early Christianity, see Giles Constable, Attitudes Toward Self-Inflicted Suffering in the Middle Ages (Brookline, MA: Hellenic College Press, 1982), especially pp. 10–15. 11  See the entry ‘mortify’ in The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, ed. C. T. Onions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 591. 12  Robert Hasenfratz, ‘“Efter hire euene”: Lay Audiences and the Variable Asceticism of Ancrene Wisse’, in Anchorites, Wombs and Tombs, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy and Mari Hughes-­ Edwards (Cardiff, 2005), pp. 145–160 (p. 149); see further Cate Gunn, Ancrene Wisse: From Pastoral Literature to Vernacular Spirituality (Cardiff, 2008), p. 105. 13  See further Kugle, Sufis and Saints’ Bodies, pp. 6–41. 14  See, for example, 73: 1–8: ‘O thou wrapped up in thy raiment! Keep vigil the night long, save a little—A half thereof, or abate a little thereof Or add (a little) thereto—and chant the Qur’an in measure, For we shall charge thee with a word of weight. Lo! the vigil of the night is (a time) when impression is more keen and speech more certain. Lo! thou hast by day a chain of business. So remember the name of thy Lord and devote thyself with a complete devotion.’

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not to separate ‘love mysticism’ and ‘ascetic traditions’ too readily.15 The genre of zuhdiyya (ascetic poetry) has its origins in the eighth and ninth centuries, with influence from the Christian poet al-Ḥ ı ̄ra, ʿAdı ̄ b. Zayd (d. c. 600): It is in this poet that we find the earliest significant treatment of the ubi sunt topos, which may have been inherited from the muse of earlier Christians of the region, but which was later Islamised in the zuhdiyya as a standard rhetorical feature, often stressed by passages of anaphora (the question ayna ‘where is...?’ beginning a whole series of lines).16

Zuhdiyya and Sufi literature have been traditionally placed in opposition, but it is possible to see elements of zuhdiyya expressed in Sufi poetry, including that of Ibn ʿArabı ̄ and Ibn al-Fāriḍ.17 As witnessed in Chap. 2 of this book, Sufi poets image Jesus as the quintessential model for solitary lover-ascetics.18 And as Sa’diyya Shaikh notes in her monograph on gender and sexuality, ‘Ibn ʿArabı ̄ suggests that those who undertake spiritual retreats (khalwa), remembrance or invocation (dhikr), and other types of spiritual discipline prepare their hearts for receptivity to the divine’.19 Ibn Tufail’s Ḥ ayy develops self-mortifying practices when he realizes that eating any edible plant or animal would ‘cut them off from their own fulfilment and prevent them all from achieving their intended purpose’.20 He attempts to cease eating, but on realizing that this is not possible, formulates clear regulations for himself:

15  See further Olga Solovieva, ‘“Veiled with a Special Veil”: Rabi’a of Basra and the Ascetic Reconfiguration of Identity’, Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality 49.2 (2014), 4–28. Rkia Elaroui Cornell, trans., Early Sufi Women: Dhikr an-niswa al-­ muta’abbidat as-Sufiyyat (Louisville, Ky.: Fons Vitae, 1999), p. 60. 16  P.  F. Kennedy, ‘Zuhdiyya’, in  Encyclopaedia of Islam, ed. P.  Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donel and W.P. Heinrichs, 2nd edition, online (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, [accessed 5th January 2020]). 17  See, for example, Kennedy’s remarks on ‘the survival of zuhdiyya once it was eclipsed by Ṣūfı ̄ poetry from the 6th/12th century onwards’ (Encyclopedia of Islam) [accessed 5th January 2020]. 18  See further Oddbjørn Leirvik, Images of Jesus Christ in Islam, 2nd edn (London: Continuum, 2010), p. 85. 19  Sa’diyya Shaikh, Sufi Narratives of Intimacy: Ibn ‘Arabı ̄, Gender, and Sexuality (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), p. 68. 20  Ḥ ayy Ibn Yaqza ̄n, trans. Goodman, p. 144.

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As for the amount, he felt it should be enough to stave off hunger, but no more. […] In terms of protection, the requirements for keeping alive the vital spirit were easily taken care of. He wore skins and had a house to guard against any incursion of the environment. This was enough for him. He did not consider it worth his while to spend a great deal of time on it.21

Ibn Tufail here demonstrates part of the philosophy behind the development of a ‘rule’ and a regime of discipline for contemplatives. Ḥ ayy’s abstemiousness becomes a crucial facet to his growing intimacy with the Divine. In Christian and Islamic contemplative traditions, self-­mortification has a close, fluid relationship with embodied affect.

Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s Tarjuman̄ al-ashwaq̄

For Ibn ʿArabı ̄ in the Tarjuma ̄n al-ashwa ̄q, physical destitution signifies the destitution of the Lover’s heart. These physical markers take the form especially of ruined buildings, overwhelming fire, cascading tear-water, and the red-white shades of shame and fear. Colour, materiality, decay—all become signifiers for the mortified, embodied heart. In Poem VIII of the Tarjuma ̄n, the speaker resides in places of decay, where love constantly renews itself in the heart (VIII: 1).22 Crucially, the mouldering remains are identified in Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s commentary as the site of self-abjection. Such self-mortification can never be a cold, aloof act—it is filled with desiring love, with ʿishq. After all, the entirety of Creation is a manifestation of Divine desire and anguish. In the words of Shaikh, ‘Creation is the outpouring response to nothing less than the intimate decree of God’s desire’.23 And in the words of Henry Corbin in his classic study, the Divine is known for ‘the sadness of the primordial solitude that makes Him yearn to be revealed in beings who manifest Him to Himself insofar as He manifests Himself to them’.24 Tears (dumu’) and fire (nār)—those crucial affective-somatic signs—are continually generated in the ‘ruined dwellings’ inhabited by Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s Lover: ‘These tears (dumu’) are shed over  Ḥ ayy Ibn Yaqza ̄n, trans. Goodman, pp. 144–45.  The Tarjumān al-ashwāq: A Collection of Mystical Odes, ed. R. A. Nicholson (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1911): all subsequent quotations and translations are to this edition, incorporated in the text; references are to poem and line number respectively. 23  Shaikh, Sufi Narratives of Intimacy, p. 69. 24  Henry Corbin, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ʿArabı ̄ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 184. 21 22

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their ruined dwellings, but souls are ever melted (dhawa ̄b) at the memory of them’ (VIII: 2).25 In this realm of destitution, the Lover is an impoverished figure panting after the Beloved’s camels (3). The search can only be enabled through the lowering of the self, the mortifying of the self to the level of dust: ‘I have rolled my cheek in the dust in tender and passionate affection’ (4). In such debasement, Love drowns and burns (5). In this loving self-mortification, existence is one of continual decay and debasement, ever accompanied by tears and burning or melting. Such liquescence of the Lover, formed of both tears and a melted heart, becomes an important imagistic marker in Poem XLI. The fire of longing makes an appearance in this poem; and in his distress, the weeping Lover creates an entire river (nahr) of tears, blocking the camels’ progress (3, 7–8). In Poem XLIII, the speaker begs the driver for pity of one who breaks (kasara) colocynth (hanzal) at the moment of farewell, in allusion to the Lover’s watering eyes (6). This weeping Lover positions themselves in a near-ritualized, genuflecting pose: ‘Laying his palms crosswise on his bosom to still a heart (qalb) that throbbed at the noise of the (moving) howdah’ (7). Poem XV also opens with overwhelming flames and tears (1–2). In the commentary for this poem, the flame is defined as one of yearning, longing for Heaven in the exile of the world. Fear and shame are necessarily identified in this longing, the redness (ihmirār) of the cheek set against the pale-white dawn (2–3). Such a white-red synthesis is also (though differently) witnessed in the blood-shame of Christ imaged in Ancrene Wisse and the Wooing Group, with his kaleidoscopic skin shifting between pallidity and bloodiness.26 Furthermore, Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s colourful affective-ascetic body is echoed in the Tarjuma ̄n’s language of inscription. In Poem XXIII, the landscape is inscribed with messages of love-longing, for people had written (kataba) lines for a suffering lover (XXIII: 5). In this inscription, the Lover is both high and low; as will be seen later in Ancrene Wisse and the Wooing Group, exaltation co-exists with debasement. In Poem XXXI, the two are intertwined intricately with one another: ‘if her seat were a valley (but her throne is a high mountain), | The low 25  See also the call in Poem XXVIII: ‘O camel-driver, go slowly, for the fire is between my ribs’ (Tarjumān XXVIII: 9). The commentary understands the camel-driver in this case to be ‘the voice of God calling the aspirations to Himself’ (comm 9). On tears, see also XXVIII: 10–11. 26  See Part VI of Ancrene Wisse, 134–135; and Lofsong of ure Lefdi in The Wooing of Our Lord and the Wooing Group Prayers, p. 206.

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ground would be made high by her: he who looks enviously shall never attain to that height’ (XXXI: 8). The Lover of Poem XXIII inhabits the sky yet is also ‘trodden underfoot like burning ashes’ (6). Ascension to these heights can never be achieved without a lowering of the self, a degradation at the seat of the valley before the climb to the mountain peak. In this co-existence of high and low, the speaker of Poem XXIII has died the death of the drowned (‘mawt al-gharı ̄q’, 7), a total death of the self that also characterizes Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s poetry and the anchoritic English texts. The Lover must be ravaged utterly to gain access to the Beloved; the Lover wears anguish as a garment, and tears become a source of drink (XXIII: 17)—a line which perhaps echoes Psalm 41: 4 and Psalm 79: 6, with which Ibn ʿArabı ̄ may have been familiar through his studies of Christian scripture.27 Such totality of embodied affect is all the more prominent in the poetry of Ibn al-Fāriḍ.

Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s Poetry (Excluding Naẓm al-suluk̄ and al-Khamriyya)28 Ibn al-Fāriḍ has been known as the sultan al-‘asshiqı ̄n (the sultan of lovers).29 In this poet’s Dı ̄wān, his Lover is one who suffers desperately— all in embodied terms. Anguish must pulse through each part of a lover’s body (jism). No region of the body escapes the workings of love: the Lover is wracked in the ribs, in the head, in the very bowels (II: 10, 29, 19; XII: 9; XIV: 36). Viscera in particular are representative of a deep affective locus, a painful centre of feeling (I: 17; III: 13, 20; IV: 19; V 41; XIV: 26). The Lover’s illness can even take on an oozing fluidity (V: 45). The Lover is also, more simply, one wearied and emaciated (VIII: 23; XIII: 55; XIV: 31–32, 34–35, 55). There is an ever-increase of suffering alongside the depletion of the body (IV: 20); the pain is relentless and beyond all cure (V: 43). As also seen in the Tarjumān, the camels themselves suffer an

27  ‘My tears have been my bread day and night, whilst it is said to me daily: Where is thy God?’ (Psalm 41: 4); ‘How long wilt thou feed us with the bread of tears: and give us for our drink tears in measure?’ (Psalm 79: 6). 28  Naẓm al-sulūk will be discussed at a later stage of this chapter, and Al-Khamriyya will be examined in the subsequent chapter, Chap. 5. 29  Th. Emil Homerin, ‘Ibn al-Fāriḍ: Ruba’iyat, Ghazal, Qasida’, in Windows on the House of Islam: Muslim Sources on Spirituality and Religious Life, ed. John Renard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 194–202 (p. 194).

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emaciation, a conventional trope of pre-Islamic (jāhiliya) poetry (IV: 3–6; XIII: 135). Such all-encompassing anguish has two contrary pulls in Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s Dı ̄wa ̄n: it inscribes the body into being, yet also erases it into invisibility. The body can be clothed in signifying fabric: the Lover ‘displayed the mourning garment of agony upon his temples, testimony to his enduring pains’ (V: 46), and they likewise wear a ‘robe of sickness’ in VII (VII: 5), testament to their ‘languid body [jism] and weighed-down heart [qalb]’ (VII: 6).30 In possible invocation of Qur’an 45: 3–6, the emaciated body of poem XI itself becomes a signifier, a revelatory inscription of hidden secrets:31 ‘So wasted my body is, ’tis transparent to all my secrets [asra ̄r]; my bones [ʾiẓa ̄m], shrunk to thinness, reveal therein a most inward meaning’ (XI: 15). But elsewhere, the emaciated body becomes a site of invisibility, recalling the unseen lover of Tarjumān (LIII: 3). The wasting away of Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s Lover is such that their presence becomes like absence; they would be undetectable were it not for their sighing (XIV: 35–36). With the Lover suffering such extreme illness, to the point of invisibility, Ibn al-Fāriḍ navigates fana ̄ʾ: a technical term in Sufi terminology that refers to the death of the ‘self’, the annihilation of the ego (nafs), which in turn enables the eternal abiding with God (baqāʾ).32 Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s Dı ̄wān is replete with ‘terms standard to the Sufi lexicon of his time’, and this includes those terms, like fana ̄ʾ, that relate to how ‘the lover passes away from self-will to abide (baqāʾ, yabqa, yabqi) with the beloved’.33 With the speaker repeatedly crying for their own destruction through love, the ailing body becomes the site on which fana ̄ʾ may be imaged and explored (III: 6,13–15, 26; VII: 1; VIII: 3; XIV: 4,15). The dying body thus reveals a fundamental paradox of the contemplative life: on the one hand, it is an 30  In this chapter, quoted translations of Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s poems (other than Naẓm) are Arberry’s. 31  ‘Lo! in the heavens and the earth are portents for believers. And in your creation, and all the beasts that He scattereth in the earth, are portents for a folk whose faith is sure. And the difference of night and day and the provision that Allah sendeth down from the sky and thereby quickeneth the earth after her death, and the ordering of the winds, are portents for a people who have sense. These are the portents of Allah which We recite unto thee (Muhammad) with truth’ (surah 45: 3–6). 32  See further Andrew Wilcox, ‘The Dual Mystical Concepts of Fanāʾ and Baqāʾ in Early Sufism’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 38.1 (2011), 95–118. 33  Homerin, ‘Ibn al-Fāriḍ: Ruba’iyat, Ghazal, Qasida’, in Windows on the House of Islam, ed. Renard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 194–202 (pp. 194 and 195).

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existence defined by death to the world; on the other, it requires a fervent aliveness to the Beloved. This creates a unique space in which death-affect might flourish. Such a living death/deathly life fills his poetry: ‘There belongeth to thee in the tribe one that is perished, yet liveth through thee, one that hath found sweet delight to perish in passion’s cause’ (VIII: 9)—a statement echoed in Lofsong of ure Louerde, there in invocation of Galatians. Death-life also appears in IX, with the term for passionate love, hawa, rendered ‘ardour’ in Arberry’s translation: ‘I hold that death is life, if suffered for ardour’s sake’ (IX: 3–10; XI21; XIV: 56). As the speaker expands: ‘no man may live by love [ḥubb] who dies not for his love’s sake’, reinforcing the co-existence of sweetness and bitterness (‘ere honey is gathered in, must be suffered the bees’ cruel stings’ [IX: 6]). Olfactory and taste-based sweetness permeates Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s Dı ̄wa ̄n and is strongly associated with the Lover’s devastation in love (see I, IV, V, VIII, IX, XI, XII, XIV). In Poem XIV, because of the veiled face of the Beloved, the Lover finds both life and death (XIV: 56). This is soon aligned with an existence in the wilderness, poignantly reminiscent of the wild death-life of the anchorite’s cell: ‘now, instead of the dwellings I knew, I take my repose in the desert, and find my joy in the wild beasts, since of men I have become wildly estranged’ (XIV: 59). The co-existence of death and life—and inseparable from this, the co-existence of pain and pleasure—is elaborated in Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s masterpiece, Naẓm al-sulu ̄k.

Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s Naẓm al-suluk̄ In Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s Naẓm al-sulūk (Poem of the Sufi Way), the complexity of embodied affect—and its relationship with asceticism—comes into ever more prominent focus. This is fundamental to a poem that shows clear ‘aesthetic concerns’: a fact occluded by the first commentaries of the poem which ‘naively read the work as an accurate portrayal of Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s personal spiritual quest’.34 Whilst scholarship has traditionally made parallels between Naẓm and the Arabesque form of architecture, Th. Emil Homerin modifies this image to suggest that the poem can be more 34  Th. Emil Homerin, ‘ʿUmar Ibn al-Fāriḍ: A Saint of Mamluk and Ottoman Egypt’, in Manifestations of Sainthood in Islam, ed. Grace Martin Smith with Carl W. Ernst (Istanbul: ISIS Press, 1993), pp. 85–94 (p. 86). See further Homerin’s comment that the Sufis ‘appropriated the Arabic poetic tradition’, in ‘“Tangled Words”: Towards a Stylistics of Arabic Mystical Verse’, in Reorientations: Arabic and Persian Poetry, ed. Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 190–198 (p. 190).

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a­ ccurately read as a ‘spiral’.35 Such architectural terminology is important for understanding embodied affect in Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s work, though it has not yet been used as such. Naẓm forms a ‘spiral’ of embodied feeling—of love, shame, anguish, joy. Pain and pleasure interact in an ever-­interlocking sequence, a spiral that reaches out to the Beloved as it also reaches back, returning to the Lover’s depths.36 In the earliest stages of the poem, the Lover performs their embodied suffering with a problematic vainglory. The Lover speaks of their breakage through passion and highlights their disease, fever, and tears, even invoking Abraham and Noah as parallels (10–15). Affliction itself becomes a kind of adornment (58–57)—the ultimate statement of its performance. But then comes a key rebuke from the Beloved: ‘You aimed for another’s love | and fell short, blind | to the straight pilgrim’s path to me [maḥajatti]’ (Homerin, 84).37 The Beloved alludes to what should be the steady path of pilgrimage towards her—not an elaborate performance. She challenges the Lover’s performance of suffering, calling attention in particular to their restless, obtrusive soul (86). To truly be in love with the Beloved, the Lover must be lost within her; they must become a vessel in which her form (sur̄ a) is revealed—each must be absorbed into the other (98–99). In fact, they should be ‘the line under the dot of ba ̄ ’ (94). This refers to Arabic script, in which a line (kasrah) comes beneath the dot marking the letter ba ̄ (‘B’) to clarify its pronunciation as bi, ‘or, in this case, bı ̄ (i.e., “in//by/with me”)’.38 Ultimately, such absorption into the Beloved is not a question of life. Death is the true answer—fanaʾ̄ (99–102), the annihilation of the self within the Beloved. The Lover’s reply to the Beloved’s criticism marks a modulation. They echo her focus on the necessity of death, speaking of such fana ̄ʾ, this 35  Th. Emil Homerin, trans., ʿUmar Ibn al-Fāriḍ: Sufi Verse, Saintly Life (Mahwah, NJ: 2001), pp. 69–70. On the parallels between Naẓm al-sulūk and ‘arabesque’, see further Issa J.  Boullata, ‘Verbal Arabesque and Mystical Union: A Study of Ibn al-Fāriḍs Al Ta’iyya Al-Kubra’, Arab Studies Quarterly 3.2 (1981), 152–169. 36  On the difficulty of distinguishing ‘pain’ and ‘pleasure’ in premodern texts, see especially Robert Mills, ‘A Man Is Being Beaten’, in New Medieval Literatures, V, ed. Rita Copeland, David Lawton and Wendy Scase (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), pp. 115–53. 37  Translations of Naẓm are my own unless otherwise specified. 38  Th. Emil Homerin, ʿUmar Ibn al-Fāriḍ: Sufi Verse, Saintly Life, n. 94 (p. 100).

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utter annihilation: ‘in the face of death, I am upright’ (111). But it is a death filled with feeling—the Lover imagines how the Beloved has caused tribes immeasurable pain, employing the trope of the Bedouin poet speared with love (118). The feeling is also expressed in medical vocabulary—she infects the Lover’s heart but will also cure it, being both the cause of illness and its remedy. The illness leads the Lover to a statement on their abjection, shifting from pride to abasement (124). This can be read as the opposite trajectory to Lofsong of ure Louerde, where the abjected speaker grows in assurance in approaching the Beloved, as will be seen. Such abasement is, for Ibn al-Fāriḍ, associated with a devastation of self as a crumbling structure: the Lover speaks of a tearing down of self. The self is no longer a fortress; penetration is enabled in the Lover who has been degraded, with all defences lost (‘faqdi ḥamı ̄yatı ̄’, 125). From this point onwards, the Lover conveys the constant peeling away of everything, even need itself. All must be given up, all must be surrendered; the Lover must relinquish all that they are to the Beloved (175–177). Such an approach to the Beloved must be marked by urgency. In such urgency, one crushed must nonetheless stand and walk forth in a sacrifice and effacement of the self (181). A significant passage, dense with Sufi terminology of Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s time, develops this brokenness (231ff).39 In this exposition, the poet employs an array of images that evoke being scattered and fragmented, which lead to a lucid account of solitary asceticism. It is notable that reflection on asceticism comes here and not only prior to the higher stage of ascent. Self-mortification cannot belong only to the infant stages of a soul’s progress; it must be intertwined with the many ascending steps, even as the Lover tries to break free from their bodily existence. Fasting (sawm), vigils, litanies (wird), and solitary prayer are all identified (269–71). Seclusion comes to the foreground here: solitude is crucial in the wait for rapture, as is food restriction—perhaps strengthening the image of the emaciated lover propagated so forcefully in Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s other poems: I departed from my familiar regions, cutting off the ties of brotherhood, and chose my reclusive seclusion [‘uzla]. I thought to examine closely what was lawful in abstinence,  See further Homerin, ‘Umar Ibn al-Fa ̄riḍ: Sufi Verse, Saintly Life, p. 140 n. 231.

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limiting nourishment to only guard my strength. […] I exposed my determination in a solitary ascetic existence, preferring my self-­mortifications [‘zuhdi’], and answer to my prayer. (Naẓm, 272–76)

The emphasis on the ‘reclusive seclusion’ (here with the term ‘uzla) also recalls the poet’s earlier associations between khalwa and the unveiling of the bride in the chamber (jalwa) (209, ‘jalwati khalwati’). In fact, the return to asceticism signals the necessity for the Lover to work within the established tenets of Islam. This is highlighted by a discussion of the form of the angel Gabriel (280–85), to clarify that union is distinct from incarnation (ḥulūl).40 The speaker is careful to seek verification in the Qur’an and the hadı ̄th, the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad (285). In this sanctioned asceticism, enabled through endurance or patience (sabr), illness and health, death and life, become one: they coalesce to such a degree that they become near-indistinguishable (337–344): My death in her, in rapture, will be a delectable life, and if I do not die in love, I will live as one suffocated. So, my heart, melt in intense passionate love; oh my fervid pains, make me dissolve; oh fire of my insides, make straight in passionate love the curves of my bent ribs. (Naẓm, 339–341)

The Lover enters a welcome world of illness; they ask disease for death and affirm that they will now relinquish the remainder (baqa ̄ʾ) of their life (345). As has been observed by Homerin, this is a clear play on the root ‘to remain’ (b-q-a) and ‘its meaning in the Sufi lexicon as “abiding” with God’.41 The state of the Lover’s health is no longer important, since they have become dead in the world of the living (346). As will be seen, this is deeply redolent of anchoritic death. The anchorite too, as the Ancrene Wisse-author would say, is dead in the world of the living—and in this death, lives solely with the Beloved on the Cross. Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s speaker becomes not only a misplaced inhabitant in the living world, but also an  See further Homerin, ‘Umar Ibn al-Far̄ iḍ: Sufi Verse, Saintly Life, p. 154 n. 280.  Homerin, ‘Umar Ibn al-Fāriḍ: Sufi Verse, Saintly Life, p. 172 n. 345.

40 41

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uninhabitable domain: the Lover can shelter nobody in their decrepit ‘bones’ (ʿiẓa ̄m) (347). In this essential brokenness, the soul is pushed towards a demise (mawt) (350–351). Yet this death is generative, with a garden (ḥadı ̄qa) found in the Beloved’s eyes (353–54); a garden is seen in the Beloved, as the shriven soul generates a garden for the Beloved in Ancrene Wisse.42 Through this beauty, the Beloved is also a religious regimen, a pilgrimage, a mosque (355–361). The Beloved becomes a refuge, an architectural seat of feeling and desire that exists beyond time (360–365), which parallels the poetry of Proto-Sufi Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya several centuries earlier.43 Contemplative listening (samaʿ) helps the ascetic lover as they try to heal the wounded multiplicity of creation, circling towards the hidden form of the Beloved (410). The Lover remarks on the spirit (rūḥ) flying towards Heaven, where it was breathed (nafakha) into the outward form (su ̄rah) (426). This is a clear invocation of surah 15 of the Qur’an, Al-Hijr (‘The Stoneland’), which recounts God’s creation of Adam: ‘“When I have fashioned him and breathed My spirit into him, bow down before him,” and the angels all did so’ (surah 15: 29–30). The soul thus remembers (‘dhakara’) its true essence, and in this remembrance is poised between Heaven and Earth in a loving, exilic longing (429). This act of remembrance further invokes the Sufi practice of dhikr, itself buttressed by Qur’an 2: 152.44 As the speaker’s tense position begins to resolve itself, the poem becomes marked by a language of healing. The sentient, aching soul recovers and is made whole (573, 576). In this healed state, the Lover can cry that no estrangement remains, no barrier stands between their soul and intimacy (578), echoing, for instance, verses from surah 2 (‘Al-Baqarah’, The Cow) and 50 (‘Qāf ’, the Arabic letter qāf ) of the Qur’an.45 The Lover can celebrate oneness, can celebrate the dissolution of all ruptures (579)—a dissolution of that bitter state announced in Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s Tarjuma ̄n with the dreaded croak of a raven. The affective-ascetic body—ill, emaciated, wounded, pained, pleasured—is both barrier and doorway to this oneness.

 See Ancrene Wisse, Part V, 128.  See Sufi Poems: A Mediaeval [sic] Anthology, ed. and trans. Martin Lings (Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 2004), p. 3. 44  ‘Therefore remember Me, I will remember you’ (surah 2: 152). 45  ‘And when My servants question thee concerning Me, then surely I am nigh’ (surah 2: 186); ‘We verily created man and We know what his soul whispereth to him, and We are nearer to him than his jugular vein’ (surah 50: 16). 42 43

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Ancrene Wisse In Ancrene Wisse and the Wooing Group, affective healing and illness are associated primarily with confessional contexts, which signal one key difference from the Islamic poetry.46 The tripartite model of Christian penitence bolstered by the Fourth Lateran Council (1215)—contritio cordis (contrition of heart), confessio oris (confession of mouth), and satisfactio operis (satisfaction of/in deed)—does not have a straightforward parallel in Sufi traditions.47 But there remains an emphasis on embodied pain in love—a composite physical-affective pain bound with pleasure—that is very resonant with the Arabic material. In the poetry of Ibn al-Fāriḍ and Ibn ʿArabı ̄, the inseparability of embodied affect from discourses on self-­ mortification means that audiences are given a significant role in the enrichment of their own affective literacies. This is replicated in the English anchoritic texts, where the affective body is enhanced by its contact and merging with the ascetic body. Such merging is evident in Part VI of Ancrene Wisse and in the Wooing Group text known editorially as Lofsong of ure Louerde. Debasement in love is a dominant narrative in Ancrene Wisse; it recalls the images in the Tarjuma ̄n of rolling in the dust and weeping within decayed abodes. Through such debasement, a contemplative life demands that one is concurrently dead and alive. For Ibn al-Fāriḍ, we saw that this is an opportunity to explore fanāʾ (annihilation). In Ancrene Wisse, and in Lofsong of ure Louerde, death-life becomes synonymous with penitential demise, itself defined as an affective crucifixion. The opening of Part VI of Ancrene Wisse affirms the all-pervasiveness of penitence in the anchoritic life (132: 1–4). In this all-encompassing penitence, the anchorite finds a unique place on the Cross with Christ. The Ancrene Wisse-author’s tripartite model of self-mortifying lives on Earth—the ‘pilegrimes’ (pilgrims), the ‘deade’ (dead), and those ‘ihongede wið hare gode wil o Iesuse rode’ (hung with their good will on Jesus’ Cross)—follows the peregrino,  See especially Ancrene Wisse, Part IV, 69, 74, 104.  On the development of this three-fold penitential process, see further Mary C. Mansfield, The Humiliation of Sinners: Public Penance in Thirteenth-Century France (Ithaca, 1995), pp. 16–17; Nicole Bériou, ‘Autour de Latran IV (1215): La naissance de la confession moderne et sa diffusion’, in Pratiques de la confession: des Péres du désert à Vatican II: quinze études d’histoire (Paris, 1983), pp. 73–93 (p. 81); and Pierre-Marie Gy, ‘Les définitions de la confession après le quatrième concile du Latran’, in L’Aveu: antiquité et moyen-âge (Rome: École française de Rome, 1986), pp. 283–296 (p. 288). 46 47

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mortuo and crucifixo categories in the sixth of Bernard of Clairvaux’s (d. 1153) ‘Sermones in Quadragesima’ (132: 15–16).48 But the author makes what Bella Millett terms ‘radical departures’ from the sixth Lenten sermon.49 Most crucially, as Millett summarizes, he ‘identifies the highest level with the penitential suffering of the anchoritic life’.50 Elsewhere in Ancrene Wisse, the anchorites are defined as being dead to the world—no doubt alluding to such emphases in their ritual enclosure.51 In Part VI, however, the anchorite is distinguishable from the ‘deade’; it is the third step, and not the second, that is specified as the ‘ancre steire’ (133: 74). Occupying the apex of the hierarchy, the anchorites are distinguished by their sensitization to pain: they are dead but also, like Christ in Part II of Ancrene Wisse, excruciatingly alive. Anchorites are dead to the temptations that beset the ‘pilegrimes’, yet alive to their Beloved. The anchorites and the ‘deade’ are both concealed from the sinful allurements of the world in a way that the pilgrims are not (133: 40–44). But whereas the dead only have God within their hearts (133: 59–60), the anchorite is a sharer of His pain. As in Bernard’s sermon (IV, 378), the dead are entirely unfeeling: ‘Preise him, laste him, do him scheome, sei him scheome—al him is iliche leof’ (133: 56–58: Praise him, disparage him, do shame to him, slander him—all is equally pleasing to him). Anchorites, in stark contrast, are distinguished by their sensitivity. From a basis in Galatians 6: 14, the author remarks:52 Ah þe þe is o rode ant haueð blisse þrof, he wendeð scheome to menske ant wa into wunne, ant ofearneð for-þi hure ouer hure. Þis beoð þeo þe neauer ne beoð gleade iheortet bute hwen ha þolieð sum wa oðer sum scheome wið Iesu on his rode; for þis is þe selhðe on eorðe, hwa-se mei for Godes luue habben scheome ant teone. (134: 82–87) (But the one who is on the Cross and has bliss from it, he turns shame to honour and woe into joy, and earns reward over reward. These are those 48  Sancti Bernardi Opera, 8 Vols, ed. J. Leclercq, C. H. Talbot and H. M. Rochais (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1957–1977), IV, 377–380 (377). 49  Millett, ed. Ancrene Wisse, II, 237: 6/14–94. 50  Millett, ed. Ancrene Wisse, II, xxxii. 51  See, for example, Part II (46: 1034–1035) and Part VIII (156: 36–40) of Ancrene Wisse. See further Ann K. Warren, Anchorites and Their Patrons in Medieval England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 98–99; and Rotha Mary Clay, The Hermits and Anchorites of England (London: Methuen, 1914; repr. 1968), p. 94. 52  ‘But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ; by whom the world is crucified to me, and I to the world’ (Galatians 6: 14).

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who are never so glad-hearted as when they suffer some pain or shame with Jesus on the Cross; for this is happiness on earth: whoever may, for God’s love, have shame and harm.)

Pain and pleasure become progressively more intimate in this passage. The anchorites first turn (‘wendeð’) shame into honour, and pain into joy, in a process of transformation. But subsequently, they derive joy from the pain and shame, rendering any transformation unnecessary: pain-joy/joy-pain becomes the defining feature of their self-mortifying life. Later in Part VI, embodied affect becomes centred on ‘bitterness’, echoing Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s bee stings among the honey (IX: 6). From Aelredian premises (139: 283–289), the Ancrene Wisse-author first devotes attention to the role of body-based self-mortification.53 The biblical narrative of Nicodemus bringing a hundred ‘weies’ of myrrh and aloes (John 19: 39) is used to underscore the need for both perfection and moderation in physical pain (140: 335–343).54 But soon after, the author announces a shift to ‘bitternesse inwið’ (140: 343–346). This inner bitterness encompasses various forms of affective pain, as represented by the three Marys. The fact that ‘Mary’ signifies ‘bitterness’ is an etymology he is keen to repeat (140–142: 351, 388, 420). From this etymological basis, a tripartite model of affective pain emerges: Þe earste bitternesse is i sunne bireowsunge, ant i deadbote, hwen þe sunfule is iturnd earst to ure Lauerd. Ant þeos is understonden bi þe earste Marie, Marie Magdaleine [...]. Þe oðer bitternesse is i wreastlunge ant i wragelunge aȝeines fondunges. And þeos is bitacnet bi þe oðer Marie, Marie Iacobi, for ‘Iacob’ spealeð ‘wreastlere’. […] Þe þridde bitternesse is i longunge toward heouene ant i þe ennu of þis world […]. Ant tis þridde bitternesse is understonden bi Marie Salomee, þe þridde Marie, for ‘Salome’ spealeð ‘pes’ […]. (140–141: 351–377) (The first bitterness is in contrition for sin and in satisfaction, when the sinful one is first turned to the Lord. And this is understood to be the first Mary, Mary Magdalene […]. The other bitterness is in wrestling and wrangling against temptations. And this is signified by the other Mary, Mary Jacob, for Jacob means ‘wrestler’. […] The third bitterness is longing 53  For the source text, see Aelred of Rievaulx (d. 1167), De institutione inclusarum, in Aelredi Rievallensis Opera Omnia: 1 Opera Ascetica, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis, i, ed. A. Hoste and C. H. Talbot (Turnhout: Brepols, 1971), 653–657. 54  ‘And Nicodemus also came, (he who at the first came to Jesus by night,) bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about an hundred pound weight’ (John 19: 39).

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towards Heaven and in ennui of this world […]. And this third bitterness is understood by Mary Salome, the third Mary, for ‘Salome’ means ‘peace’.)

These Marian representations thus encompass an affective spectrum. Contrition is present in the ‘sunne bireowsunge’, and it is fused with hope (141: 356–359). Mary ‘wreastlere’ represents temptation, itself a nexus of affective states including sorrow and fear.55 The yearning for Heaven embodied in Mary Salome is aligned with a broad compunctio cordis, which subsumes the anguish of repentance with that of exilic longing.56 In such a rich affective realm, pleasure and pain—or, otherwise put, sweetness and bitterness—become richly intertwined. The ‘bitternesse’ generates ‘swetnesse’ (see 140: 345–346, and 141–142); the Beloved is a giver of myrrh and of aloes. To feel with the Beloved is to be continuously degraded, as witnessed in the poetry of Ibn al-Fāriḍ and Ibn ʿArabı ̄. In Part VI of Ancrene Wisse, this concept is developed from an exegesis of Canticles 2: 8 (‘The voice of my beloved, behold he cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping over the hills’). The Ancrene Wisse-author departs from Bernard of Clairvaux’s angel-based interpretation of the mountains and hills in the Sermones super Cantica Canticorum: 57 [… Dunes bitacnið þeo þe leadeð hest lif; hulles beoð þe lahre. Nu seið ha þet hire leof leapeð o þe dunes;] þet is, totret ham, tofuleð ham, þoleð þet me totreode ham, tuki ham al to wundre, schaweð in ham his ahne troden þet me trudde him in ham, [ifinde] hu he wes totreden, as his trode schaweð. Þis beoð þe hehe dunes, as munt of Muntgiw, dunes of Armenie. Þe hulles, þe beoð lahre, þeo, as þe leafdi seið, hire [leof] ouerleapeð, ne trust nawt se wel on ham, for hare feblesce ne mahte nawt þolien swuch totreodunge. Ant he leapeð ouer ham, forbereð ham ant forbuheð aþet ha waxen herre, from hulles to dunes. (143: 452–463)  See, for example, Ancrene Wisse, 88: 743–752.  See Jean Leclercq The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, trans. Catharine Misrahi (NY: Fordham University Press, 1961), p. 39. On this reference to Mary Salome, see further Roger Dahood, ‘Ancrene Wisse and the Identities of Mary Salome’, in A Companion to Ancrene Wisse, ed. Yoko Wada (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), pp. 225–243. As Geoffrey Shepherd observes, the Ancrene Wisse-author ‘uses stock material throughout, but no treatment has been found which reproduces exactly the combinations of interpretation and etymology’ (Ancrene Wisse: Parts Six and Seven, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972], p. 46, 14/7). 57  Sermons 53 and 54 (Sancti Bernardi Opera, II, 95–111). 55 56

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(Mountains signify those who lead the highest life; hills signify the lower. Now she says that her beloved leaps over the mountains: that is, tramples them, soils them, allows others to trample them, abuses them extremely, shows in them his own footprints that one may tread in them, find how he was trampled, as his treads show. These are the high mountains, as the Mount of Jove [St Gotthard mountains of the Lepontine Alps],58 of Armenia. As for the hills, which are the lower: they, as the lady says, her Beloved leaps over, not trusting so well in them, for their feebleness may not suffer such treading. And he leaps over them, spares them, and avoids them until they grow higher, from hills to mountains.)

Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s speaker traverses the stars yet is also trampled as burning ash. Here in Ancrene Wisse, the self-mortifying anchorite becomes an Alpine mountain, trampled by Christ in order to receive His imprints. The value of the ‘schadewe’, passing over the less reliable hills, rests in its potential to transform into such an imprint: ‘aþet ha waxen here, from hulles to dunes’ (until they grow higher, from hills to mountains). The anchorite’s growth allows ever greater levels of degradation, for such debasement carries with it the sweetness of the Beloved—as further attested in Lofsong of ure Louerde.

Lofsong of ure Louerde The meditation known editorially as Lofsong of ure Louerde has been hidden from view in studies of Middle English; even among its fellow Wooing Group texts, it is often side-lined.59 But it is worthy of significant critical attention. As has been discussed elsewhere, this meditation enables a startling level of confidence in its readers.60 Perhaps the most striking moment in this text is the confident voicing of Canticles 2: 6 and 8: 3 (‘His left hand is under my head, and his right hand shall embrace me’) (p. 232). Lofsong of ure Louerde is thus powerfully echoic of Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s Naẓm al-sulūk; 58  See Ancrene Wisse, ed. Robert Hasenfratz (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000), Appendix II: Proper Names Index (Online) [accessed 28th December 2019]. 59  This is also true of On God Ureisun of ure Lefdi. See further Annie Sutherland, ‘The Unlikely Landscapes of On God Ureisun of ure Lefdi’, in Middle English Lyrics: New Readings of Short Poems, ed. Julia Boffey and Christiania Whitehead (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2018), pp. 73–86. 60  A. S. Lazikani, ‘Seeking Intimacy in the Wooing Group’, Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures 43.2 (2017), 157–85.

