Insight Editions · No. 149
On the Mysteries of Fasting
Ibn al-Arabi · Translated by Aisha Bewley; edited by Laleh Bakhtiar
Ibn al-Arabi interprets Islamic fasting through legal disagreements and Sufi metaphysics, examining abstention, divine attributes, lunar timing, the Night of Power, and retreat.
A study guide to On the Mysteries of Fasting by Ibn al-Arabi, translated by Aisha Bewley; edited by Laleh Bakhtiar. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
Overview
It follows the book's own order: the series foreword and editor's preface, the eighty-nine chapters of the treatise grouped into five movements, and Appendix A, al-Ghazzali's short account of fasting from The Alchemy of Happiness. Quotations are short and exact; everything else is paraphrase.
Argument Map
How the Book Is Built
The volume is a single long chapter of a much larger work, split by the translator into eighty-nine numbered chapters and 523 numbered paragraphs (the paragraph numbers begin at 65, continuing the series). Around it sit four kinds of material, and a reader should know which voice is speaking:
- Seyyed Hossein Nasr, the series editor, in a short foreword dated Washington DC, June 1997.
- Laleh Bakhtiar, the editor, in a one-page preface (Chicago 2009) that dates the two authors and quotes James Morris on the importance of this part of the Futuhat.
- Ibn al-Arabi, in the treatise: a long opening poem, then chapters that each begin with law and end in interpretation, with short poems, dreams and anecdotes from his own life.
- Al-Ghazzali, in Appendix A, translated by Jay R. Crook, as a plain overview of the rules for readers new to the terms, with the translator's endnotes.
The book closes with a general index and pages of advertisements for other titles.
Chapter Map
| Part | Book chapters | Pages | Central question |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Foreword, Preface, opening poem, ch. 1-3 (paras 65-107) | xxiii-15 | What is a fast, and why does God call it His own? |
| 2 | Ch. 4-28 (paras 108-213) | 15-61 | When does the month start, what breaks the fast, who is excused? |
| 3 | Ch. 29-42 (paras 214-287) | 61-91 | What do expiation, forgetfulness and fast-breaking teach? |
| 4 | Ch. 43-59 (paras 288-410) | 92-155 | How do the days of the month and week become stations? |
| 5 | Ch. 60-89 (paras 411-523) | 156-215 | The moment, the feasts, the Night of Power and the retreat |
| 6 | Appendix A (al-Ghazzali) | 217-228 | How does the plain account compare? |
| 7 | Synthesis and Glossary (editor) | All | What follows, and what is it good for today? |
Ten Ideas in Brief
- Fasting is a non-action. It is defined by what one does not do, so it is hidden and cannot be shown off.
- "The fast is Mine." God claims fasting alone among acts and repays it Himself.
- No like. Fasting has no like among acts of worship, as God has no like among things.
- Abstention and elevation. The Arabic word for fasting carries both meanings; the faster holds back and is raised.
- The names govern the hours. The name Ramadan rules the day, the Originator rules the breaking, the Withholder rules the dawn.
- Law first, then meaning. Every inward reading is anchored in a ruling, a hadith or a verse.
- Illness is inclination; travel is wayfaring. The legal excuses become maps of the spiritual path.
- The right of God comes first. In debts, expiations and the order of prayer and food, God's due is settled before the creature's.
- The Sufi is the child of the moment. Each time has its own judgment; strictly, a missed moment cannot be made up.
- Mercy precedes wrath. The treatise ends with a God who is pure good, and a punishment that is accidental, not essential.
Editor's Note on Method
Dates appear only where the book prints them, and where the book prints them inconsistently that is noted.
Part 1. The Frame and the First Principle
The front matter places the treatise in a series and dates its authors; the opening poem and the first three chapters state the principle that everything else unfolds. Fasting is a refraining, refraining has no like, and what has no like belongs to God.
The Foreword and the Preface
Nasr's foreword is a statement of purpose for the whole series: clear, readable translations of masterpieces of Islamic thought, which "belong to all human beings who are interested in true knowledge in whatever form it appears." It carries no discussion of fasting.
Bakhtiar's preface does three things in a page. It dates the authors as printed: Ibn al-Arabi "1165-1245 CE" and al-Ghazzali "1058-1111 CE." It quotes James Morris, who calls Chapters 66-72 of the Futuhat, the chapters on purification, prayer, alms, fasting and pilgrimage, "almost certainly the most detailed and exacting phenomenology of spiritual experience in the Islamic tradition," presented as an "irenic reconciliation" of contrasting legal views. And it explains Appendix A: al-Ghazzali uses the same sources, Qur'an and hadith, but Ibn al-Arabi "adds level upon level" of meaning to what may look like a simple practice.
The Opening Poem
The treatise begins with a long poem in which the speaker addresses his own self. Its argument is the book's argument in compressed form. The poem asks whether the fast is "abstention without elevation" or elevation without restraint, and answers that they are both together. It tells the reader:
...
The fast belongs to God, so do not be ignorant.
You are merely the place of its manifestation.
Three images in the poem return later. The self is made feminine, receptive, like the earth that serves as a bed for what God sows. The intellect is bound by the law: intellects "surrender to what their proof refutes" and believe without perceiving. And the fast divests: news has come of a prescribed fast "which will divest you," that is, strip the servant of any claim. The prose begins with a heading that is also the book's last lesson: there is nothing absolute in the world of possibility.
Chapter 1. What a Fast Is
Abstention and elevation
The Arabic word for fasting, sawm, means holding back, and an old usage applies it to the day "when it has reached its highest point," the noon at full height. Ibn al-Arabi cites the poet Imr al-Qays for that usage. Fasting is called fasting because it stands higher than every other act of worship: God raised it by denying that it is like any other act, removed it from the servants' ownership and claimed it for Himself.
A non-action with no like
Ibn al-Arabi then makes a careful distinction. God is a real existent of whom nothing is like. Fasting is "a non-existent intelligible": it has no like because it is not a thing at all. The same phrase, "no like," is said of both, but for opposite reasons, and the faster must not confuse a borrowed absence with the divine presence.
"It is Mine"
The heart of the chapter is the sacred saying transmitted by Muslim from Abu Hurayra. God says that every action of the son of Adam belongs to him "except the fast. It is Mine, and I repay him for it." Fasting is a protection; the faster should not speak obscenely or loudly, and if insulted should say "I am fasting." The smell of the faster's mouth is "more delectable to God than the scent of musk," and the faster has two joys: at breaking the fast, and at meeting his Lord, when he "rejoices in his fast."
| Phrase in the saying | Ibn al-Arabi's reading |
|---|---|
| "It is Mine" | Fasting is the attribute of timeless self-reliance (samadiyya), transcending food. God strips it from the servant and ascribes it to Himself. |
| "I repay him for it" | The fast passes back to its owner; only one who has no like meets the One who has no like. |
| "I am fasting" | A report of non-action: I am leaving the act you are doing to me. The faster disconnects himself from the curser's act. |
| The breath and the musk | The breath carries the good words "I am fasting." With God it is not like musk with us; His perception of scent resembles nothing. |
| "He rejoices in his fast" | Not "in meeting his Lord": he rejoices in the rank of having no like, by which he sees. |
| The joy of breaking | Giving the animal soul its due is a right God made obligatory; the gnostic gives it "by the hand of God." |
Abu Talib al-Makki supplies a summary: "Whoever finds in his journey, that is his repayment."
The smell of the faster
An anecdote gives the doctrine a body. In Mecca, by the minaret at the Hazawwara gate, Ibn al-Arabi sat with Musa ibn Muhammad al-Qabbab, who kept food with a smell everyone found offensive. Knowing the hadith that angels dislike what offends people, Ibn al-Arabi resolved to tell him to remove it. That night God told him in a dream: "Its smell with Me is not like its smell with you." Al-Qabbab wept and prostrated in thanks, and then removed the food anyway: "good manners with the divine law is better."
The Gate of the Quenched and the three ranks
A hadith from Sahl ibn Sad speaks of a gate of the Garden called al-Rayyan, "the Quenched," through which only fasters enter. Quenching is completion: the faster who has been thirsty is filled. The chapter closes with a plan of ranks that the rest of the book assumes.
| Rank | What is held back | What breaks it |
|---|---|---|
| The common fast | Food, drink, intercourse, as the law defines | The legal breakers |
| The fast of the self (the elite) | The limbs, by the self's command | Acts of the limbs God forbids |
| The fast of the heart | The heart, made vast enough to contain God ("The heart of My servant contains Me") | Filling the heart with other than its Creator |
Chapter 2. The Kinds of Fast
A short classification follows. Obligatory fasts are Ramadan and its make-up days, fasts owed for a cause (expiation), and vows, which are "extracted from the miserly." Recommended fasts are tied to a time (the middle days of the month, Mondays and Thursdays), to a state (fasting every other day, which he calls the most balanced, or fasting while striving in the way of God), or unrestricted. The map is worth keeping; Parts 3 and 4 work through it.