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as seen, in the Sufi poem, the degraded Lover also develops in assurance, eventually becoming one with the Beloved. As in Ibn al-Fāriḍ poetry, the speaker in Lofsong of ure Louerde foregrounds affective-ascetic bodiliness to celebrate wretchedness that is infused with love.61 The text’s status as a prayer is established with the pleading first-person voice, ‘ich bidde ant bi seche þe wið inward heorte’ (I bid and beseech you with inward heart) (p.  226). Spoken in the seclusion of the heart, this prayer is formed of Christ’s activity within the world and is focused around the potencies of His body.62 In fact, the opening of Lofsong of ure Louerde establishes the theological basis of embodied affect and in this way is necessarily distinct from the poetry of Ibn al-Fāriḍ and Ibn ʿArabı ̄. The incarnation is voiced, with an emphasis on the intactness of Mary’s body: ‘Iesu crist godes sune soð godd and soð mon of þe eadie meiden iboren maria. þet is meiden and bute make moder’ (Jesus Christ, God’s son true God and true man, of the blessed maiden Mary born, who is maiden and mother without equal). Mary’s body is without ‘bruche’, without breach (p. 226)—Christ’s flesh is formed from an un-penetrated body, and such wholeness becomes tied with the meditator’s ‘completion’ in their love. As the voice bids and beseeches, Christ’s complete body is formed through a series of partial images. It is as though individual ‘pixels’ converge to form the many elements and significances of Christ’s body. To clarify this effect, it is worth quoting the passage in full: ich bidde ant bi seche þe wið inward heorte þurh þin akennednesse ine meidenes licame of þe holi Goste. and þuruh þin iborenesse wið uten bruche of hire bodie þuruh al þet ðu tawhtest. and þoledest for sunfule in eorðe. þurh þine vif wunden. and þe eadie flod þet of ham fledde. þurh ðe irene neiles and þe þornene crune. and þurh þe pinen and þe schomen and þi deorewurðe deað oðe rode and þuruh ðe ilke rode i-halewed of þine deorewurðe limen. ðet þu on hire mildeliche streihtest. and þine moderes ream and sein i[o]hanes soruwe þo þu somnedest ham ase sune and moder. uor rewðe of þine pinen and þurch þine blisfule ariste þe þridde dai of deaðe. and þurh þine wurðful astiunge into heouene. þurh ðe grace and þe ȝeoue 61  On embodied affect in the Wooing Group more broadly, see further Anne Savage, ‘The Wooing Group: Pain, Pleasure and the Anchoritic Body’, in The Milieu and Context of the Wohunge Group, ed. Susannah Mary Chewning (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), pp. 165–177. 62  On prayer in seclusion or ‘privacy’, see further R. W. Southern, Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 102.

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of þe holi goste. þet þu on hwite sune dai sendest þine deorewurðe deciples. and ȝettedest to þeo þet rith luuieð þe and leued. and þurh þine eisfule cume a domesdai to demen boðe cwike and deade. and þurh þine eadi flesche and þine iblescede blode i-sacred oðe weouede. þurh þe mihte of fuluht. þurh alle þe oðre sacremens. þet holi chirche ileueð. þurh þine muchele milce and merci þet is more þen al þet is inempned wið-ute þe grace of þe oli goste. þet is efne wið þe and wið þin eadi feder. Godd of alle godd ful. haue merci of me and iher mine bonen. (pp. 226–228) (I bid and beseech you with inward heart through your conception in the maiden’s body of the Holy Ghost, and through your birth without breach of her body, through all that you taught, and suffered for the sinful on earth; through your five wounds, and the blessed flood that flowed out of them; through the iron nails and the crown of thorns, and through the pains and shames and your precious death on the Cross, and through that same Cross hallowed with your precious limbs on which you mildly stretched, and your mother’s wailing and St John’s sorrow when you coupled them together as son and mother for compassion of your pain and through your blissful rising the third day of death, and through your honourable ascent into Heaven; through the grace and the gift of the Holy Ghost that you sent on Whitsunday to your precious disciples, and poured on those who rightly loved and believed in you, and through your terrifying coming on Doomsday to judge both the living and the dead; and through your blessed flesh and your blessed blood consecrated on the altar, through the power of baptism, through all the other sacraments that Holy Church believes in, through the great compassion and mercy that is more than all that is named, except the grace of the Holy Ghost, who is equal with you and with your blessed Father; God, full of all goodness, have mercy on me and hear my prayers.)

This prayer is vast in its expanse, tracing the many redemptive expressions of Christ’s body. His body is brought into relief repeatedly, in so many forms—infant, wounded, bleeding, dead, resurrected, and, ultimately, consumable in the consecrated Eucharist. As will be examined in Chap. 5, the Wooing Group meditations can be read as Eucharistic tools, and it is no coincidence that the prayer of this passage culminates in this sacrament. Most germane to the present chapter is the way in which these individual images coalesce into a whole body that redeems humankind. Furthermore, the preposition ‘þuruh’ has an effect of both embodiment and disembodiment. It positions Christ’s body as the focal point of the meditation while simultaneously suggesting a transparency to his body, a looking ‘through’. Such a dual pull enables the meditators to delve into the significances of

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Christ’s Flesh, whilst also distancing themselves sufficiently to negotiate their own embodied affect in relation to this perfect Incarnated Body. After all, embodied affect is first generated from the speaker’s sinfulness. Early on in the text, the sins are described as ‘ateliche’ and ‘grisliche’; these adjectives of Old English origin both have primary senses of ‘horrible’ and ‘hideous’, and they frequently have bodily connotations (p. 228).63 This is reinforced by the mapping of Christ’s body onto the sinner’s flesh. His wounded body and the preciousness of his blood become sites of hermeneutic inscription, as the anguish of Christ’s wounds is transferred onto the wounds of sin (p.  228). There is an emphasis on the satiety of the wounds, which in turn suggests a fullness of anguish in the sinner: ‘þurh þine fif wunden iopened o rode. wið neiles uor-driuene and seoruhfulliche fordutte. hel me uorwunded’ (p. 228) (through your five wounds opened on the Cross, with nails driven through and sorrowfully shuttered [or filled up], heal me who is wounded). The past participle ‘fordutte’ is intriguing. Catherine Innes-Parker translates it as ‘filled up’ (p. 229), and it has a range of possible meanings attested in the MED.64 If translated as ‘closed up’ or ‘shuttered’—with Christ’s wounds somehow acting both as apertures and as opaque screens—the participle would then harmonize with the subsequent plea to ‘opene’ up the senses (‘wittes’) ‘touward heouenliche þinges’ (p. 228) (towards heavenly things). Like the wounded Christ, the sinful lover is both locked and unlocked, closed yet utterly open. Central to Lofsong of ure Louerde is this paradox of sealing and unsealing, which has rich resonances with Ibn al-Fāriḍ and Ibn ʿArabı ̄. This also speaks to a more fundamental common ground between the traditions. Affective sensitivity exists alongside the worldly death—whether in the form of penitential surrender or annihilation of the ‘ego’—that must characterize a spiritual vocation. In Lofsong of ure Louerde, this is expressed through the Galatians reference (2: 20):65 63  See entry ‘atelı ̄ch adj’ in MED (Online), especially the citations on bodily hideousness from St Margaret, the South English Legendary/Legendaries, Body and Soul (Vernon), and Ancrene Wisse; and entry ‘grislı ̄ adj. & n.’, particularly the quotations from Ancrene Wisse, where the adjective is associated with hideousness of sight through bodily discharge and bodily pain (both entries accessed 29 October 2019). 64  ‘To close up (an opening); to stop (the ears, the mouth), to close (a wound), to fill up or cover (a grave, a pit, a dungeon, etc.); fig. word ~, to prevent speech’: entry ‘forditten v.’, MED (Online) [accessed 4th November 2019]. 65  ‘I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me’ (Galatians 2: 20).

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beo ðe world [dead] to me. and me to þe worlde. þurh þine ariste louerd to liue; bute deaðe. of soule deaðe arer me. and ȝif me lif in ðe. þet ich iþisse worlde ne luuie nout bute þe liuinde louerd. and hwat so god is uor þe. þet ich to þe world beo dead. and euer liuie. to þe. þet ich muwe siggen wið seinte powel þet seið. ich liuie nout ich; auh crist liueð in me[.] (p. 230) (May the world be dead to me, and me to the world. Through your arising, Lord, to life without death, raise me from the death of the soul, and give me life in you, so that I may love nothing in this world except you, living Lord, and whatever is good for you, that I may be dead to the world and ever alive to you, that I may say with St Paul, who says, I live not I, but Christ lives in me.)

There is a desire to speak with Paul—not from, instead of, about, or for Paul; the desire is to speak with him. This cannot simply be explained as an assumption of Paul’s voice. It is a shared speaking, a shared utterance, to truly become dead and alive. Such collaborative voicing takes on further potency in the extended description of death through sin (p. 230). In their death-life, the speaker of Lofsong of ure Louerde combines debasement and exaltation, the low and high, capturing the incessant pulls on the spiritually oriented soul. An ascetic lowering exists alongside an ascent through redemption: ‘louerd þi merci ase ich ham heie iclumben wið þis ilke bone. þet ligge so lowe’ (p. 230) (Lord, your mercy, as I am climbed high with this same prayer, who lies so low […]). This is deeply resonant of Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s speaker in the Tarjuma ̄n (Poem XXIII), who flies beside the constellations and yet is also found underfoot. Such duality becomes all the more powerful as Lofsong of ure Louerde reaches its climax in the Canticles.66 The Canticles reference is striking in its assurance—the Bride asks confidently for the Beloved’s right arm to embrace the soul wholly, enclosing it in His grasp: Mi leofmonnes luft erm halt up mine heaued heo seið. 7 his riht erm schal biclupen me abuten. let me beo þi leouemon 7 siggen ase heo seið. leof wið þi luft erm. þet is. wið þine worldliche ȝeouen hold up min heauwed ðet ich þuruh to muche wone ne falle i fulðe of sunne. 7 leof wið þin riht erm. þet is in heuene wið endeleasse blissen biclupe me abuten. (p. 232)

66  It should be remembered, however, that the meditation may have also been read in isolable sections, according to Anselmian possibilities. See further Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109), Orationes sive meditationes, in S. Anselmi Cantuariensis Archiepiscopi Opera Omnia, ed. F.S. Schmitt, 6 vols, III (Stuttgart: F. Frommann, 1968), 3.

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(My lover’s left arm holds up my head, she says, and his right arm shall embrace me all about. Let me be your lover and say as she says: beloved with your left arm, that is, with your worldly gifts hold up my head that I do not fall in filth of sin through too much need. And lover, with your right arm, that is, in Heaven with endless bliss, embrace me all about.)

In their vernacularly voiced confidence, the speaker reaches for Christ’s arms both for support in their continual self-mortification (‘that I do not fall in filth of sin through too much need’) and for bliss in their future afterlife. As Lofsong ure Louerde nears its end, with the speaker’s elevated confidence, a homophony of biblical and patristic references ensues (p. 234). It is in being bereft of all human comfort that a speaker can feel the presence of the Holy Ghost. The devotee must experience a shearing of the self— not unlike that seen in Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s Naẓm, where the shedding of the ego allows the descent of the Beloved, allows the Heart to become a reliable guide towards the form of the Beloved. A translation of love, from the earthly to the divine, as affirmed in Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s Tarjuma ̄n, is made concrete in Lofsong of ure Louerde with reference to Augustinian precepts:67 auh þe ich chulle luuien nu. uor ham þet ich luuede er and truste to and hopede. uor nu ich understonde hu soð hit is ðet seint austin seið in his boc. uniseli is ðet is wið luue to eni eorðlich þing iteied. uor euer bið ðet swete; abouht mid twofold of bittre. (p. 236) (And [or but] I shall love you now, in the place of those that I before loved and trusted and hoped in, for now I understand how true it is what St Augustine says in his book. Accursed [or unwise]68 is the one who is tied with love to any earthly thing, for that sweetness is always bought with twice the bitterness[.])

Earthly sweetness is inevitably encircled with a twofold bitterness; in this assertion also lies, perhaps, the desire that earthly bitterness might purchase a twofold sweetness. As seen in Ancrene Wisse, bitterness and sweetness are always companionate. Pain and pleasure are each other’s 67  The source, as identified by Millett, is Augustine’s Confessiones (PL xxxii, 697, 699). The same image is used in Hali Meiðhad: Hali Meiðhad, ed. Bella Millett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), EETS O.S. 284, p.  14, ll. 4–10. On this passage shared in Hali Meiðhad and Lofsong of ure Louerde, see further Millett, ed., Hali Meiðhad, pp. xx–xxi and p. 42, n. 14/4–10. 68  See further entry ‘uniseli(e adj’ in MED (Online) [accessed 28th December 2019].

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accompaniment, as was witnessed earlier in the poetry of Ibn ʿArabı ̄ and Ibn al-Fāriḍ. The ending of Lofsong of ure Louerde expresses a surrender into Christ’s loving power, underwritten by the echoic repetition of ‘milzfule’ (merciful or compassionate; pp. 236–238). In this embodied love, Christ with his perpetually signifying body is potentiality itself: ‘ase þu meiht, ant const, ant wult’ (as you may, and can, and will) (p. 238). Allowing dominant critical terms in the history of emotions a greater fluidity—so that they might embrace distinct theologies and traditions—is one step towards enabling comparative readings of embodied affect across Islamic and Christian contemplative texts. In Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s Tarjuma ̄n al-ashwāq, Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s Dı ̄wa ̄n, Ancrene Wisse, and Lofsong of ure Louerde, the body becomes a site on which complex affective stirrings might be stimulated and negotiated. In neither tradition can body-centric images be read merely as metaphors or analogies for emotional states; this oversimplifies the complexities of embodied affect in both the English and Arabic texts. Both traditions convey a unique death-affect. When read through the lens of avian emotion, embodied affect reveals the paradoxical nature of the solitary-ascetic existence in both traditions: it is an existence that invites a death to the world alongside an extraordinary aliveness to the Beloved. In this living death/deathly life, the desiccation of the ‘self’—of ego-based desire and need—has a fraught intimacy with ascetic practice. Affective debasement necessitates an embodied language that is neither strictly literal nor strictly figurative; the affective-ascetic body of these texts disrupts all such binaries. In this debasement, pain and pleasure become near-indistinguishable, with bitterness and sweetness each taking their portion of the devotee’s heart. The Lover’s affective-ascetic body is at once destitute and enriched. Ground down in suffering, this body emerges as a generative space, a blood-red garden of delights.

CHAPTER 5

Blood and Wine

With gentle Eucharistic tones, Irigaray writes of a ‘feast of love’ that acts as a spatial and temporal bridge: ‘The feast of love […] can be celebrated, gathering together the mortal and the divine, the earthly and the celestial in an encounter where giving and receiving are exchanged in the elation of the present’.1 The realms of Heaven and Earth coalesce in this act of feasting, creating an ontological unity between death and life, between the Divine and the fleshly. And in this wondrous, present moment, memory allows past and future to engage in a generous dance. Much of Irigaray’s description might be on the Eucharist; the Eucharist is, after all, a sacrament glowing with omnitemporal love. The liquid within the chalice ripples outwards with infinite significations. Both blood and wine are rich cultural signifiers, and in particular, they can act as affective signifiers or stimuli.2 Blood and wine interact within a devotee’s affective literacies, becoming symptomatic or emblematic of affective shifts, and at times even synonymous with these shifts. Avian emotion renders such interactions legible in both Christian and Islamic traditions.  Irigaray, The Way of Love, p. 131.  On European texts, see especially Bonnie Lander Johnson and Eleanor Decamp, ‘Introduction’, in Blood Matters: Studies in European Literature and Thought, 1400–1700, ed. Bonnie Lander Johnson and Eleanor Decamp (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), pp. 1–12. 1 2

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. S. Lazikani, Emotion in Christian and Islamic Contemplative Texts, 1100–1250, The New Middle Ages, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59924-9_5

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Across these traditions, intimacy with a text intersects powerfully with growing intimacy with the Divine. In this intimacy reside blood and wine as complex hermeneutic tools. How a text may be known—and how the Beloved may be known—begin to converge. In Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s engagement with khamr, he performs the (un)speakability of the Beloved. Shushtarı ̄’s own wine poetry edges closer to celebrating the Beloved as ultimately speakable and knowable. The Wooing Group texts become tools in Eucharistic preparation; the texts are consumed, softening the heart for consuming the Beloved. In the poetry of Ibn al-Fāriḍ and Shushtarı ̄, and in the lyrical Wooing Group, remembrance (dhikr/‘munegunge’) is tied intimately to blood or wine, or blood-wine.3 This has scriptural foundations, as encapsulated in surah 33: 41 (‘Believers, remember God often’) and Luke 22: 19 (‘do this in remembrance of me’).4 The Wooing Group meditations are Eucharistic tools enabling remembrance of Christ; Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s al-Khamriyya performs dhikr (remembrance) as an essential practice and embraces the samaʿ (audition, listening) so crucial to Sufi recollection of the Beloved. As seen in Chap. 2, the interlocutors in Shushtarı ̄’s ‘At the monastery door’ understand the wine, the khamr, in very different terms from one another. The Shushtarı ̄-speaker finds that it is not the wine they have sought, leading to the clear ‘disappointment’ Alvarez observes.5 A twenty-­ first-­century reader is confronted with this difference between Christian and Islamic handling of wine and divine intoxication. As discussed in previous chapters, incarnational theologies do not sit easily with Islamic thought. Can we find dialogue when a Sufi seems to say that Christian ‘wine’—used in that poem as a symbol for wisdom and learning—is not what they wanted? I think the dialogic encounter of blood, wine, and blood-wine is possible and is not one of inevitable disappointment. Whilst Ibn al-Fāriḍ and Shushtarı ̄ never explicitly term wine a kind of blood, there is evidence of Eucharistic influence. The wine is the essential life of all, being present before the time of Adam, as Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s and Shushtarı ̄’s 3  On ‘munegunge’ in the Wooing Group, see further A.S.  Lazikani, ‘Remembrance and Time in the Wooing Group’, in Reconsidering Gender, Time and Memory in Medieval Culture, ed. Elizabeth Cox, Liz Herbert McAvoy and Roberta Magnani (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2015), pp. 79–94. 4  I have used the New King James Version in the text in this instance to highlight the parallel emphasis on remembrance in both Qur’an and Bible. The Douay-Rheims translation of Luke 22: 19 reads, ‘Do this for a commemoration of me’. 5  Alvarez, trans., Shushtarı ̄: Songs of Love and Devotion, p. 117.

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speakers both affirm.6 It is also important to note that the notion of God as a form of nourishment is not unthinkable to Sufi writers. In the chapter dedicated to prophet Luqmān (XXIII) in Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s Bezels of Wisdom, for instance, the opening verse indicates that there may to some degree be an ‘eating’ of God: ‘Should the deity wish sustenance for us, | Then He may be food for us, as He wishes’ (p. 237).

Blood and Sweetness in the Poetry of Ibn ʿArabı ̄ and Ibn al-Far ̄ iḍ Writing on late medieval women contemplatives in Europe, Bynum has cautioned against combining wound and blood devotion uncritically, since, she notes, ‘we find that what flows from Christ’s side in mystical visions, prayers and hymns is often the sweetness of milk and honey, not blood’.7 Such caution is all the more applicable to the Islamic texts, where the link between blood (dam) and sweetness (ḥala ̄wa) is not immediately self-evident. Whilst blood and sweetness are not always explicitly aligned in the poetry of Ibn ʿArabı ̄ and Ibn al-Fāriḍ, the two imagistic strands run deeply in the texts and are echoic of the Lover’s most profound struggles. Blood allows the self-reflexive expression of asceticism. Sweetness has an epistemological valency—it becomes one expressive mode for knowledge of, and union with, the One. The convergence of these two imagistic strands has striking effects, blending ascesis and contemplative knowledge within the Sufi tarı ̄qa. Wakefulness in love, the keeping of vigils for the Beloved’s sake, permeates Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s Dı ̄wān. The eyes of Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s Lover are marked by fever, ‘after her restlessly watching’ (XIV: 75)—linking to vigil practice, or wird. The pupils of their eyes are ‘dead’ and their ‘tears lave their lifeless corpse’ (XIV: 76). Sleeplessness is resonant of keeping vigils as a form of self-mortification, as attested in VIII: ‘Yearning hath taught mine eye to  See further Alvarez, trans., Shushtarı ̄: Songs of Love and Devotion, p. 41; and Lings, ed. and trans., Sufi Poems, pp. 72–73. In the case of Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s al-Khamriyya, the reference to Adam is part of the section omitted by Homerin in his translation, providing the following explanation: ‘These verses were not included in the version of the poem collected by Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s grandson, ‘Alı ̄, who knew of them but thought them to be of dubious authenticity. These verses are also absent from manuscripts of the oldest commentaries on the Wine Ode’ (p. 44). I have nonetheless included these lines in this chapter’s discussion whilst acknowledging that they may not be attributed to Ibn al-Fāriḍ accurately. 7  Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond  (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), p. 14. 6

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be watchful through all the night, so that it now beholdeth thee, even without slumber’ (VIII: 42). As the speaker expands: ‘sweet the night, wherein I trapped thee nightly journeying, spreading out my vigilance to be my nets’ (VIII: 43). In this constant waking, ‘my hand cleaves to my breast throughout the livelong night’ (XIV: 91). Vigils and their links with weeping are further implied in XI: ‘In the evening my heart is distraught with ardent Passion, and in the morning mine eye pours forth the tears of sorrow’ (XI: 11).8 Dead eyes, and their association with wird (keeping vigils), also have a more specific function as sites of bleeding. Poem I refers to ‘wounded eyelids’ from sleeplessness, leading to ‘tears’ that ‘are mingled all with blood’ (11). These bloodied tears ‘exceed by far the rains of the setting stars’ (I: 14), and ‘He bestoweth on mountain-bottoms the cataract of his weeping, when the clouds have grudged their rains’ (V: 50). The Lover’s tears form rain showers (XIV: 24), recast into blood later in the poem. When people wonder at the redness of their tears, the Lover replies: ‘I slaughtered the sheep in mine eyelids as hospitality to the ghostly guest, and my tears flowed blood over my cheeks’ (XIV: 39). In VIII is the following assertion: ‘blood that has flowed from my wounded eyelids for thee’ (VIII: 22). In II, the blood tears are linked to the melted heart: ‘Look thou upon a heart that is melted with ardent love for thee, and an eye overwhelmed in the waves of its blood-flecked tears’ (II: 40). This is also the case in XII: ‘out of my heart springs a flame that serveth well for a firebrand, and from mine eyes stream tears that flood like continuous rains’ (XII: 8). The blood tears are generated from the annihilation of the body in XI: ‘Struck down by the violent impact of love, my ribs sore wounded, lacerated mine eyelids, that stream unceasing with blood’ (XI: 16).9 Beyond these bleeding eyes, Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s and Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s poetry is also richly sweet: olfactory and taste-based sweetness perfume the corpus of both poets. The latter is most relevant for our purposes, though the two are not always straightforwardly separable. The significance of sweetness in the epistemologies of Islamic and Christian contemplative texts would require a book-length study of its own. In Sufi vocabularies of contemplative ascent, sweetness has a central role. Sweetness is one important form

8 9

 I have used Arberry’s translations in this paragraph.  The translations in this paragraph are also Arberry’s (see previous note).

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of experiencing disclosure of the Divine in Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s work.10 There are three forms of ‘openings’ (futūḥ): opening of expression (ʿibāra), opening of sweetness (ḥalāwa), opening of unveiling (mukāshafa).11 More broadly, tasting (dhawq) is an essential word in Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s vocabularies and in that of other Sufis.12 Dhawq is high on the ladder, associated also with kashf, or ‘unveiling’.13 According to Chittick’s definition, adopted here, dhawq for Ibn ʿArabı ̄ is the ‘first stage of the experience of God’s self-disclosure’, followed by ‘drinking’ (shurb) and ‘quenching’ (rı ̄); to these Ibn ʿArabı ̄ may also add ‘intoxication’ (sukr).14 Knysh defines dhawq as a form of ‘mystical intuition’.15 Chittick suggests dhawq is associated in Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s work with experiential knowledge of the Divine, in opposition to intellectual pursuit.16 Knysh also observes that for Al-Ghazāli, ‘intuition, or direct tasting (dhawq), of divine mysteries’ is ‘superior to the pettifogging casuistry of the exoteric ulema’.17 Olfactory sweetness is pungent in Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s Tarjuma ̄n, and it remains linked with the sweetness of taste. In Tarjuma ̄n XXXIX, the quest for the Beloved involves detection of a range of traces. Faced with the Beloved’s invisibility, the Lover will ‘find no guide but in their scent, the sweetest of traces’ (2). Such traces are found within the heart, as the commentary confirms (comm 2). This search through sweetness is mirrored in Tarjuma ̄n LX, where there is an alertness to remaining scents: ‘breathe the scent of the wind over against their land, in desire that the (sweet) airs may tell thee where they are’ (2). The Lover identifies markers as they navigate the desert of absence for the Beloved: ‘I know that they encamped at the bān  tree of Idam, where the ʿarār plants grow and the shı ̄h and the katam’ (3). Such is the quintessential desert landscape of the poetic nası ̄b. But the commentary offers further exposition. It affirms that the phrase ‘at the bán tree of Idam’ refers to ‘the station of Absolute purity at the end of the journey to God’ and ‘the ʿarār plants’ are ‘sweet spiritual influences proceeding from lovely spiritual beings’ (comm 3). Addressing the girl of 10  Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-Arabı ̄’s Metaphysics of Imagination (New York: State University of New York Press, 1989), p. 169. 11  Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, p. 224; see also p. 370. 12  See Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, pp. 44, 86, 394 n. 19. 13  Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, p. 70. 14  Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, pp. 392–393 n. 36. 15  See ‘Index of Terms’ in Knysh, Islamic Mysticism: A Short History, p. 354. 16  Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination (New York: State University of New York Press, 1989), p. 3. 17  Knysh, Islamic Mysticism: A Short History, p. 148.

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fourteen directly in Tarjumān XL, the speaker avows: ‘Thou art a pyx containing blended odours and perfume, thou art a meadow producing spring-herbs and flowers’ (5). These mixed scents are, according to the commentary, ‘Divine sciences and influences’ (comm 5). Again, there is the sense of melange in the Beloved: she is a vessel that not only imparts, but also combines, mixes. Furthermore, sweet saliva is a trope found repeatedly in the work of Ibn ʿArabı ̄ and Ibn al-Fāriḍ and suggests divine knowledge. This is hinted at in Tarjuma ̄n XXX: ‘The bees compete with one another whenever she spits’ (25). The sweetness of saliva has near-­ Eucharistic echoes and is clarified in the commentary as ‘sciences of communion and converse and speech which leave a delicious taste in the heart’ (comm 4).18 Comparably, in Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s corpus, sweet fragrances are vestiges of the Beloved’s presence. Poem I details the ‘sweet perfume of the night-­ journeying breeze’ (1). Smell is significant in VIII, with the ‘odour of ambergris’ that is ‘giving expression to thy sweet scent’ (VIII: 52). Speaking to the camel rider in XII, the Lover cries: ‘Turn aside at the enclosure […] seeking the thicket of the wild lote-tree, abounding in sweet bay and lavender’ (XII: 4). The ‘sweet perfume’ is mentioned in XIV (1), possibly reinforced by the ara ̄k bushes mentioned a few lines later (XIV: 6). These traces of sweetness run parallel to a dichotomy of sweetness and bitterness: ‘How bitter is separation […] and how sweet is reunion after loneliness’ (IV: 18). In V, the speaker declares: ‘To endure their absence is like bitter aloes (sabr) to me’ (V: 34). Reaffirming the dichotomy, though here combining pain with sweetness, the speaker cries: ‘to endure their cruelty, such pain I count truly as sweet as choicest dates’ (V: 34; see also V: 37). Bitterness shades into sweetness in the Beloved’s presence, however cruel, again with the invocation of the sabr: ‘Bitter aloes it is to endure your absence; while to endure your cruelty—this, its bitterness ever is sweet to me’ (IX: 19). In Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s Naẓm, a Lover’s longing is associated especially with taste. The speaker refers to the ‘fruit of torment’ and ‘sweetness of love’s cravings’ (413). The Lover speaks in terms of feasting and overflowing in love, reminding us of Irigaray’s words that opened this chapter: ‘sweet and delicate delights | as sustenance for union’ (403), their ‘essence’ (dha ̄t) ‘poured forth’ and ‘set to overflow’

 See also Tarjumān XLVI: 2.

18

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(404).19 The emaciated lover whom we witnessed in the previous chapter speaks, longingly, of nourishment (405). The epistemological directive of the Sufi is perfused with sweet spoors. Encounter with the Divine, riveting disclosure of the Beloved, is in the Lover’s own dhawq of the Beloved’s sweetness.

Divine Intoxication: The Wine of Shushtarı ̄ and Ibn al-Far ̄ iḍ The al-Khamriyya Tradition There is a clear prominence of blood and sweetness in the conceptual and imagistic vocabularies of both Ibn al-Fāriḍ and Ibn ʿArabı ̄; the presence of both melds asceticism with divine intimacy, as the bleeding Lover tastes the Beloved’s delicacy. The association of blood with discourses of self-­ mortification and the establishment of sweetness as an epistemological mode both inform wine, khamr, as an encapsulation of encounter with the Divine. The al-Khamriyya (wine poetry) tradition had a long history in classical Arabic preceding Sufi writers. Ibn al-Fāriḍ and others work within this well-established tradition, exemplified by Abu Nuwās (756–814) and Ibn Quzmān (1078–1160).20 As observed by Phillip F.  Kennedy in his studies on Abu Nuwās, the topic of wine ‘became disengaged from other themes and developed into a separate genre’ from the early seventh century, with important consequences: ‘Wine became a medium of liberated expression, giving voice to verses of religious profanity, hedonism and licentiousness’.21 Abu Nuwās epitomized such ‘hedonism’ and ‘licentiousness’, though we could avoid the moralistic charge of this latter word. This wonderfully irreverent poet even ‘parodied the abandoned campsite theme of the traditional qaṣı ̄da by composing a lament for the disappearance of old drinking taverns’.22 He also frequently combines alcoholic ­consumption 19  I have used Homerin’s translations of the Naẓm, and Arberry’s translations of other poems, in this paragraph. 20  See further Raymond Farrin, Abundance from the Desert: Classical Arabic Poetry (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011), p. 241. For a useful schematic table of the sections of al-Khamriyya, with the suggestion that the final section recapitulates earlier themes, see Farrin, Abundance from the Desert, p. 247. 21  Phillip F.  Kennedy, Abu Nuwas: A Genius of Poetry (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2005), pp. 58–59. 22  Irwin, The Penguin Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature, p. 123.

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with sexual encounter, linking his beloved’s face with a coveted goblet: ‘His face, a goblet next his lip, | looks like a moon lit with a lamp’.23 And in one of the poems by Ibn Quzmān, a cheerful and unrepentant speaker with a wine-soaked moustache announces that drunkenness is like a perpetual wa ̄jib (duty, obligation).24 It is such a tradition that our Sufi poets inherited but also, crucially, reclaimed. In the hands of Ibn al-Fāriḍ and Shushtarı ̄, the hedonistic, self-­ pleasuring wine of Abu Nuwās and Ibn Quzmān became a means of expressing divine intoxication. Wine as signifier gestured towards ecstatic absorption in the One through a knowing love or loving knowledge. Sufi re-appropriation of this tradition itself had deep roots.25 The al-Khamriyya tradition is most fully embodied in Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s famous wine poem, known as al-Khamriyya (The Wine Poem/The Wine Ode), though it does make repeated appearances elsewhere in his Dı ̄wa ̄n: ‘When I remember you, I sway with emotion as though I have been given to drink of wine, because of the fragrance of your memory’, reads an assertion in Poem III of Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s Dı ̄wān (III: 19). In Poem V, the speaker reflects: ‘Of his mouth and his glances cometh my intoxication; nay, but I see a vintner in his every limb’ (V: 20). And in XI come these lines, a tying of wine with remembrance: ‘Pass round the remembrance of her I desire […] for the tales of the Beloved are my wine’ (XI: 1). As in the al-Khamriyya (X) poem, soundedness is crucial to remembrance: ‘mine ear may witness the one I love’ (XI: 2).26 The Sufi employment of the al-Khamriyya tradition is further epitomized in Shushtarı ̄’s monastery poems, as seen in his ‘At the monastery door’ in Chap. 2. In his other monastery poem, ‘Is that a lamp?’, wine is affirmed to be hawa (intense love). In the depths of night, the speaker of this qaṣı ̄da sees a burning glow emanating from the

 Quoted from Irwin, The Penguin Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature, p. 124.  For an excerpt from this poem by Ibn Quzmān, see Alvarez, Shushtarı ̄: Songs of Love and Devotion, p. 151. 25  See Massignon, Essay on the Origins of the Technical Language of Islamic Mysticism, p. 19, and Homerin, ‘Tangled Words’, p. 191. 26  In XIV, the intoxication is, however, made separate from wine. The Beloved rustles the grass: ‘Stirring the dear grasses of al-Ghuswair, and that stirring—not wine—moved me to intoxication’ (XIV: 4). All translations to Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s Dı ̄wān in this paragraph are Arberry’s. For further discussion of khamr in Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s work, see especially Th. Emil Homerin, Passion Before Me, My Fate Behind: Ibn al-Fāriḍ and the Poetry of Recollection (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011), pp. 143–175. 23 24

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monastery, like the brightness of dawn (fajir), and they are unable to identify it as a lamp or a glass of wine (Nashshār, p. 42). This Wine of Love is also prevalent in Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s Tarjuma ̄n. Poem XVI has the image of ‘thirsty souls’ (XVI: 12), an image enhanced a few lines later: ‘Giving to the fair (women) the wines of intimacy’ (XVI: 16). In Poem XXVI, the curved valley is identified as the place of love (‘the trysting-­place’ where the camels can rest [1]). The meadow is fertile, luscious and soft (3–5), with raindrops ‘descending from the crevices of the clouds like tears shed by a passionate lover because he is parted from her he loves’ (6). In this deluge, the Lover can ‘drink the pure essence of its wine with its intoxication’ (7), hearing a singer sing of the ‘pure wine’ of the Garden of Eden (8). Here Ibn ʿArabı ̄ also responds to the al-Khamriyya tradition, with the wine signifying ‘spiritual meanings and Divine sciences, which fill the heart with delight’, wine ‘derived from the Presence which comes to dwell in the souls of gnostics at the time of nurture’ (XXVI: comm 7–8). Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s al-Khamriyya It remains Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s poem al-Khamriyya that offers the most extended reflection of this wine of divine intoxication. The poem inspired many centuries of theological and grammatical commentaries.27 In the words of Martin Lings, wine is in this poem ‘the symbol of Gnosis and Love in their Essential Oneness, the Divine Radiance whereby all things exist and the Divine Attraction whereby all existence is reabsorbed into its Principle’.28 Becoming drunk on wine is the utter absorption with the One, in totality of Love. The poem attempts to deconstruct the meaning of this wine through an array of rhetorical strategies whilst also surrendering to the wine’s ultimate ineffability. That the wine acts symbolically in this poem is reinforced by the speaker’s repeated assertions that drinking the wine is no sin: ‘wala ʿār ʿalayhim, wala ithm’ (no shame upon him, nor sin).29 The sin is in not taking it (p. 73).  See further Homerin, ‘Umar Ibn al-Fāriḍ: Sufi Verse, Saintly Life, pp. 43–44 and 52–65.  Martin Lings, Sufi Poems: A Mediaeval [sic] Anthology (Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 2004; repr. 2012), p. 66. 29  Lings, ed., Sufi Poems, p. 69. In the case of Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s al-Khamriyya, my transliteration is based on Lings’ edition so that readers might make reference to the full poem in the original should they wish, as Lings’ anthology is more widely available than Arberry’s transcription or Mahmūd’s edition. However, all translations of the al-Khamriyya are my own, and not Lings’. 27 28

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It is highly likely that Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s conception of this ‘wine’ was influenced by Eucharistic imagery, although this is difficult to prove directly.30 As Shushtarı ̄ does, Ibn al-Fāriḍ references the folk of the monastery (‘ʾahl aldayr’, p.  73). Monasteries were key places of intimate contact between Muslims and Christians both in southern Europe and in the Middle East. For Ibn al-Fāriḍ, the monastery’s folk stop short of drinking his wine—perhaps alluding to the perception, like Shushtarı ̄’s, that Christians do not quite have the right understanding of this divine liquid (p. 73). The fact remains, though, that Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s contact with Christian thought may have informed his depiction of the wine in al-Khamriyya. Equally, however, it is important to remember that Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s wine (madām, khamr) is distinctly non-corporeal. Throughout, its disembodiment is underscored by the wine’s existence without origins. It came into being before ‘creation [khalq] of the vine [karm]’, and its pressing came before Adam. The wine is an orphan (yatı ̄m) as the skin of the grape is lost at its pressing. More directly, the wine is separated from any anchor in human flesh. It has nothing before it and nothing after it (p. 71). Our souls are the wine, while our ‘phantoms’ (ashbāh) are the vine, declares the speaker; the term ashbāh seems to hint at the ephemeral body.31 They are intoxicated by the wine before their own existence, and after the decay of their bones (ʿiẓa ̄m). The effects of this wine exist before and after the human flesh has form, in stark contrast to the identification of Christ’s blood in Lofsong of ure Lefdi (for instance) as ‘flesch founge of þine eadie bodie’ (p.  206: flesh received from your [Mary’s] blessed body). Despite this non-corporeality in Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s work—a fact that makes the wine very different from wine in Christian contexts—there are remarkable parallels between this wine of love and Christian conceptualizations of the wine as Christ’s blood. These parallels reside in remembrance; spiritual-sensory immersion alongside concealment; the wine’s curative properties; and the hermeneutic acts fundamental to its taking, resonant with the transformation of wine into blood in the hands of the celebrant. Central to Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s poem is the notion of dhikr, remembrance, founded upon Qur’an 33: 41 and resonant of Sufi ritual. As Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s Tarjuma ̄n-exegete remarks, the heart is a wasteland without dhikr, a 30  See further Th. Emil Homerin, trans., ‘Umar Ibn al-Fa ̄riḍ: Sufi Verse, Saintly Life, p. 41; and Th. Emil Homerin, Passion Before Me, My Fate Behind: Ibn al-Fāriḍ and the Poetry of Recollection (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011), pp. 143–175. 31  Lings also appears to interpret ashba ̄h this way, as he translates the line as ‘Our spirits wine are, and our bodies vine’, and he contrasts Adam’s ‘spiritual or “winal” nature’ with Adam’s ‘human or “vineal” nature’ (Lings, ed. and trans., Sufi Poems, p. 72, and p. 99, n. 81).