Chapter 3. Ramadan
Gates opened, gates locked, satans chained
The famous hadith says that in Ramadan the gates of the Garden are opened, the gates of the Fire locked and the satans chained. Each clause is read inwardly. The Garden is a veil, and the fast is a veiled act that only God knows. The fire is the fire of nature, which turns on itself when denied fuel. The satans are the attribute of distance; Satan runs through a person like blood, and hunger and thirst block his canals.
Ramadan as a name of God
Ibn al-Arabi accepts a weak hadith that Ramadan is one of the names of God and strengthens it with the Qur'an's command that whoever witnesses the month should fast it (2:185): Ramadan is the only month named with a divine name. The Qur'an was sent down in it, on the Night of Power; Book, Qur'an and Criterion name its ranks. One difference matters: our fast can be broken, but God's fast admits no breaking.
The fast-breaker and the eater
God discloses Himself every night of the year, but His self-disclosure at the breaking of a fast is not like His self-disclosure to one who did not fast. The faster who eats at sunset is called a "fast-breaker"; the one who never fasted is only called an "eater." Breaking presupposes something held. Rising at night to pray draws its strength from food, and that strength, like the night, is unseen.
A hadith warns against saying one has prayed through every night of Ramadan and fasted it all: the month contains fasting and breaking, rising and sleep, and no one should claim to have filled it. The day of the fast, he adds, has a first and a last, dawn and sunset, as the One without like is called the First and the Last; but its first is not like its last, because the faster begins described by the fast and ends described by breaking it.
Who must fast, and how a month is counted
The fast is obligatory on the healthy, adult, sane, resident Muslim, from dawn to sunset. A month is twenty-nine or thirty days. On a cloudy night most scholars complete Shaban to thirty; Ibn al-Arabi says to consult the astronomers, and if the moon was in a position to be seen, act on it; otherwise complete thirty. He adds a numerology of three, thirteen, twenty-three and thirty, in which the sun stands for the spirit and the moon for the self, and he sets aside the solar calendars of other peoples as unnecessary.
Part 2. The Month, the Day and the Excuses
Chapters 4 to 28 are the core legal section. Each takes one question, lists the opinions of the jurists, states Ibn al-Arabi's ruling and then reads the question as a map of the inner life. The sighting of the moon becomes the rising of gnosis; the sick and the traveller become the inclining heart and the wayfarer.
The Method in One Diagram
This is what Morris, quoted in the preface, calls an irenic reconciliation. Ibn al-Arabi rarely says a rival jurist is simply wrong. He rules on the outward question, then shows that each opinion describes a real state of some traveller.
Chapters 4-7. Seeing the Moon and Reading the Day
Clouds and calculation (ch. 4)
When clouds hide the new moon, most scholars complete thirty days; some fast the doubtful day; a minority reckon the courses of the sun and moon, a view the book attributes to Ibn al-Shikhkhir. Ibn al-Arabi sides with reckoning. The Prophet's words that his community is "an unlettered nation" that neither writes nor calculates describe a fact, he implies, not a rule against calculation.
Inwardly, the new moon of gnosis rises in the heart from the name Ramadan, and the faster fasts; it rises from the name Originator of the heavens and the earth (Fatir, a word that also suggests breaking the fast), and he breaks it. The cloud is the interspace (barzakh) that veils; the gnostic then calculates by the moon of his own intellect, state by state.
Sighting by day (ch. 5)
If the crescent is seen during the day, he rules: before noon it belongs to the previous night, after noon to the coming one. Noon is the "Stopping-place of Equality," where master and servant are hard to tell apart, as in the verse "thou hast not thrown when thou hast thrown" (8:17). Two kinds of witness map onto the two halves of the day.