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barren desert (XXXI: comm 9). To quote Homerin: ‘Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s dhikr, his “recollection”, becomes more than the shaman-poet’s conjuring of his beloved’s shade, for dhikr is the Sufi practice of meditation undertaken to induce ecstasy, and perhaps, too, the beatific vision’.32 Dhikr is further explored in Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s Naẓm al-sulūk. Naẓm contains an important recitation of the senses’ role in memory (420ff). First comes the ear—the ear is associated with memory, in the form of the singing doves (421). The doves’ voices enrich the meditator, as Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s speaker hears them as reflections of their own grief. Then come sight, taste, and touch, with a statement on how memory is invoked within the heart through what the senses convey (Naẓm, 424). There is then a return to a focus on listening, with the chanting of the Beloved’s name: ‘I witness her by listening through my totality’ (425). Such dhikr, nurtured by the senses, is at the heart of Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s conception of wine in the al-Khamriyya. The very opening line of the al-Khamriyya announces that consumption of the said wine is ‘in memory of the beloved’ (dhikr-al-habı ̄b, p. 69). This mention of dhikr is strengthened later in the poem with the suggestion that memory (dhikr) can be induced even without the object being known—as one might long for Nu’um when she is invoked, in reference to the Bedouin beloved featuring in classical Arabic ghazals.33 Consumption of this wine is an act awash with remembrance of the Beloved in the al-Khamriyya. As an articulation of divine Love and Oneness, the wine is characterized by various curative properties, echoic of Christ’s blood as salve. The speaker lists its healing potencies, all accumulating to a near-image of the wine. It is perceptible through its effects, as the wine resurrects the dead, and it cures physical and mental illness or impairment.34 The speaker affirms: ‘If you put the wine on a dead man’s grave, his spirit [rūḥ] would awaken and his body become vivified’. The wine can also enable those who are paralysed to walk; those who are mute to speak; those who are blind to see; and those who are deaf to hear. One whose nose is blocked in the West (gharb) would be released from the blockage if its fragrance sifted in the East (p.  71). If a healer traces the  Homerin, ‘Umar Ibn al-Fa ̄riḍ: Sufi Verse, Saintly Life, p. 9.  See further Farrin, Abundance from the Desert, p. 22. 34  For reasons of space, I cannot address the important developments in disability studies as applied to medieval texts. See, for example, Jenni Kuuliala’s Childhood Disability and Social Integration in the Middle Ages: Constructions of Impairments in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century Canonization Processes (Turnhout, 2016), pp. 1–28. 32 33

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letters of its name [‘ḥarūf ismiha’] on the forehead of one possessed by the jinn, the script would cure them (pp. 69–71). There remains an impulse throughout his poem to apprehend the wine—to know it, to read its marks. The wine works through its traces (atha ̄r). A hand coloured by the wine-vessel would become its own compass; the wine becomes a guiding star in the night, which links back to the poem’s earlier astral images of the full moon (badr) and the stars (nujūm). The stain on the hand becomes a mark of divine influence (pp. 69–71). The wine allows inscription—perhaps even resonant of Christ’s hands wounded with nails in remembrance of his creation (Ancrene Wisse, 149: 170–74). Its inscription can be a form of protection and healing, as with the brow-mark of one afflicted with the jinn, quoted above. Its inscription can also cause an entire army to lose consciousness: ‘if inscribed on the army’s [jaysh] standard, all underneath the banner would become drunk from the sign’. The wine stains, emblazons, and writes: all these are strategies in the attempt to understand the way that wine leaves its ‘marks’ (p.  71). Yet, with all this emphasis on inscription, there is an attendant concern with the hermeneutics of concealment. Much of the poem is centred on the wine’s secrecy—its masked, veiled nature. As stated early on in the al-Khamriyya, the wine is associated with secrets (asra ̄r). No image (su ̄ra) can be made of the wine. Imagining (taṣawar) enables a devotee to know the wine whilst also inevitably keeping the wine unknown and unreachable. The wine has a secret history, encased in the breast (sidr) (pp. 71–73). All that can be known is the Name (ism) alone. The Wine is near-reachable through devotion to the Name, a fundamental part of Islamic practice and Sufi dhikr, which involves invocation of the Names of God. Despite the wine’s hidden nature, there is a simplicity to the process of reaching it; the name (ism) alone brings happiness (faraḥ) in the place of burden or anxiety (ham), and thus the seal of its jar can render a whole tavern drunk (p. 69). The reference to ‘seal’ (khatm) seems a clear allusion to Muhammad as the ‘seal of the prophets’. The wine is imagined as being ‘unveiled in secret’ to someone who is blind. This statement on ‘unveiling’ (kashf ) comes in the passage dense with sensory release related to sight and sound (pp. 69–71). As explained by Lings, given that the Arabic noun khamr is feminine, it is essentially a statement of unveiling a female body.35 The  See further Lings, ed. and trans., Sufi Poems, p. 98 n. 73.

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Lover is engaged in a relentless hermeneutic cycle of concealment and near-revelation. The poem itself contains a plea from others to ‘describe’ (wasafa) this wine, leading to the following non-description: ṣafā ʾan wa-la mā ʾan, wa-luṭfan wa-la hawaun wa-nūran wa-la nāran, wa rūḥan wa-la jismū. (p. 71) (Pureness without water, gentleness without air, light without fire, soul [or spirit] without body.)

Raymond Farrin labels this description ‘esoteric’ and also observes that here the wine is associated with the four elements ‘without their materiality’.36 This absence of materiality is important for the non-­ corporeal emphases of this poem: the wine is spirit without body. Coming after the list of its various potencies discussed above, there is also a suggestion that the wine itself allows eloquence in its description (p. 71), though Ibn al-Fāriḍ demonstrates the fraught processes of such an attempt. The statement near the end of the poem on the need to take the wine in its purified form might itself be a longing for some hermeneutic clarity (p. 73). Nevertheless, the closing of the poem remains celebratory, disarming all possible criticism of the speaker’s inebriation. The poet remarks that wine can bring only joy, never existing with anxiety (ham), just as sorrow (gham) does not exist with song (p. 73). A life absent from this wine’s inscription is a ravaged, empty life. It is the ultimate wastage, leading to tears buka (tears) on the self (nafs) for a squandered life (ʿamr).37 The ending asks the Lover to become drunk with this khamr as a matter of urgency—life is otherwise a vacuum (p. 75). Like the Tarjuma ̄n of Ibn ʿArabı ̄, al-Khamriyya is a poem about the perplexing, urgent hermeneutics of love.  Farrin, Abundance from the Desert, p. 244.  On traditions of buka (weeping) among early Sufis, see further Rkia Elaroui Cornell, trans., Early Sufi Women: Dhikr an-niswa al-muta’abbidat as-Sufiyyat (Louisville, KY.: Fons Vitae, 1999), pp.  61, 98, 108, and 124. On weeping in Islamic preaching, see Linda G. Jones, ‘“He Cried and Made Others Cry”: Crying as a Sign of Pietistic Authenticity or Deception in Medieval Islamic Preaching’, in Crying in the Middle Ages: Tears of History, ed. Elina Gertsman (London: Routledge, 2012), pp.  102–135. On traditions of weeping in Christian hagiography, see Kimberley Joy-Knight, ‘“Si puose calcina a’propi occhi”: The Importance of the Gift of Tears for Thirteenth-Century Religious Women and their Hagiographers’, in Crying in the Middle Ages, ed. Gerstman, pp. 136–155. 36 37

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Shushtarı ̄ Like Ibn al-Fāriḍ, Shushtarı ̄ is a master poet of contemplative wine, though in his craft there is a greater emphasis on epistemological clarity.38 The essence of this drink is distilled by the poet in ‘O perplexed heart’: wasāra mashrubi min inā’i | lakinnu mustā’dab al-wurūd, min khamratan ma asārha āsir | wala junāt qātta min mu’arrās: kam āskarat qāblanā akābir! | limitli had-assarāb yu’attās. (Corriente, p. 80) (My drink comes from a vessel, but it tastes like roses, Wine that was not pressed by the presser, nor taken from a trellis. How it has intoxicated great ones before us! For this kind of drink, one thirsts.)

These are all motifs that we see expressed repeatedly both in Shushtarı ̄’s verse and in Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s al-Khamriyya. In its sweetness, the wine alludes to the intuitive dhawq, yet it is somehow knowable through a more ordinary hermeneutic vehicle, or a cup. It has no originary moment, not harvested or pressed as wine would be. The drink acts across the ages, inducing longing in the speaker. The wine of love is further clarified in the poem known as ‘Wine from no wine press’. The Beloved gifts the wine of revelation, and it is associated with transparency: ‘My beloved gave me glasses with a wine not pressed, | from the drink of the pure ones. In it, everything is made manifest’ (Corriente, p.  63). It reveals bridal forms, the jalwa: ‘To me was revealed my bride; I saw only perfection. My inebriation intoxicated me, as many men have become drunk from it’ (Corriente, pp. 63–64).39 Later the speaker also says of the khamr: ‘It was illuminated for me like a bride, and I saw the sun and the moon’ (Corriente, p. 64). Alongside its revelatory capacity, it is life-giving: ‘The drink vivifies souls [‘nufūs’], and whoever drinks of it becomes intoxicated’ (Corriente, p.  64). The wine is ever-giving, a gift to be shared: ‘The wine goes round among us, and we 38  On Shushtarı ̄’s fame as a wine poet, see further Alvarez, trans., Shushtarı ̄: Songs of Love and Devotion, p. 35. This epistemological clarity of Shushtarı ̄’s that I argue for here should also not obscure the enigmatic nature of his monastery poem ‘Is that a lamp?’, mentioned earlier in this chapter. 39  On the jalwa as revelation, see further Twinch, ‘The Beauty of Oneness Witnessed in the Emptiness of the Heart’, Ibn ‘Arabi Society Online, [accessed 30th December 2020].

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are all drunk’ (Corriente, p.  64). The communal drinkers embody the wine’s revelation: ‘See the men here with full hearts; see them all dancing. The secret is manifest in them, for this they exchanged their souls [or, selves] and their night has become day’ (Corriente, p.  64). Shushtarı ̄ emphasizes illumination, the potential knowability of the wine of love. In fact, drinking the wine is the finding of the One within the soul, confirmed in ‘Let go of Zayd and Mayya’: ‘I drink wine from the cup, and from myself I meet myself, and in myself it is myself I love’. The Beloved is the true essence and soul (‘rūḥi wadhāti haqı ̄qa’) (Corriente, p.  38); the Beloved is the fine wine that fills and waters the soul (‘tamlā watasqı ̄ni khamra raqı ̄qa’). The soul is the locus of all truth, and in this lies the pleasure of the wine: ‘washrub hanı ̄yya marı ̄yya | khāmra qadı ̄ma jalı ̄yya’ (drink in good health, the wine old and clear). Love requires a surrendering of all that is worldly, as encapsulated in the legendary figures of Zayd and Mayya. By the close of the poem, this divine intoxication is cast again in words of illumination: ‘my essence [dhāt] emanates like the sun; from myself I meet myself in myself; it is myself I love’. A qaṣı ̄da of Shushtarı ̄’s opens with the call ‘How good to drink wine in the solitary sanctuaries’ (Nashshār, p. 35). As noted in previous chapters, the noun khalwa invokes the solitary retreats practised by Sufis.40 Throughout, the speaker affirms the wine’s benignity and beneficence, defending it against the criticisms of the faqih or Islamic jurist. As they assert, like Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s speaker, ‘There is no sin in it’; it has fermented from ‘before the time of Adam’, and its ‘source is the highest of goodness’ (Nashshār, p. 36). The speaker associates it with essential Islamic practices, including the circumambulation (t ̣awa ̄f ) of the Kaʿaba in the Hajj, the reading of the Qur’an, dhikr, and prayer (Nashshār, p. 36). The speaker protests against the jurist’s criticism: ‘Oh faqih, if you taste and listened to the music in the retreats, you would leave this world and everything in it, and live in passion for the rest of your days’ (p. 36). As the speaker also conveys to the faqih in the zajal ‘My art’: ‘My drink, with him, from the glass, and the ḥadra [‘presence’, ‘gathering’] with those sitting round, good friends around me, they have taken the cost [or burden] from me’ (Corriente, p. 124). As is clear in ‘Licit to drink’, the drinking of this choicest of wines is tied intimately with dhikr and, through this, the potentiality of knowing. This 40  The use of the term khalwa in the plural in this poem is translated by Alvarez as ‘Sufi retreats’ (p. 41). I have rendered it ‘solitary sanctuaries’.

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is also made clear in the opening of the poem ‘How I began’: ‘I began by remembering my beloved: I became enraptured and my life became delicious, a wondrous secret [‘sirran ʿajı ̄b’] revealed’ (Corriente, p. 148). The speaker emphasizes the joyful communality of the drink, announcing warmly: ‘ashrub, ya nadı ̄mi, watı ̄b | wa’ish fi amān alhabı ̄b: | qad fūzta bisı ̄rran ajı ̄b’ (Corriente, p. 148) (Drink, my companions, enjoy. Live in the peace of the Beloved, attained through a wondrous secret). The speaker encourages their friends: ‘Go on, finish the glasses, drink them up, and enrich your essence in the station of the saints [‘fi maqām sādat’]’ (Corriente, p.  148). Calling to the cupbearer ‘Give us drink!’ (‘asqı ̄na mudām’), the speaker seeks the pleasure and peace it brings, seeing their state of enraptured love as parallel to the noble saints (‘sādāt kirām’ [Corriente, p.  148]). This echoes the opening line of another piece, in which the speaker declares that they were given a drink of passionate love (hawa) ‘not from the earth nor from the sky’ (Nashshār, p. 33). And the refrain of another of Shushtarı ̄’s poems reads ‘hūbbak qad saqāni akwās’ (how many cups has your love given me) (Corriente, p. 77). The poem ‘How I began’ is underpinned by a message of forgiveness, with the refrain vital to its devotional meaning. The speaker intones repeatedly ‘ʿafa Allāhu ʿamma maḍā’ (‘God forgives what is past [or what is gone]’) (Corriente, p.  148). This refrain is thus a direct invocation of Qur’an 5: 95.41 The wine offers intimate remembrance of the Divine and with it a certain epistemological security.

The Wooing Group as Eucharistic Tools In a Christian context, any mention of ‘wine’ has specific resonances that cannot be easily elided into the Islamic material. Wine is utter spirit for Shushtarı ̄ and al-Fāriḍ: as al-Fāriḍ might say, wine is spirit orphaned from the grape skin; or as Shushtarı ̄ might say, it is wine distilled from no wine press. But wine cannot be separated from corporeal connotations in Christian texts; the association with the Eucharist cannot be denied.42 41  ‘Allah forgiveth whatever (of this kind) may have happened in the past, but whoso relapseth, Allah will take retribution from him. Allah is Mighty, Able to Requite (the wrong)’ (surah 5: 95). 42  For an overview of the Eucharist in this period, see further Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: the Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), especially pp. 1–82; and Ann W. Astell, Eating Beauty: the Eucharist and the Spiritual Arts of the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), especially pp. 1–26.

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Even within the pervasive Eucharistic codes of this period, the Wooing Group texts are notable in their utter saturation in the sacrament of the altar. They might even be defined as Eucharistic tools, with their deep preparation of the devotee for the taking of this sensitive sacrament. I would further contend that they are themselves Eucharistic texts for the readers’ consumption. In subsuming the texts within themselves, the readers are primed for the taking of the flesh and blood of their Beloved. Differently from the poetry of al-Fāriḍ and Shushtarı ̄, which attempts to steer readers away from a corporeal reading, the Wooing Group meditations become centre points of corporeality. But the Wooing Group texts also share a profound affinity with Ibn al-Fāriḍ and Shushtarı ̄. Eucharistic blood-wine becomes a facilitator of hermeneutic modes whilst also resisting interpretative impulses. Always shimmering in this struggle is ‘remembrance’ of the Beloved, an attempt to re-present a Beloved who is so unknowable. Wine is never explicitly mentioned in any of the Wooing Group texts; the closest reference is to the sweetness of the Saviour’s blood. Whilst some Middle English lyrics, for instance, are embossed with the image of Christ in/as the winepress—founded upon Isaiah 63: 2–3, Revelation 14: 18–20, and possibly Matthew 21: 33–34—this is not an explicit strand of imagery in the Wooing Group meditations.43 But this is not to say that the sacramental wine is not present in their texture. Wohunge and Ureisun of God are daubed with sweetness imagery, generated from the Canticles 43  For instance, Natalie Jones has investigated Christ as wine press in the fifteenth-century lyric Ihesus woundes so wide, contextualized in the treatise and broader manuscript in which it is situated: Natalie Jones, ‘Ihesus woundes so wide and the fons vitae: Text, Image and the Manuscript Context’, in Middle English Lyrics: New Readings of Short Poems, ed. Julia Boffey and Christiania Whitehead (Cambridge: D.S.  Brewer, 2018), pp.  99–108 (p.  107). ‘Why then is thy apparel red, and thy garments like theirs that tread in the winepress? I have trodden the winepress alone, and of the Gentiles there is not a man with me: I have trampled on them in my indignation, and have trodden them down in my wrath, and their blood is sprinkled upon my garments, and I have stained all my apparel’ (Isaiah 63: 2–3); ‘And another angel came out from the altar, who had power over fire; and he cried with a loud voice to him that had the sharp sickle, saying: Thrust in thy sharp sickle, and gather the clusters of the vineyard of the earth; because the grapes thereof are ripe. And the angel thrust in his sharp sickle into the earth, and gathered the vineyard of the earth, and cast it into the great press of the wrath of God: And the press was trodden without the city, and blood came out of the press, up to the horses’ bridles, for a thousand and six hundred furlongs’ (Revelation 14: 18–20); ‘There was a man an householder, who planted a vineyard, and made a hedge round about it, and dug in it a press, and built a tower, and let it out to husbandmen; and went into a strange country’ (Matthew 21: 33).

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(4: 3, 4: 11, 5: 1) and Psalms (18: 11; 118: 103), that brims with connotations of the sacramental wine.44 This is combined with direct assertions of the theology of the Incarnation, as found in Wohunge: ‘Ant mon of þat ilke flesch þat we beren on eorðe’ (p. 90: And man, of the same flesh that we bear on earth). All five texts facilitate absorbed meditation on the Beloved’s Blood, through which the text bleeds into, nourishes, the very being of the audiences. On God Ureisun of ure Lefdi has perhaps the least dominant references to the Eucharist, especially when set against the formidable Eucharistic overtones of Wohunge and Ureisun of God. Lofsong of ure Lefdi and Lofsong of ure Louerde, in turn, are understudied texts, but their Eucharistic texture is no less significant.45 On God Ureisun of ure Lefdi In its loving outpouring to the Holy Mother, On God Ureisun of ure Lefdi speaks of blood in its capacity for exchange. Blood is the essence of the meditator’s love in the opening stanza: ‘al min heorte blod to ðe ich offrie’ (p. 152: I offer to you all my heart’s blood). This is echoed in the closing stanza, with the meditator confirming blood as the essence of their utter devotion: ‘Mi lif is þin, mi luue is þin, mine heorte blod is þin’ (p. 160: my life is yours, my love is yours, my heart’s blood is yours). Such framing of blood as near-synonymous with ‘love’ recasts the one direct reference to the salvific blood of her Son in this text: ‘ich ðe biseche uor ihesu cristes blode’ (p. 156: I beseech you, for Jesus Christ’s blood). This harmonizes with a lyric such as ‘Hi sike, al wan his singe’, with the assertion of Christ giving away his heart’s blood (‘his herte blode for-lete’).46 The invocation of Mary the standing mother in On God Ureisun of ure Lefdi also facilitates 44  A detailed consideration of the textual traditions behind this imagery of sweetness and honey is available in Innes-Parker, ed. and trans., The Wooing of Our Lord and the Wooing Group Prayers, pp. 113–115. ‘Thy lips are as a scarlet lace: and thy speech sweet. Thy cheeks are as a piece of a pomegranate, besides that which lieth hid within’ (Canticles 4: 3); ‘Thy lips, my spouse, are as a dropping honeycomb, honey and milk are under thy tongue; and the smell of thy garments, as the smell of frankincense’ (Canticles 4: 11); ‘sweeter than honey and the honeycomb’ (Psalm 18: 11); ‘How sweet are thy words to my palate! more than honey to my mouth’ (Psalm 118: 103). 45  As such, in the following discussion, I do not follow the order of the Wooing Group texts as found in the Nero manuscript, nor do I begin with Wohunge (MS Cotton Titus D. xviii) as the longest meditation. 46  English Lyrics of the Thirteenth Century, ed. Carleton Brown (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), pp. 122–124, l. 6.

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the potential for the blood of the Passion to flow outwards—though it remains in subtle tones (p.  156). In the other Wooing Group texts, the sweet drink of Christ’s blood is more plainly in abundance. Wohunge In the itemized qualities of the Beloved at the start of Wohunge, central is that of ‘mi huniter’ (‘my honey’ or ‘honey drop’) which leads the speaker onto a statement of active remembrance of the Beloved: ‘Swetter is munegunge of þe þen mildeu o muðe’ (p. 80) (Sweeter is remembrance of you than honeydew in the mouth). Rosemary Woolf observed the echoes in  Wohunge’s opening  of the hymn entitled Dulcis Iesu memoria.47 The identifications of the Beloved as sweetness are deepened with the further incantation of the positions/terms of Christ as lover, where he is affirmed to be ‘mi sawle swetnesse’ (p. 82: my soul’s sweetness). When meditating on his ‘conditions of eligibility’, the sweetness is more explicitly connected to his blood: ‘þu swete iesu for me ȝef þeseluen, þat tin ahne heorte blod ne cuðes tu wið halde’ (p. 84: you sweet Jesus for me gave yourself, you who could not withhold your own heart’s blood). Its preciousness is underscored in commodified terms: ‘Derre druri ne ȝef neauer na lefmon to oðer’ (p. 84) (Never did a lover give a more precious jewel to another). As the section on ‘conditions of eligibility’ unfolds, there remain meditative pulses that release his sweetness in the meditative process: ‘swete ihesu’ (p. 88, ll. 111, 120), or the reference to his ‘nesche childes limes’ (tender child’s limbs). The refrain of Wohunge itself revolves around the pleasure (‘likinge’) he brings, alluding to the sweetness of his blood (p. 110). When reflecting on Christ’s poverty, his body is revealed and gazed upon, uncovered in the heart’s eye: baðe ȝung ant elder alle Gate þu hafdes hwer þu mihtes wrihe þine banes. Ah atte laste of þi lif hwen þu for me swa rewliche hengedes on rode, ne hafdes in al þis world hwer wið þat blisfule blodi bodi þu mihtes hule and huide. (both young and older you had the means by which you could cover your bones. But at the end of your life, when you so pitifully hung on the cross 47  Rosemary Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), pp. 173–174.

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for me, you had no means in all this world by which you could cover and hide your body.)

This bareness is linked immediately to him as ‘swete lefmon’ (sweet beloved) (p. 96). On the one hand, this is a logical progression from the assertions on Christ’s hunger. But on the other, it is also an opportunity for meditative uncovering: an opportunity for Christ’s ‘blodi bodi’ to be on display, consumed meditatively in advance of (or perhaps as consolation until) the taking of his flesh and blood in the sacrament. The pairing of ‘hule and huide’ is most probably due to the alliterative prose and can be translated as ‘conceal’.48 It is an alliterative pairing found in a range of other texts in the Middle English corpus.49 But the use of these two words, ‘cover and hide’, also draws attention to the uncovering taking place in this meditative moment, the unsheathing of Christ’s body for a blissful, healing consumption. The Middle English verb hilen means not only ‘to cover’, but also ‘to spread over, bury’, to ‘deck’, to ‘blot out’, to ‘clothe’, to ‘shelter’; ‘to conceal’, ‘to hide’, ‘to thrust in (a sword)’. It also has the potential meaning of ‘to embrace (sb.), fondle, cherish’.50 The meditator may have both senses at play: to cover, to embrace; as Christ is uncovered, so does the ‘fondling’ become more possible. As the readers become immersed in their Beloved’s suffering, his sweet-­ tasting blood becomes ever more readily available. There is his bloody sweat in Luke 22: 44 and the blood wringing from his fingernails at his capture: ‘ha þe bunden swa hetelifaste þat te blod wrang ut at tine finger neiles as halhes bileuen’ (p. 102) (they bound you so cruelly fast that the blood wrung out of your finger nails, as holy ones believe).51 The scourging and buffeting cause the blood to densify: þer þu wes for mi luue wið cnotti swepes swungen swa þat ti luueliche liche mihte beo to torn 7 to rent, ant al þi blisfule bodi streamed on a Girre blod. Siðen o þin heaued wes set te crune of scharpe þornes. þat wið eaueriche þorn wrang utte reade blod of þin heali heaued. (p. 102)

 Innes-Parker, trans., The Wooing of our Lord and the Wooing Group Prayers, p. 97 l. 247.  See further MED ‘hilen v.’ 50  MED ‘hilen v.’, senses 1 and 2. 51  ‘And his sweat became as drops of blood, trickling down upon the ground’ (Luke 22: 44). 48 49

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(There you were for my love swung with knotted scourges so that your lovely body might be torn and rent apart, and all your blissful body streamed with clotted blood. Then on your head was set the crown of sharp thorns, [and] with every thorn wrung out red blood from your holy head.)

‘Girre blod’ is an especially visceral phrase.52 ‘Gire’ as an adjective has the sense of ‘gory, clotted’, and the MED suggests that when used as ‘girre blod’ it can be rendered ‘gore’; the adjective derives from Old English gyr(e), gyru with the sense of ‘muddy, filthy’.53 The word brings the reader painfully close to the nature of Christ’s blood, with no escape from the gruesome reality inscribed in Eucharistic consumption. The meditation is unrelenting: ‘A nu of þa honden 7 of þa fet swa luueli. streames te blod swa rewli’ (p. 104: Ah, now from the hands and the feet so lovely streams the blood so pitifully), followed by the giving of the bitter gall (p. 104). In Wohunge, the sacramental blood-flow is linked immediately to amorous inscription, and this might be paralleled with al-Fāriḍ’s al-­Khamriyya, the hand dyed with the goblet, the army banner inscribed with the wine’s name. This is the crux of Wohunge, its doctrinal-affective heart: he þurles his side cleues tat herte. 7 cumes flowinde ut of þat wide wunde. þe blod þat bohte. þe water þat te world wesch of sake 7 of sunne. A swete iesu þu oppnes me þin herte for to cnawe witerliche 7 in to redden trewe luue lettres. for þer i mai openlich seo hu muchel þu me luuedes. (p. 106) (he pierces his side, cleaves that heart, and there comes flowing out of that wide wound the blood that bought, the water that washed the world of sickness and of sin. Oh sweet Jesus, you open for me your heart to know evidently and to read in there true love letters. For there I may openly see how much you loved me.)

After this reading of the love letters, which will be examined more thoroughly in the penultimate chapter of this book, the speaker imagines hanging with Christ on the Cross: ‘A iesu swa swet hit is wið þe to henge. For hwen þat iseo o þe þat henges me biside; þe muchele swetnesse of þe reaues me fele of pine’ (p. 108: Ah Jesus, it is so sweet to hang with you, for when I look upon you who hangs beside me, the great sweetness of 52  See further Innes-Parker on her choices of translation here (Innes-Parker, trans., The Wooing of our Lord and the Wooing Group Prayers, p. 137 n. 87). 53  ‘gire adj’, MED. The citations provided in the MED entry are all from the Ancrene Wisse Group (Juliana, the Corpus Christ MS 402 Ancrene Wisse, Wohunge).

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you relieves me of much pain). The subjunctive mood and the future tense have shifted to the indicative present: it is an assertion of the taking of the Beloved, the taking of the sacrament. Wohunge is a deeply Eucharistic text; it allows the soul to become suitably pliant for the consumption of the Host. The readers become drenched in salvific blood, poised in its ever-­ renewing, ever-adapting significance. Ureisun of God Like Wohunge, the incantatory opening of Ureisun of God has the Beloved’s sweetness blended into its texture: ‘Mi sikere swetnesse’ (my sure sweetness), ‘Swete Iesu mi leof’ (sweet Jesus my beloved), ‘min huniter’ (my honey) (p.  172). Such a sweet lover deserves a ‘swete wuninge’ (sweet dwelling) in the soul (p. 174). This is put into relief by the image of honey licked off thorns, the bitterness and sweetness intermingling just as pain and pleasure co-exist intimately in the anchoritic life (p. 174).54 The honey here takes on a very different meaning from the honey Beloved. Here it is the false mellifluence of earthly pleasure. As such, it allows the reader greater sensitivity in distinguishing types of sweetness: the readers must become discerning tasters. After all, the wall of sin prevents engagement with the Beloved. He is invoked, ‘swete Iesu’, but the sweetness remains on the other side of a chasm, as unreachable as the arms stretched out: ‘hwi ne cusse ich þe sweteliche ine goste. wið swete munegunge of þine goddeden?’ (p.  178: why do I not kiss you sweetly in spirit with sweet remembrance of your good deeds?). It is a sweetness, a ‘sweet remembrance’, that cannot quite yet be encountered, though the reader is aware of its presence: ‘hwi ne iuele ich þe imine breoste so swete ase þu ert?’ (p. 178: why do I not feel you in my breast, as sweet as you are?). The verb felen here is noticeable. The sweetness cannot yet be felt, however much the reader desires and longs for this delectability. Intimacy is denied in this cold and dark estrangement (‘hwi ertu me so freomede?’ [why are you estranged from me?]). These questions ring in the silence, the pregnant-­ painful absence of the responding voice. The reader is hindered from overcoming this painful barrier: ‘hwi ne con ich wowen þe. wið swete luue wordes alre þinge sweetest. ant alre þinge leoflukest ant luue wurðest? wei wei’ (pp. 178–80: why can I not woo you with sweet love-words you of all things sweetest, and of all things most lovable, and most worthy of love?  Millett observes a parallel image in Hali Meiðhad (Millett, ed. Hali Meiðhad, p. xx).

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Alas). Even the sweetness of love-words cannot be voiced; all that can be spoken is the lamenting exclamation, ‘wei wei’ (alas). Of all the Wooing Group texts, it is Ureisun of God that problematizes access to the Eucharist most intensely. When there is comfort to be found on meditating on the salvific power of the blood, it is in the form of questions rather than assertions: A; iesu þin ore. hwat deih þeonne þi blod isched oþe rode. hwat deih þeonne þe large broc of þine softe side. þe streames þet striden adun of þine deorewurðe uet, ant of þine eadie honden. nes hit forto saluen seke ine sunnen? hwoa is þeonne unweaschen, þet aueð þis halwende wet inwið his heorte? hwoa þerf beon unsalued, þet haueð so mihti salue, ase ofte as he þer to haueð treoue bileue? Min heouenliche leche, ðet makedest us of þi swolf so mihti medicine, iblesced beo þu euer[.] (p. 180) (Oh Jesus, your mercy. To what use then was your blood shed on the Cross? To what use then was the large brook from your soft side, the streams that flowed down from your precious feet, and from your blessed hands: is it not to save those sick in sin? Who, then, is unwashed, who has this healing moisture in his heart? Who needs remain unhealed, who has so mighty a salve, as often as he has true belief? My heavenly doctor, you make for us of yourself so powerful a medicine; may you be blessed forever[.])

Unlike those anguished questions earlier in the meditation, these questions do enable greater hope for answers; they allow for a responding voice. This is perhaps because meditation on the potencies of Christ’s blood can have a preparatory function for the taking of the Eucharist. In drinking the sacramental wine, the reader is aware in each drop of the unparalleled significance of this drink (p. 182). But they are also aware of the agonizing obstruction between their soul and the precious blood-wine in the vessel.55 Lofsong of ure Lefdi In accordance with Ureisun of God and Wohunge, Lofsong of ure Lefdi/Oreisun of seinte Marie offers meditation on the sweetness that

55  On cases of women tasting the wafer as blood when denied the Eucharist, see Bynum, Wonderful Blood, pp. 4–5.

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imbues the Beloved’s flesh from his mother.56 The very first word is ‘swete’: ‘Swete leafdi seinte marie meiden ouer alle meidnes’ (p. 202), and this is given more potency in a later statement of the union of their bodies through the incarnation, ‘his flesch founge of þine eadie bodie’ (p. 206: flesh born [or, formed] of your blessed body). This strengthens the section of the text that shows affinity with practices of auricular confession.57 The acknowledgement of sin is infused with the hope provided by that sweetness. And as in Ureisun of God, the reader must distinguish between kinds of sweetness, for the body might allow one to ‘[mis] iloued swote smelles’ (loved wrongly [literally, ‘mis-loved’] sweet smells), as the other senses have also erred and in so doing damaged the soul (p. 202).58 This text subsequently provides a deconstructed Passion scene, in a non-linear, non-chronological framework for the reader’s rumination. Blood daubs each element and is at times brought to the foreground, as with the shifting red-white clothes (‘bi his cloðes wrixlunge. Nu red, nu hwit’ [p. 206]: by his clothes’ changing, now red, now white) and the ‘blodrune’ from his nails (p. 208). Lofsong of ure Louerde Echoic of Lofsong of ure Lefdi, the opening of Lofsong of ure Louerde is a meditation on Christ’s body, facilitating sensitive discernment and consumption of the sacrament. The doctrinal core is affirmed through Mary’s life-giving role (‘þin akennednesse ine meidenes licame of þe holi Goste. ant þuruh þin iborenesse wið uten bruche of hire bodie’, p.  226: your conception in the maiden’s body of the Holy Ghost, and through your birth without breach of her body). This then allows absorption into the flowing blood in all its manifestations: ‘þurh þine vif wunden. ant þe eadie flod þet of ham flodde. þuruh ðe irene neiles ant þe þornene crune’ (p. 226: through your five wounds, and the blessed flood that flowed from them; through the iron nails and the crown of thorns). An especially direct 56  This meditation is found in two versions: a full version in London, British Library Cotton Nero A. xiv (fols 126v-8r), and a fragmented version in London, British Library Royal 17 A. xxvii (fol. 70r-70v). In the latter manuscript, it is entitled Þe Oriesun of Seinte Marie. 57  See further Catherine Innes-Parker, ‘Þe Wohunge of ure Lauerd and the Tradition of Affective Devotion: Rethinking Text and Audience’, in The Milieu and Context of the Wohunge Group, ed. Susannah Mary Chewning (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), pp. 96–122 (p. 107). 58  There are clear parallels here with Part II of Ancrene Wisse (20–47).

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reference to the sacrament is given, perhaps the most explicit in all of the Wooing Group: ‘þuruh þine eadi flesche ant þine iblescede blode i sacred oðe weouede’ (through your blessed flesh and your blessed blood consecrated on the altar); and this is then connected to ‘fuluht’ (baptism) and ‘alle þe oðre sacremens. þat holi chirche ileueð’ (all the other sacraments that the holy church believes in). The sacrament of the ‘weouede’, however, is given particular prominence. This text might itself be seen as an indispensable tool in the preparation of the soul for this sacrament; the text invites assimilation of the Lover’s body into one’s own, penetrating through the polluted casing of one’s soul. A dominant statement on the blood that might parallel Lofsong of ure Lefdi emerges slightly later in the meditation: a drope of þine deorewurðe blode. þat tu o rode scheddest were inouh to weaschen alle folkes fulðe, þeo sterke stremes ant þet flod þet fleaw of þine wunden, moncun uor to helen; clense ant waschs mine sunfule soule þuruh þine fif wunden iopened o rode. wið neiled uor driuene and seoruhfulliche fordutte, hel me uorwunded […]. (p. 228) (a drop of your precious blood that you shed on the Cross were enough to wash all folk’s filth, the stark streams and the flood that flowed from your wounds, in order to heal humankind; clean and wash my sinful soul through your five wounds opened on the cross, with nails driven through and painfully closed up, heal me [who is] badly wounded.)

This is a clear Eucharistic marker, a statement on the blood’s significance provided for meditative consumption. The subsequent assumption of various biblical and patristic voices (pp. 232–236) is followed by a focus on the delectability of the Flesh: ‘Swete softe iesu iseli beoð ðet þe luuieð ant þine siker swetnesse. þat no mon mai leosen bute he þe treulac of þine luue lete’ (p. 236) (Sweet, soft, Jesus, innocent [or blessed] are those who love you and your sure sweetness, which no man may lose unless he forsakes the constancy of your love). The softness might be compared with ‘nesche’ (soft, tender) limbs of the infant Christ in Wohunge of ure Lauerde. In Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse, ‘tenderness’ combines both need and desire. Whereas the sexual is ‘the Feast’, tenderness is ‘nothing but an infinite, insatiable metonymy’.59 Intoxication in wine, in both corporeal and distinctly non-corporeal terms, is such tenderness: an unending need-­desire for immersion in Divine Love. In the case of the Wooing Group, Barthes’ tenderness is a pivotal word, for so much of these meditations are  Barthes, Lover’s Discourse, p. 224.

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concerned with the tenderness of Christ’s skin: the ‘nesche’ limbs of the infant Christ foreshadowing the crucified body that will be near-soluble in its bloodiness. Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse also ends with the ‘mystical accent’ of non-­ possession: ‘The best and most delectable wine, and also the most intoxicating… by which, without drinking it, the annihilated soul is intoxicated, a soul at once free and intoxicated!’60 The voice at this point in A Lover’s Discourse is aligned with ‘Ruysbroeck’, but it would work equally well with the note ‘Ibn al-Fāriḍ’ or ‘Shushtarı ̄’.61 Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s al-Khamriyya and Shushtarı ̄’s verses perform an immersive dhikr of the Beloved. The Wooing Group meditations become Eucharistic texts, enabling remembrance of Christ in the act of their consumption; they nourish the soul awaiting that sensitive sacrament. All the English and Arabic texts are concerned with the inscription of divine intoxication whilst also acknowledging the hermeneutic impossibilities raised by this ineffable wine. The wine-image is both profoundly corporeal yet also distinctly non-corporeal, occupying a unique role in a devotee’s affective literacies. An avian approach exposes this fluidity in the image vocabularies of the English and the Arabic contemplative texts. Moreover, the avian perspective accentuates memory as an indispensable component of affective literacies in both traditions—remembrance of the Divine entwined with memory in a devotee’s meditative work. Blood, wine, and blood-wine become near-synonymous with love in various guises in Shushtarı ̄’s verses, Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s poetry, and the prose meditations of the Wooing Group. With this reservoir of images, authors and audiences attempt to express and shape the Lover’s delectable intimacy with the Divine, alongside their anguish of separation. This image-reservoir also emblematizes the ways in which the Beloved signals their own love. Sweetness is the marker of the Beloved across the texts; sweetness leaves its traces for the Lover to follow in their quest for the missing One. Like the only-glimpsed love letters of Wohunge, the Sufi khamr can never quite take form.

 Barthes, Lover’s Discourse, p. 234; on non-possession, see also pp. 232–233.  Barthes here invokes Flemish contemplative John van Ruysbroeck (d. 1381).

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PART IV

Affective Semiotics

CHAPTER 6

Absence

How humanity roves, seeking the love of the Beloved.1 As the Canticles ask, ‘Whither is thy Beloved gone?’2 The Lover and Beloved both exist in an unstable absence, reappearing and disappearing like phantoms in photographs. In A Lover’s Discourse, Barthes writes as though an ‘image’ itself may be cruel, for ‘it leaves no room for me’: ‘I am excluded from it as from a primal scene’. Such is its very ‘definition’; an image is ‘that from which I am excluded’. Barthes’ speaker then reflects on the puzzle-pictures of children’s magazines which contain secret, camouflaged figures.3 But differently from such pictures, in the semiotics of love, the Lover cannot even hide within cryptic shapes; their exclusion is complete.4 Semiotics can often harbour such cruelty. An avian approach reveals that Islamic and Christian texts function through a painful semiotics of absence—that they speak through lack. Ibn ʿArabı ̄ and Ibn al-Fāriḍ reappropriate the pre- and early Islamic amatory poem in the desert camp. These lovers search for the Beloved frantically through the arid landscape which itself seems to throb 1  See Alvarez’s interpretation of a line from Shushtarı ̄: ‘How men wander seeking the love of the beloved’ (Alvarez, trans., Shushtarı ̄: Songs of Love and Devotion, p.  76). For the original, see Corriente’s transliteration (p. 38). 2  Song of Songs 6: 1. 3  See further Meirion Bowen, ed., Gerhard on Music: Selected Writings (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000; repr. London: Routledge, 2017), p. 95. 4  Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, p. 132.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. S. Lazikani, Emotion in Christian and Islamic Contemplative Texts, 1100–1250, The New Middle Ages, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59924-9_6

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with longing. The anonymous readers of the Wooing Group and Ancrene Wisse are forever confronted with the empty space where the Beloved should be—echoic of the wilderness embraced by the Desert Mothers and Fathers.5 This constant seeking of the Beloved in both traditions is crucial to the affective literacies of its audiences. But the standard narrative of affective literacies can be enriched by taking these Arabic poems into its remit, with the semiotics of absence performed in a richly localized desert, rather than the often-unspecified space of the English texts. With the perspective of avian emotion, we can more fully inhabit these contemplative wild-lands. The following observation on the fourteenth-century text The Chastising of God’s Children is also, I believe, true for the Christian and Islamic texts studied in the present book: Seeking a Lord who is both present and absent is the perennial labour of the contemplative. This ‘game of hide-and-seek’ encapsulates the dialectic tension between intimacy and detachment, absence and presence, faced by a soul dwelling on Earth yet devoted to God.6

Ibn Tufail’s Ḥ ayy seems to perform this struggle as he probes each created thing to find the absent creator: By now thought of this Subject was so deeply rooted in his heart that he could think of nothing else. He was distracted from his prior investigation of created being. For now his eye fell on nothing without immediately detecting in it signs of His workmanship—then instantly his thoughts would shift from craft to Craftsman, deepening his love of Him, totally detaching his heart from the sensory world, and binding it to the world of the mind.7

5  See further Ancrene Wisse, 144: 479–490. For overviews of these early Christian traditions, see: Helen Waddell, trans., The Desert Fathers (New York: Vintage, 1998), pp. 3–29; Benedicta Ward, trans., The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks (London: Penguin, 2003), pp. vii–xxxiii; Ward, Harlots of the Desert: A Study of Repentance in Early Monastic Sources (London: Mowbray, 1987); and Laura Swan, The Forgotten Desert Mothers: Sayings, Lives, and Stories of Early Christian Women (New York: Paulist Press, 2001), pp. 5–19. 6  A. S. Lazikani, ‘What Grace in Presence: Affective Literacies in The Chastising of God’s Children’, in Late Medieval Devotional Compilations in England, ed. Marleen Cré, Diana Denissen, and Denis Renevey (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2020), pp. 411–432 (p. 415). 7  Ḥ ayy Ibn Yaqzan̄ , trans. Goodman, pp. 134–35.

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Ḥ ayy’s ‘Craftsman’ is there, yet not there. Each created being contains within it ‘His workmanship’, but the Craftsman Himself is not in evidence. Such an absence-presence causes the stirring of desire, the perennial labour of looking upwards. Texts can become vehicles of God’s presence whilst also performing the dialectic of absence and presence in contemplative endeavour. Mark Amsler has remarked that medieval texts and images ‘render Jesus semiotically present’, yet ‘their linguistic and visual textuality depends on the absent Jesus, his not-there-ness which is the precondition for contemplative and imaginative semiosis’.8 A comparable point has been made by Aaron Hughes on medieval Islamic and Jewish texts, with regard to the role of the imaginative faculty in making the absent present.9 A dialectic between multiple Sufi states (maqāmat) is central to Aṭṭār’s work, and it is termed ‘hybridity’ in Hellmut Ritter’s terminology. Such ‘hybridity’ inevitably entails a push-and-pull of absence-­ presence.10 All this work is very much in keeping with twentieth-century theorists—including Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze—who have problematized any simple polarization between absence and presence.11 The dialectic of absence-presence may be apprehended in the poetry of Shushtarı ̄; Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s Fuṣu ̄ṣ and Tarjuma ̄n; Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s verse (especially Naẓm al-sulu ̄k); Ancrene Wisse; Ureisun of God; and Wohunge of ure Lauerde.

Shushtarı ̄

Like Ibn al-Fāriḍ and Ibn ʿArabı ̄, Shushtarı ̄ engages with the nası ̄b tradition of lamenting for the lost Beloved in the desert, ‘a powerful combination of geographical realities and poetic tradition’.12 Shushtarı ̄’s speakers luxuriate in the presence of the Beloved:  Amsler, Affective Literacies, p. 147.  Aaron W.  Hughes, Texture of the Divine: Imagination in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), especially p. 8. 10  See Ritter’s comment on ‘hybridity’, which in Atṭ ạ ̄r’s work denotes being ‘pulled back and forth between different states’ (The Ocean of the Soul, p. 133; see also p. 143). 11  See further Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1976); and Gilles Deleuze, ‘Plato and the Simulacrum’, trans. Rosalind Krauss, October 27 (1983), 45–56. See also Amanda Bell, ‘absence/presence’, ‘The Chicago School of Media Theory’, https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/ keywords/absence-presence/ [accessed 20th July 2020]. 12  Alvarez, trans., Shushtarı ̄: Songs of Love and Devotion, p. 103. 8 9

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Do not complain of the distance when you know your beloved is not far. Someone whose beloved is always present, tell me, how could he pine? His glances give beauty, fulfilling all desire [muna]; he is rejuvenated. (‘O perplexed heart’: Corriente, p. 79) You who are present in my heart [fuʾa ̄d], to think upon you makes me happy. (‘Only love remains’: Nashshār, p. 35)

The Beloved’s attendance centres on the ḥaḍra. Ḥaḍra means ‘presence’ in Arabic, but the word also describes a ritual of prayer and chant. It is also ‘the technical term for mystical ecstasy or trance’, ‘the unveiling of the divine’: [A]s the poet achieves that state in which the self is abolished, his presence is the divine presence. That is to say, my presence is the same as His presence. The possessive particle ‘my’ can no longer be understood in a conventional sense.13

In ‘The lover’s visit’, the speaker declares that the object of his desire (‘munyati’) visited him, and there was union (‘wisāl’); the loved one is crucially present at the ḥaḍra: ‘He was present at my ḥaḍra [‘ḥaḍār ḥaḍrati’], the cup went round, and I reached my hopes [‘balāgtu al-amāl’]’ (Corriente, p. 39). The presence is all-pervasive: ‘In my fixed abode [or stillness]14 he dwelled, and in my movement, present and never absent’ (Corriente, p. 40). In the muwashshaḥ ‘In my heart so near’, there is the repeated call: ‘allāhu, allāhu, [hu] mā’i ḥāḍir, fi qālbi qarı ̄b’ (God, God, present with me in my heart so near) (Corriente, p. 38). But God can also be keenly absent in Shushtarı ̄’s verse. In ‘Pay no attention’, the speaker finds the desert landscape to be one of desiccated absence: A flock, a ban tree, La’la, Khayf, the gazelle of Bani Amr, what are these? O heart, turn away from the delusion of the sand dunes and abandon the flock of the forbidden sanctuary. 13  Lourdes Maria Alvarez, ‘The Mystical Language of Daily Life: Vernacular Sufi Poetry and the Songs of Abu Al-Hasan Shushtarı ̄’, Exemplaria 17 (2005), 1–32 (27). 14  ‘Stillness’ is Alvarez’s translation (Shushtarı ̄: Songs of Love and Devotion, p. 59).

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The beauty you mention will not last, what need has the wise man for what is mortal?15

These geographical details are all hallmarks of the desert-poem genre. Shushtarı ̄ employs these tropes as signs of absence; they carry within them their own decay: ‘The beauty you mention will not last’. Instead, the Lover desires the one whose Beauty surpasses these. The camels are participants in this longing or desire (shawq), in accordance with the poetic tradition seen in Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s and Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s verse. In the qas ̣ı ̄da ‘Desire drives the camels’, the camels long with the Lover to reach Najd. On reaching al-‘Aqiq, near Medina, the speaker imagines declaring ‘the heart of the enthralled is back at camp, worn out’ (p. 108). The site is potentially empty, however, with the poem offering the possibility of only partial fulfilment: ‘If no one is there, embrace their habitations and be satisfied, for earth stands in for water’ (p. 109), in invocation of the reference to ablution in Qur’an 5: 6.16 If it does satisfy the Lover’s desire, though, the reached destination can offer exquisite refreshment. In ‘Drop all pretense of shame’, the camels can rest and the rider can relieve them of their burden: ‘Oh, friend, let the beasts rest from the fatigue of the night’s journey and know that your travels are over’ (p. 109). With the desirous camels, the traveller can find relief: ‘Abandon your wandering; you have attained your desire. You reached the priestly monastery through the scriptures’ (p. 109). The word for ‘wandering’, asfār, also evokes asfār (books, scriptures), suggesting the labour and discipline involved in the Sufi tarı ̄qa.17 In that place of fulfilled desire, there is music and wine, in invocation of Sufi dhikr: ‘Quicken to the melodies and abandon yourself to them; sway to the ecstasy of the strings’ (pp. 109–110). All shame can dissipate, reminding us of the sinless, shameless wine of Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s Khamriyya, observed in the previous chapter: ‘Drop all pretense of shame at your eternal love for them. Don’t you see that I have lost my shame?’ (p. 110).18 Shushtarı ̄ calls 15  This is Alvarez’s translation (Shushtarı ̄: Songs of Love and Devotion, p. 107); I have used Alvarez’s translations in this paragraph. 16  ‘And if ye are unclean, purify yourselves. And if ye are sick or on a journey […] and ye find not water, then go to clean, high ground and rub your faces and your hands with some of it’ (Qur’an 5: 6). 17  See further Alvarez, trans., Shushtarı ̄: Songs of Love and Devotion, p. 178 n. 7. 18  The translations in this paragraph are Alvarez’s (see n. 15  in previous page). For the Arabic, see Nashshār, pp. 49 and 38–39.

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upon the desert regions of Arabic poetic tradition to create a dialectic of absence and presence—even more fully attempted in the poetry of Ibn ʿArabı ̄ and Ibn al-Fāriḍ.

Ibn ʿArabı ̄ Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam Unlike the Tarjuma ̄n al-ashwa ̄q, the Fuṣu ̄ṣ is not formed from poems in the nası ̄b form in which a Lover laments the absent Beloved. But this text is foundational for understanding absence-presence in the Tarjumān, for it foregrounds two bases of the shifting intimacy: the impulse towards permeation within the Beloved and vice versa; and the mutual longing that brings about Creation. Creation is defined by its longing for love; the longing of the Creator returns and reflects this anguish, as from a mirror. Ibn ʿArabı ̄ suggests that the Divine Himself may be formed entirely of longing, with invocation of surah 33: 5719: God has, indeed, described Himself in terms of hurt when he says, those who would hurt God and his Apostle. What greater hurt is there for Him than that He should try you with some affliction or station unknown to you, so that you might beg Him to relieve it, when you are heedless of Him? […] [B]y your asking Him to relieve you, the Reality Himself is relieved, you being His outer form. (p. 217)

Human suffering cannot be separate from Divine suffering; when humanity throbs in pain, the Divine is necessarily throbbing with it. The apex— or rather, the ‘seal’—of the Fus ̣u ̄s ̣ is of course the chapter dedicated to Muhammad (XXVII). Crucially, it seems to revolve around this verse on mutual longing of Lover and Beloved, which has poignant echoes of the Tarjuma ̄n: The Beloved longs to see me, And I long even more to see Him, The hearts beat fast, but destiny bars the way, I groan in complaint and so does He[.] (p. 273)

19  ‘Lo! those who malign Allah and His messenger, Allah hath cursed them in the world and the Hereafter, and hath prepared for them the doom of the disdained’ (surah 33: 57).

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For Ibn ʿArabı ̄, there is a continual pull from the Divine for His own ‘selfdisclosure’, tajalli, founded upon surah 7: 143.20 The Lover and Beloved are together entrenched in this state of perpetual longing, this perpetual distance and obscuration. It is in Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s Tarjuma ̄n where such a dynamic between Lover and Beloved is played out most forcefully. Tarjumān As addressed in previous chapters, the Tarjumān responds to a deep-­ rooted tradition of classical, pre-, and early Islamic, Arabic poetry on the seeking of the lost Beloved in an empty desert plain. The entire collection is thus replete with the semiotics of absence. As Poem II begins, for example: ‘On the day of parting they did not saddle the full-grown reddish-­ white camels, echoed in line 10 (‘The day when they departed on the road…’). The Lover is on a journey to find the Beloved—ever absent, ever far. As the speaker cries in Poem XXXVI, ‘I crossed every desert and wilderness to meet her, riding on the big-humped she-camel and the old dromedary’ (XXXVI: 3). And in poem XLIX, the Lover laments ‘in my time of severance, for my time of union’. Perhaps the clearest statement of absence, of the Divine’s not-there-ness, reverberates in Poem LV: ‘I am absent, and desire makes my soul die; and I meet him and am not cured, so ’tis desire whether I am absent or present’ (LV: 1). As the commentary explains in the poem (LV), worth quoting in full: He is continually tormented, for in the anguish of absence he hopes to be cured by meeting his Beloved, but the meeting only adds to his pain, because he is always moving from a lower state to a higher, and the latter inevitably produces in him a more intense passion than the former did. (LV: comm 1–4)

Absence and presence are inscribed in each other—the one must always haunt the other.

20  ‘And when Moses came to Our appointed tryst and his Lord had spoken unto him, he said: My Lord! Show me (Thy Self), that I may gaze upon Thee. He said: Thou wilt not see Me, but gaze upon the mountain! If it stand still in its place, then thou wilt see Me. And when his Lord revealed (His) glory to the mountain He sent it crashing down. And Moses fell down senseless. And when he woke he said: Glory unto Thee! I turn unto Thee repentant, and I am the first of (true) believers!’ (surah 7: 143). See further Chittick, ‘Rūmı ̄ and wahdāt al-wujūd’, in Poetry and Mysticism in Islam, p. 73.

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Throughout the Tarjuma ̄n, the specificities of the desert landscape immerse the gnostic in this parched world of love-longing. In poem XXXII, the speaker remembers the time spent with camels and ‘my kindling fire for them by rubbing the ʿafār and markh together’—alluding to the wood of these trees used for kindling purposes. Specific locations in the desert wilderness and the Islamic homeland are identified, such as al-­ Haditha and al-Karkh, and Sal’ and Hājir (XXXII), and ‘the gazelles of Dhāt al-Ajra’ positioned between an-Naqā and La’la (XXVIII). In Poem LVII, the gazelles are located at Najd (and glossed in the commentary as ‘the exalted spirits’, LVII: comm 1). The Lover requests the ‘breeze of the wind’ to carry a message to the ‘young girl of the tribe’ (1, 2). The message is relayed to the audience, as though listening in to the wind, and it is entirely one of location: ‘Our trysting-place is at the guarded pasture beside the hills of Najd on the Sabbath morn, | On the red hill towards the cairns and on the right hand of the rivulets and the solitary landmark’ (2–3). This is a place of nourishment and rest—the Sabbath. The poem then gives way to the anguish of love in this hoped-for encounter. On the Beloved, the Lover says: ‘if her words be true and she feel the same tormenting desire for me as I feel | For her, then we shall meet covertly in the heat of noon at her tent with the most inviolable troth’ (LVII: 4–5); ‘she and I will communicate what we suffer of love and sore tribulation and grievous pain’ (6). With this vocabulary for the anguish of love, the Lover speaks their longing for the desire to be made present—the ‘objects of desire’ becoming manifest, as roses in a garden: ‘Perchance he who brought the objects of desire (into my heart) will bring them face to face with me, and their gardens will bestow on me the gathered roses’ (8). This is nonetheless haunted by the previous question, ‘Is this a vague dream[?]’, echoing surah 12: 44.21 The Lover meditates on sites that embody both fertility and decay— and destabilizes the boundary between the two. This strengthens the semiotics of absence; there is a filling of empty, mouldering spaces—and a sense of the painful loss of presence that can occur even within the most luscious of grounds. The speaker enacts the anguish and the progress towards annihilation within specific locations: ‘He is a dead man between an-Naqā and Laʾlaʾ | For I am dead of despair and anguish, as though I were fixed in my place’ (XXVIII: 20–21). In Poem XXX, the speaker gazes 21  ‘They answered: Jumbled dreams! And we are not knowing in the interpretation of dreams’ (surah 12: 44).

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on camels and gazelles in ‘the deserts of Idam’ (glossed in the commentary as ‘the stations of abstraction and isolation’, comm 2) (2). Here, the speaker asks their ‘two friends’ to ‘beg speech of the relics of an abode which has become ruined after them’ (3)—suggestive of the potentiality that might emerge from ruins. The Lover’s sorrow is again affirmed (‘mourn for the heart of a youth who left it on the day when they departed, and weep and wail’, 4). ‘The sands of the guarded pasture’ are identified in the commentary as ‘referring to the endurance of anguish caused by separation in a station remote from phenomenal being and inaccessible’ (comm 5). As the speaker exclaims, ‘’twas only a frenzy of love which overwhelmed me’ (7). As explained in the commentary, ‘my preoccupation with love for Him veiled me from Himself’. The love-frenzy is thus bound with the incessant concern of union and separation: ‘How oft did we cry out in hope of union! How oft did we cry out in fear of parting’ (34). As the Lover journeys through the desert, their quest is infused with lamentation, often embodied in dove’s song, as the dove who warbles before the Lover’s disappearance in Poem III or the wailing ringdove in XIII. The desert universe resounds and yet is also silent. To seek a voice in that world is the never-ending vocation of the gnostic. The constant call to the camels and their drivers encapsulates the endless keening of the longing soul. The camel itself is in anguish, a key trope of the nası ̄b, as she ‘complains of her worn hoofs and of deserts and wilderness’ (XXIX: 18), echoing the devotee’s struggle in the unforgiving landscape. They then pause at the ‘sandy tract of Hājir’, with the sight of she-camels and their young ‘at al-Uthayl’ (XXIX: 20). The camels also weep in agony in Poem V (V: 5) as the soul pants in longing. The explanation in the commentary is that the camels are the ‘actions or lofty thoughts’, constantly pushing upwards towards the Divine Names (comm 5). Throughout these specific locations that throb with absence-presence, Ibn ʿArabı ̄ is deeply concerned with the hermeneutic gaps in which the Lover has fallen and in which they must continuously fall. Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s work is characterized by the dialectic of absence-presence in the texture of his language. Poem XLV is dedicated to the process of seeking, and it is formed partly of questions. This poem shows the quest for presence as one of relentless inquiry: ‘The loved ones of my heart—where are they?’ (XLV: 1) and ‘As thou sawest their apparition wilt thou show to me their reality?’ (XLV: 2). At the end of this poem, the speaker requests that they need not ask ‘Where are they?’ (XLV: 6). Their yearning words flood

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through all the Tarjumān: ‘How long, how long was I seeking them! and how often did I beg to be united with them’ (XLV: 3). The ‘fear of being parted from them’ dissipates, but then comes the fear of being with them (XLV: 4); unity with the Beloved is an overwhelming conflagration. In the Lover’s enquiring state, absence forever encroaches on presence; and presence forever perforates absence. The lover’s hermeneutic gaps are also expressed in continual affirmation and negation. As William Chittick observes: ‘One must combine affirmation and negation, just as one must combine incomparability and similarity’.22 The Lover has been tormented by the ‘cheating phantoms [ashba ̄ḥ]’ (XXVIII: 22): ‘Sometimes the wind deceives when it causes thee to hear what is not (really) heard’. These ‘phantoms’ are glossed in the commentary as ‘the similes and images in which God, who has no like, is presented to us by the world of breaths’ (comm 22). Words can never convey He who has no like. The speaker announces that they are ‘distraught between the sun and the gazelles’ (XLII: 1) (informed in the commentary by Qur’an 65: 12 [XLII: comm 1]), remarking: ‘He who forgets Suhā is not forgetful, but he who forgets the sun is forgetful’ (XLII: 2).23 ‘Suhā’ refers to the star known in Western traditions as Alcor, of the ‘Mizar and Alcor’ double in Ursa Major; Suhā signifies ‘the neglected star’, presumably in reference to this star being fainter than Mizar.24 The commentary explains this as follows: ‘The heedless man is not he who neglects what is invisible, like the star Suhā, but he who neglects what is visible and manifest, like the sun’ (comm 2). Yet so much of the Tarjuma ̄n is concerned with the difficulty even of the visible, the discernible. Revelation is encoded in lightning (barq) from al-Ghadā in XXXVI: 4— the lightning being another trope from classical Arabic poetry, and evident also in Shushtarı ̄’s verse, with the illuminating lightning at al-Himā.25 In the Tarjuma ̄n commentary, the lightning is explained as ‘the luminous radiance of the most inaccessible veil of the Divine glory’. The ‘coming in 22  William Chittick, ‘Rūmı ̄ and wahdāt al-wujūd’, in Poetry and Mysticism in Islam: The Heritage of Rūmı ̄, ed. Amin Banani, Richard G.  Hovannisian, and Georges Sabagh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 70–111 (p. 77). 23  ‘Allah it is who hath created seven heavens, and of the earth the like thereof. The commandment cometh down among them slowly, that ye may know that Allah is Able to do all things, and that Allah surroundeth all things in knowledge’ (surah 65: 12). 24  See further this nineteenth-century outline of astral names: J. Ellard Gore, ‘The Names of the Stars’, The Gentleman’s Magazine 286 (1899), 17–23 (20). 25  See Alvarez, trans., Shushtarı ̄: Songs of Love and Devotion, p. 106.

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the night’ refers to ‘the darkness of the phenomenal world’ (XXXVI: comm. 4). There is an incomplete penetration of the unknowability, that thick veil. As will be examined in the following chapter, veiling and unveiling (kashf ) of the Divine are essential images in Sufi semiotics; there is the understanding that the Divine must necessarily be veiled, for no human being would be able to withstand a direct encounter. As mentioned earlier, there can be a fear of union. Poem XLVII refers to one who is veiled from view, turning away from the Lover (4): ‘His veiling did me no hurt; I was only hurt by his having turned away from me’ (5). As explained in the commentary: ‘I am necessarily veiled from God, but God’s turning away from me is caused by some quality in me of which I am ignorant and which I cannot remove until God enables me to know what it is’. The self is a terrible and painful barrier; the gnostic must ever strive with the nafs, through processes that are always fraught. The semiotics of absence also play out in written shapes or codes. Poem LIII, for instance, assumes a graphological mould. At the point of farewell between lovers, says the speaker, ‘thou wouldst deem us, as we clasp and embrace, to be a doubled letter’ (1). The lovers share a unified grapheme. There is thus unity in perception, despite the infinitesimal severance: ‘Although our bodies are dual, the eye sees only a single one’ (2). This push-and-pull of duality and unity also extends to the realm of pronouns. As Alvarez observes on Shushtarı ̄, quoted earlier: ‘The possessive particle “my” can no longer be understood in a conventional sense’.26 This can be further explained with reference to the Bezels, in the chapter for Jesus. This chapter contains a linguistic discussion of how the third-person pronouns ‘them’ and ‘he’ are pronouns of ‘absence’, the pronouns themselves being ‘naught but the veil that hides them from God’ (Bezels XV, ‘Jesus’: p. 185). The absence that resides in such minute and fundamental parts of speech, in the very pronouns, is further clarified in Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s Naẓm.

Ibn al-Fāriḍ, Naẓm

Like the speakers of the Tarjuma ̄n, the speaker of Naẓm invokes the trope of the separation at the desert camp, with the departure of the camels and their riders. As noted in the introduction, Ibn al-Fāriḍ here works within a ‘long ghazal tradition originally ascribed to the ʿudhra clan of seventhand eighth-century Arabia’, a poetic tradition marked by ‘[f]eelings of loss  Alvarez, ‘The Mystical Language of Daily Life’, 27.

26

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and despair’ with the Lover who ‘pines away in abject humility, accepting and even relishing the cruelties of unrequited love’.27 But we can more precisely define this ‘loss and despair’, this ‘abject humility’, as being coloured by the absence-presence dialectic. Loss is shaped by a quest for union, an inscription of empty spaces with presence. Early in the Naẓm, the barriers erected by pronouns begin to be shaken, though they still remain in place: veiled from the self, the speaker declares, ‘I was her’.28 Such union (jam’) is connected with rare gifts (165); the giving up of self must enable the Lover to seek the Beloved alone, with no expectation of reward—a line that echoes the famous verses attributed to Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya.29 The lovers form one shape, and not two, as in Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s single grapheme (Naẓm, 215); when one is called, the other responds (216–17). This is grammatically expressed in the second person’s sign: ‘The ta of the second person became the first between us, and in this I have risen above those who maintain difference’ (218). As Homerin explains this: In Arabic, the letter t can mark a past tense verb as the second person singular masculine (ta) or feminine (ti). In union, however, the second person is subsumed into the first person (tu), namely ‘I’.30

Ibn al-Fāriḍ acknowledges the difficulty, however, for his audiences in ‘seeing two as one’. As such, he announces that he will reveal its ‘hidden signs’ in ways that are clearer, with a parable. This parable is of a woman possessed by a ‘jinn’. When this woman speaks, the jinn is speaking through her, and yet the woman herself is also speaking: ‘the one speaking those strange things you heard was other than her, though in a sense she spoke’ (225). In this parable one can understand union—and the need to be free from the ‘fire of separation’ (na ̄r qatʾia) (228). True union is such that there can be no ‘withness’ (264). Pronominal and prepositional relationships fail, as witnessed earlier in Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s 27  Emil Homerin, ‘Ibn al-Fāriḍ: Ruba’iyat, Ghazal, Qasida’, in Windows on the House of Islam: Muslim Sources on Spirituality and Religious Life, ed. Renard, pp. 194–202 (p. 195). 28  See also the image of the veil at line 230. 29  ‘O Lord, if I worship You/Because of fear of hell | Then burn me in hell. | If I worship You | Because I desire paradise | Then exclude me from paradise’. This translation is from Islamic Mystical Poetry: Sufi Verse from the Early Mystics to Rūmı ̄, ed. Mahmood Jamal (London: Penguin, 2009), p. 8. 30  Homerin, trans., ‘Umar Ibn al-Fa ̄riḍ: Sufi Verse, Saintly Life, p. 136 n. 218.

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Tarjuma ̄n. This domain of oneness is superior to one who endures hope and fear—recalling the earlier statement that love should not be generated from terror or desire of reward. The realm of oneness is joyful (305–306). The speaker declares themselves to be the only one of their brothers to have achieved ‘the sobriety of union’ (ṣaḥwa al-jamʾ, 311), associated with the station of Moses and Muhammad—the ears of the first, and the eyes of the second. Having reached this exalted status, the Lover is the source and essence of all (313). The Lover, thus growing in confidence and in deeper unity, celebrates their ability to achieve a closer nearness, greater than they expected or hoped for, employing the technical term qurb (nearness, closeness) to convey this (377).31 There is further contemplation on the Beloved’s pulchritude (379–80), with the Lover being entirely transfixed in ‘witness’ (ashhad) of her ‘beauty’ (ḥasnahu) (382); after all, she ‘doubled’ the speaker’s every union, suggesting an exponential growth in unity (381). To double a union could also, however, be a contradiction in terms; this may be one of Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s linguistic strategies to bewilder the ʿaql—the reason or intellect. With greater assurance, the Lover can cry that there is no longer any separation: ‘I verified that we in truth are one’, as they revel in the joyful oneness, this ‘sobriety of union’ (577–578). All essence is now united in every ‘atom’ (dhara) (587); the speaker sees those who have no remaining self as phantoms (ashba ̄ḥ), who in unity are like light spirits (‘bi-jamʿiya ka-l-arwāḥi khaffat’) (594). By the later stages of the poem, the speaker is in an ever more secure union, testified by their consideration of union in reference to Noah, Solomon, Abraham, Moses, Joseph, Jesus, and finally Muhammad (602–615). The Lover then dedicates time to outlining the history following Muhammad (622ff), with reference to ʿAlı ̄’s exegesis (625). They can now also speak of the growing maturity of the soul, speaking of its earlier stage as being like an infant’s (632–34), paralleling biblical verses such as 1 Corinthians 3: 1–2, Hebrews 5: 12, and 1 Peter 2: 2.32 With their union with the Beloved, the speaker becomes present everywhere; as they relate  See further Homerin, trans., ‘Umar Ibn al-Fāriḍ: Sufi Verse, Saintly Life, p. 180 n. 377.  ‘And I, brethren, could not speak to you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal. As unto little ones in Christ. I gave you milk to drink, not meat; for you were not able as yet […]’ (1 Corinthians 3: 1–2); ‘For whereas for the time you ought to be masters, you have need to be taught again what are the first elements of the words of God: and you are become such as have need of milk, and not of strong meat’ (Hebrews 5: 12); ‘As newborn babes, desire the rational milk without guile, that thereby you may grow unto salvation’ (1 Peter 2: 2). 31 32

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this pervasiveness: ‘In the compounded world, I manifested in all forms and shapes, decorated them with beauty’ (643). Qurb becomes ever more possible: ‘all of me is nearness’, with the vacation even of the problematic preposition ‘in’ (fı ̄) (648–50). They can now ‘erase the difference of my fragmentation’ (651). Absence disintegrates to reveal the presence within it. The greeting from the Beloved must always be ‘or nearer’ (751), in echo of surah 53: 5–9, on the Qur’anic revelation; this reference at once affirms divine nearness while also alluding to the limits of language to convey such intimacy.33 There can never be full knowledge of Divine closeness; we are confronted with an ever-receding horizon, an ever-shifting love-game. The Lover is in proximity, in intimacy, in distance, in estrangement, in oneness; they are in an ever-quest to come nearer and nearer to the light (nūr) of the Divine, radiating from the niche of essence (‘mishkātu dhātiya ashraqat’) (752).

Ancrene Wisse Akin to Sufi poetry, especially that of Shushtarı ̄, anchoritic guidance texts act to lessen absence. The authors seek to address the gaps in knowledge of their readers, at times supposedly at the readers’ request.34 The Ancrene Wisse-author, for instance, opens with Canticles 1: 3 and alludes to the paths of knowledge lovers may find in grammar, geometry, and theology (1: 3–12).35 But the details of the text have an altogether different effect. Ancrene Wisse draws attention repeatedly to the pervasive absence of the divine. The text persists in creating absence as much as it attempts to provide concrete steps to gaining the presence of Christ, as much as it strains to diminish the gap between Lover and Beloved. Throughout, there is the continual emphasis on this life as an exile, underpinned by biblical verses such as Job 10: 1 and Hebrews 13: 14.36 Tom License highlights ‘exile’ as one key theoretical model in the categorization of anchoritic lives, and 33  These Qur’anic verses will be quoted and discussed further in Chap. 8 (‘Birds’ Ascent: Conclusions’). 34  This is the case for both the Ancrene Wisse-author (1: 10–12) and one of his principal named sources, Aelred’s De institutione inclusarum (see further De institutione inclusarum, in Aelredi Rievallensis Opera Omnia: 1 Opera Ascetica, ed. A.  Hoste and C.  H. Talbot. Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis, i. Turnhout: Brepols, 1971), 637–38. 35  ‘[T]he righteous love thee’ (Canticles 1: 3). 36  ‘My soul is weary of my life’ (Job 10: 1); ‘For we have not here a lasting city, but we seek one that is to come’ (Hebrews 13: 14).

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Ancrene Wisse is demonstrative of this model.37 The solitary life is defined explicitly as a wilderness, with the original anchoritic readers themselves early models for ‘wild women’, perhaps38: ‘Wildernesse’ is anlich lif of ancre wununge. For alswa i wildernes beoð alle wilde beastes ant nulleð nawt þolien monne nahunge, ah fleoð hwen ha heom ihereð, alswa schulen ancres, ouer alle oþre wummen, beo wilde o þisse wise, ant þenne beoð ha ouer oþre leoue to ure Lauerd, ant sweetest him þuncheð ham—for of all flesches is wilde deores flesch leouest ant swetest. (74: 230–35) (Wilderness is the solitary life of the anchorite’s dwelling. For just as in the wilderness all beasts are wild and cannot suffer the approach of humans, but flee when they hear them, so should the anchorites, above all other women, be wild in this way. And then they are beloved above others to our Lord, and he finds them the sweetest—for of all flesh, wild-deer meat is the most precious and the sweetest.)

This moves from a general flight into the wilderness to a striking image of the Lord feasting on the anchorite’s wild-deer flesh, a clear Eucharistic reversal. The exiled anchorite, retreating to the wilderness in this life of unknowing, becomes as an animal moving through undomesticated land. Later, the author cites and glosses Isaiah 61: 7  in the expression of an unknown country39: Ysaias: In terra, inquit, sua duplicia possidebunt. ‘Ha schulen’, seið Ysaie, ‘in hare ahne lond wealden twauald blisse, aȝein tuaald wa þet ha her dreheð’. ‘In hare ahne lond’, seið Ysaie; for alswa as ðe vuele nabbeð na lot in heouene, ne þe gode nabbeð na lot in eorðe. (135: 140–43) (Isaiah: In their land, he says, they will possess double. ‘They shall’, says Isaiah, ‘in their own land possess two-fold bliss for the two-fold woe that they endure here’. ‘In their own land’, says Isaiah: for just as the evil have no share in heaven, the good have no share in earth.) 37  Tom Licence, Hermits and Recluses in English Society, 950–1200 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), especially pp. 111–130. 38  On the mythographical trope of the ‘wild woman’ in a range of traditions, see further Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (London: Rider, 1992; repr. 1998), especially pp. 1–20. 39  ‘For your double confusion and shame, they shall praise their part: therefore shall they receive double in their land, everlasting joy shall be unto them’ (Isaiah 61: 7).

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Within the continual exile, there are, nonetheless, signs or markers of the Lord’s abiding presence. In his departure from his beloved friends in the Pentecost, leaving them in foreign territory, ‘uncuðe þeode’ (94: 998), the Lord nonetheless leaves them loving words, with citation and glossing of John 14: 27.40 These words are his residue through his absence. More specifically, the author clarifies: ‘þis wes his druerie þet he leafed ant ȝef ham in his departunge’ (94: this was his love token that he left and gave them in his departure). ‘Druerie’ can be translated as ‘love-token’, as it has this sense of a ‘token of love or affection’, a ‘keepsake’, even a ‘treasure or jewel’.41 It is a token passed from lover to lover. Earlier, the anchoritic readers are also reminded of the bridal ‘morning gifts’ (‘marheȝeouen’) they will be given in the afterlife (37: 688). The ‘morning gifts’ are known from early Germanic laws as the bestowal of a gift from husband to wife in the morning after the consummation of their marriage.42 The anchorites’ morning gifts are ‘swiftnesse’ and ‘leome of a briht sihðe’ (37: 689), the light of bright sight. Both are gifts of presence, bestowed by the Beloved. The presence of Jesus can only come through the absence of all else, the absence of all disturbance (36: 646–49). The enduring dialectic of absence and presence is inscribed in the sacrament of the Eucharist, as gestured towards in the previous chapter. The Eucharist can itself be a statement of utter presence, the making of bread and wine into the very flesh and blood of the Beloved. Such is its preciousness that the Ancrene Wisse-author is clear on the fact that it should not be taken too frequently for fear of it losing its value.43 In the description of the Mass in Part I of Ancrene Wisse, there is a crucial 40  ‘Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, do I give unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, nor let it be afraid’ (John 14: 27). 41  Middle English Dictionary, ‘druerie’ (n.) [accessed 17th March 2020]. 42  On the tradition of ‘morning gifts’, evident from the centuries of early Germanic settlers in England, see further Meryl Thomas, ‘The Early Historical Influences on Separation of Property in English Law’, Journal on European History of Law 5.2 (2014), 27–40 (see especially 29). See also MED entry for ‘morn’, sense 3.c: ‘a nuptial gift, a gift presented by the husband to the wife on the morning after the consummation of the marriage; the marriage portion’ [accessed 17th March 2019]. 43  There are numerous cases of denial of the Eucharist causing significant distress for women devotees in particular. See, for instance, this passage from James of Vitry’s (d. 1240) Vita of Marie d’Oignies: ‘I knew of one of these women who, when she violently desired to be refreshed by the meat of the true Lamb, the true Lamb himself could not endure that she languish for a long time but gave himself to her and, thus refreshed, she recovered’ (Mary of Oignies: Mother of Salvation, ed. Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker [Turnhout: Brepols, 2006], p. 48).

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passage—based on Augustine’s Confessiones—on the Lord’s entrance into the soul. This passage has contemplative possibilities: Efter þe measse cos, hwen þe preost sacreð—þer for ȝeoteð al þe world, þer beoð al ut of bodi, þer i sperclinde luue bicluppeð ower leofmon, þe into ower breostes bur is iliht of heouene, ant haldeð him heteueste aþet he habbe iȝettet ow al þet ȝe eauer easkið. (13: 223–240) (After the Mass-kiss [i.e. the kiss of peace], when the priest consecrates [the Eucharist]: there, forget the world; there, be out of your body; there, in sparkling love embrace your lover, who has descended from Heaven into your chest’s bower, and hold him fiercely [or, tightly] until he has given you all that you ever ask.)