The lone witness (ch. 6)
A man who sees the moon alone must fast (one early scholar excepted), and Ibn al-Arabi adds that he must also break the fast on his own sighting. Jurists dispute whether one just witness suffices or two. His inward reading is one of the book's clearest statements of method: the two witnesses are the Book and the Sunna. Al-Junayd said the knowledge of the Sufis "is limited by the Book and the" Sunna; Abu Yazid al-Bistami's companions looked for Qur'anic grounds for his ecstasies. What the two witnesses do not confirm is neither accepted nor rejected. And the gnostic's knowledge differs from the philosopher's not in its object but in its route: "The kingdom is the same but the means varies."
When the day begins (ch. 7)
Does the fast begin at the spreading white dawn or the red? He rules: when the dawn becomes clear to the one looking, as the verse says, until the white thread is distinct from the black (2:187). The names divide the day between them.
The name "fast-breaker" governs those excused: the sick, the traveller, the nursing and pregnant. White dawn stands for pure belief, red for independent reasoning mixed with imagination. And a moral follows from the rule that one may eat until the dawn is clear: a servant is not blamed for failing to recognise God in His places of manifestation until it becomes clear to him. The hadith "I am his hearing and his sight" is the dawn that eventually makes it clear.
Chapters 8-12. What Breaks the Fast
| Chapter | Question | Ruling as given | Inward reading |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8 | The three breakers | Food, drink, intercourse | Food is the knowledge of tasting; drink a middle self-disclosure that needs a container, so an "other"; intercourse is pleasure in pairing, which contradicts having no like |
| 9 | What reaches the stomach or brain by other routes | Depends on whether the perception is the same | Sages and gnostics may reach the same result by different means; similitude, "as if you were seeing Him" |
| 10 | Kissing | Permitted, forbidden, or allowed for the old and not the young | The kiss is the place of speech. Speech and vision do not join: "If He speaks to you, He does not let you see." The old are heirs who convey; the young are beginners |
| 11 | Cupping | Allowed; the Prophet was cupped while fasting | The Reviver and the Withholder are "sisters"; letting blood seeks the Benefitter |
| 12 | Vomiting | Involuntary: no make-up; induced: make up | The stomach is a treasury, the self its king; what enters differs from what leaves |
Moses at the sand (ch. 10)
The chapter on kissing turns into a reflection on Moses, who asked to see God after being spoken to. Ibn al-Arabi reports that a Suhrawardi teacher held that seeing and speech can join; he replies that such a man witnessed the interspace, the imagination, where they do join, not God as He is. Then he gives a rare personal note: he tasted Moses' station in a little moisture in the sand, "the size of the palm of a hand," and "rejoiced since it was water." Moses had gone looking for fire. The sign arrives in the form one needs, not the form one seeks.
The body is always under some name (ch. 12)
The vomiting chapter states a principle used throughout: the body is never without a governing divine name, and its predisposition decides which name rules, as a land's people determine which ruler can govern them.
Similitude (ch. 9)
Chapter 9, on substances that reach the body by routes other than the mouth, is short but sets a principle about knowledge. Sages and the people of God may reach the same results, one by reflection and one by unveiling. If the route differs but the perception is the same, the case is the same; if the perceptions differ, the ruling differs. The test case is the hadith "Worship God as if you were seeing Him": the "as if" is a similitude, an image in the imagination, and the faster must know the difference between the image and what it images.
Chapters 13-15. Intention and Impurity
Most jurists make a night intention a condition of the fast. Ibn al-Arabi notes the problem: Ramadan arrives by God's will, not the faster's wish. Names of opposite meaning, Harmer and Benefitter, belong to one essence; judgments follow states, as wine turned to vinegar becomes lawful. A short poem says the names have arbitration but not authority.
On timing (ch. 14), some require the intention before dawn for every fast, others allow it after dawn for voluntary ones. Dawn is a sign of the sun as a name is a sign of the named. Knowledge of the One is obligatory and precedes; knowledge of the relations among names is supererogatory.
On waking in a state of major impurity (ch. 15), most scholars say the fast is valid; Abu Hurayra once said otherwise and, when challenged, insisted it was the Prophet's word. Ibn al-Arabi prefers validity: give everything its due (20:50), nature its nature and the divine relation its own.