There has been debate about whether or not such a passage gestures towards disembodied union with the Beloved. But Cate Gunn convincingly shows that this passage is reminiscent of contemplative language of the suffusion of the Divine within the loving soul.44 In addition to affirming the Lord’s presence, however, the Eucharist also enacts his absence. One of the ‘astounding thoughts’ (under the category of ‘Wunderfule ant gleadfule’, 92) that can shock an anchoritic reader out of temptation is to imagine that Jesus stands in front of them, visualizing an intimate conversation and request of his beneficence: Wunderfule ant gleadfule: as ȝef þu sehe Iesu Crist ant herdest him easki þe hwet te were leouest, efter þi saluatiun ant þine leoueste freond, of þing of þisse liue (92: 909–11) (Wonderful and joyful: as if you see Jesus Christ and hear him ask you what you would most want, after your salvation and that of your dearest friend, of the things of this life[.])

As joyful as this meditation may be, it is suggestive of Jesus’ persistent absence. Later, in Part IV, the anchoritic readers imagine the Beloved’s body beside them with only a wall as separation, following a citation and gloss of Hebrews 12: 4.45 The author reassures the readers: [… ȝe habbeð þet ilke blod,] þe ilke blisfule bodi þet com of þe meiden ant deide o þe rode, niht ant dei bi ow. Nis bute a wah bitweonen. (100: 1224–26)  See further Millett, ed., Ancrene Wisse, volume II, 34: I/223–5ff.  ‘For you have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin’ (Hebrews 12: 4).

44 45

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(You have that same blood, that same blissful body that came of the maiden and died on the Cross, by you night and day. There is but a wall between you.)

It is a body revealed in Mass: euche dei he kimeð forð ant schaweð him to ow fleschliche ant licomliche inwið þe Measse—biwrixlet þah on oþres lite, under breades furme, for in his ahne ure ehnen ne mahten nawt þe brihte sihðe þolien. (100: 1226–29) (each day he comes forth and shows himself to you, fleshly and bodily within the Mass—changed, though, into the appearance of another, under the form of bread; for if he were in his own form, our eyes could not tolerate the bright sight.)

This reference of Christ’s concealment—Christ appearing in the form of bread to protect human sight—synchronizes deeply with the image in the Sufi poetry of God being unseeable except through a veil. Absence is also generated from divine mercy, from a wish to not overwhelm the devotee. The wall between anchorite and the Beloved is a more tangible manifestation of the results of sin, as are the dreaded marks on the devil’s scroll erased only by confession (130: 612). But elsewhere in Ancrene Wisse, sin is itself shaped as an absence or negation: a hole. The sinful body might itself be imaged as a destructive lack, a ‘black hole of anti-matter’ to use an anachronistic phrase. The sinning body in Ancrene Wisse is pockmarked with ugly orifices, as in the infamous image of the female temptress as a pit in which men might tumble and in the image of nostrils likened to privy holes (23–24: 122–150, 105: 1416). In this conceptualization of sin and the sinning body as filthy hollows, there are parallels with Julian of Norwich’s (b. 1342) Revelations of Divine Love. Notably, Julian does not see sin itself during the revelations. She explains that she believes sin to be a form of non-being, knowable only by its painful effects: ‘I beleve it hath no manner of substance ne no party of being, ne it myght not be knowin, but by the peyne that it is cause of’.46 In the sin-as-absence model, if applied also to Ancrene Wisse, the nonbeing of sin becomes the generator of the Lord’s absence, set against the apertures of his body which act as entrances into his being (111: 1629–31). 46  Georgia Ronan Crampton, ed., The Shewings of Julian of Norwich (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications), 949–950. Accessed online: https://d.lib.rochester.edu/ teams/text/the-shewings-of-julian-of-norwich-part-1 [accessed 30th July 2020].

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Ureisun of God Turning now to the Wooing Group, we find that Ureisun of God and Wohunge establish themselves as foundational texts in the semiotics of absence. They position themselves at the heart of a devotee’s search for the Beloved. On the one hand they are Eucharistic tools that help prepare the soul for receiving the sacrament (see Chap. 5); on the other they resist becoming tools that allow easy access to the Divine. Ureisun of God itself might be read as an object of absence. Its semiotics are predicated on absence, and the meditative journeys inscribed within it cannot but repeatedly allude to absence. It is formed from a dialectic of remoteness and nearness. In this text, the speaker inhabits a region where they are not yet a true lover—but where they are nothing but a lover of the divine. It is a strange liminal space of absence-presence, presence-absence, in continual and pressurizing shifts. The Beloved and Lover shuttle towards, away from, and against one another across the distance, never quite settling on the joy of shared presence. Perhaps its most poignant and crucial moment is in the cry: ‘Woa is me þet ich am so freomede wið þe’ (p. 174: Woe is me that I am so estranged from you). The opening of the meditation is, though, one of tantalizing presence. The assertions of sweetness reach towards a palpable presence, as the echoes of Dulcis Iesu memoria reverberate around the speaker (p. 172). Christ is a certain or sure sweetness (‘siker swetnesse’, p. 172). This is followed by a string of assertions of Jesus as sensorially, sensually present: he is the speaker’s life (‘lif’), love (‘leof’), healing balm (‘healewi’), and honey drop (‘huniter’, p. 172). But even if the opening of the meditation appears to saturate the speaker in honeyed and illuminated love, they cannot remain immersed in the Beloved’s sweetness. Even as the speaker images the light of the Lord, this becomes configured in terms of apophasis. In comparing Jesus with the sun, the speaker imagines Jesus in terms of an absence—he is unlike the sun, which in turn is but a shadow in comparison: ‘Iesu al feir, aȝein hwam þe sunne nis buten ase a scheadewe, ase þeo þet leoseð hire liht and scomeð aȝein þine brihte leoure uor hire þeosternesse’ (p.  172: Jesus all fair, compared with whom the sun is but as a shadow, as though it loses her light and is shamed by her darkness when compared to your bright countenance). The meditation speaks in shadows and mists—not in terms of being, not in the brightness of assertion and the surety of presence. It is a shadow-world that slinks into the speaker’s own dark heart (‘þeostri heorte’) and sooty soul (‘soule þet is suti’, p. 174).

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This becomes ever more pressing when the speaker voices the fact that they have not attained the status of lover. They must ask the Beloved if they might shift towards Him and away from earthly pleasure, using both verbs ‘wend’ and ‘turn’ (p. 174). Still, presumably, turned away from the Lord, they cannot yet even dare to utter the name Beloved or Lover: ‘mi leofmon, der ich so cleopien þe’ (p. 174) (my lover, if I may dare to call you so). The sweetness of the opening meditation is disrupted by the intrusion of thorns, the tongue licking the honey from its thorny abode (p. 174). Earthly ‘cumfort’ cannot but be ‘imengd wið baluhsihð, ant wið bitternesse’ (p.  174: mingled with misfortune [or suffering] and with bitterness). Entrance into the Beloved’s embrace is framed with a haunting conditionality, especially in the form of negating interrogatives: hwi ne bihold ich hu þu streihtest þe for me on þe rode? hwi ne worpe ich me bitweonen þeoilke ermes so swiðe wide to spredde, ant i openeð so þe moder deð hire ermes, hire leoue child for to bicluppen? (p. 176) (why do I not behold how you stretch yourself for me on the Cross? Why do I not throw myself between those same arms spread out so very widely, and opened up as the mother does her arms to embrace her beloved child?)

There is not yet a tactile encounter, not even a beholding of the possibility of a tactile encounter. The Mother-Christ’s voice is one that speaks lovingly while also hinting at the loved-child’s absence: ‘hwo leof? hwo lif? hwo deð him her bitweonen? hwoa wule beon bi clupped?’ (p. 176) (who is my love? who is my life? who rests here between [my arms]? who wants to be embraced?). This builds into the speaker’s statement of utter absence from the stretched arms: ‘hwi nam ich iþin ermes so istreihte, ant ispred on rode?’ (p. 176:106–107) (why am I not in your arms so stretched and spread on the Cross?). The speaker then becomes entrenched in unremitting statements of conditionality, waiting for a fulfilment that will perhaps never come: hwi mid ermes of luue ne cluppe ich þe so feste. þet no þing þeonne ne muwe breiden mine heorte? hwi ne cusse ich þe sweteliche ine goste. wið swete munegunge of þine goddeden? hwi nis me bitter. al þet mi flesch likeð? hwi nis me unwurð euerich wordlich þing a-ȝein þe muchele delit of þine swetnesse? hwi ne iuele ich þe imine breoste so swete ase þu ert? hwi ertu me so freomede? hwi ne con ich wowen þe. wið swete luue wordes alre þinge swetest. and alre þinge leoflukest ant luue wurðest? (p. 178–180)

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(Why do I not embrace you so tightly with arms of love that nothing may pull away my heart? Why do I not kiss you sweetly in spirit, with sweet remembrance of your good-deeds? Why is everything bitter, all that pleasures my flesh? Why do I not count as unworthy every worldly thing as much as delight of your sweetness? Why do I not feel you in my chest, as sweet as you are? Why are you so estranged from me? Why can I not woo you, with sweet love-words, you who are of all things sweetest, and all things most lovable and worthy of love?)

As is clear from this quoted passage, the statements of absence are unrelenting: absence from embrace, from remembrance, from true asceticism, from the feeling of sweetness, from the skills to truly woo so beloved a being. The very feeling is absent from the chest. These are all questions not only about the absence of souls in love but also about the absence of capacity. The speaker cries of failure and struggle. The pivotal question is perhaps ‘hwi ertu me so freomede?’ (why are you so estranged from me?), echoing the earlier lament: ‘Woa is me þet ich am so freomede wið þe’.47 All converge painfully into a bitter ‘wall’ of sin (p. 180), reminiscent of the wall imagined between the Lover and Beloved in Ancrene Wisse, discussed earlier. This wall is very different from the comforting sanctuary within the dovecote, quoted in Chap. 1. The end of the meditation then sees a shift to concerns surrounding the absence of Mary and of John the Evangelist. The isolation of the speaker becomes all the more visible: Hwi leafdi hwi; nabe ich euer biforen mine heorte eihen. þeo ilke þreo stondunges. þi sune was ituht on rode. þurh driuen fet ant honden. wið dulte neiles. blodi his side. 7 þi stondunge leafdi. 7 sein iohanes ewangelistes weopinde otwo half wið sorhfule sikes? Hwi ne bihold ich þis euer in min heorte. ant þenche ðet hit was for me, ant for oðre sunfule to aredden of helle. ant forto ȝiuen us heoueriche blisse? (pp. 184–186) (Why lady, why do I not have before my heart’s eyes those same three standing figures, your son stretched on the Cross, feet and hands driven through, with blunt nails, bloody his side; and you standing lady, and St John Evangelist’s weeping on the other side with sorrowful sighs? Why do I not behold this ever in my heart, and think that it was to deliver me, and for other sinful ones, from Hell, and to give us the bliss of the heavenly kingdom?) 47  The adjective ‘fremede’ is of Old English origin and has the sense of ‘strange, foreign, remote, unfamiliar’ as well as ‘estranged, unfriendly, hostile’ (MED entry [accessed 20th March 2020]).

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The ending can be nothing but a stream of repeated questions, asking relentlessly from the place of lack, from a place of incapacity and uncertainty.

Wohunge Wohunge flourishes in a realm of uncertainties. Existing as it does in this realm, the meditation falls at times in the region of conditionality and at other times in the region of potentiality; in other words, it enables the speaker to shift between awareness of the Divine’s absence and hope in the possibility of His presence. The closing envoi of the meditation could not be any clearer about the unavoidable absence of the Divine. The authorial voice requests prayer for himself and asserts the purpose of the text. When the speaker is not performing their liturgical routine, they may speak these words to Jesus (‘carpe to ward ihesu’); in its voicing, the meditation allows the meditator to ‘þench as tah he heng biside þe blodi up o rode’ (p. 111) (think as though he may hang beside you, bloody upon the Cross). In this sense, it is even less certain than the mere barrier imagined by the Ancrene Wisse-author. Here in Wohunge, the meditator can only imagine in analogues: it is as though he is there; he is not—physically, ‘really’, ‘actually’— there. Moreover, the refrain that works as a supportive structure throughout the meditation is itself a repeated statement of absence: ‘A ihesu mi swete ihesu leue þat te luue of þe beo al mi likinge’ (p. 82) (Ah Jesus, my sweet Jesus, grant that the love of you be all my pleasure).48 The verb leven is given in the subjunctive form, a wish that the speaker may have their entire pleasure in the Beloved.49 It is true that the meditation opens with a sensorial immersion akin to that of Ureisun of God, imbued with the Canticles (4,3, 4: 11, 5: 1) and the Psalms (18,11; 118: 103)50: Iesu swete iesu. mi druð. mi derling. mi drihtin. mi healend. mi huniter. mi haliwei. Swetter is munegunge of þe þen mildeu o muðe. (Jesus, sweet Jesus, my dear one, my darling, my lord, my saviour, my honey, my healing potion. Sweetner  is remembrance of you than honeydew in the mouth). 48  The refrain’s occurrences are at 82: 46, 84: 59, 84: 77, 86: 84, 88: 108, 88: 129, 90: 143, 92: 172, 98: 260, 100: 307, 110: 431 (page and line number respectively). 49  See further MED entry ‘leven (3)’. 50  These biblical verses are provided in the previous chapter.

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The speaker inhabits this world of sweetness, remembrance of the Beloved tasted as honeydew. The earlier parts of the meditation—focused as they are on love-worthiness and sensual re-creation of Divine presence—is one of cataphatic assertion. The Beloved fills the world, facilitating repletion and satiety, and not only lack (p.  82). The speaker voices David in the Psalter for this assertion, specifically Psalm 23: 1: ‘as te hali prophet dauid cwiddes, drihtines is te eorðe, ant al þat hit fulles weld ant al þat trin wuneð’ (p. 82) (as the holy prophet David says, ‘The earth is the Lord’s, and all that fills it, the world, and all that dwells therein’).51 Creation is all the Beloved’s, who in turn is spoken to with sweet endearments, ‘mi sweting’ (my sweet one) (p. 82). However, a modulation comes in the consideration of Christ as sufferer. The reflection on Christ’s early years is suffused with utterances of His own lack, born as he was ‘destitute and wretched’ (‘westi and wrecched’ [p. 96]). His lack of shelter is expressed through the negating image of a ‘wall-less house’ (‘waheles hus’, p. 96), and his hunger in later years is a broiling anguish (‘hat hungre’, hot hunger) in response to the ‘want of food’ (‘wone of mete’, p.  96: 242). This is contrasted with the fullness endowed to Creation, echoing the earlier reference to Christ ‘filling’ the world: Christ feeds the birds in flight, the fish in water, and the folk on earth (p.  96). This pervasive lack in his poverty connects to the lack in terms of love—the longing of the Divine for his creation that we witness also in Sufi texts. In the continual considerations of Christ’s suffering, the affective response itself is always partially conditional, due to the speaker’s own limitations and the Lord’s persistent absence. The meditator wonders how a heart cannot break, but does not affirm their own heart has broken: ‘hwat herte ne mai to brek’ (p. 100). The meditator again uses the thorny conditional ‘may’ of their own heart’s breaking: ‘min herte mai to breke’ (p. 102). The heart may break, but its breakage can never be stated with certainty. That the complex Crucifixion scene also shuttles between the second- and third-person pronouns has been much commented upon.52 This inevitably leads to an alternation between delighting presence—the

51  ‘The earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof: the world, and all they that dwell therein’ (Psalm 23: 1). 52  See especially Jennifer Brown, ‘Subject, Object and Mantra in Þe Wohunge of ure Lauerd’, in The Milieu and Context of the Wohunge Group, ed. Susannah Mary Chewning (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), pp. 66–83.

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speaker addressing Christ directly, you—and alienating distance—Christ becomes simply, painfully, he.53 The denial of complete presence, the enduring consciousness of absence, nevertheless also opens up the potential for encounter. It is at the point of entrance into Christ’s Heart that we see a definitive shift towards uncertainty in the sense of potentiality rather than in the sense of lack. This tone of potentiality is clear when the speaker imagines their capacity to witness Christ’s love: ‘þer i mai openlich seo hu muchel þu me luuedes’ (p. 106: there I may openly see how much you loved me). This is enhanced with the imagined kiss and embrace: ‘I mai þer þe swa sweteli kissen and cluppen’ (I may there kiss and embrace you so sweetly), deriving from his love a ‘gastli likinge’ (spiritual pleasure) (p. 106). Where the modal verb ‘may’ had before implied an incapacity, here ‘mai’ becomes loaded with promise. The meditator is allowed a growing assurance, even if this assurance is never complete. With the potential for presence all the clearer, the speaker underlines their capacity to speak with the Psalmist—shifting towards collaborative speech, in contrast to the mere invocation of Psalms and other biblical verses earlier in the text. The speaker announces, with quotation of Psalm 115: 1254: nu mai i seggen wið þe salmewrihte, Quid retribuam domino pro omnibus quae retribuit mihi? Lauerd hwat mai i ȝelde þe for al þat tu haues ȝiuen me? Hwat mai þole for þe for al þat tu þoledes for me? (p. 108) (now may I say with the psalmist: What shall I render to the Lord, for all the things he hath rendered unto me? Lord, what may I yield to you for all that you have given me? What may I suffer for you, for all that you suffered for me?)

The voice of the Psalmist can be spoken, both in Latin and in an assured vernacular gloss, and spoken with collaborative intent. The capacity to give to the Lord is enabled, if not stated with certainty; the speaker may ask how the Lord may give. Presence is never quite allowed in Wohunge—nor in any of the Christian or Islamic texts studied in this chapter. Absence continually haunts these 53  Compare 102: 314–328, 104: 332–352, 104: 354–361, 106: 363–368, and 106: 372–374. 54  ‘What shall I render to the Lord, for all the things he hath rendered unto me?’ (Psalm 115: 12).

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texts, reaching towards the not-thereness of pastness and otherness. We might recall Barthes’ words on Werther who ‘speaks in the present tense’, and yet ‘in an undertone, the imperfect murmurs behind the present’.55 A broader understanding of ‘imperfect tense’ infects these medieval texts. Their semiotics do not function in clean polarities, the ‘absent’ or the ‘present’ as opposites; there is a richer continuum, where absence and presence mingle in an imperfect exchange. In Risālatu’t ̣-Ṭ uyu ̄r (The Epistle of the Birds) by Ahmad Ibn Muhammad Ghazāli (d. 1126), one of the possible sources of At ̣t ̣ār’s The Conference of the Birds, the birds embrace a ‘torque of yearning’ around their necks and a ‘girdle of longing’ around their waists.56 Like contemplatives, the birds are always marked, even imprisoned, by a dialectic of absence-presence. With an avian perspective of emotion, it is clear that in both the Islamic and Christian contemplative texts, absence and presence co-exist  in an intimate dance. An avian perspective enables us to identify shared strategies of dealing with absence-presence in distinct languages—from relentless questions to a linguistic struggle with pronouns. The explicit desert world of the Sufi poetry also enhances our reading of the spaces of love-longing in the English texts, which are configured as arid, thirst-inducing spaces echoing the dwelling of the Desert Mothers and Fathers.57 The Beloved is veiled or caught behind a wall; the Beloved is unspeakable, unimaginable, unreachable. But the texts facilitate a puncturing of the barriers; they facilitate a nearness. Come, the Beloved speaks: come. Hidden as the Beloved is, Theirs is an enciphered bower, filled with signs for the Lover to decode.

55  Barthes, Lover’s Discourse, p. 216. The reference is to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (1749–1832) Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther). 56  Avery, trans., ‘Appendix II: The Risa ̄latu’t ̣-Ṭ uyūr, “The Bird’s Story” of Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazāli, Offered in English from the Persian’, in The Speech of the Birds, trans. Avery, pp. 551–560 (p. 551). On this potential source, see further Hellmut Ritter, The Ocean of the Soul, pp. 8 and 10–18. 57  See Vincent Gillespie’s comment that dryness encompasses ‘a thirst for release from time and language into unmediated presence’, in relation to fourteenth-century English texts (‘Postcards from the Edge’, in Looking in Holy Books: Essays on Late Medieval Religious Writing in England (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), p. 330).

CHAPTER 7

Secrecy

The Beloved can be a secret, even from their own lovers. For Barthes, this is the ‘amorous subject’ who is inconnaissable, unknowable: the other is impenetrable, intractable, not to be found: I cannot open up the other, trace back the other’s origins, solve the riddle. Where does the other come from? Who is the other? I wear myself out, I shall never know.1

In thirteenth-century English and Arabic contemplative texts, the Beloved exists in codes and riddles, shimmering behind veils, vibrating within runic seals. The image of the veil, in particular, is a central one in Sufi vocabulary: it is a source of pain yet also of protection.2 But the Beloved’s secrecy is not a static unknowability. Again, Barthes offers us a useful starting point: the other is not to be known; his opacity is not the screen around a secret, but, instead, a kind of evidence in which the game of reality and appearance is done away with. I am then seized with that exaltation of loving someone  Barthes, Lover’s Discourse, p. 134.  See especially Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s Tarjumān: VII: 2; XI: 11; XIV: 7; XIV: 7; XXV: 5–6; XXXV: 1–2; XXXIX: 6; XLI: 7–8; LXII: 6–7; XLVII: 4–5; XLVIII: 8–9; LVI: 2 (and his commentaries on these lines); and Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s Naẓm al-sulu ̄k: 26–27, 150–165, 230, 259, 264, 353, 387–389, 441, 516–525, 704, 717. 1 2

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. S. Lazikani, Emotion in Christian and Islamic Contemplative Texts, 1100–1250, The New Middle Ages, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59924-9_7

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unknown, someone who will remain so forever: a mystic impulse: I know what I do not know.3

Even in their indecipherability, the Beloved of these medieval contemplative texts becomes a ludic surface or site, enabling the incessant game of meaning-making. That such hermeneutics of secrecy have particular traction in the solitary existence might be highlighted by the historical origins of ‘secret’ and ‘rune’. The English noun and adjective ‘secret’ derives, via Old French, from Latin secretus, ‘originally a past participle of secernere to separate, divide off’.4 The origins of the noun ‘rune’ are partly attributable to ‘cognate roune (n.)’ with the sense of ‘a secret, a mystery; an obscure or mysterious saying’, and associated with being apart and separate: to act in secrecy, in roune.5 As the Ancrene Wisse-author himself remarks, God reveals to his beloved ones ‘his dearne runes ant heouenliche priuitez’ (his recondite mysteries and heavenly secrets) only when they are ‘ane, bi hamseoluen’ (alone, by themselves) (60). An avian vantage point demonstrates that Ibn ʿArabı ̄, Ibn al-Fāriḍ, Shushtarı ̄, Ancrene Wisse, Wohunge, and Thomas of Hales’ Love Rune all share a profound concern with the secrecy involved in affective process— and yet also with its concurrent revelation and display.6 It is not the emotion itself that is inaccessible. After all, ‘emotion’ is not an entity waiting to be unearthed from the text; affective response is generated in the interdependency of text and reader. Rather, affective response works in a secret symbology that is nonetheless always straining to be transcribed and understood. Across the Christian and Islamic texts, there is the pursuit of a secret, nested, veiled Beloved. This also means that the affective response, the feeling nurtured through approach to the Beloved, is itself wrought in secret languages. This puts a strain methodologically on terms such as  Barthes, Lover’s Discourse, p. 135.  OED online [accessed 24th March 2020]; entry not fully revised, originally published in 1911. 5  OED online [accessed 24th March 2020]; entry updated Third Edition, March 2011. Readers may be especially familiar with its usage at the end of the Old English poem The Wanderer, ‘Sundor æt rune’ (Apart in secrecy/secret meditation): The Wanderer, ed. R.  F. Leslie, revised edition (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1985; repr. 1997), p. 68, l. 111. 6  On the unsaying in ‘mystical’ discourses, see especially Mark S. Burrows, ‘Raiding the Inarticulate: Mysticism, Poetics, and the Unlanguageable’, Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 4.2 (2004), 173–194. 3 4

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Amsler’s ‘affective literacies’ and William Reddy’s ‘emotives’—even McNamer’s ‘scripts for the performance of feeling’.7 We are perhaps also confronted with affectively literate illiteracies, with emotives that erase as much as they create, with scripts that dissolve as they are used. It is first important to acknowledge the deep exegetical traditions in both Christian and Islamic contemplative histories that are concerned with translating the secrets of scripture.8 Both the Bible and the Qur’an are replete with references to creation itself as a continual source of signification, releasing signs of the Divine for those who read it properly. The entirety of surah 21 is especially relevant here, and other Qur’anic verses in this vein include 10: 5, 13: 3, 16: 79, and 45: 3–6.9 Relevant biblical verses include Job 12: 7–9, Psalm 18: 2–6, and Romans 1: 20.10 The entirety of creation is thus feasibly a text to be read and glossed. Through 7  See McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), p. 12. 8  For interrelations between the traditions, see Thomas E. Burman, Reading the Qur’an in Latin Christendom, 1140–1560 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007; repr. 2011), especially pp. 1–11; and Scott J. Bridger, Christian Exegesis of the Qur’an: A Critical Analysis of the Apologetic Use of the Qur’an in Select Medieval and Contemporary Arabic Texts (Cambridge: James Clarke & Company, 2016), especially pp. 1–40. See also Lejla Demiri, ed. and trans., Muslim Exegesis of the Bible in Medieval Cairo: Najm al-Dı ̄n Tūfi’s (d.716/1316) Commentary on the Christian Scriptures (Leiden: Brill, 2013), especially pp. 29–70. 9  ‘He it is Who appointed the sun a splendour and the moon a light, and measured for her stages, that ye might know the number of the years, and the reckoning. Allah created not (all) that save in truth. He detaileth the revelations for people who have knowledge’ (surah 10: 5); ‘He it is Who spread out the earth and placed therein firm hills and flowing streams, and of all fruits He placed therein two spouses (male and female). He covereth the night with the day. Lo! herein verily are portents for people who take thought’ (surah 13: 3); ‘Have they not seen the birds obedient in mid-air? None holdeth them save Allah. Lo! herein, verily, are portents for a people who believe’ (surah 16: 79); ‘Lo! in the heavens and the earth are portents for believers. And in your creation, and all the beasts that He scattereth in the earth, are portents for a folk whose faith is sure. And the difference of night and day and the provision that Allah sendeth down from the sky and thereby quickeneth the earth after her death, and the ordering of the winds, are portents for a people who have sense. These are the portents of Allah which We recite unto thee (Muhammad) with truth. Then in what fact, after Allah and His portents, will they believe?’ (surah 45: 3–6). 10  ‘But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee: and the birds of the air, and they shall tell thee. Speak to the earth, and it shall answer thee: and the fishes of the sea shall tell. Who is ignorant that the hand of the Lord hath made all these things?’ (Job 12: 7–9); ‘The heavens shew forth the glory of God, and the firmament declareth the work of his hands. Day to day uttereth speech, and night to night sheweth knowledge. There are no speeches nor languages, where their voices are not heard. Their sound hath gone forth into all the earth: and their words unto the ends of the world. He hath set his tabernacle in the sun’

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reading the signs of creation, the multiple layers of signification can be apprehended for both the Christian and the Muslim contemplative. As is well known, biblical commentators engage with a model of layered and interdependent interpretative modes: the literal, the allegorical or typological, the tropological, and the anagogical.11 As outlined by Omaima Abou-­Bakr, Sufism embraces a two-tier exegesis: tafsı ̄r and taʾwı ̄l. The former relates to ‘external interpretation of the Quran [sic] that seeks to explicate the outer level of the revelation, such as the immediate literal meaning and the rhetorical and grammatical questions’; the latter relates to ‘the internal interpretation that seeks the inner level of meaning’. Through this, the outer level of meaning (ẓa ̄hir) becomes entwined with the fundamental, concealed meaning (ba ̄ṭin).12 There are also specific Qur’anic verses identified as ‘obscure’ (mutashābih).13 Both traditions of scriptural exegesis will have been influenced by—and continued to resonate with—the Jewish tradition of exegesis. Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) was nurtured in Al-Andalus, and in his Judeo-Arabic Guide to the Perplexed says the following on divine secrets found within parables and riddles: You should not think that these great secrets are fully and completely known to anyone among us. They are not. But sometimes truth flashes out to us so that we think that it is day, and then matter and habit in their various forms conceal it so that we find ourselves again in an obscure night, almost as were at first. We are like someone in a very dark night over whom lightning flashes time and time again.14

(Psalms 18: 2–6); ‘For the invisible things of him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made’ (Romans 1: 20). 11  The foundational discussion remains Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame, In.: Notre Dame University Press, 1964); see especially pp. 5–34 and 244–261. For a more recent discussion, see Eyal Poleg, Approaching the Bible in Medieval England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013; repr. 2016), especially pp. 108–150. 12  Omaima Abou-Bakr, ‘The Symbolic Function of Metaphor in Medieval Sufi Poetry: The Case of Shushtarı ̄’, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 12 (Metaphor and Allegory in the Middle Ages) (1992), 40–57 (41). 13  Abou-Bakr, ‘The Symbolic Function of Metaphor in Medieval Sufi Poetry: The Case of Shushtarı ̄’, 41. 14  Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines, excerpted in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B Leitch et  al, 2nd edition (NY: W.W. Norton, 2010), pp. 162–177 (p. 167).

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Maimonides gestures towards the fractures of exegesis; interpretation might occur in imperfect and frustratingly brief moments, as seen in our Christian and Islamic texts. The lightning flash of illumination is, furthermore, a prominent image in Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s own exegetical models.

Ibn ʿArabı ̄

The Tarjuma ̄n al-ashwāq is itself a display of encoding; it is filled with secrets that need deciphering, as Ibn ʿArabı ̄ himself seems to perform in the commentary he later produced. At the heart of Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s cosmogony is an Essence, a Being, that calls to all the Lovers of creation, that seeks to find each shattered remnant of the Unity and gather them all together. This is ratified elsewhere in Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s corpus. In Chapter II of the Bezels of Wisdom (‘Seth’), the sight of the Divine is dependent on the seer, for ‘the recipient sees nothing other than his own form in the mirror of the Reality’ (p. 65). In Chapter VII of the Bezels (‘Ishmael’), Ibn ʿArabı ̄ asserts that the Divine rests within the devotee, in invocation of Qur’an 89: 30: ‘And enter into my Paradise [jannah], which is my covering. My Paradise is none other than you, for it is you who hide Me with your [individual] self’ (p. 107).15 As Austin notes, Ibn ʿArabı ̄ is also here ‘using the root janna with the meaning “to be hidden”’.16 God is hidden within each loved soul, so that in entering Paradise the gnostic enters themselves (p. 108). Shifting our focus from Fus ̣u ̄s ̣ to the Tarjuma ̄n, we see a continual struggle between illumination and the act of veiling—between concealment and revelation. The veiled Divine—and the contemplative process of unveiling (kashf )—is a crucial element of Sufi semiotics in a range of texts over several centuries.17 The Divine Beloved must be masked from the soul enmeshed in its corporeality. The Divine is masked because it needs to be; if it were to shed its covering to allow direct access, this would be intolerable to the soul still lingering in the corporeal world. A veil is not an act of cruelty but an act of mercy. Should the veil be removed—should the veil be even pierced—the gazer will be overwhelmed in torment (XIV: 15  ‘But ah! thou soul at peace! Return unto thy Lord, content in His good pleasure! Enter thou among My bondmen! Enter thou My Garden!’ (surah 89: 27–30). 16  Austin, trans., The Bezels of Wisdom, p. 107 n. 121. 17  See further Chittick, ‘Rūmı ̄ and wahda ̄t al-wujūd’ in Poetry and Mysticism in Islam, especially p. 73.

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comm 7). The veil does not protect what it covers; it protects the one who gazes longingly for the absent Beloved. It is for this reason that the speaker always searches for sources of illumination, with the trope of the lightning flash (barq): ‘My desire is for the lightning and its gleam, not for the places and the earth’ (XIV: 2). Luminescence also radiates from the mouth of the Beloved in XXXIX: ‘If she unveils her mouth, she will show to thee what sparkles like the sun in unchanging radiance’ (6). Poem IV is replete with dualisms of light and dark—tenebrous mystery alongside illumined revelation. As the speaker states, ‘They journeyed when the darkness of night had let down its curtains, and I said to her, “Pity a passionate lover, outcast and distraught, | Whom desires eagerly encompass”’ (IV: 3–4). The darkness is testament to the unseen—the veiled. The commentary supplies the following explanation: ‘the ascension of the prophets always took place during the night, because night is the time of mystery and concealment’ (IV: comm 3). The darkness signifies how ‘the veil of the Unseen let down the curtains of gross corporeal existence, throwing a shroud over the spiritual subtleties and noble sciences which it enshrines’ (IV: comm 3). In their pursuit, the Lover is surrounded by longing, and all takes place in darkness—it is an arduous and unclear journey where the pursuer must always work within the concealed and the unknown. The darkness is brightened by the Beloved’s flashing front teeth (IV: 5), allowing illumination, and in the final line, the Beloved’s voice emerges as she reveals the Lover’s lack of satiety: ‘And she said, “Is it not enough for him that I am in his heart and that he beholds me at every moment? Is it not enough?”’ (IV: 6). True separation cannot be, for the Divine is ever-present, in-­dwelling in the heart of the gnostic. Like the lightning flash of illumination, the moon is a powerful signifier in Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s language of secrecy, redolent of Qur’anic and astronomical discourses.18 It is itself glossed in the commentary for Poem XXIX as ‘a manifestation of Divine majesty in the heart’ (XXIX: comm 21). The speaker imagines the moon’s ‘circumambulation’ (ṭawa ̄f ) along with his own circumambulation of this figure (‘while he circumambulated me I was not circumambulating anyone except him’) (21–20), indicative of circling the Kaʿba. But rather than drawing a circular line, this Divine 18  On the moon as central Sufi signifier in later centuries and in other regions, see further David Lee, Contextualization of Sufi Spirituality in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century China: The Role of Liu Zhi (c. 1662–c. 1730) (Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications, 2015), pp. 39–40 and 205–209.

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­ anifestation assumes a role of erasure: ‘He was effacing his footprints m with the train of his robe, so that thou wouldst be bewildered even if thou were the guide tracing out his track’ (23). The commentator explains that in this erasure, the ʿa ̄rif must always be confronted with barriers: ‘our knowledge of Him is ignorance and bewilderment and helplessness […] gnostics may recognize the limits of their knowledge of God’ (XXIX: comm 23). Creation is filled with hermeneutic erasure to the point of ‘bewilderment’ (ḥayra). The devotee must continually face their limitations when confronted with a Being who leaves traces only to erase them. In Poem XXV, the speaker describes a moon that remains at a remove: ‘O moon that appeared to us veiled in a red blush of shame upon thy cheek! | Had she removed her veil, it would have been a torment, and on this account she veiled herself’ (5–6). Here again is the intolerability of direct access to the Divine, as explained in the commentary: He keeps Himself veiled in mercy to us, in order that our substance may survive, for in the survival of the substance of phenomenal being the Divine Presence and its lovely Names are manifested, and this is the beauty of phenomenal being; if it perished, thou wouldst not know, since all kinds of knowledge are divulged by means of forms and bodies[.] (XXV: comm 6)

Creation allows some signification of the Divine—of the ‘moon’—but it must still remain veiled; its true form would be unbearable. This is further underscored in Poem XXXV. There, the moons have ‘veiled faces’ (1); but ‘[t]hey unveiled shining faces like suns and cried with a loud voice “Labbayka”, visiting the holy shrines’ (2). This captures the constant pull between  the knowability and unknowability of manifestations. As the commentary explains, the moons signify the Divine Names issuing from a Divine Presence. The Divine Names are veiled ‘lest anyone who was unable to endure the sight of their splendour should behold them and perish’; they only unveil themselves, clarifies the commentator, ‘in the heart that was prepared to receive them’ (XXXV: comm 1–2). For Ibn ʿArabı ̄, language itself is a continual game of concealment and revelation, of hermeneutic achievement and failure.19 Poem XLIV affirms Divine manifestation occurring in a sea of unknowability. The moon 19  On the notion that ‘language about the ineffable […] never copies: it always creates’, see further Louis Dupré, ‘Unio Mystica: The State and the Experience’, in Mystical Union in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: An Ecumenical Dialogue, ed. Moshe Idel and Bernard McGinn (1996; repr. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016), pp. 3–24 (p. 8).

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emerges from ‘the night of hair’, as ‘the black narcissus bedewed the rose’ (1). The Beloved cannot be conceived: ‘If she enters into the mind, that imagination wounds her: how, then, can she be perceived by the eye?’ (3). The pleasure in this manifestation is not absent, but the knowing is slippery: ‘She is a phantom of delight that melts away when we think of her: she is too subtle for the range of vision’ (4). She liquefies at any attempt to conceive of her in the ‘mind’s eye’. Descriptions (wasaf ) fail, descending into muteness or confusion (5–6). Comparison itself is a false process (‘her form is not to be compared with any’, 10). The ‘heaven of light’ is beneath ‘the sole of her foot’ and her ‘diadem is beyond the spheres’—a similitude that confounds as it seeks to clarify. The commentary suggests the image should be informed by Qur’an 20: 4, on the process of scriptural revelation from the Creator.20 The Lover does seem to find peace in the presence of the Beloved in the ‘mind’ and ‘imagination’ (12, 13) in Poem XLVI: ‘Wherever I am, there is the full moon’ (12). As they assert: ‘Is not my imagination her place of rising and my heart her place of setting? for the ill-luck of the ba ̄n and gharab trees have ceased’ (13). The commentary provides the lexical significance of these trees: ‘The bān tree suggests bayn (separation), and the gharab tree ghurbat (exile)’ (XLVI: comm 13). Yet the commentary again suggests imaginative and hermeneutic failure. As the exegete states: ‘Nothing but this natural world hinders the hearts of gnostics from perceiving the Divine Ideas; accordingly the heart is in woe and distress because of the war that continually exists between them’ (XLVI: comm 1). The ʿa ̄rif must search for ‘symbolic’ means of expression, as other modes and conceptual frameworks fail.21 Poem XII centres on the potentialities and limitations of figurative modes in the gnostic’s journey. A celebration of images unfolds: the monastery, the gazelle, the meadow that is munamnama (intricately coloured or decorated) (1–2). As the heart is capable of every form in XI, here in XII the speaker adopts a variety of roles: ‘at one time I am called the herdsman of the gazelles in the desert, and at another time I am called a Christian monk and an astrologer’ (3). In this chain of images, there comes a statement of Oneness and Trinity: 20  ‘We have not revealed unto thee (Muhammad) this Qur’an that thou shouldst be distressed, But as a reminder unto him who feareth, A revelation from Him Who created the earth and the high heavens, The Beneficent One, Who is established on the Throne’ (Qur’an 20: 2–5). 21   See further Abou-Bakr, ‘The Symbolic Function of Metaphor in Medieval Sufi Poetry’, 40–57.

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‘My Beloved is three although He is One, even as the (three) Persons (of the Trinity) are made one Person in essence’ (4). The theological nuance of this is given in the commentary: ‘Number does not beget multiplicity in the Divine substance, as the Christians declare that the Three Persons of the Trinity are One God […]’ (XII: comm. 4). Ibn ʿArabı ̄ is careful to distinguish such multiplicity from the Christian Trinity. The Divine is seen in various forms depending on the beholding lover: Those who worship God in the sun behold a sun, and those who worship Him in living things see a living thing, and those who worship Him in inanimate objects see an inanimate object, and those who worship Him as a Being unique and unparalleled see that which has no like. (XII: comm 3)

This final example pushes against the possibility of likeness in language; any potential expressions of God, in all His Un-Likeness, begin to disintegrate. In fact, the statement of the Trinity leads to a justification of figurative modes: So be not displeased, O friend, that I speak of gazelles that move round the marble statues as ‘a shining sun’, Or that I use metaphorically the necks of gazelles, the face of the sun, and the breast and wrist of the white statue, Just as I have lent to the branches (spiritual) endowments and to the meadows moral qualities, and to the lightning laughing lips. (XII: 5–7)

This extenuation might be read as the objective of Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s commentary itself, coming as it did as a defence against the critique of orthodox clerics. The speaker ‘lends’ the images certain qualities, as the branches (‘ghusūn’) become clothed or decorated (labasa). The Arabic verb for ‘lend’ here, ‘iʿāra’, may evoke a term for metaphor, istiʿārah (literally, ‘borrowing’).22 Figurative modes are termed a kind of ‘lending’ and ‘borrowing’ in an imagistic currency—but despite such transactions, the Utter Uniqueness of God can never be computed. There is a need for multiplicity in image, and such a manoeuvre cannot be considered a debasement of the Divine. The commentator to Poem XXIX leads us into an ever-failing chain of reasoning; God defies all analysis, all attempts at itemization and categorization. The speaker is always in hermeneutic exertion.  See further Geert Jan van Gelder, Classical Arabic Literature: A Library of Arabic Literature Anthology (New York: New York University Press, 2012), pp. 37 and 429. 22

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Ibn al-Fāriḍ As with his Andalusian contemporary, concealment is central to the strategies of Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s work. In one poem of his Dı ̄wa ̄n, the speaker enflamed by the Divine affirms that communication with the One is a concealed language when in solitude (verb khala ̄): ‘I have been alone with the Beloved, and between us is a secret subtler [or more delicate] than the gentle breeze as it glides’.23 To be subtler (adjective rāqiq) than the gentle breeze (nası ̄m) is to be beyond hearing and translation; it is a complete secret (sirr) shared between Lover and Beloved. In another poem of the Dı ̄wān, the Lover sees the Beloved in a multiplicity of forms: ‘She appeared to yearning ones in all manifestations, clothed in forms astounding in beauty’.24 In turn, the Lover manifests themselves in various forms, taking the disguise of legendary lovers: Qays, Kuthayyir, Jamı ̄l. But the Lover nonetheless acknowledges that these forms conceal as they reveal; they veil (ḥajaba) as they manifest (p. 81). In their shared whispering, there can be no genuine distinction between Lover and Beloved, and it is in their unification that hidden signs are revealed. The Lover and Beloved are an inherent reflection of one another, the soul panting in longing to be unified with the Whole, as in another poem in al-Fāriḍ’s Dı ̄wān: ‘Showing Herself, She showed forth Being to mine eye | So that I saw Her in my seeing’s every sight. Her showing made me witness mine own hidden deep’.25 To see the Beloved is to efface the Self and to efface the act of sight: ‘So mine existence in my seeing vanished, | Seeing’s existence I sloughed off, effacing it, | And I embraced the Object I did contemplate, | With seeing effaced in what it saw’.26 All of Creation is erased: Divine Love is an erasure as much as it is an inscription. Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s speaker announces the effacement of Self, the effacement of the barrier between ‘I’ and ‘You’: For I to Me appeared in them, with Self concealed, I ever She am, and She I hath ever been— No difference, but it was Myself that loved Myself,  Translation my own; the Arabic is available in Lings, ed. and trans., Sufi Poems, p. 75.  Translation my own; the Arabic is available in Lings, ed. and trans., Sufi Poems, p. 81. 25  In this paragraph, I have used Lings’ translations: Lings, ed. and trans., Sufi Poems, p. 76. 26  Lings, ed. and trans., Sufi Poems, p. 78. 23 24

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And there is nothing with Me in the world but I, No thoughts of with-ness trespass mine intelligence.27

This freedom from ‘with-ness’—the freedom from any division between Self and Other—is further evident in al-Fāriḍ’s Naẓm al-sulu ̄k, a text replete with secrecy. There, the process of witness is one of ‘rubbing out, not fixing in place’: witness of the Divine resides not in inscription, but rather in erasure (Naẓm, 211).28 Naẓm al-sulūk itself opens with intoxication. Unlike the lively celebration seen in al-Khamriyya, here in Naẓm, it is a hidden, concealed inebriation. Revelation occurs not in the riotous tavern but in the secrecy of the bridal chamber at the moment of the bride’s unveiling (jalwa). In their secret chamber, the Lover’s suffering is both concealed and revealed, in a continual pull between the two. The Lover’s emaciation itself becomes a form of expression, of revelation (19). But there is also the suggestion that their pain is secret: the inscription of love occurs within, with the descent of angels into the heart, and it is an anguish that needs unveiling (26–27). The distress is associated both with disclosure and with the impossibility of divulgence.29 The soul itself exists in disguise and shadow, with the Beauty remaining ever-subtle and demanding rigorous interpretation (75).30 Concealment is difficult, however, as the entire self pulses with the need for disclosure (131–132). The Lover is impelled to move towards an unveiling of the Beloved; as she takes off the veil, time itself collapses and reforms into a loop. Once the unveiling takes place, perception is enhanced with all existence or being (wuju ̄d) brought to the speaker’s gaze (nazar) (214). The Beloved is also a shape-shifter (245ff), working within the tradition that saw the capricious lover as a jinn who changes form.31 The Beloved appears and disappears (250); she ‘manifested in all kinds of disguise, in shapes beautiful and unique’ (251). As observed  Lings, ed. and trans., Sufi Poems, p. 82.  Translation my own. Homerin discusses the Sufi terminology here,  Ibn al-Fa ̄riḍ: Sufi Verse, Saintly Life, p. 134 ns 210 and 211. 29  See also Homerin, trans., Ibn al-Fāriḍ: Sufi Verse, Saintly Life, p. 112 n. 137. 30  See further Homerin Ibn al-Fa ̄riḍ: Sufi Verse, Saintly Life, p. 110 ns 130 and 132, and p. 110 ns 133–34 and 137. 31  See further Michael Sells, ‘Bewildered Tongue: The Semantics of Mystical Union in Islam’, in Mystical Union in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: An Ecumenical Dialogue, ed. Moshe Idel and Bernard McGinn (1996; repr. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016), pp. 87–124 (pp. 91 and 93). 27 28

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previously, the Lover too is a shape-shifter, having appeared in the form of all lovers throughout time, whether Qays, Kuthayyir, Jamı ̄l. The Lover speaks of an unveiling (kashf ) from all directions as the self becomes perpetually manifest to itself (259–260). As the Lover comes ever closer to Oneness, ‘names’ and ‘attributes’ collapse, for ‘they are only traces of the shapes I made’ (316). And as is later affirmed, ‘I have no attribute, for that is mere description, as a name is but a mark; if you wish to refer to me, speak of me with allusion’ (325). This is very telling of Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s hermeneutic concerns: allusion and poetic figurations are necessary for the subtleties of spiritual meaning, in lines very similar to Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s appeal to figurative modes quoted earlier. The exalted one can only speak ‘strange sayings, beyond what can be comprehended, too subtle to be imagined’ (320); conceptual structures crumble alongside the weak supports of language that attempt to hold them up. This is reinforced by a series of oppositions: ‘my joining is my severance, my nearness is my distance, my love is my detestation, my ending is my beginning’ (322). It is only in the world of metaphor and linguistic cancellation that oneness can be understood: ‘My greeting to her is metaphorical; in reality, my greeting is from myself to me’ (333). In their growing nearness, their qurb, the speaker themselves is unrolled, in a line quoted earlier in this book: ‘If she unfurled my body, she would have seen all essences [jawhar], with all hearts [qalb, “kullu qalbin”] in which are all love [maḥabba, “kulla maḥabbati”]’ (387). This utter containment and unity in creation allows the Lover to be a locus of revelation, of disclosure. The unveiling (kashf ) of the Beloved provides security (388), with this unveiling reflecting the unrolling of the Lover. Crucially, this unveiling brings about compassion throughout creation, all friction dissipated. In the ‘eye of union’ (ʿayn al-jamaʿ), one sees a reversal to the norm: rivalries become alliances, and all enmity and abuse a source of gratitude (389–390). The Lover corrects their language of dualisms, however, as they are now ever nearer to a lack of distinction between Lover and Beloved (393). Such a lack of distinction means that much is still veiled from others (394), with another statement that ‘allusion’ alone can allow understanding: ‘in allusion there is meaning that [direct] expression covers’ (395). The Lover turns to their hearing in this ‘state of contemplation’ (406), referring to the practice of samaʿ—listening or ‘audition’.32 At this point, the Lover has attained a state that is beyond duality, even beyond the  See further Homerin, Ibn al-Fa ̄riḍ: Sufi Verse, Saintly Life, p. 190 n. 407–441.

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­ uality found in ‘union’.33 This is imagined as advancing beyond a ‘door’ d or ‘gate’ (bāb) to a place ‘where there is no veil in union’ (441). Such a place, absent of veils, is not easy to reach (443). We may be reminded of ʿAṭt ̣ār’s avian travellers in The Speech of the Birds, traversing terrible valleys, many dying—and who, even at the moment of reaching the Simorgh’s abode, are turned away (4172–4178). It is notable also that Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s speaker becomes their own apostle, their own vessel for unveiling Divine truth: ‘I was a messenger [rasūl] sent to me from myself, my essence by my signs brought to me’ (460). The essence of the ‘self’, without selfishness and egotism, is the concealed locus of spiritual discovery, the covered home of the Divine. The Lover’s own unveiling is a circular un-layering and re-layering: ‘From me, there appeared to me what I wore as a disguise from me’, and the speaker remains separate from those who still retain ‘ambiguous [or clothed] features’ or any ‘remnant’ of self (475, 486). Now they are finally beyond duality: ‘the rug of otherness was rolled up evenly’ (490). It is the Lover who has the power to unveil (516), seeing themselves in a mirror and hearing their own voice (517–518). Longing, their hand upon the heart, they encounter a flash (barqa) illuminating the once-dark sky (521), as in Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s Tarjuma ̄n. This is a place where reason or intellect (ʿaql) stays away, for the veil was caused by the ‘secrets of [their] wisdom’ (525). Intellect, reason, wisdom: these can be heavy burdens, screens that obscure. In illumination, rust (saḍa ̄) is removed from the ‘mirror’ of being (527), reinforcing the earlier image of seeing a reflection and hearing an echo. But, even when becoming free of duality, the Lover remains veiled, and their reflections are replete with words for concealment and secrecy (534–663). The soul has transcended to a place that needs decoding: ‘the soul revealed [tajalla] herself to herself in the invisible world in the form of a gnostic guiding her to understand the strange meanings’ (669), employing the Qur’anic term for Divine disclosure or revelation, tajalli. The soul is the source of its own knowing (748). The soul remains the conduit for veiled truth; it is disguised, but it must also be ‘dis-guised’, shed of the various forms that obscure the Beloved.

 See Homerin, Ibn al-Fa ̄riḍ: Sufi Verse, Saintly Life, p. 200 n. 441.

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Shushtarı ̄

To grasp Shushtarı ̄’s hermeneutics of secrecy, we must first see the ways in which he centralizes the soul (rūḥ). The soul is the locus of both secrecy and revelation; Beloved and Lover are one, and the finding of the Beloved necessitates an exploration of the Lover. Remembering ʿAt ̣t ̣ār’s birds, they gaze at the legendary Simorgh to see only themselves. The Beloved is reflected in the Lover’s own form, though the Beloved’s own form remains hidden—crucially, ‘veiled’. Unveiling and mirroring are linked closely, as revelation is found in the reflection of Beloved and Lover.34 This is fused with the self-annihilation of the Lover (see  especially  Corriente, pp.  90 and 93). Reflection of Creator/Creation is iterated in another muwashshaḥ with the following assertions: ‘What is hidden only appears to you in the mirror’ (Corriente, p.  93); and ‘law futı ̄h ʿalā qālbak, turfā alhujūb’ (if your heart opened, the veils would be lifted) (Corriente, p. 93). As the devotee struggles to lift the veils, they can nonetheless remember with comfort that God gazes on them: ‘In what is hidden and what is manifest, He sees you continually’ (Corriente, p. 93). The poem ‘I’m a sight to see’ further opens with a statement of non-­ differentiation between the Lover and the Beloved: ‘I am Lover and Beloved; there is no other’ (Corriente, p. 119). As the speaker affirms, the One can be sought within the self; one need not travel to find the One within. For Shushtarı ̄, the ‘secret’ (sirr) can be found within the depths of the Self. We are the Secret. Later it is asserted that the treasure is ‘naked’ and not hidden. Parallels can be made here with Hale’s Love Rune, as will be discussed—with the hidden wisdom that must be open yet remain shut. In an especially celebratory moment, both speaker and listener are together on the mountain: ‘The speaker and the spoken to are on the mountain of knowing’ (Corriente, p. 120). The devotee is defined by the Divine speaking, underscoring the inseparability in the One (kalim, kalı ̄m). This is an invocation of Qur’an 42: 51.35 This allows an exchange to happen in nearness—a call in proximity, a sun not too far away (p.  120). The shining countenance of the Divine can be seen in each human being (‘fi kūlli insān’): ‘Look upon my beauty, witnessed in every human being’  See Alvarez, trans. Shushtarı ̄: Songs of Love and Devotion, especially p. 54.  ‘[I]t was not (vouchsafed) to any mortal that Allah should speak to him unless (it be) by revelation or from behind a veil, or (that) He sendeth a messenger to reveal what He will by His leave. Lo! He is Exalted, Wise’ (surah 42: 51). 34 35

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(Corriente, p. 120). Again, no distant travels are needed; we need only turn and look at another face, or indeed our own face, to see God. Branches (aghsa ̄n) of a tree hold flowers in various colours (alwān), yet it is one (wa ̄hid) water-source that nourishes them: ‘Like the water that flows through the core of the branches: | they drink from one water, though the flowers are many colours’ (Corriente, p. 120).36 Such terms as analogy or simile must inevitably fall short; this image pushes against the possibility of analogy, since the imaged branches themselves, the flowers, the water: all are part of the Creation that is one with the Creator. The reference to multicoloured branches is also an inescapable reference to the form of the muwashshaḥ in which Shushtarı ̄ composes, and thus continues to perform the poetic mode’s own limitations. This poem ends by keying itself to prayer. The ‘seven’ refers to the first chapter of the Qur’an (‘Al-Fātihah’, ‘The Opening’).37 In all the secrecy of creation, there is an opening, a fa ̄tihah, in which the Divine may be read. Shushtarı ̄’s poem ‘In my heart’s eye’ foregrounds the Beloved as both hidden and manifest: O hidden one, eternal, how visible you are, how evident! [even though] you may have become absent from my sight, in my heart’s eye, I view you. (Corriente, p. 68)

With the eye (‘ayn) of the heart (qalb), the Beloved cannot be concealed: ‘You never hide from me, nor does your secret hide from me’ (Corriente, p.  68). The Beloved can be read in the ‘entirety of all that is’ (‘jami’ almawjudāt’): ‘silent or speaking or frozen; in animal or plant; in everything you will see God’. The Beloved is dispersed through all Creation (Corriente, p. 68). Comparably, the poem ‘Hidden in plain sight’ engages with the ultimate paradox of God as both revealed and concealed, employing vocabulary redolent of Qur’anic exegesis of apparent and hidden meanings (ẓa ̄hir, bāṭin): ya mān badā ẓāhir ḥı ̄n astatār, wa’akhtafā bātị n lāmma ẓahār: ẓahār ta, lam takhfā ‘ala aḥād, 36  Compare to Ibn ʿArabı ̄ myriad of flowers within a single garden (Tarjuman̄ X: 1 and comm. 1). 37  See further Alvarez, trans., Shushtarı ̄: Songs of Love and Devotion, p. 171; and Lings, ed. and trans., Sufi Poems, p. 101 n. 96.

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wagı ̄bta, lam taẓhār likūlli hād. (Corriente, p. 61) You who appear manifest when hidden, And hidden [deep or within] when manifest: You appear, not hidden from anyone; And you are absent, not manifest to everyone.

As these lines show, there is a sharp alignment of the absence-presence dialectic with the dialectic of concealment and revelation. In such a dialectic of concealment-revelation, Shushtarı ̄ considers the means of apprehending the Beloved. The zajal ‘Just understand me’ is underpinned with the refrain ‘just understand me’ (‘ifhamnı ̄ qāt’). As Alvarez affirms, this repeated call ‘functions as a plea to the listener, as well as an acknowledgement of the limitations of the poet’s own speech’.38 The Beloved may be approached by those with understanding or knowledge: ‘lam yahtajāb lal ʿarifı ̄n’ (Corriente, p. 81) (He is not veiled to the ones who know). As in ‘In my heart’s eye’, the Beloved is inscribed in all of Creation, even in inscription itself: My beloved encompasses all being [wuju ̄d]; He is visible in black and white, and in Christian and in Jew, And in the letters and in the points, Just understand me, just understand me.

The audience is asked to dispense with imaginative modes (‘alkhhayāl’, Corriente, p. 81). They must turn away from the poem itself: ‘My friend, my friend, don’t pay attention to my form’ (‘ya sahibı ̄, ya sahibi, la taltafāt liqālini’, Corriente, p.  81). The true ‘secret’ of the Beloved’s existence, spoken in the Divine’s own voice, is in pervasive paradox: sirr al-wujūd fi jūmlati, wagāybati fi ḥāḍrati, waḥājbatı ̄ fi qūrbati. (Corriente, p. 81) (The secret of my being is in my togetherness. My absence is in my presence, My veiledness in my nearness.)  Alvarez, Shushtarı ̄: Songs of Love and Devotion, p. 83.

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The listener hears the Divine voice resound, speaking of His absence in presence, His veiledness in nearness. The Divine voice ruptures the poem from within it, drawing attention to the poetic mode’s failure from within its own mechanisms. The failure of modes is further expressed in ‘Stop tiring yourself’ where the speaker opens with a reflection on the end of all speech: ‘Do not add one verse. Do not add one verse. I achieved my purpose. The beloved: I saw him’ (Corriente, pp. 47–48). Instead of fruitless analysis, the Lover must engage only in spiritual audition (samaʿ). The soul remains the locus of Divine revelation: If you feel [‘shaʿartu’], it is yourself you feel; you are the feeling. If you noticed nearness or farness, or darkness or light, That is you, developing within you, circling you. (Corriente, p. 47)

Beloved and Lover are enfolded together, in manifestation and in hiding. When turning to ‘Master of illusion’, the reader can witness the inescapable veiledness of all Creation, for as the speaker asserts repeatedly at regular intervals, ‘People are only illusions [or fantasies]’ (Corriente, p. 64). The term employed for ‘illusions’ is khayāl, which is a supple term in Arabic poetics; it is associated, in particular, with the poet’s imaginative faculty.39 The Divine is rendered a poetic craftsman, a ‘master of the images [suwar]’, reminding us of Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s ‘world of similitudes’. The entirety of Creation, for Shushtarı ̄ as for Ibn ʿArabı ̄, is but a likeness or a reflection of the Creator, the phantom-images of the Poet. The devotee must acknowledge that existence is a curtain or veil (‘al-wujūd sitāra’) (Corriente, p. 64). The Shushtarı ̄-speaker remarks that, in its initial stages, the soul is like a child (tifl), believing the mere ‘replicas’ to be the ‘model’ (mithāl) itself. As it matures, the soul realizes that these replicas are ‘dead and frozen’. For they are but veils: ‘In them, the one who made them is veiled, hidden in them as he appears in them’ (Corriente, p. 65). The developing soul must continually look within, beyond, through (reminding us, perhaps, of Lofsong of ure Louerde): ‘Those veils are themselves veiled. | They are known when they become letters [‘ahruffā’]’ (Corriente, p. 65). The soul must transform the undecipherable into meaningful inscription. Only

39  See further ‘khayāl’, in Marlé Hammond, A Dictionary of Arabic Literary Terms and Devices (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), online [accessed 27th December 2020].

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then can the Lover reach the source of all illusion, that puppet-master or poet concealed behind the curtain. Elsewhere, Shushtarı ̄ engages more explicitly with images of written letters, which has powerful resonances with the secret ‘love letters’ written in the heart of Christ in Wohunge, as will be seen. ‘I translated a letter that cannot be read: who among those who understand will understand me?’ says the speaker of another of Shushtarı ̄’s poems (Corriente, p.  125). Within this act of tarjama, translation, is concealment of the Beloved: ‘Invocation of the invoker is hidden among us […] It evaporated in the eye of the viewer’ (Corriente, p. 125). We are here in the secrecy of a Sufi gathering, sirr al-ḥaḍra (Corriente, p. 125). Inscription and erasure grow nearer, further underlined in the later assertion: ‘In a written line appeared to me the secret of the lover to the beloved’ (Corriente, p. 126), in a kind of inversion of Christ’s own love letters to his Beloved in Wohunge. ‘The letters of His name’ is a poem which turns to the Divine Name, Allah. Shushtarı ̄ sees the gaps within the inscription of the name as spaces for meaning-making: Alif at the start of the name [ism], And two Lams without body [‘bilā jı ̄smi’], And a Ha, the inscribed sign. With two letters is a secret spelled [‘tahājja sı ̄rra ḥarfāyni’]. There is a name without a whereabouts. (Corriente, p. 110)

The speaker focalizes onto the double-lam at the centre of the word, which encodes the incorporeal Divine.40 Penetrating into the depths of the Name, the speaker reads the letters as protective coverings of the rich blankness within: Inspect all these letters together, You will find that in them the heart is cleansed, and is relieved after its suffering, and moves forward between two shrouds, shielded by two subtle symbols [‘biramzāyni raqı ̄qayni’]. (Corriente, p. 110)

 See further Alvarez, Shushtarı ̄: Songs of Love and Devotion, pp. 169–170.

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The purified heart (qalb) is found in the space between the two letters, in the void enclosed within the markings. As Alvarez explicates this poem: The doubled Lam at the centre of the word becomes a focus of the poem, the space between the two letters compared to a cleansed heart shrouded on two sides, a sun between two moons; that is, meaning, essence, resides in the blank space in the heart of the word, where the self has no marker against which to locate itself.41

The self is nullified within the empty kernel of the inscribed Name. This blank core of the word is a cosmic emptiness, abundant with signification: for it is in the self’s obliteration that the Beloved may be found. Such loving inscription—and the love encoded in blankness—is also attested repeatedly in the English anchoritic texts.

Ancrene Wisse The anchoritic life is alive with secrets; it is an existence marked by veiling, insulation, enclosure: the windows discourage the anchorite from looking out, but they also seek to prevent the outside from peering in. Invisibility and inaudibility are prerequisites to the anchoritic life (Ancrene Wisse, 18: 401–403). That is why the night is so suitable to the anchorite, that ‘niht-­ fuhel’ (night-bird, 56–57: 322–77). The night allows purity, says the Ancrene Wisse-author, for in it nothing can be seen or heard (57: 371–72); the ‘heard’ element is added in later revisions of the work.42 Whilst retaining its literal meaning—for the night is the time of vigils—the night’s darkness also becomes expressive of the secret nature of the anchoritic life. The Ancrene Wisse-author underscores the secrecy of good prayer and good deeds, which flourish under the cover of ‘night’. He observes that Esther’s prayer was pleasing to King Ahasuerus, in a citation of unclear origin gesturing towards a number of approximate statements in the Book of Esther.43 He then applies this to the anchoritic existence through etymological analysis:  Lourdes María Alvarez, trans., Abu al-Hasan Shushtarı ̄: Songs of Love and Devotion (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2009), pp. 84–85. 42  See further Millett, trans., Guide for Anchoresses, p. 202 n. 68. 43  The citation especially echoes Esther 5 and 7. See, for instance: ‘And when he saw Esther the queen standing, she pleased his eyes, and he held out toward her the golden sceptre, which he held in his hand: and she drew near, and kissed the top of his sceptre’ (Esther 5: 2); ‘And the king said to her again the second day, after he was warm with wine: What is thy 41

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‘Hester’ on Ebreisch, þet is ‘ihud’ on Englisch, ant is to understonden þet bone ant oðer goddede þet is idon on hudles is Assuer icweme, þet is, þe King of heouene; for ‘Assuer’ on Ebreisch is ‘eadi’ on Englisch[.] (57: 379–82) (‘Hester’ in Hebrew is ‘hidden’ in English, and from this is understood that prayers and good deeds that are done in secrecy please Ahasuerus, that is, the King of Heaven, for ‘Ahasuerus’ in Hebrew is ‘blessed’ in English.)

The translation of Esther as ‘hidden’ is an etymology repeated later in Part III (65: 695–96). In this exegesis of the Book of Esther, the author casts the anchoritic existence itself as flowering in secrecy, in the hiding place of the anchorhold.44 Elsewhere, the Ancrene Wisse-author imagines each devotee carrying a ‘breostes bur’ (chest’s bower) for the Beloved (13: 243), and in Wohunge, the reader is ‘steked’ (confined) with Christ inside a ‘chaumbre’ (p. 106). All this is profoundly redolent of the khalwa/jalwa (solitary retreat/bridal unveiling in enclosure) of the Sufi texts. The anchorites themselves can be vessels for concealing treasure, and it is this concept that highlights the secret encodings of the Divine. Developing the exegesis of Luke 9: 58, the Ancrene Wisse-author elaborates on bird’s nests. The word ‘nest’ derives from Old English, of Germanic origin, and is related to Latin nidus with the sense of ‘resting place’ (nether + sit).45 This recalls the dove making its resting place in Christ’s Side Wound, following Bernardine readings of Canticles 2: 14.46 As mentioned in Chap. 3, such a resting place must be rough on the outside and soft on the inside, in order to serve its protective function: Þet nest beo heard wiðuten, ant softe ant swete þe heorte wiðinnen. Þeo þe beoð of bitter oðer of heard heorte, ant nesche to hare flesch, ha makieð petition, Esther, that it may be granted thee? and what wilt thou have done: although thou ask the half of my kingdom, thou shalt have it. Then she answered: If I have found Favour in thy sight, O king, and if it please thee, give me my life for which I ask, and my people for which I request’ (Esther 7: 2–3). See further Millett, trans., Guide for Anchoresses, p. 202 n. 3.70. 44  The noun ‘hidel’ denotes ‘a secret place, hiding place; refuge’, even ‘a hollow in a stalk of grain’ (MED [Online] [accessed 16th May 2020]), itself indicative of the anchorhold (though in this instance, the phrase ‘on hudles’ is used). 45  OED, ‘nest, n.’ (Online); entry updated Third Edition, September 2003 [accessed 3rd August 2020]. 46  See further E. Ann Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), p. 137.

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frommard hare nest, softe wiðuten, ant þorni wiðinnen. Þis beoð þe weamode ant te estfule ancres, bittre wiðinnen as þet swete schulde beon, ant estfule wiðuten as þet hearde schulde beon. (53: 221–26) (That nest is rough without, and the heart within soft and sweet. Those that have bitter or hard hearts, and are soft on their flesh, make their nest insideout: their nest is soft within, and thorny without. These are the angry and the self-indulgent anchorites—bitter within, where they should be sweet, and gentle without, where they should be hard.)

Here again, the reader must be immersed in ever-signifying images and in dichotomies, as though ‘heard’ and ‘softe’—both somehow maintained by the anchorite. Perhaps aware of this tension, the author combines a birth-­ death paradox in this resting place. On the one hand, chicks should be born from it; an anchorite with an inverted nest will fail to give birth to these chicks of virtues (53: 228). On the other hand, the nest is also a place, like the anchorhold, in which the anchorite must die. To this effect, the author elaborates on Job 29: 18, ‘I shall die in my nest’: Þet is, ‘ich chulle deien i mi nest, beon ase dead þrin (for þet is ancres rihte) ant wunien aðet deað þrin, þet ich nulle neauer slakien, hwil þe sawle is i þe buc, to drehen heard wiðuten, alswa as nest is, ant softe beo wiðinnen.’ (53: 230–33) (That is, ‘I shall die in my nest, be as dead in there (for that is right for the anchorite) and dwell in there until I die, that I shall never slacken, while the soul is in the body, to endure hardness externally, as a nest is, and be soft internally’.)

It is an ever-present catch between negation and assertion. And in this resting place is the constant signifier of Christ. The eagle (‘earn’) keeps a precious gemstone in its nest, a gemstone identified as Christ himself: Þe earn deð in his nest a deorewurðe ȝimstan, ‘achate’ hatte, for nan attri þing ne mei þe stan nahhin, ne hwil he is i þe nest hearmin his briddes. (54: 234–36) (The eagle puts in its nest a precious gemstone, called ‘agate’, for no poisonous thing can come near the stone, nor harm the chicks while it [agate] is in the nest.)

The nest-heart becomes a signifier, allowing the endless production of meaning. Agate in Ancrene Wisse is emphasized as a cure for a poisonous

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snake bite.47 The bird’s protective function is key, and in this one can read parallels with ʿAt ̣ṭār’s hoopoe, guardian of all the longing souls. The combination of eagle and agate is a tradition stemming from Jerome, and the mention of the gemstone appeals at this point not to bestiaries, but rather to lapidaries.48 This hermeneutic concealment of a gemstone can be paralleled with another thirteenth-century text in English, the lyric known as Love Rune.

Hales’ Love Rune in Dialogue with Ancrene Wisse and Wohunge As observed in Chap. 1, Thomas of Hales was a thirteenth-century Franciscan friar, known to have composed in English, Latin, and Anglo-­ Norman. His English Love Rune has important parallels with Ancrene Wisse and the Wooing Group. Whilst the lyric is not targeted at an anchoritic readership, the identified recipient (the ‘mayde Cristes’) may suggest a nun or lay recluse.49 And, like Ancrene Wisse and Wohunge of ure Lauerde, the text centres on nurturing love for the Bridegroom. Moreover, Love Rune is deeply concerned with the secrecy and disclosure of a precious entity. The poem can itself be read as a secret, puzzle, riddle, or ‘rune’, as a range of scholars have shown.50 Thomas of Hales ‘wurche a luve ron’ (creates a love rune) as an intricate jewel; the text is itself at once an act of love and a hermeneutic challenge. For Thomas, the poem should be spoken in a time of longing.51 The text comes to the reader when they feel longing, and it seeks to intensify the reader’s affective shift:

47  See Hasenfratz, note 192ff. See also Joan Evans, Magical Jewels of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Particularly in England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922), especially p. 113. 48  See further Hasenfratz, ed., Ancrene Wisse, n. 192ff; and Millett, trans., Guide for Anchoresses, p. 200, n. 3.45. 49  However, the phrase may also indicate a devoted laywoman. See further Susanna Greer Fein, ed., Moral Love Songs and Laments (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1998), in ‘Thomas of Hales, Love Rune: Text’, n. 1 [accessed online, 2nd December 2020], https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/publication/fein-moral-love-songs-and-laments 50  See further Susanna Greer Fein, ed., Moral Love Songs and Laments (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1998), in ‘Thomas of Hales, Love Rune: Introduction’ [accessed online, https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/publication/fein-moral-love-songsand-­laments 24th September 2020]. 51  Such a moment of longing is resonant of the hapax legomenon ‘langunghwila’ (hours or times of longing) in the Old English poem The Dream of the Rood (The Dream of the Rood,

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Hwenne thu sittest in longynge, Drauh the forth this ilke wryt: Mid swete stephne thu hit singe, And do al so hit the byt. (201–204) (When you sit in longing, You should draw forth this same text: With sweet voice you should sing it, And do everything as it bids you.)

This is comparable with the lines at the close of Wohunge; though in the Wooing Group text, it is when the reader is ‘at eise’ (at ease), not involved in the regular devotions: þis haue I writen þe for þi þat words ofte quemen þe heorte to þenken on ure lauerd. And for þi hwen þu art on eise carpe to ward ihesu ant seie þise wordes. (p. 110) (I have written this for you that words may often please the heart to think on our Lord. And for you when you are at ease to speak towards Jesus, and say these words.)

Wohunge establishes the mechanisms of reading: to ‘carpe’, to ‘seie’, and to ‘sing’. The statement that words ‘ofte quemen þe heorte’ indicate that the text itself has a prominent role in instigating or provoking the affective shift. Differently from Wohunge, Thomas of Hales’ words suggest that the text comes in the moment of feeling—not before it. It is important not to simply reduce the texts to ‘mechanisms’ for the ‘production’ of emotion. The dynamic is altogether more complex and less easily described. A fundamental difference between Thomas’ and Shushtarı ̄’s poems is that in the Sufi’s, there is no intermediary figure participating in the Lovers’ exchange. The situation evoked in Hales’ poem, perhaps fabricated, is of a male author writing a guidance text at a woman’s behest, asserted both in the first person in the English poem itself (ll. 1–8) and in the Latin incipit. Susanna Greer Fein has observed the complex sexual and gender fluidity generated by this dynamic, which resonates with Salih’s ed. Michael Swanton, revised edition [Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1987; repr. 1996], p. 100, l. 126).

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triangular model.52 There is the love evoked between Christ and the female reader, but there is also the love between the Thomas-speaker and Christ, and the desire between author and reader. Even if the author might be discouraging the reader’s misplaced desire, such desire is not erased. With such a triangular model of desire in place, affective literacies become multifaceted, involving a range of figures—and, in so doing, complicating and perhaps even cancelling out one set of affective literacies with another. The later section of the poem, with its focus on sponsa Christi, is rich in comparative potential with the Sufi verse.53 As Shushtarı̄ speaks of unearthing treasure, treasure becomes the directive of Love Rune. This is imbued in the form itself, the alternating rhymes reminiscent of an interlocked jewel, and the poet as a form of craftsman.54 A crucial hermeneutic image-­cluster in Love Rune is that of the gemstone.55 The gemstone is defined primarily as virginity. In Love Rune, the act of protecting the gemstone is itself made into a desirable quality—it makes one sweeter than any flower, sweeter than any spice (151, 168). Sweetness is then associated at the end of the poem with the singing of the poem itself, the enactment of the desire (‘Mid swete stephne thu hit singe’, l. 203). On more than one occasion, the poet gives specific details of various gemstones, a strategy which may be informed by medieval lapidaries. He first regales the reader with an account of the jewel-studded temple of Solomon (ll. 113–116). This abode is then disassembled, for the  heavenly dwelling of which the poet speaks at this point in the poem ‘is feyrure of feolevolde’ (is fairer manifold, l. 117). It is as if this language of gems has been constructed only to be undone, bringing the reader close to imagination only to then render the image redundant. Later the speaker remarks: Hwat spekstu of eny stone That beoth in vertu other in grace — Of amatiste, of calcydone, Of lectorie and tupace,  This was mentioned in Chap. 1 (‘Birds Beneath the Eaves’).  There is much potential for considering the earlier section of Hales’ Rune on the contemptus mundi (ll. 1–86) in conjunction with earlier Arabic zuhdiyya poetry, but such a project is beyond the scope of the present work. 54  See further Susanna Greer Fein, ed., Moral Love Songs and Laments (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1998), in ‘Thomas of Hales, Love Rune: Introduction’ [accessed online 24th September 2020]. 55  For a discussion of this ‘formula’, see further Ian Bishop, ‘Lapidary Formulas as Topics of Invention: From Thomas Hales to Henryson’, Review of English Studies, New Series, 37.148 (1986), 469–477. 52 53

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Of jaspe, of saphir, of sardone, Smaragde, beril, and crisopace? Among alle othre ymstone, Thes beoth deorre in uyche place. (ll. 169–76) (What do you say of any stone That possesses a power or other grace: Of amethyst, of chalcedony, Of cock-stone, of topaz, Of jasper, of sapphire, of sardonyx, Emerald, beryl, and chrysoprase? Among all other gemstones, This one is more precious in every place.)

Again, there is dismissal of the image after all the effort to construct it, in a continual frustration of hermeneutic fulfilment.56 The repetition of ‘Hwat spekst’, in particular,  draws attention to the inevitable failure of speech in evoking the preciousness of virginity as conduit to the Divine Beloved. The specificity, however, generates a rich reservoir of meaning-­ making for the reader. Emotion is not itself locked away; rather, it becomes part of this process of hermeneutic mining, searching for the spiritual treasure of a blissful union with the Beloved. This then allows the issue of disclosure to be played out for reader/ listener, author, and Christ, whose own wounded body is a constant source of divulgence. The poet asks the reader to unfurl the scroll of the poem:57 This rym, Mayde, Ich the sende, Open and withute sel Bidde Ic that thu hit untrende. (193–195) (This rhyme, Maiden, I send to you, Open and without seal. I ask that you unroll [or unfurl] it.) 56  On types of gemstones listed in medieval lapidaries, see further Evans, Magical Jewels, especially pp. 74–75. 57  For further discussion of these final stanzas of the poem, see Bernard S.  Levy, ‘The Annunciation in Thomas de Hales’ “Love Ron”’, Mediaevalia 6 (1980), 123–134 (125–126).