Chapters 16-22. The Sick and the Traveller
This is the section where the legal excuses become a spiritual geography.
| Chapter | Question | Ibn al-Arabi's ruling |
|---|---|---|
| 16 | If the sick or the traveller fasts, does it count? | No: they must make it up. The sick person's fast is a voluntary good act; the traveller's is not, since "Fasting in a journey is not part of piety" |
| 17 | Is it better to fast or break? | Three views, each matched to a name: fast is God's attribute (fast); breaking is servanthood (break); no rivalry among names (equal), the "school of the realized ones" |
| 18 | How far is a journey? | Anything called a journey. The least journey is moving from one name to another; the longest is unlimited |
| 19 | How ill must one be? | The least that is called illness, with Rabia ibn Abd al-Rahman |
| 20 | The day of departure | No fixed rule: "states vary" |
| 21 | Arriving home mid-day | Discussed with the purified menstruant; forbidden truths (slander) and permitted untruths (reconciliation, war, to one's wife) |
| 22 | Setting out mid-Ramadan | Most allow it; the strong choose their name, the ruled are moved by it |
The deeper argument of chapter 19 is that for the people of God there is no purely permitted act: every act inclines toward something, and the only question is whether it inclines where God calls. The sick person turns to God from necessity (17:67); "overpowering illness" is attributing one's acts to oneself.
Chapters 23-25. Making Up What Was Missed
Neither must make up the fast, he rules, and the reason widens into a principle: "making something up is basically inconceivable in the Path." Each moment has its own experience; the time that has passed has no authority over the present, and the one to come has none yet. An afternoon prayer resembles the noon prayer in form, not in reality.
On consecutive make-up days (ch. 24), most do not require them; the window runs from the second of Shawwal to the end of Shaban. Each view of the make-up window matches a state: whoever thinks life short makes speed obligatory, whoever thinks time wide allows choice, whoever is cautious recommends it. Created things are in the grip of the divine names in two ways, by the names' realities and by the things' own readiness, and a person "with two eyes" keeps both in view. On delaying a make-up until the next Ramadan (ch. 25), he requires only the make-up, without the extra expiation others impose. The chapter's illustration is Umar holding his nose at a bag of musk from the booty before it was divided, saying "There is benefit from this by its smell": scrupulousness has many faces. Ibn al-Arabi calls this question "among the most beneficial questions in the path."
Chapter 26. Dying with Fasts Owed
The legal views (a guardian fasts for the dead, or feeds, or neither unless willed) become an account of the shaykh and the disciple. A shaykh can complete a dead disciple's practice and clothe his imaginal form with it. Here Ibn al-Arabi tells the story of his own teacher.
A second story concerns Abu Ishaq ibn Tarif at Algeciras in 589 AH, who explained why he counted both his praisers and his detractors as friends of God: the praiser describes him by the praiser's own quality, the detractor has been shown his faults by God. "I only see the Friends of God." The friends, Ibn al-Arabi adds, intercede first for those who harmed them, and he himself promised intercession for everyone he had seen.
Chapters 27-28. The Pregnant, the Nursing and the Very Old
For pregnant and nursing women Ibn al-Arabi rules feeding the poor, without make-up: the relevant verse (2:184) is not abrogated, a view he grounds in Companion reports. When the right of God and the rights of creatures compete, he puts God's first, as a bequest precedes a debt in the verse of inheritance (4:12), and leaves unpaid creditors to the public treasury.
For the very old, feeding is recommended, not obligatory, and only for those able. The one who sees no power of his own drops both fasting and feeding: God is the one who feeds and is not fed (6:14), and where there is no obligation there is no substitute.
Part 3. Expiation, Forgetting and the Breaking of the Fast
Chapters 29 to 42 deal with what happens when a fast goes wrong, deliberately or by forgetting, and how it is repaired; then with the recommended fasts and the hour of breaking. The jurist's questions about expiation open onto servanthood and mastery, divine jealousy and the right of God.
Chapter 29. Deliberate Intercourse and the Bedouin
The founding case is a hadith: a Bedouin confesses that he had intercourse with his wife during a Ramadan day. The Prophet tells him to free a slave; he cannot. To fast two consecutive months; he cannot. To feed sixty poor people; he has nothing. A basket of dates arrives and the Prophet gives it to him to distribute. The man asks whether there is anyone poorer than himself between the two lava fields of Medina, and the Prophet laughs and tells him to feed his family.