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These lines suggest the poem’s potential to be both opened and closed, readable yet also unreadable. As the maiden might ‘untrende’ the scroll, she can also re-furl it; the unfurling and re-furling is all part of this process of divine love. It is a treasure that can be ‘naked’, as Shushtarı ̄ put it, but also clothed by language and parchment. The assertion of the poem itself provided ‘open and withute sel’ can also be set alongside both Wohunge and Ancrene Wisse. In the parable of the Lover-Knight, the Ancrene Wisse-author remarks on the Lord’s communication with his lovers. First, he sends messengers ‘wið leattres isealet’ (with sealed letters)—but these letters are then ‘opened’ in the Gospels, brought by the Beloved himself. The Gospel is clearer in meaning than the Old Testament.58 The Gospels are then further opened in the body of Christ, the written charter, who composes ‘wið his ahne blod saluz to his leofmon, luuegretunge forte wohin hire wið and hire luue wealden’ (with his own blood salutation to his lover, a love-greeting with which to woo her and gain her love) (146). In the context of the Passion, to break open the seal of a letter is a stunning act of love. Initially, the king woos a woman from a faraway land (‘feorrende londe’, 146), and Thomas of Hales’ gemstone is ‘of feor iboren’ (borne from afar, l. 153). The distance adds not only to the sense of its preciousness, but also to the sense of its potential unreadability. Set against the Arabic Islamic material, many more possibilities are generated. Ibn ʿArabı ̄ writes on the bezels being the placement for the seal of a ring, as the prophets were seals of wisdom—with seal here indicating completion and perfection, most perfectly in the figure of Muhammad, the ‘Seal of the Prophets’. But sealing also leads to mystery and mystification. Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s text is an obscuration of wisdom as much as it is a revelation of hidden truths. Thomas of Hales and the Ancrene Wisse-author gesture towards the revelation of Christ’s love, but do not go any further. To venture deeper into the concealed signs of love, we must pause instead on the longest of the Wooing Group meditations, Wohunge of ure Lauerde—a text shaped by the author’s conception of the reader’s perspective.59 The reading of Christ’s amorous secrets is most exquisitely seen  See further Millett, ed., Ancrene Wisse, vol. II, 261.  This observation is made by Catherine Innes-Parker, ‘Ancrene Wisse and Þe Wohunge of Ure Lauerd: The Thirteenth-Century Female Reader and the Lover Knight’, in Women, the Book and the Godly, ed. Lesley Smith and Jane H.  M. Taylor (Cambridge: D.  S. Brewer, 1995), pp. 137–48. 58 59

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in this text. Longinus’ spear invades Christ’s side: the Heart is touched by the spear-point and is ripped apart to allow the Lover’s entrance (p. 106). The Sacred Heart is the site of ultimate secrecy at the same time as it is the site of ultimate disclosure. In this insulated space, the speaker penetrates Christ’s wounded body to read ‘trewe luue lettres’: A swete iesu þu oppnes me þin herte for to cnawe witerliche 7 in to redden trewe luue lettres. for þer i mai openlich seo hu muchel þu me luuedes. (p. 106) (Oh sweet Jesus, you open your heart for me to know evidently [or clearly or skilfully], and in there to read true love letters. For there I may openly see how much you loved me.)

The speaker is granted the capacity not simply to read these love letters, but to read them ‘openliche’, resonating with the first adverb ‘witerliche’, which could mean ‘evidently’, ‘clearly’, ‘skilfully’, or ‘knowingly’.60 Hales sends a ‘rym’, whereas the prose Wohunge refers to inscription upon the Heart itself. Christ’s letter-body is unsealed, broken open to reveal the message of love within. But even if the letters are open and clear to the speaker, they are not translatable into human language. No insight is given of these ‘letters’; it is possible that they may even refer to alphabetical items rather than epistolary forms.61 As with the Sufi poets, the Beloved is perhaps found not in inscription, but in erasure. The speaker shifts outside the Heart before the inscriptions can be transliterated. If the ‘lettres’ are interpreted as alphabetical, this would have an irresistible synergy with Shushtarı ̄’s verse. As the empty space between letters generates meaning in Shushtarı ̄’s poem, here too is a reading of blankness. With an avian view, it becomes clear that all these Islamic and Christian authors, with all their collective audiences, generate the preciousness of love in secrecy and disclosure. It is a language of love that needs to be learned, played out, erased, learned, and played out again—the devotees seek constantly this spiritual treasure hidden in the process of meaningmaking itself. Shushtarı ̄ and Thomas of Hales are love-crafters; they form the potential for finding treasure, even as it continually eludes the desiring soul. In the work of Ibn ʿArabı ̄, Ibn al-Fāriḍ, and Shushtarı ̄, the poetry allows access whilst also veiling the Truth from view. A poem can  See further entry ‘witerli’, in MED [accessed 21st June 2020].  I am indebted to Professor Bella Millett for this idea (pers. comm. 2012).

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never be a full disclosure of love—a poet can only enter into relentless affective encoding and decoding. Their Middle English counterparts— Hales’ Love Rune, Ancrene Wisse, Wohunge—speak of the secrecy of the Beloved, a treasure hidden in the depths, a writer and reader of love letters that are as exposed as they are indecipherable. It is in this dialectic that affective literacies are nurtured, placing strain on traditional terminology in the history of emotions. Instead of ‘literacies’ and ‘scripts’ for performance, we should perhaps also emphasize affective reading practices predicated on illiteracies and de-/un-scripting. An effaced grapheme might be the brightest of signifiers.

PART V

Conclusions

CHAPTER 8

Birds’ Ascent: Conclusions

Birds Among the Lovers The Tarjumān-dove’s cry emanates from the sky’s expanse, or from the hidden crevices of desert plants, repeatedly calling of fraught love. As though in harmony, the ringdove of The Universal Tree and the Four Birds releases a cry when hearing the Tree’s words; she speaks this cry ‘in the garden of her sanctity’, with her neck-ring linked to contemplation of her essence. This ‘ring of splendour’ is bestowed on her by the Divine, and he also provides her with the ‘Lote Tree of the Limit’ as her abode.1 The lote tree, sidrah, invokes surah 53, ‘Al-Najm’ (The Star), which speaks of Muhammad as receptacle for Qur’anic revelation: The Qur’an is nothing less than a revelation that is sent to him. It was taught to him by [an angel] with mighty powers and great strength, who stood on the highest horizon and then approached—coming down until he was two bow-lengths away or even closer—and revealed to God’s servant what He revealed. [The Prophet’s] own heart did not distort what he saw. Are you going to dispute with him what he saw with his own eyes? A second time he saw him: by the lote tree beyond which none may pass near the Garden of

1

 Jaffray, trans., Universal Tree and the Four Birds, p. 38.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. S. Lazikani, Emotion in Christian and Islamic Contemplative Texts, 1100–1250, The New Middle Ages, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59924-9_8

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Restfulness, when the tree was covered in nameless [splendour]. (surah 53: 4–16)2

Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s doves interlink with human souls, all encompassed by their contemplative potential, dwelling in a space of continual revelation and hoped-for disclosures of Love. Theirs is a contemplative cry of longing, bird language and love language entwined. Such entwinement is affirmed more explicitly in ʿAṭṭār of Nishapur’s The Speech of the Birds. Towards the end of this text, a speaker recounts the words of Aristotle upon Alexander’s death: ‘As long as you lived, unceasingly you gave counsel. | For the people today this counsel has become perfected’ (4522).3 The author then applies this Aristotelian wisdom to his work (4532–4524), asserting: Among lovers the birds are included, Because before death’s summons they fly the cage. Each has a different definition and explanation, Because birds have a different tongue. Before the Simurgh that person has perfected the elixir Who has known the language of all those birds. (4525–4527)4

Apart from reminding us of the shared Hellenistic heritage of both Islamic and Christian contemplative traditions, ʿAṭṭār’s words are a fitting conclusion to this book in a number of ways. On the most basic level, these lines encapsulate ʿAṭt ̣ār’s—as Ancrene Wisse’s—alignment of birds with human souls. The birds are among the Lovers for, like the seeking soul, they leave earthly entrapments, taking flight at the sound of death. Death here is not simply about bodily demise; the death-summons also brings to the fore the death of the self, the annihilation of the ‘I’. Moreover, At ̣t ̣ār also highlights the multiplicity of language among the birds, with the consummate lover able to converse with all. Speaking with all ‘thirty birds’ (si morgh in

2  See further the discussion of Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s invocation of these Qur’anic verses in Chap. 3 (‘The Many Shapes of the Heart’) and Chap. 6 (‘Absence’). 3  The Speech of Birds, trans. Avery, p. 402. 4  The Speech of Birds, trans. Avery, p. 403.

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Persian), the devoted soul can see the Simorgh, that legendary bird who represents the Divine in ʿAṭt ̣ār’s text. For the twenty-first-century reader, this statement—‘birds have a different tongue’—can become a wider configuration for the attempt at comparative histories of emotions. It is in traversing different languages and cultures that an enhanced scholarly language of love may be attained. Language of love refers to the nuanced attempts to express love—and its related affective shifts—and to shape and stimulate it through linguistic forms. But the phrase also highlights the potentially loving nature of scholarly speech as we seek to converse with the past and as we seek to listen to dialogues generated in the centuries preceding us. Luce Irigaray and Roland Barthes have been posited as helpful voices in developing this comparative language of love. I have also put forward the term ‘avian emotion’ for labelling this cross-cultural work: moving, like a bird, between separate cultures, in an attempt to hear the many bird-tongues.

This Book With this approach of avian emotion, the dialogues sought in this book have been between English Christian and Arabic Islamic contemplative texts, from approximately the years 1100 to 1250. I have focused on a certain cross-section of texts: Ancrene Wisse and the Wooing Group, and the work of Sufi poets Ibn al-Fāriḍ, Ibn ʿArabı ̄, and Shushtarı ̄. The grounds for comparative study are many, and Chap. 1 (‘Birds Beneath the Eaves’) outlined the rich cultural exchange between Arabic and English in the period under study. But in tracing the language of love in these texts, I have tried to look beyond mere echoes across the corpora; I have tried, instead, to search for deeper hermeneutic and semiotic affinities and interchanges across these texts. My choice to focus on the details of the texts themselves—rather than adopting a more heavily theoretical approach— has been deliberate. I believe we have to listen closely to the texts themselves to allow them to become equal partners in a dialogue and to avoid overwhelming them with our own discourses. There have been numerous methodological difficulties in this project, and this book’s own limitations should not be overlooked. My use of English as the language of writing, and my use of predominantly European and North American critical frameworks, remains problematic. This also creates attendant complications, as with the accuracy and value of transliteration. The very posturing of a study that ‘looks outwards’ assumes

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English as the norm, a fact that should not go unvoiced in the at-times painful relationships between ‘Britain’ (itself often used in an England-­ centric way, erasing Ireland, Wales, and Scotland) and the ‘Arab world’.5 Scholarship on Sufism itself has had a colonialist history, and although I have sought to move away from earlier biases, a colonialist and Eurocentric undercurrent in my vocabulary is inevitable—even with words such as ‘theology’. What I hope I have done, however, is begin a dialogue that has yet to be fully attempted. I have written for those who may be unfamiliar with this Sufi material and for whom this may form an ‘Other’—but an ‘Other’ that can be brought into dialogue with scholarship on Christian devotional cultures. Comparative study might be viewed as an ‘Other-­ ache’, to use Barthes’ term for empathy between lovers. I have tried to respond to the ache and disturbance that Arabic, as a Lover-Other, brings to a ‘Western’ discourse. Barthes shows that the anguish of a failed lover’s dialogue contains within it the failures of listening: ‘Like a bad concert hall, affective space contains dead spots where the sound fails to circulate’.6 ‘Friendship’ allows the circulation of sound, like blood to a body’s organs: ‘The perfect interlocutor, the friend, is he [sic] not the one who constructs around you the greatest possible resonance? Cannot friendship be defined as a space with total sonority?’7 In constructing dialogue, we can create a space of friendship—one that allows hearing, allows speaking, allows a true circulation of sound. Irigaray, in turn, writes of the ‘air of love’. In the sharing of air, there is a communality. It is the originary life-force, as Sufi Ibn ʿArabı ̄ might say of water.8 For Irigaray, navigating this air is an act filled with potential: Air is the environment where humans come into the world, where they grow, live and work. It can be inhabited by more or fewer currents or vibrations, but trying to return to the stillness of its expanse is preferable to trying to open an emptiness in it in order to create a still virgin space.9 5  On expanding the boundaries of the term ‘Britain’, see further Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘Infinite Realms’, in Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages: Archipelago, Island, England, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 1–16. 6  Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, p. 167. 7  Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, p. 167. 8  See Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s assertions on water as ‘the origin of the elements’; ‘the secret of life permeates water’ and ‘everything has its origin in water’: Bezels of Wisdom, p. 213. 9  Irigaray, The Way of Love, pp. 66–67.

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This is the space of converse in many modes: ‘Air allows modulating sounds, speaking with different tones, and also singing, crying or whispering’.10 In this air of loving discourse, there are no domineering subjects. Instead, each participant is a gifted sign, whole and beautifully communicable. Irigaray reaches for a touching light and illuminating touch that allows co-existent, participatory speech. She arrives at this final expression of it: Touch which allows turning back to oneself, in the dwelling of an intimate light. But which also goes to encounter the other, illuminated-illuminating, overflowing one’s own world in order to taste another brightness.11

Our medieval contemplatives themselves write of touch, light, vibration, a tongue treated to another’s sweetness; the whole of Creation exhales in shared surrender. Comparative study can allow these two languages and religious traditions to touch-illumine one another within a vibrating silence—to allow for a (near-)perfect sonority. With this sense of ‘Other-ache’, my wish has been to suggest avenues for placing these texts in dialogue with one another. This has followed a tripartite structure, subsequent to the introduction (Chap. 1): paradigms of love (Chaps. 2 and 3); embodied affect (Chaps. 4 and 5); and the semiotics of love (Chaps. 6 and 7). After the introduction of Part I, Part II considered two separate love-paradigms in different senses: Jesus as model of/for love, and the heart as an encryption or an encoded site for affective process. Chapter 2 (‘Jesus the Lover, Jesus the Beloved’) studied the fluid representation and role of Jesus/ʿIsa in the Christian and Islamic contemplative texts. It considered Ibn ʿArabı ̄, Shushtarı ̄, and Ibn al-Fāriḍ alongside their Persian counterparts Aṭṭār and Rūmi, for whom Jesus is a quintessential model. This was counterpoised against the Jesus of the Christian texts. He is the Beloved in Ancrene Wisse and the Wooing Group, but he is also a model Lover in these and the Islamic texts: an ascetic roamer who teaches the human capacities and ways of love. Considering Jesus as both Subject and Object of love renders our understanding of devotional love more pliable, moving in multiple directions. This strengthens the sense of how Jesus might work as an adhesive within and between the ‘emotional communities’ of Sufis and Christian contemplatives. Chapter 3 (‘The Many  Irigaray, The Way of Love, p. 67.  Irigaray, The Way of Love, p. 174.

10 11

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Shapes of the Heart’) examined the ‘heart’/qalb as a central image in audiences’ affective literacies, focusing on all three Sufi poets and on Ancrene Wisse. The heart is a locus for negotiating complex affective relationships: emotion with cognition and rationality; emotion with the spirit/soul; the workings of ascetic-affective processes in the heart; the heart as house of the soul and as dwelling-place for the divine Beloved. The heart becomes a malleable image in the hands of audiences, shape-shifting to encode affective shifts: in the words of Ibn ʿArabı ̄, the heart is capable of every form; and in Ancrene Wisse, there is a dizzying showcase of the heart’s numerous forms. Part III turned to embodied affect, a dominant facet of research within the history of emotions. The theological differences between the two traditions came into especially stark relief in this part of the book. Chapter 4 (‘Flesh’) examined traditions of self-mortification, ascesis/zuhd, in the embodiment of love. Both Christian and Islamic traditions harbour a powerful paradox of lowering and heightening in the devotional life’s shapes and rhythms—the devotees undergo a ‘humble [or lowering] exaltation’ to use Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s terms (Naẓm, 212–214). Within this, both traditions also emphasize a paradoxical death-life of the solitary-ascetic lover. We could use the term ‘death-affect’ to encapsulate the unique devotional affect cultivated by solitaries imaged as ‘dead to the world’ in both traditions. Chapter 5, ‘Blood and Wine’, considered these two intertwined signifiers in the texts and their intimacy with remembrance/dhikr of the Beloved. The Sufi poets engage with a deep-rooted tradition of wine odes, the khamriyya tradition. In Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s Al-Khamriyya, he performs a dialectic of speech and silence, whereas in Shushtarı ̄’s handling of khamr, there is greater emphasis on its ultimate disclosure. Ancrene Wisse and the texts of the Wooing Group are profoundly evocative of the Eucharistic cultures in which they were produced. Ureisun of God and Wohunge (along with other texts in the Group) can be read as Eucharistic tools—the texts themselves are consumed in a softening of the heart, preparing it for the taking of the Host. Across both corpora, the divine is accessible through an image of wine played out in texts or through the texts themselves as pre-Eucharistic consumption. Yet the texts remain conscious of the hermeneutic barriers in place—the blood-wine/khamr can never be fully known or spoken. Part IV looked at deep semiotic interchanges between the traditions in the form of absence and secrecy. Both traditions are marked by veiledness, a lack of transparency and lack of presence in their devotional semiotics.

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After all, as spoken in the Tarjuma ̄n, the process of seeking the Beloved is one of utter perplexity: ‘Lovers lose their way in love and become entangled’ (I: 4). Chapter 6 (‘Absence’) examined the semiotics of not-there-­ ness in the Islamic and Christian material. Contemplatives are confronted with an absent Beloved, who must be sought continually, not unlike the capricious jinn of the Arabic deserts, forever disappearing and manifesting again in a new form.12 Chapter 7 (‘Secrecy’) studied the semiotics of concealment in these texts. Affective devotion in both Islamic and Christian contemplative traditions is associated with a secrecy in language, even a runic concealment. The Beloved cannot be reached by the usual channels. The Beloved is veiled, hidden, encrusted beneath and within layers of not knowing and failures of signification. Language unveils and veils, unveils and veils, in a cyclical hermeneutic rhythm, a continual paradox for the wandering soul. As Ibn ʿArabı ̄ asserts in Chapter XIX of the Bezels (dedicated to Job): ‘Worship Him and trust in Him from the standpoint of veiled consciousness’ (p. 215). Here Ibn ʿArabı ̄ invokes surah 11: 123 and 6: 101.13

Future Work Terminologies and Temporalities In enabling such dialogue, there are wider ramifications for the field of the history of emotions. Affective literacies (Mark Amsler) become more fluid, containing a wider range of practices in ‘reading or perceiving a text’.14 Working across cultures even allows the potential for ‘literate illiteracy’, an affective literacy predicated on hermeneutic struggles. Affective literacies nurtured within separate cultural traditions can also enhance one another when they come into contact: as with, for instance, configuring the contemplative life as a desert wilderness. We can arguably find cohesive emotional communities across the distinct religious traditions, expanding 12  On the shifting forms of the jinn paralleling the Beloved, see further Sells, ‘Bewildered Tongue’, p. 91. 13  ‘And Allah’s is the Invisible of the heavens and the earth, and unto Him the whole matter will be returned. So worship Him and put thy trust in Him. Lo! thy Lord is not unaware of what ye (mortals) do’ (surah 11: 123); surah 6: 101 is quoted in Chap. 2 (Jesus the Beloved, Jesus the Lover). 14  Amsler, Affective Literacies, p. 103.

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Barbara Rosenwein’s sense of emotional communities existing across time and space.15 Moreover, Christian and Islamic texts alongside one another multiply the many directions and permutations of divine love, heightening the complexity within given emotional communities. Such an awareness corresponds to work by Damien Boquet and Piroska Nagy, among others, that revises Rosenwein’s work to highlight variations and fissures within these communities.16 ‘Scripts for the performance of feeling’, to invoke Sarah McNamer’s work on performatives and emotives, can be modified to allow for the sense of contemplative texts as also ‘de-scripting’ emotion. Texts can de-script emotion in re-enacting the hermeneutic frustrations inherent in affective reading. Whilst this study has clear temporal limits (c. 1100–1250), its attempt at dialogue is significant for both earlier and later periods. First, Basran female spirituality of the seventh and eighth centuries offers an important earlier analogue for European devotional writing, especially in the figure of Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya. I have suggested this elsewhere, and there is significant scope for further analysis in this area.17 I believe there is also much potential in examining Ibn ʿArabı ̄ as a potential analogue, if not indirect source, for the fourteenth-century The Cloud of Unknowing and Shewings of Julian of Norwich. His own complex philosophy of language enriches an understanding of the hermeneutic and semiotic struggles of these canonical ‘mystical’ texts in English.18 As remarked in the introduction, Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s writing opens up linguistic otherworlds that distort ‘Reality’ as much as they parallel it. Such research would also respond to the work by Robert J. Dobie, G. Kakaie, and Etin Anwar, among others, on Ibn ʿArabı ̄ and Meister Eckhart (1260–1328).19  See, for example, Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, p. 2.  See Damien Boquet and Piroska Nagy, Medieval Sensibilities: A History of Emotions in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), p. 49. 17  See Ayoush Lazikani, ‘Encompassment in Love: Rabi’a of Basra in Dialogue with Julian of Norwich’, Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures 46.2 (2020), 115–136. For parallels made between Rābiʿa and European contemplatives, particularly Franciscans, see further: Margaret Smith, Muslim Women Mystics, pp.  63, 91–92, 98–99, and 107; and Charles Upton, trans., Doorkeeper of the Heart: Versions of Rabi’a (Putney, VT: Threshold, 1988), pp. 14–17. 18  See further Michelle Karnes, ‘Julian of Norwich’s Art of Interpretation’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 42.2 (2012), 333–363. 19  Robert J.  Dobie, Logos and Revelation: Ibn ʿArabı ̄, Meister Eckhart, and Mystical Hermeneutics (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2010); Richard Woods OP, ‘Mystical Union in the Teachings of Ibn ʿArabı ̄ and Meister Eckhart’, Medieval 15 16

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Divine Maternity Investigation into Divine ‘maternity’ would be another promising area for future researchers. It is true that in both the Christian and Islamic texts, the Divine is sought with romantic and erotic posturing. In the Early Middle English texts and in the poetry of Aṭt ̣ār, Rūmı ̄, and ‘Ibn ʿArabı ̄, for example, the Divine is the consummate Beloved. But the love between Divine and Creation is not encoded solely in amorous terms. As the speaker of Wohunge reflects: ‘for i þe ane mai ich alle frend finden. Þu art me mare þen fader, mare þen moder, Broðer, suster, oðre frend’ (p. 92: for in you alone may I find a full friend [or kinsman]. You are more to me than father, more to me than mother, brother, sister, or friend). It is this position of Christ as ‘mother’—or rather, ‘more than mother’—that might provide especially fertile ground for comparative study. In both traditions, Divine Love can find its nearest expression in the love of a mother, an unconditional, endless interflow of affection.20 The Mother-Christ is a topos with roots in the Bible, especially Isaiah 49: 15, Isaiah 66: 11–13, and Matthew 23: 37.21 Both Anselm of Canterbury and John of Fécamp (d. 1078) are key contributors to the literate tradition of the Mother-Christ inspired by scripture.22 In the Islamic texts, the Divine is also defined in many instances as a maternal figure. Maternal love Mystical Theology 22 (2013), 74–90; G. Kakaie, ‘The Dialogue Between Islam and Christianity as Viewed by Ibn Arabı ̄ and Eckhart’, Studies in Interreligious Dialogue 14.2 (2004), 177–201; Etin Anwar, ‘Prophetic Models in Islamic and Christian Spirituality in the Thought of Ibn ʿArabı ̄ and Meister Eckhart’, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 15.1 (2004), 147–162. 20  See also Barbara Newman, ‘Indwelling: A Meditation on Empathy, Pregnancy, and the Virgin Mary’, in Karl F. Morrison and Rudolph M. Bell, eds, Studies on Medieval Empathies (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), pp. 189–212. 21  ‘Can a woman forget her infant, so as not to have pity on the son of her womb? and if she should forget, yet will not I forget thee’ (Isaiah 49: 15); ‘That you may suck, and be filled with the breasts of her consolations: that you may milk out, and flow with delights, from the abundance of her glory. For thus saith the Lord: Behold I will bring upon her as it were a river of peace, and as an overflowing torrent the glory of the Gentiles, which you shall suck; you shall be carried at the breasts, and upon the knees they shall caress you. As one whom the mother caresseth, so will I comfort you, and you shall be comforted in Jerusalem’ (Isaiah 66: 11–13); ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered together thy children, as the hen doth gather her chickens under her wings, and thou wouldest not?’ (Matthew 23: 37). 22  See further Lauren Mancia, Emotional Monasticism: Affective Piety in the Eleventh-­ Century Monastery of John of Fécamp (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), especially pp. 1–17.

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responds in its ever-giving way, in its search for an ideal of self-erasure to enable a complete mingling of Self and Other, a love that collapses all into its own arms. Ureisun of God imagines the Mother-Christ’s arms opened wide. Ibn al-Fāriḍ speaks of the lullabies of Divine immanence encoded in samaʿ (spiritual audition). Ancrene Wisse understands the Mother-Christ on the Cross as a source of all compassion and mercy, and Ibn ʿArabı ̄ in the Bezels of Wisdom writes on the Prophet Aaron, glossing Qur’anic verses 20: 92–95:23 It was because Aaron’s Prophethood derived from the divine Mercy that Moses said to his brother, O son of my mother, addressing him by reference to his mother and not his father, since mercy pertains to the mother more than the father and is more profuse in its effect. But for this mercy, she would not have the patience to persevere in the rearing of her children.24

It is then in Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s chapter on Moses where maternity—particularly voluntary and absent maternity—becomes especially prominent. In describing Moses’ mother’s denial of her instinct, Ibn ʿArabı ̄ states: ‘Although she felt a strong urge to suckle him, she cast him out on the waters when she feared for his safety’ (pp. 256–257). Maternal love can involve absence and denial and barrier. She demonstrates that ‘all motivation springs from love’ (p.  257). As such, she becomes linked to Ibn ʿArabı ̄’s conception of creation as a shift from and towards love: ‘The movement that is the coming into existence of the Cosmos is a movement of love’ (p. 257). The Cosmos responds in longing: ‘the Cosmos longs to behold itself in existence as it did in its latency, so that, in every respect, its movement from the latency of nonexistence into existence is a movement of love by the Reality and the Cosmos’ (p. 257). And it is later affirmed: ‘movement is for love, there being no movement in existence except for love’ (p. 258). As seen in the Tarjumān, all movement is for love; love’s absence is still found in a Cosmos entirely formed of love, embodied perfectly in the mother.

23  ‘He (Moses) said: O Aaron! What held thee back when thou didst see them gone astray, That thou followedst me not? Hast thou then disobeyed my order? He said: O son of my mother! Clutch not my beard nor my head! I feared lest thou shouldst say: Thou hast caused division among the Children of Israel, and hast not waited for my word’ (surah 20: 92–94). See also the discussion of the Sāmirı ̄ in Chap. 3 (‘The Many Shapes of the Heart’). 24  Austin, trans., Bezels of Wisdom, p. 243.

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As previously remarked, Ureisun of God likens Christ’s crucified position to that of a mother opening her arms to clasp her child. His arms are ‘i openeð so þe moder deð hire ermes, hire leoue child for to bicluppen’ (opened up as the mother does her arms to embrace her beloved child) (p. 176). This is resonant with Part VI of Ancrene Wisse, where the crucified Mother-Christ’s stretched arms shields humanity from the Father’s beating (138: 245–257). As has been discussed elsewhere, Ancrene Wisse also contains a striking passage on the ‘hide-and-seek game’ played between Mother and child, Divine and human soul—a passage that is later adapted in the fourteenth-century devotional compilations The Chastising of God’s Children and The Pore Caitiff.25 Christ-as-Mother re-emerges in Part VII of Ancrene Wisse. In explaining the four types of love, the author reflects that a loving mother must be entirely sacrificial, providing a bath of blood to heal her sick child (149: 155–57). Such a bath was given by the Mother-Christ: Þis dude ure Lauerd us þe weren se seke of sunne ant swa isulet þer-wið þet na þing ne mahte healen us ne cleansin us bute his blod ane, for swa he hit walde. His luue makeð us beað þrof[.] (149: 157–60) (Our Lord did this for us who were so diseased with sin and so sullied with it that nothing could heal us or cleanse us but his blood alone, for this is what he wanted. His love makes us a bath from it[.])

This single bath then multiplies as the author explains the three baths of baptism, tears, and blood—the third ‘halheð bat ha oðre’ (149: hallows both the others), supported by citation and translation of Revelation 1:  5.26 The author further offers exegesis of Isaiah 49: 15, tying the Mother-­Christ with remembrance. Whilst Jesus himself is not cast as a mother figure in the Islamic texts, the maternity of the Divine is very much in evidence. We might remember the close phonological and semantic associations between the Arabic

25   See further Catherine Innes-Parker, ‘The Legacy of Ancrene Wisse: Translations, Adaptations, Influences and Audience, with Special Attention to Women Readers’, in A Companion to Ancrene Wisse, ed. Yoko Wada (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), pp. 145–173. 26  ‘And from Jesus Christ, who is the faithful witness, the first begotten of the dead, and the prince of the kings of the earth, who hath loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood’ (Revelation 1: 5).

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words for mercy (raḥm) and womb (raḥim).27 As the author of Ancrene Wisse ties remembrance and the Divine, so too does Ibn al-Fāriḍ evoke Divine maternity as an act of reciprocal dhikr; it is a remembrance of God and a celebration of the Divine’s remembrance of us. In a striking passage of Naẓm, Ibn al-Fāriḍ likens the soul to an infant soothed by lullabies. An infant may feel trapped in their swaddling and struggles mournfully to be free from their discomfort (430–431). The infant finds relief in lullabies, throwing away their load and listening intently to the one who sings (432). Such sweet (ḥulw) sounds allow them to forget their bitter (murr) condition and instead ‘remember a secret whisper of pre-eternal covenants [‘najwā ʿuhūdin qadı ̄mati’]’ (433).28 The infant can break free from its coverings to be comforted by an old, fundamental song pulsing in the very atoms of the cosmos. Such is the state of the soul—suffocated by its fleshly layers, it is soothed by audition. The rocking of the cradle likewise comforts the infant as desire courses through them: idhā hāma shawqan bi-l-munāghi wa-hamma an yatı ̄ra ilā autānihi l’auwalı ̄yatı ̄ yusakkanu bi-t-taḥrı ̄ki wahwa bi-mahdihı ̄ idha-mā lahū aidı ̄ murabbı ̄hi hazzatı ̄. (435–435) (When he is burdened with desire from the lullabies, and he is anxious to fly to his first homelands, he is calmed by the rocking of the cradle, as the hands of his guardian moves it softly from side to side.)

This is mapped onto the Sufis’ dancing (434–36). The speaker suggests that samaʿ facilitates a kind of comforting death, the listener aligned with a suffering person surrendering the nafs (soul, or self) (438–439). The listener may be torn apart in longing, but such longing is somehow inflected with peace. The Christian texts speak of a mother as life-giving and sacrificial in her bleeding, resonant of course with the texts’ theological bases, 27  See further William Chittick, ‘Divine and Human Love in Islam’, in Divine Love: Perspectives from the World’s Religious Traditions, ed. Jeff Levin and Stephen G. Post (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press, 2010), pp. 163–200 (p. 169). 28  I adopt one of Homerin’s possible translations here. See further Homerin’s comments on this line’s reference to the Primordial Covenant (Homerin, trans., ‘Umar Ibn al-Fāriḍ: Sufi Verse, Saintly Life, p. 196 n. 433).

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but such an emphasis on blood-exchange would not be quite as relevant in an Islamic context. Instead, Ibn al-Fāriḍ turns to the soothing acts of the Mother-Divine, singing to free the soul from its incarceration in matter. The Lover becomes a reflection of such maternal nurture, as the celestial, astral imagery merges with a language focused on reproduction and germination. The Lover becomes a fertile ground for the ‘seed’ (dhurrı ̄yah) of devotion and becomes moreover a nursing mother: ‘milk of the breast of union flowed from me’ (503). Despite its clear differences from Christian iconography, such an image echoes the Mother-Christ’s lactating sidewound and His own mother’s nurturing breasts.29

Another Collared Dove Let us end with a fable. In 1251, an Old Spanish collection of animal tales known as Calila e Dimna was produced.30 Calila e Dimna is a translation of the eighth-century Arabic Kalila wa-Dimna—itself a translation by Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ of a Persian text, which was in turn based on the fourth-­ century Sanskrit Panchatantra.31 In this layering of sources, Calila e Dimna encapsulates the complex lingual and cultural dialogues that have unfolded through the centuries. This instance also reminds us specifically that a thirteenth-century Spanish text has an Arabic—and more broadly a non-Western—source. Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s Arabic version was translated not only into Spanish, but also into Hebrew, into Turkish, and back into Persian.32 In an essay on the cross-cultural travels of this text, Marianne Marroum puts forward the term ‘transmimesis’ to describe ‘a multifarious mimesis coupled with transculturation’:

29  On Christ as nursing mother, see further Bynum, Jesus as Mother, especially p. 123. On Virgo lactans imagery, see further Miri Rubin, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (London: Penguin, 2010), especially pp. 64, 201, and 207. 30  A helpful summary of the text and its history can be found in The Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. Robert E. Bjork (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), entry ‘Calila e Dimna’ by Lourdes María Alvarez [accessed online 24th September 2020]. See further Calila e Dimna, ed. Juan Manuel Cacho Blecua and María Jesús Lacarra (Madrid: Clásicos Castalia, 1984), pp. 9–70. 31  Kalila and Dimna, trans. Wheeler Thackston (Indianapolis; Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 2019), pp. ix–x. The basis for Thackston’s translation is a Persian rendition of Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s Arabic (p. xvi). 32  See further Lourdes Maria Alvarez ‘Calila e Dimna’, in The Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. Bjork; and Kalila and Dimna, trans. Thackston, pp. ix–xxii.

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the politics of oppositionality coupled with triangular desire not only generate a mimetic active process of self-fashioning but also become the manifold vectors for the writing of Kalila wa Dimna and the subsequent inception of a cross-cultural encounter and actuation of cultural transmission.33

Desire for this text has reverberated across cultures, and in each of its forms, the text has a deep history of cross-fertilization and cross-cultural mapping. Through many languages it has continued to generate a range of affective potentialities. These have inevitably altered depending on the emotional communities in which this text has been encountered and re-­ formed; but in each form, so many emotional communities have left their mark. Calila e Dimna/Kalila wa-Dimna itself has a complex narrative form, comprising multiple, intersecting levels of diegesis.34 The overarching frame narrative is of two jackals, Kalila and Dimna, sharing animal-based stories with moral import. In one fable, a group of doves manage to rescue themselves from the hunter’s snare, inspired by their leader, known as Mutawwaqa—the Arabic for ‘collared’: The hunter opened his net, sprinkled some grain, and lay in wait. After a while a flock of doves came led by their queen, a dove called Mutawwaqa. When they saw the grain they alighted, unaware of the danger, and were all caught in the net. […] ‘This is no time for strife,’ said Mutawwaqa. ‘We should all consider it more important to save our friends than to save ourselves. We should cooperate in using our strength to lift the net, for therein lies our salvation.’ In obedience the doves lifted the net and flew off. […] When Mutawwaqa saw that the hunter was following them, she said to her friends, ‘This vengeful man is earnest in pursuing us. […] We should fly to villages and forests to block his view of us, and then he will gikve up. Nearby there is a mouse who is a friend of mine. I will ask him to cut these bonds.’35

All ends well, and the doves are freed with the help of the mouse. As the fable continues, there arise further tales of animal solidarity, all generated 33  Marianne Marroun, ‘Kalila Wa Dimna: Inception, Appropriation, and Transmimesis’, Comparative Literature Studies 48.4 (2011), 512–540 (512). 34  See further ‘Kalı ̄la wa-Dimna’, in Marlé Hammond, A Dictionary of Arabic Literary Terms and Devices (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), online [accessed 26th December 2019]. 35  Kalila and Dimna, trans. Thackston, pp. 57–58.

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ultimately by the dove’s act of communal love. In Ibn Ḥ azm’s Ṭ awq al-ḥamāma, the ringdove is a symbol of love, and here the collared dove is the purveyor of communal wisdom and compassion. I like to imagine the words of Mutawwaqa as her own solitary cry: a call to listen across realms, across the boundaries over which birds fly.

Glossary of Key Arabic Terms

ʿAnqā:  legendary bird in Arabic traditions ʿaql:  reason or intellect arāk (tree):  in Latin salvadora persica, a tree native to the Middle East and Africa; it features prominently in classical Arabic poetry. ʿārif:  gnostic aya (plural ayāt):  the term denoting verses within each surah of the Qur’an; the term has the sense of ‘sign’. bān (tree):  the ‘Ben tree’, in Latin the Moringa peregrina, is a plant found in the Arabı ̄an peninsula and Egypt; it features prominently in classical Arabic poetry. baqa ̄ʾ:  remaining, enduring in God barzakh:  liminal barrier between the living and the dead bāt ̣in:  ‘hidden’ meaning in Qur’anic exegesis bismillāhi al-raḥmani al-raḥı ̄m:  ‘In the Name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful’ (or, the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful): the opening words of each surah of the Qur’an buka:  weeping ḍamı ̄r:  inner self, heart, conscience dayr (pl. diyara ̄t):  monastery, residence of Christian monks dha ̄t:  essence dhawq:  taste; intuitive knowing

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. S. Lazikani, Emotion in Christian and Islamic Contemplative Texts, 1100–1250, The New Middle Ages, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59924-9

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dhikr:  remembrance du’a’:  beseeching prayer given freely fanaʾ:  annihilation, death of self fuʾa ̄d:  heart; intuition fas ̣ṣ:  (pl. fus ̣ūs ̣): bezel, the setting for a gemstone in a ring fuṣu ̄s ̣:  see faṣṣ ghada:  in Latin Haloxylon persicum, in English the ‘white saxaul’, a tree found in Asia and North Africa; it features prominently in classical Arabic poetry. gharaba:  depart, leave ḥadith:  speech, specifically Muhammad’s sayings used as guidance alongside the Qur’an ḥaḍra:  presence; chanting ritual; technical Sufi term denoting ecstasy ḥal:  spiritual ‘state’ hawa:  love, passion ḥayra:  bewilderment, perplexity; a Sufi state ḥikam:  wisdom ḥika ̄yā (plural ḥikāya ̄t):  exempla, stories hodhod:  hoopoe bird ḥulūl:  incarnation imām:  leader of prayer in Islam insa ̄n al-kāmil:  Perfect Human ʿishq:  love iʿtiqād:  belief ittiḥa ̄d:  union jalwa:  bride’s unveiling in a chamber jam’:  union jawhar:  essence jinn:  spirits, genies; considered causes of ‘madness’ kashf:  unveiling khalı ̄l:  intimate friend khalwa:  seclusion, spiritual retreat khamr:  wine khamriyya:  a tradition of ‘wine poems’, celebrating the intoxicating effects of alcohol; a pre-Islamic and early Islamic tradition that was reappropriated by Sufi writers khatm:  seal; the Prophet Muhammad is known as ‘the seal of the prophets’ (khātim an-nabı ̄yı ̄n or kha ̄tim al-anbiya ̄), a phrase used in surah 33: 40 of the Qur’an

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khaya ̄l:  illusion, imagination khirqa:  Sufi garment, mantle labbayka:  spoken on the Hajj pilgrimage, with the sense of ‘at your service’ lubb:  heart; intuition madām:  alcohol, any intoxicating drink maghrib:  west maḥabba:  love maqāma (pl. maqāma ̄t):  spiritual station mashriq:  east miḥrāb:  a niche in the wall of a mosque to mark the direction for prayer minbar (pl. mana ̄bir):  the pulpit in mosques munāja ̄h (pl. muna ̄jāt):  form of prayer, connoting intimate conversation musha ̄hada:  contemplation, witnessing muwashshaḥ:  a form of strophic poetry associated with Al-Andalus; the main body of the poem is usually in classical Arabic or Hebrew; the close or kharja (exit) is in vernacular Arabic or a romance dialect. nabi:  prophet nafs:  self, ego qalb:  heart qiblah:  denoting the direction for prayer qurb:  nearness, proximity ra ̄hib (pl. rāhābı ̄n, ruhba ̄n):  monk raḥm:  compassion, mercy rasūl:  messenger, in reference to the prophets ru ̄ḥ:  soul, spirit s ̣adr:  chest; breast; heart; intuition samaʿ:  spiritual audition ṣaḥwa:  sobriety after divine intoxication salāt:  the ritualized Islamic prayer sidrah:  lote tree Simorgh:  legendary bird in Persian traditions sukr:  intoxication su ̄rah (surah):  a chapter of the Qur’an; it has the sense of ‘image’ of ‘form’. tafakkur:  engrossed meditation takhallul:  intimate penetration, permeation tarı ̄qa:  route, path; a type of Sufi ‘order’

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taṣawar:  to imagine, to picture, to visualize t ̣awa ̄f:  circling the Kaʿba in the Hajj ummah:  people; Muslim community waḥdat al-wujūd:  ‘Oneness of Being’, the Sufi belief in the ultimate unity of all creation; a term associated with Ibn ʿArabı ̄ though not actually used by him wajh:  face, countenance walı ̄ha:  rapture wird:  practice of keeping vigils, litany ẓah̄ ir:  ‘outward’ level of meaning in Qur’anic exegesis zajal (pl. azja ̄l):  a form akin to the muwashshaḥ, but composed fully in vernacular Arabic zuhd:  asceticism zuhdiyya:  a tradition of ascetic literature

Bibliography1

Primary Manuscripts, Facsimiles, and Early Printed Books Bellarmino, Roberto, De Gemitu columbae (Germany: apud. Cornel. ab Egmond, 1626). Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 145. London, British Library MS 9255. London, British Library, MS Add 7735. London, British Library, MS Add 27263. London, British Library, MS Cotton Cleopatra C.vi London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero A. xiv. London, British Library, MS Cotton Titus D. xviii. London, British Library, MS Harley 5786. London, British Library, MS Royal 17 A. xxvii. Oxford, Jesus College MS 29.

 This bibliography is formed of works cited. However, there are a few instances of works consulted but not cited earlier in this book. These consulted works have been important in the general development of this project, and thus should be acknowledged. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. S. Lazikani, Emotion in Christian and Islamic Contemplative Texts, 1100–1250, The New Middle Ages, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59924-9

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Editions Editions of Arabic Early Sufi Women: Dhikr an-niswa al-muta’abbidat as-Sufiyyat, trans. Rkia Elaroui Cornell (Louisville, Ky.: Fons Vitae, 1999). Ibn al-Fāriḍ, ʿUmar, The Mystical Poems of Ibn al-Fāriḍ: Edited in Transcription from the Oldest Extant Manuscript in the Chester Beatty Collection, ed. A. J. Arberry (London: Emery Walker, 1952), Chester Beatty Monographs 5. Ibn al-Fāriḍ, ʿUmar, Dı̄wān Ibn al- Fāriḍ: tahqıq̄ wa-dirāsah naqdı̄yah, ed. ‘Abd al-Khāliq Mahmūd (al-Haram [Jīzah]: ‘Ayn lil-Dirāsāt wa-al-BuḤūth al-Insānīyah wa-al-Ijtimāʿīyah, 1995). Ibn ʿArabī, Muhyddin, The Tarjumān al-ashwāq: A Collection of Mystical Odes, ed. and trans. R. A. Nicholson (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1911). Muslim Exegesis of the Bible in Medieval Cairo: Najm al-Dīn Tūfi’s (d.716/1316) Commentary on the Christian Scriptures, ed. and trans. Lejla Demiri (Leiden: Brill, 2013). Shushtarī, Abu al-Ḥ asan al-, Dı̄wān Abı ̄ al-Ḥ asan Shushtarı:̄ shāʿir al-Ṣuf̄ ı̄yah al-kabı̄r f ı ̄ al-Andalus wa-al-Maghrib, ed. ʿAlī Sāmī Nashshār (Alexandria: Manshaʾat al-Maʿārif, 1960). Shushtarī, Abu al-Ḥasan al-, Poesía Estrófica (Cejeles Y/O Muwassahāt) Atribuida Al Místico Granadino As-Sustarī (Siglo XIII. d. C., ed. F. Corriente (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, Instituto de Filologia, Departamento De Estudios Arabes, 1988). Sufi Poems: A Mediaeval [sic] Anthology, ed. and trans. Martin Lings (Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 2004).

Editions of English A Talkyng of þe Loue of God: Edited from MS. Vernon (Bodleian 3938) and Collated with MS. Simeon (Brit. Mus. Add. 22283), ed. M. Salvina Westra (The Hague, 1950). Ancrene Wisse, ed. Bella Millett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005–2006), 2 Vols, Early English Text Society O.S. 325 and 326. Ancrene Wisse: Parts Six and Seven, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972). Ancrene Wisse, ed. Robert Hasenfratz (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000). Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Riverside Chaucer, Third Edition, ed. Larry D. Benson and F. N. Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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English Lyrics of the Thirteenth Century, ed. Carleton Brown (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932). Hali Meiðhad, ed. Bella Millett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), EETS O.S. 284. Julian of Norwich, The Shewings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Georgia Ronan Crampton (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1994). Moral Love Songs and Laments, ed. Susanna Greer Fein (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1998). Þe Wohunge of ure Lauerd, etc., ed. W. Meredith Thompson. EETS O.S. 241 (London: Oxford University Press, 1958). The Chastising of God’s Children and the Treatise of Perfection of the Sons of God, ed. Joyce Bazire and Eric Colledge (Oxford, 1957). The Dream of the Rood, ed. Michael Swanton, revised edition (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1987; repr. 1996). The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999). The Wanderer, ed. R. F. Leslie, revised edition (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1985; repr. 1995). The Wooing of Our Lord and the Wooing Group Prayers, ed. and trans. Catherine Innes-Parker (Peterborough, Ontario, 2015).

Editions of Persian ʿAt ̣ṭār, Farīd al-Dīn, Manṭiq al-tạ yr, ed. Muhammad Rida Shafiʿī-Kadkanī (Tehran: Sukhan, 2004).

Editions of Latin Aelred of Rievaulx, De institutione inclusarum, in Aelredi Rievallensis Opera Omnia: 1 Opera Ascetica, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis, i (Turnhout: Brepols, 1971). Anselm of Canterbury, Orationes sive meditationes, in S. Anselmi Cantuariensis Archiepiscopi Opera Omnia, ed. F.S. Schmitt, 6 vols, III (Stuttgart: F. Frommann, 1968). Bernard of Clairvaux, Sancti Bernardi Opera, 8 Vols, ed. J. Leclercq, C. H. Talbot and H. M. Rochais (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1957–1977). Peter Lombard, Sententiae in IV libris distinctae, 2 Vols, i (Grottaferrata, Rome: Editiones Collegii S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas, 1981). The Life of Christina of Markyate: a Twelfth-Century Recluse, ed. and trans. C. H. Talbot (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959).

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Editions of French, Spanish, and Italian Calila e Dimna, ed. Juan Manuel Cacho Blecua and María Jesús Lacarra (Madrid: Clásicos Castalia, 1984). Dante, Inferno, ‘Digital Dante’, Columbia University, https://digitaldante. columbia.edu/dante/divine-­comedy/inferno/inferno-­5/ [accessed 23rd July 2020]. John of the Cross, ‘Sayings of Light and Love’, as provided in ‘The Matheson Trust: For the Study of Comparative Religion’, https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/solitary-­bird [accessed 23rd July 2020]. John of Howden, Rossignos, ed. Glynn Hesketh (London: Anglo-Norma Text Society, 2006).

Editions of Post-1550 Texts Catmull, Katherine, Summer and Bird (NY: Penguin Group, 2012). Soueif, Ahdaf, The Map of Love (London: Bloomsbury, 1999).

Translations Translations of English Anchoritic Spirituality: Ancrene Wisse and Associated Works, trans. Anne Savage and Nicholas Watson (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1991). Ancrene Wisse: A Guide for Anchoresses, trans. Bella Millett (Exeter, 2009).

Translations of Arabic and Judeo-Arabic Classical Arabic Literature: A Library of Arabic Literature Anthology, trans. Geert Jan van Gelder (New York: New York University Press, 2012). Doorkeeper of the Heart: Versions of Rabi’a, trans. Charles Upton (Putney, VT: Threshold, 1988). Early Sufi Women: Dhikr an-niswa al-muta’abbidat as-Sufiyyat, trans. Rkia Elaroui Cornell (Louisville, Ky.: Fons Vitae, 1999). Ibn al-Fāriḍ, ʿUmar, ʿUmar Ibn al-Fāriḍ: Sufi Verse, Saintly Life, trans. Th. Emil Homerin (Mahwah, NJ: 2001). Ibn ʿArabī, Muhyddin, The Tarjumān al-ashwāq: Collection of Mystical Odes, ed. and. trans. R.A. Nicholson (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 2011). Ibn ʿArabī, Muhyddin, The Bezels of Wisdom, trans. R. W. J. Austin (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1980).

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Ibn ʿArabī, Muhyddin, Ibn al-ʿAfrabı ’̄ s Fusūs al-ḥikam: An Annotated Translation of The Bezels of Wisdom, trans. Binyamin Abrahamov (London: Routledge, 2015). Ibn ʿArabī, Muhyddin, L’interprète des désirs (Turjumān [sic] al-ashwāq), trans. Maurice Gloton (Paris: Albin Michel, 1996). Ibn ʿArabī, Muhyddin, Contemplation of the Holy Mysteries and the Rising of the Divine Lights (Mashāhid al-asrār al-qudsiyya wa matāli’ al-anwār al-ilāhiyya), trans. Cecilia Twinch and Pablo Beneito (Oxford: Anqa Publishing, 2001). Ibn ʿArabī, Muhyddin, Universal Tree and the Four Birds, trans. Angela Jaffray (Oxford: Anqa Publications, 2006). Ibn Hazm, ʿAlī Ibn Aḥmad, The Ring of the Dove: A Treatise on the Art and Practice of Arab Love, trans. A. J. Arberry (London: Luzac & Company, 1953). Ibn Tufail, Muhammad Ibn ʿAbd al-Malik, Ḥayy Ibn Yaqzān, trans. Lenn Evan Goodman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Islamic Mystical Poetry: Sufi Verse from the Early Mystics to Rumi, ed. and trans. Mahmood Jamal (London: Penguin, 2009). Maimonides, Moses, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines, excerpted in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B Leitch et al, 2nd edition (NY: W.W. Norton, 2010), pp. 162–177. Shushtarī, Abu al-Ḥasan al-, Abu al-Hasan al-Shushtarī: Songs of Love and Devotion, trans. Lourdes María Alvarez (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2009). The Meaning of the Glorious Qur’an, trans. M. M. Pickthall (Hyderabad-Deccan: Government Central Press, 1938). The Mystical Poems of Ibn al-Fāriḍ, trans. A. J. Arberry (Dublin: E. Walker, 1956), Chester Beatty Monographs 6. The Penguin Anthology of Classical Arab Literature, ed. and trans. Robert Irwin (London: Penguin, 1999). The Qur’an, trans. Abdel Haleem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Translations of Latin and Anglo-Norman Aelred of Rievaulx, ‘A Rule for the Life of a Recluse’, trans. Mary Paul Macpherson, in Treatises: the Pastoral Prayer, ed. M.  Basil Pennington (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1982), pp. 41–102. Aelred of Rievaulx, The Liturgical Sermons: the First Clairvaux Collection, Sermons One-Twenty-Eight, Advent-All Saints, trans. Theodore Berkeley and M. Basil Pennington (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 2001). Douay-Rheims Bible, The Holy Bible, Douay Version: Translated from the Latin Vulgate (Douay, A.  D. 1609: Rheims, A.D. 1582). London: Catholic Truth Society, 1956). From the Norman Conquest to the Black Death: An Anthology of Writings from England, ed. Douglas Gray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Goscelin of St Bertin, The Book of Encouragement and Consolation, trans. Monika Otter. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004.

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Index1

A Aaron (prophet), 224 Abraham (prophet), 14, 39, 63, 115 Absence, 42, 113, 135, 136, 143, 152, 159–162, 161n11, 164–167, 169, 170, 172, 174–183, 201, 220, 224 Abu Nuwās, 22, 137, 138 Abu Talib al-Makki, 32, 76n4 Qut al-qulu ̄b, 32, 76n4 Abu Yaqub Yusuf (caliph), 17 Adam, 14, 118, 132, 133n6, 140 Aelred of Rievaulx, 43n166, 91, 121n53 ʿAishah al-Manubiyya, 11, 11n29 Al-Andalus, 11, 15–17, 16n49, 17n51, 23, 23n81, 24, 31, 32n126, 188 ʿAlı ̄ (grandson of Ibn al-Fāriḍ), 133n6 ʿAlı ̄ (grandson of Ibn al-Fāriḍ), see Ibn al-Fāriḍ, ‘Umar

ʿAlı ̄ (son-in-law of the prophet Muhammad), 15 Al-Khamriyya, 16, 112n28, 138–144, 220 Almohads, 31 See also Al-Andalus Almoravids, 31 See also Al-Andalus Anchorite, 6, 6n10, 19, 22, 36n144, 43, 52, 59, 66, 69–73, 75, 92, 94, 95, 97, 99–102, 114, 117, 119–121, 123, 173, 174, 176, 203–205 See also Hermit Anchoritism, 36 Ancrene Wisse, 5, 5n8, 6, 9–11, 10n24, 10n26, 18–19, 18n59, 19n60, 21, 21n71, 22, 34n135, 36n144, 41, 42n163, 43, 48, 49, 52, 52n14, 53, 59, 66–73, 66n67, 70n75, 70n78, 72n81,

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. S. Lazikani, Emotion in Christian and Islamic Contemplative Texts, 1100–1250, The New Middle Ages, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59924-9

263

264 

INDEX

Ancrene Wisse (cont.) 75, 89–98, 93n53, 94n55, 94n60, 96n64, 96n65, 100n72, 106, 108, 108n12, 111, 111n26, 117–123, 118n42, 119n46, 120n49, 120n50, 120n51, 122n55, 122n56, 123n58, 126n63, 128, 129, 142, 151n53, 154n58, 160, 160n5, 161, 172–176, 172n34, 175n44, 179, 180, 186, 203–206, 206n48, 210, 210n59, 210n60, 212, 216, 217, 219, 220, 224–226, 225n25 Andalusia, 11, 31 Animal fables, 227, 228 Annihilation, 16, 35, 87, 113, 115, 116, 119, 126, 134, 166, 216 ʿAnqa ̄ (legendary bird), 12, 39 Ansāri of Herāt, ‘Abdullah Al-, 52, 60 Anselm of Canterbury, 20, 127n66, 223 ʿārif, see Gnostic Asceticism, 10, 10n24, 30, 30n118, 47, 48, 52, 55, 106, 108, 109, 114, 116, 117, 133, 137, 179, 208n54, 220, 234 See also Desert Astronomy, 196 At ̣ṭār of Nishapur (Farı ̄d ud-Dı ̄n At ̣ṭār), 6, 28, 33, 216 Manṭiq-ut-t ̣air, 6, 7n15, 183 See also Persian Audition, 36, 84, 89, 118, 132, 141, 166, 196, 201, 218, 224, 226 Augustine, 6n10, 28, 76n3, 95n63, 101, 128, 128n67, 175 Augustine of Hippo Confessions, 128n67, 175 Letters, 40n161 Averroes/Ibn Rushḍ, 29, 31 Averroes, see Ibn Rushḍ Avicenna/Ibn Sı ̄nā, 29

Avicenna, see Ibn Sı ̄nā Awḥādi, Rukn al-Dın̄, 53, 54, 56, 69 B Ba ̄n, 3, 13, 43, 84, 231 Barzakh, 58, 59, 231 Bellarmino, Roberto, 4 De Gemitu columbae, 4 Berber, 31 Bernard of Clairvaux, 101n74, 120, 122 Bestiaries, 206 See also Animal fables Bewilderment, 81, 191 Bezels of Wisdom, The, 14, 15n38, 22n74, 39, 57–61, 189n16 See also Ibn ʿArabı ̄, Muhyddin, Fuṣus̄ ̣ al-ḥikam Bible 1 Corinthians, 171, 171n32 1 Peter, 171, 171n32 Canticles, 5, 69n72, 71, 105, 105n1, 105n2, 122, 123, 127, 147, 148n44, 172, 180, 204 Douay-Rheims, 132n4 Ecclesiastes, 216 Esther, 203–204n43, 204 Galatians, 50, 114, 120, 120n52, 126, 126n65 Hebrews, 171, 171n32, 172, 172n36, 175, 175n45 Isaiah, 51n8, 68, 68n71, 72, 72n81, 147, 147n43, 173, 173n39, 223, 223n21, 225 Job, 14, 70, 70n77, 172, 172n36, 187, 187n10, 205, 221 John, 50, 51n8, 60, 72, 72n81, 101n74, 121, 121n54, 174, 174n40, 179, 223 King James Bible, 132n4

 INDEX 

Luke, 10, 51, 51n8, 70, 72, 132, 132n4, 150, 150n51, 204 Matthew, 60n52, 72, 72n81, 147, 147n43, 223, 223n21 New Testament, 63 Old Testament, 210 proverbs, 96, 96n65, 97 Psalms, 6, 6n10, 31, 63, 70, 70n76, 91, 91n48, 92, 92n51, 95, 112, 112n27, 148, 148n44, 180–182, 181n51, 182n54, 187, 187n10 Revelation, 147, 147n43, 225, 225n26 Romans, 187, 188n10 Blood, 42, 59, 68, 82, 97, 102, 111, 125, 126, 129, 131–156, 174, 175n45, 176, 210, 218, 225, 225n26 See also Jesus Body, 5, 7n15, 18, 21, 25, 37, 38, 42, 43, 53, 54, 58, 62, 63, 71, 82, 93, 94, 96, 100n73, 105, 106, 108, 111–113, 118, 119, 121, 124–126, 129, 134, 140–143, 146, 149–151, 154, 156, 175, 176, 205, 209–211, 218 Bridal, 61, 62, 117, 144, 174, 204 Bridal (language), 61, 62, 70, 88, 144, 174, 195, 204, 208 C Calila e Dimna, see Kalila wa-Dimna Canticles, 5, 5n9, 69n72, 71, 105, 105n1, 105n2, 122, 123, 127, 147, 148n44, 159, 172, 172n35, 180, 204 See also Bible, Canticles; Bible, Old Testament Capellanus, Andreas, 5, 29

265

Chastising of God’s Children, The, 160, 160n6, 225 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 43n166 Canterbury Tales, The, 7 Parliament of Fowls, The, 43n166 Children, 17, 49, 50, 51n8, 51n10, 57, 82, 149, 159, 178, 201, 223n21, 224, 225 childhood, 166, 166n6, 231 Christology, 48–54 See also Jesus Colonialism, 28 Comparative philology, 26 Compassion, 8, 24, 39, 41, 77n7, 95, 96, 125, 196, 224, 229, 233 Conditions of eligibility, 67, 149 Conference of the Birds, The, 6, 7n13, 7n15, 189 See also Atṭ ạ ̄r of Nishapur (Farı ̄d ud-Dı ̄n Atṭ ạ ̄r), Manṭiq-ut-ṭair Confession, 19, 94, 98, 100, 119, 119n47, 154, 176 Conscience, 76, 90, 92, 93, 98–100, 99n69, 99n70, 101n74, 231 Contemplative, 4, 6, 6n11, 6n12, 8–11, 12n30, 16, 18, 21, 22, 29, 41, 48, 54, 56, 58, 59, 66, 73, 75–77, 79, 87, 91, 102, 105, 108, 110, 113, 118, 119, 129, 133, 134, 144, 156, 160, 161, 175, 183, 185–189, 216, 217, 219, 221, 222, 222n17 Contrition, 93, 98, 119, 121, 122 Cordoba, 32 See also Al-Andalus Cross, 6, 6n11, 27–32, 53, 54, 68, 69, 71, 76, 102, 117, 119–121, 120n52, 125, 126, 149, 151, 153, 155, 176, 178–180, 224 See also Jesus, passion

266 

INDEX

D Dante Alighieri, 4 Inferno, 4 Decolonial, 26, 26n98 Desert, 3, 13, 34, 34n135, 36, 54, 84, 114, 135, 141, 159, 161, 162, 165–167, 169, 183, 192, 215, 221 Desert Fathers, 72, 183 Desert Mothers, 160, 183 Desire, 4, 4n5, 22, 33, 36, 39, 43, 59, 65, 79, 110, 118, 127–129, 135, 138, 152, 155, 161–163, 165, 166, 170n29, 171, 171n32, 190, 208, 226, 228 Dhikr, 36, 88, 89, 109, 118, 132, 140, 142, 145, 156, 163, 220, 226, 232 See also Remembrance Dionysius, Pseudo-, 10 Dove ringdove, 5n6, 12, 167, 215, 229 turtledove, 3, 4, 4n5, 43, 43n166 Dream of the Rood, The, 206n51

Feminist approaches, 107 Fourth Lateran Council, 119 Fusu ̄s al-hikam, 14, 22n74

E Egypt, 15, 16, 22, 23 Ephrem of Syria, 29 Essence, 39, 58, 63, 80, 81, 84, 88, 118, 136, 139, 144–146, 148, 171, 172, 189, 193, 196, 197, 203, 215 Eucharist, 125, 131, 146, 146n42, 148, 153, 153n55, 174, 174n43, 175 Exegesis (scriptural), 188

H Hali Meiðhad, 91, 91n48, 152n54 Ḥ allāj, Mansūr al-, 33, 40, 47 Hawa, 39, 232 Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, 11, 17, 82 See also Ibn Tufail, Muhammad Ibn ʿAbd al-Malik Heart, 6, 7n14, 8, 14, 18, 32, 35, 36, 41, 50–52, 60n52, 66, 68–70, 73, 75–79, 79n17, 79n18, 81–85, 83n29, 87–102, 90n45, 92n51, 98n67, 99n70, 100n72, 107, 110, 111, 113, 116, 124, 125, 129, 132, 134, 135, 139, 141, 144, 148, 149, 151, 153, 162, 163, 166, 167, 174n40, 177, 179, 181, 189–192, 195,

F Fana, 87, 88, 113, 115, 119, 232 Fārābı ̄, Abu Nasr al-, 29 Fāti ̣ma bint Ibn al-Muthannā, 21

G Gabriel, 48, 50, 58, 59, 72, 117 Gabriel (archangel), 48, 50, 58, 59, 72, 73, 117 Gemstones, 14, 15, 65, 68, 70n78, 97, 149, 174, 205, 206, 208, 209n57, 210 lapidaries, 206, 208, 209n57 Al-Ghazāli, Abu Hamid Muhammad Ibn Muhammad, 17, 32, 52, 79n17, 135 Ihya ulum ̄ al-dı ̄n, 52 Ghazāli, Ahmad Ibn Muhammad, 183 Gnostic, 4, 22, 28, 41, 60, 63, 79, 83, 84, 86, 87, 139, 166, 167, 169, 189–192, 197, 231 Granada, 31 Greek, 31, 41 Gregory the Great, 6n10, 92

 INDEX 

197, 199, 200, 202, 203, 205, 207, 211, 215, 219, 220, 231–233 Hebrew, 16, 77, 105, 204, 227 Hell, 68, 170n29, 179 Hermit, 30 See also Anchorite History of emotions, 8, 36–38, 42, 129, 212, 220, 221 Hoopoe (bird), 7, 7n14, 55, 206 I Iberian Peninsula, 31 See also Al-Andalus Ibn al-Fāriḍ, ‘Umar, 11, 15–17, 15n40, 15n41, 15n42, 16n44, 21, 34, 34n136, 35n137, 36, 70n73, 75, 78, 80, 81, 87–89, 87n36, 106, 109, 112–119, 113n30, 115n35, 115n38, 116n39, 117n40, 117n41, 121–124, 126, 128, 129, 132–147, 133n6, 138n26, 139n27, 140n30, 141n32, 151, 156, 159, 161, 163, 164, 169–172, 170n27, 170n30, 171n31, 185n2, 186, 194–197, 195n29, 211, 217, 219, 220, 224, 226, 227 Al-Khamriyya, 15, 16, 112–114, 132, 133n6, 137–144, 151, 156, 163, 195, 220 Dı ̄wān, 16, 112–114, 129, 133, 138, 138n26, 194 grandson ‘Alı ̄, 15, 133n6 Naẓm al-suluk̄ (Ta’iyah al-kubra), 16, 34, 36, 75, 78, 80, 81, 87–89, 112–118, 112n28, 113n30, 124, 128, 136, 137n19, 141, 161, 169–172, 195, 220, 226

267

Ibn al-Muqaffa, 227, 227n31 See also Persian Ibn ʿArabı ̄, Muhyddin, 3–5, 4n2, 11–17, 14n36, 14n37, 21, 22, 31, 32, 34, 35, 39, 41, 48, 48n3, 56–63, 63n58, 66, 71–73, 75, 79, 80, 82–88, 92, 95, 101, 106, 109–112, 118, 119, 122–124, 126–129, 133–137, 139–141, 143, 159, 161, 163–170, 186, 189–193, 196, 197, 199n36, 201, 210, 211, 216–224, 218n8 Al-Ittiha ̄d al-kawnı ̄ fi ḥaḍrat al-ishhad̄ al-ʿaynı ̄ bi-mahdūr al-shajara al-insa ̄niyya wa-l-­ tuyūr al-arbaʿa al-ruḥan̄ iyya, 12, 79 Fus ̣u ̄ṣ al-ḥikam, 14, 15, 21, 39, 57–61, 82–83, 133, 164–165, 189, 224 Futuh̄ ̣a ̄t al-Makkı ̄yya, 12 Kitab̄ al-ifsa ̄r ‘an nata’̄ ij afsār, 86 Tarjuman̄ al-ashwāq, 3, 4, 12–14, 21, 35, 39, 43, 61–63, 78, 79n18, 81, 83–88, 110–113, 118, 119, 127–129, 135, 136, 139, 143, 161, 164–169, 171, 189, 197, 221, 224 Ibn Ḥ azm, ʿAlı ̄ Ibn Aḥmad, 4, 5, 29, 31, 229 Ṭ awq al-ḥamāma, 4, 29, 229 Ibn Rushḍ, Abū al Walı ̄d Muḥammad Aḥmad, 29, 31 Ibn Sı ̄nā, Abū ʿAli, 29 Ibn Tufail, Muhammad Ibn ʿAbd al-Malik, 11, 17–19, 17n54, 18n56, 31, 82, 109, 110, 160 Ḥ ayy Ibn Yaqzan, 11, 17, 18, 82 Imagination, 95, 192, 208 Incarnation, theology of, 148 Intuition, 135 ʿIraqı ̄, Fakhr al-din, 11

268 

INDEX

ʿIsa, see Jesus Ishmael (prophet), 14, 189 ‘Ishq, 39, 40, 110, 232 J Jesus, 14, 21, 41, 47–73, 47n2, 48n4, 51n8, 52n12, 52n13, 52n14, 52n15, 53n17, 53n18, 54n20, 54n21, 54n23, 54n24, 56n30, 56n33, 58n46, 58n47, 66n66, 109, 109n18, 119, 120n52, 121, 121n54, 124, 148, 149, 151–153, 155, 161, 169, 171, 174, 175, 177, 180, 207, 211, 219, 225n26 Christ as wine-press, 146, 147n43 Christology, 48–54 Mother-Christ, 178, 223–225, 227 passion, 68, 102 Jewels, see Gemstones Jinn, 12, 142, 170, 195, 221, 221n12 John of Chrysostom, 29 John of Fécamp, 223 John of Howden, 6, 6n12, 8 Rossignos, 8 John of the Cross, 6, 6n11, 16n44 John the Baptist, 60, 72, 72n81 Judaism, 31, 49, 50, 50n7, 51n11 Torah, 49, 50, 50n7, 51n11 K Ka’ba, 85, 190 Kalila wa-Dimna, 227, 228 Khalwa, 36, 109, 145, 232 Koran, see Qur’an L Lapidaries, see Gemstones Listening, see Audition Liturgy, 64

Love, 3, 47, 75, 105, 131, 159, 195, 215 Love Rune, 11, 20, 22, 70n78, 160, 206–212, 206n49, 206n50, 208n55 Luqmān (prophet), 14, 133 Lyrics, 20–21, 67, 147 M Macarius, Pseudo-, 29 Mahabba, 39, 233 Maimonides, Moses, 188, 189 Guide to the Perplexed, 188 Mary, 10, 10n24, 19, 22n75, 36n145, 48–52, 58, 59, 67n70, 68, 70–72, 80n22, 120n51, 121, 122, 122n56, 124, 124n61, 140, 148, 154, 154n57, 174n43, 179, 181n52, 223n20 Massignon, Louis, 40, 47 See also Ḥ allāj, Mansūr alMaternity, 43, 223–227 See also Jesus; Children Mecca, 4n2, 11, 13, 15, 16 Medical texts, 29 Medina, 4n2, 11, 13, 15, 163 Memory, see Remembrance Mercy, 41, 83, 96, 125, 127, 153, 176, 189, 191, 224, 226 Monastery, 63, 63n59, 64, 66, 73, 138–140, 144n38, 163, 192, 231 Monk, 19, 64, 65, 85, 192 See also Monastery Moses, 14, 63, 83, 88, 91, 171, 188, 188n14, 224 Moses (prophet), 14, 63, 83, 86, 86n32, 88, 91, 91n47, 165n20, 171, 224, 224n23 Muhammad, 7n15, 11, 14, 15, 15n39, 17, 40, 41n162, 50, 57, 78, 83, 88, 89, 108, 117, 142, 164, 171, 183, 183n56, 210, 215, 232

 INDEX 

Muhammad (prophet), 14, 15, 15n39, 50, 57, 78, 78n11, 79, 83, 88, 88n38, 89, 108, 113n31, 117, 142, 164, 171, 187n9, 192n20, 210, 215 as seal of the prophets, 15, 15n39, 50, 83, 142, 210 Multilingualism, 31 Music, 145, 163 See also Audition Muwashshah, 16, 16n49, 17n51, 91, 162, 199 Mystical, 9, 56n33, 78, 79, 133, 162, 222 See also Contemplative N Nabulusi, ‘Abd al-Ghani al-, 65 Nafs, 16, 35, 60, 77, 81, 113, 143, 169, 233 Nazm al-suluk, 112n28, 114–118, 123, 136, 141, 195 See also Ibn al-Fāriḍ, ‘Umar Neoplatonic, 28, 30 Neoplatonism, 28, 30, 40 Niẓām of Isfahan, 13, 21 Noah (prophet), 14, 83n29, 115, 171 O Old English, 94, 126, 151, 179n47, 186n5, 204, 206n51 See also Dream of the Rood, The; Wanderer, The Oneness of being, see Waḥdat al-wuju ̄d P Paradise, 170n29, 189 Paradox, 113, 126, 199, 200, 205, 220, 221

269

Penitence, 9, 119 Persian, 6, 11, 13, 23, 33, 48, 53, 54, 73, 217, 219, 227, 227n31 Pickthall, Muhammad Marmaduke, 49n5 See also Qur’an Pore Caitiff, The, 225 Postcolonial, 26, 26n98, 27 Prayer, 18, 20n65, 60, 61, 88, 94, 95, 116, 124, 125, 127, 133, 145, 162, 180, 199, 203, 204 Pseudo-Macarius, 29 Q Qalb, 77, 77n7, 78, 79n17, 82, 84, 102, 111, 199, 220, 233 Queer approaches, 22n75 Qur’an, 85 surah 1, 41 surah 3, 48, 49, 56 surah 5, 50n6, 50n7, 51, 52n11, 60, 146n41 surah 6, 78n10 surah 10, 187n9 surah 11, 221, 221n13 surah 12, 51, 166, 166n21 surah 13, 187n9 surah 15, 118 surah 16, 62, 62n57, 187n9 surah 17, 88n38 surah 19, 48, 49, 59n49, 59n50 surah 21, 187 surah 23, 58, 58n48 surah 25, 58n48 surah 27, 7n14, 62, 62n56 surah 33, 15, 132, 164, 164n19 surah 38, 62, 62n57 surah 42, 198n35 surah 45, 113n31, 187n9 surah 50, 118n45 surah 53, 89, 172, 215, 216

270 

INDEX

Qur’an (cont.) surah 55, 58n48 surah 65, 168n23 surah 71, 83n29 surah 73, 108 surah 82, 87, 88n37 surah 89, 189n15 surah 112, 51 R Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya, 32, 39, 118 Reason (faculty), 80 Reconquista, 31 Remembrance, 4, 36, 42, 84, 88, 89, 95, 109, 111, 118, 131, 132, 132n4, 138, 140–142, 145–147, 149, 152, 156, 163, 179–181, 220, 225, 226 Ring of the Dove, The, see Ibn Ḥ azm, ʿAlı ̄ Ibn Aḥmad, Al-Ṭ awq al-ḥamāma Rossignos, see John of Howden Rumi, 23n78, 32n131, 54–59, 54n22, 54n24, 56n30, 56n35, 56n36, 56n37, 56n38, 57n44, 66, 69, 71, 73, 81n23, 87n35, 165n20, 168n22, 170n29, 219, 223 Rūmı ̄, Jalāl ad-Dı ̄n Muhammad, 11, 48, 54–59, 66, 69, 71, 73, 219, 223 Ruminatio, 96 S Sāmirı ̄, 86, 87 Sanskrit, 227 Seal of the prophets, the, see Muhammad Self-mortification, see Asceticism Seth (prophet), 14, 189

Shadow puppet theatre, 34 Sheba (queen), 62 Shi’r al-ja ̄hili, 12 Shushtarı ̄, Abu al-Ḥ asan al-, 11, 16–17, 21, 31, 41, 43, 48, 63–66, 71, 73, 75, 80, 89–92, 132, 137–147, 156, 161–164, 168, 169, 172, 186, 198–203, 202n40, 203n41, 207, 208, 210, 211, 217, 219, 220 Sicily, 31 Silence, 25, 49, 152, 219, 220 Simorgh, 7, 33, 197, 198, 217 Sı ̄murgh, see Simorgh Solitude, 18, 36, 72, 84, 89, 110, 116, 194 Song of Solomon, see Bible, Canticles; Bible, Old Testament Song of Songs, see Bible, Canticles; Bible, Old Testament Speech of the Birds, The, 6, 7, 7n15, 33, 54–56, 54n25, 55n26, 55n27, 55n28, 55n29, 56n32, 57n39, 183n56, 216 See also Atṭ ạ ̄r of Nishapur (Farı ̄d ud-Dı ̄n Atṭ ạ ̄r), Manṭiq-ut-ṭair Sponsa Christi, see Bridal (language) Suf̄ , 30, 32 Sufism, 13n34, 17, 28, 28n107, 30–41, 30n116, 30n118, 31n121, 32n130, 40n157, 40n158, 58n47, 76, 76n4, 78n8, 85n31, 110n24, 113n32, 188, 218 Proto-Sufism, 30 Sweetness, 114, 122, 123, 128, 129, 133–137, 144, 147, 148n44, 149, 151–156, 177–181, 208, 219 Symbolic, 192 Syria, 23

 INDEX 

T Ta’iyah al-kubra, see Ibn al-Fāriḍ, ‘Umar, Naẓm al-sulu ̄k (Ta’iyah al-kubra) Talkyng of þe Loue of God, ATalkyng of þe Loue of God, A, 19 Tarjumān al-Ashwaq, 3, 4, 12, 35, 61–63 Tasawwuf, 30 Taste dhawq, 135 sapere, 80 See also Sweetness Tawḥıd̄, 51 Thomas of Hales, 11, 20, 22, 186, 206, 206n49, 206n50, 207, 208n55, 210, 211 Love Rune, 11, 20, 22, 186, 198, 206–212 Torah, see Judaism U ‘Udhra (tribe), 12, 16 Union, 10, 16, 21, 33, 35, 36, 47, 78, 79, 89, 117, 133, 136, 154, 162, 165, 167, 169–171, 175, 196, 197, 209, 227 Universal Tree and Four Birds, 12 See also Ibn ʿArabı ̄, Muhyddin, Al-Ittihād al-kawnı ̄ Ureisun of God, 19, 147, 152–154, 161, 177–180, 220, 224 See also Wooing Group, On god ureisun of swiðe god almihti V Veil, 34, 80, 168, 169, 176, 185, 189–191, 194, 195, 197, 198, 198n35, 201, 221 Vernacular, 17, 66, 67, 182

271

Vigils, 116, 133, 134, 203, 234 Virginity, 208 W Waḥdat al-wujud̄ , 32, 34, 38, 234 Wanderer, The, 192n5 Wilderness, 6n10, 49, 72, 82, 114, 160, 165–167, 173, 221 See also Desert Wine, 15, 16, 42, 65, 105, 105n1, 131–156, 138n26, 147n43, 163, 174, 203n43, 220, 232 khamriyya (poetic tradition), 15, 137–139, 141, 142, 163, 220 Þe Wohunge of ure Lauerde, 19, 53, 155, 161, 207, 210 Wohunge, see Wooing Group, Þe Wohunge of ure Lauerde Wooing Group, 9–11, 19–22, 48, 66–73, 90, 91, 93, 93n53, 106, 111, 111n26, 119, 123, 123n60, 124n61, 125, 132, 132n3, 146–156, 148n44, 150n48, 151n52, 160, 177, 206, 210, 217, 219, 220 On god ureisun of swiðe god almihti, 19 On God Ureisun of ure Lefdi, 19, 20, 148–149 Lofsong of ure Lefdi, 19, 140, 148, 153–155 Lofsong of ure Louerde, 119, 123 Þe Wohunge of ure Lauerde, 19 Y Yasmı ̄na Umm al-Fuqarā, 21 Z Zoroastrianism, 31 Zuhdiyya, see Asceticism