Ibn al-Arabi's ruling is lenient: no make-up, and expiation recommended if he is able. His reading of each stage of the expiation is one of the most daring passages in the book.
| Expiation | Inward meaning |
|---|---|
| Freeing a slave, absolutely | Servanthood leaves when God is his faculties and limbs. Abu Yazid spoke from this station when he used, of himself, the words God addressed to Moses: I am God, there is no god but Me, so worship Me |
| Freeing a slave, with limit | Freed from created things, he remains God's servant; servanthood is essential to him. God as King of humanity (114:1-2); nas, humanity, from nisyan, forgetfulness |
| Fasting two months | One month by himself, one by his Lord, when God is "his foot" |
| Feeding sixty | The name Reviver acting after the name Slayer |
Chapters 30-31. Eating Deliberately, Forgetting
| Case | Majority positions | Ibn al-Arabi | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Deliberate eating or drinking (ch. 30) | Make up; some add expiation | No make-up, no expiation; much voluntary fasting | A time-bound duty missed on purpose cannot be made up. The fast is a loan; making up is returning a loan |
| Intercourse while forgetting (ch. 31) | Three views: nothing; make up only; make up and expiate | Each view given a state | See below |
| Voluntary fast broken deliberately (ch. 47) | Make up / no make-up | Obligation binds the chooser too | "Obligation affirms the source of the servant" |
| Voluntary fast broken by forgetting (ch. 48) | Make up / no make-up | No make-up | From passion, make up; from absorption in a station, not |
The three readings of forgetful intercourse show the method at its finest. Nothing is owed: divine jealousy made him forget, to show that the fast is God's alone. Make-up without expiation: the verse "thou hast not thrown when thou hast thrown" negates the act and affirms it. Both: a non-action of a non-action is an action, and "the path demands punishment for forgetfulness since it is a path of presence and forgetfulness is alien to it."
Chapter 32. Order or Choice in Expiation; the Right of God
Jurists dispute whether the three expiations must be tried in order (slave, then fast, then feeding) or freely chosen, and whether penalties exist to deter. Ibn al-Arabi notes that the Qur'an promises "two eases with one hardship" (94:5-6) and gives the easier ruling as a fatwa to others, but not to himself unless incapable.
Then he argues against the common view that the fixed penalties are deterrents. No text says so, and the facts do not fit: a murderer may be pardoned by the victim's family, but a thief's hand is cut even if the owner forgives and the goods are returned. Therefore "the right of God in things is greater than the right of the creature in them as opposed to what the religious scholars believe." The Prophet said it is "better to fulfill God's due." Following the order is better than choosing, because compelled servanthood is nearer than chosen, as obligatory acts bring more nearness than voluntary ones.
Chapters 33-37. Wives, Repetition, Delay and Accidents
| Chapter | Question | Ruling | Inward note |
|---|---|---|---|
| 33 | Does the wife who consented owe expiation? | No; the Prophet did not mention her, and one does not prescribe what God did not | The soul accepts both depravity and piety (91:8); intellect against passion |
| 34 | Repeated intercourse in one day | One expiation | One spirit can manage several bodies, as with Qadib al-Ban and Dhu al-Nun |
| 35 | Feeding later when one becomes able | Not owed | The one stripped of actions owes nothing; bound in one aspect, free in another |
| 36 | Breaking, then falling ill, travelling or menstruating the same day | Make up, no expiation | Nothing is accidental for the unveiled |
| 37 | Breaking a make-up fast | Make up, no expiation | "A number of other days" |
Iblis and the decree (ch. 36)
Chapter 36 contains a short dialogue that later readers have argued over. Iblis, asked why he refused to bow, said that had God willed it he would have bowed.
Knowledge of the decree after the act is no excuse. Ibn al-Arabi adds that some servants are told in advance of acts of disobedience decreed for them, hasten to them out of modesty before God, and repent, since forgiveness had already preceded (48:2). The hadith in which God says "Do what you like, I have forgiven you" belongs here. Judgments are ordered by states, as carrion is lawful to the one compelled; and he ends by urging a good opinion of others.
Chapters 38-40. The Recommended Fasts
Chapter 38 lists the recommended fasts: in striving, on Mondays and Thursdays, the day of Arafa, Ashura, the first ten of Dhu al-Hijja, Shaban, the white days, three days a month, the fast of David, six days of Shawwal. Part 4 treats them one by one.
Fasting in the way of God (ch. 39) is promised distance from the Fire of seventy years, in a hadith from Abu Said al-Khudri. Ibn al-Arabi reads it as the fast of servants who are not yet free; "the way of God" is every good, because "God" is the name that gathers all names. The numbers are left indefinite on purpose: which day, whose years? A day with the Lord can be very long (70:3).
The verse that every one of us will come to the Fire (cited as 16:71) is read alongside: every soul passes over it, and the seventy years of distance describe how the faster crosses. Striving in the way of God means taking on the name of force for a time, and the faster who strives wears two divine attributes at once, the fast and the strength.
Chapter 41. Intending by Night
The Hafsa hadith requires an intention at night. Ibn al-Arabi recommends forming it in the first third of the night, when God descends to the lowest heaven, "like the hospitality meal when the Real descends." The fast is unseen, like the Real, and so its reward comes without intermediary.
Chapter 42. The Hour of Breaking
The chapter opens with the hadith that the Prophet broke his fast with a little barley drink at sunset, and with Sahl ibn Sad's report: "People will remain in good as long as they hasten to break the fast." At sunset the name al-Fatir takes charge whether the faster eats or not. The night is the manifestation of the Ruler of the Unseen, who veils out of jealousy; its knowledge is of secrets, while the day's knowledge is of lights.
Then the two stations. One who delays, thinking to gain, misses the joy of breaking: "the pleasure of emerging from compulsion to choice, and from containment to release, and from constriction to expansion. It is the Muhammadan Station." Joseph, who chose to stay in prison when the king's messenger came, represents the opposite station. The Prophet said that in Joseph's place he would have answered the summoner; one sent as a mercy cannot bear restriction.
Prayer before food
The right order at sunset, he says, is the obligatory prayer first, then the meal, though both are hastened: the prayer is God's right, breaking the fast the self's. The ruling rests again on the hadith about a dead mother's fasts: "The right of God is more proper to be settled." Aisha, asked about two Companions, one who hastened both and one who delayed both, approved Ibn Masud, who hastened.
Part 4. The Calendar as a Ladder
Chapters 43 to 59 move through the recommended fasts of the month and the week. Each date becomes a station: the hidden middle of the month, the full moon, Ashura and Arafa, the six days of Shawwal, the days of the week. Along the way come a running commentary on the Qur'anic verses of fasting, a trial in a court of divine names, and some of Ibn al-Arabi's most vivid personal encounters.
Chapter 43. The Hidden Middle of the Month
A hadith from Muawiya at the gate of Homs commands fasting "the first day and its middle"; the word translated middle, sirr, also means secret. The secret of the month is the time when the moon is hidden in the grip of the sun, under its rays. So it is with a servant established in a nearness that the eyes of creatures seek but cannot see: the hidden friends of God, who are not distinguished among ordinary people in this world and will appear only when God asks to whom the dominion belongs on that Day (40:16). Because they resemble their Master in veiling, they should fast the hidden days.
Other notes in the chapter:
- The common person says he fasted Ramadan; the gnostic says "the month of Ramadan," because Ramadan is a divine name veiled by the word "month."
- The traveller is still travelling toward the month and so is not yet witnessing it; the sick person inclines away; menstruation is read as a lie of the self, and a hadith says the angel withdraws thirty miles from the smell of a lie.
- God discloses Himself gradually, as a mercy, so as not to dazzle weak inner eyes, as the moon moves from hidden to full.
- The family of the dead despair and so their grief settles; the family of the absent keep hoping. The fasts of the month are a parable of that difference.
- The Prophet's saying "I have a moment which is only wide enough for my Lord" names the station of concentrated spiritual strength (himma) that the middle fast represents. Shaban, the month of dispersal, makes its middle fast the more confirmed.
The chapter ends with praise of those who watch the sun and moon to time their worship: they are "the happiest of people" in this knowledge, because the stations of the sun and moon, read as parable, are among the greatest signs of the divine knowledge that preserves created things. A short poem says that a trustworthy, truthful one brought news of all that will be, of what hearts see in unveiling and what eyes perceive. Ibn al-Arabi treats astronomy and revelation as two readings of one sky.
Chapter 44. Every Country Its Own Moon
Kurayb saw the new moon in Syria on a Friday night, where Muawiya and the people fasted; in Medina Ibn Abbas had seen it on Saturday night and refused to follow Syria, saying this was how the Messenger of God had commanded them. Each land follows its own sighting. Ibn al-Arabi turns the ruling inward at once.
The chapter then becomes a commentary on the fasting verses of the second sura, with several passages worth keeping.
| Verse phrase | Ibn al-Arabi's gloss |
|---|---|
| Fasting is prescribed for you | Every limb has its own fast: hearing, sight, tongue, hand, belly, foot, genitals, heart |
| As it was prescribed for those before you | Earlier communities lengthened it until it reached fifty days, part of what they altered |
| So that perhaps you might be Godfearing | Take fasting as a safeguard against claiming what belongs to God |
| Whoever is ill or on a journey | Ill: in the custody of the Real. Journey (safar) from isfar, the shining of dawn: the station shines on the wayfarer |
| God desires ease for you | The ease of breaking for the sick and traveller; with hardship comes ease (94:5) |
| When My servants ask thee about Me | The Prophet is the doorkeeper; those who wear the fast are people of singling-out |
| They are a garment for you | Spouses cover each other; God is no garment for us, nor we for Him |
| These are the limits of God | Do not think beyond them; a foot may slip after it was firm |
Three more moments: a poem in which the Real calls him "from my heaven / without a letter of the alphabet" and then summons him from the earth of his being "with every letter of the alphabet"; a dream in which he woke reciting verses he had never heard, ending with the image of "the maiden confined in the tent"; and a saying of his shaykh Abu Madyan on the verse that bids the Prophet work when he is free: when you enter an act of worship, do not speak to yourself about leaving it, but say, would that it were the last. On belief, he warns that one who believes by his own intellect believes in part and explains away the rest, and calls the excuse that one only intends to keep God incomparable one of the tricks of the selves.
Chapter 45. The Meal Before Dawn
Nine traditions open the chapter: the pre-dawn meal (sahur) has blessing; it distinguishes Muslim fasting from that of the People of the Book; Bilal called while it was still night, so eat until Ibn Umm Maktum calls; whoever hears the call with a cup in his hand may finish it; Hudhayfa ate with the Prophet when, as he put it, "It is day, although the sun had not risen"; the gap between meal and prayer was the time to recite fifty verses.
Ibn al-Arabi's purpose in listing them is explicit: to show that his interpretations are drawn from what the Prophet said and did, in keeping with al-Junayd's rule that this knowledge is bounded by Book and Sunna. Knowledge given directly by God, like Khidr's (18:65), is "from above," knowledge earned by piety from beneath their feet (5:66).
The mixture of light and dark
The pre-dawn meal is stressed more than the odd-numbered night prayer, since it carries both a command and a prohibition against abandoning it. The blessing is increase. And the cup in the hand yields a rule of manners: the divine name that rules a servant in the moment keeps its jurisdiction until it is finished, and only then should he turn, with good manners, to the next name that seeks him.
The court of the names
The chapter closes with the most dramatic set piece in the book: a trial among the divine names over a servant who has sinned.
When a servant who sins falls under the name the Ever-Turning (Tawwab), it tips the balance to the Merciful, and repentance follows. When the Disappointer rules him, the contest is fiercer, and the Just steps in. To the Merciful's claim that mercy precedes anger, the Just answers that precedence is reckoned at the end of the term. To the Avenger's claim that the act is proof enough, the Just answers that acts are open to doubt: a man who drank wine may have been choking, a killer may have been avenging his father. The name the Believer testifies that the heart, its kingdom, was never invaded. The case is sent to the Transformer and suspended until death. The scene is a theology of mercy argued as procedure: no conviction on the act alone, a presumption that the believing heart was untouched, and a verdict deferred to the end.
Chapters 46-48. Doubt and the Voluntary Fast
The Day of Doubt (ch. 46): Ammar ibn Yasir said that whoever fasts it has disobeyed the Prophet. Ibn al-Arabi notes that this may be Ammar's own opinion rather than a report from the Prophet. Doubt, he says, is like the state of one whose hearing is God: look one way and you say it is the Real, look the other and you say it is the servant; when neither view prevails both fall, and one returns to the root, the existence of servant and Lord. Beneath that lies the root of roots, the existence of the Lord in the source of the servant.
On voluntary fasts (ch. 47-48), entering a voluntary act binds the servant as the obligatory does; and forgetting breaks nothing when it comes from absorption in a station rather than from passion.
Chapters 49-52. Ashura and Arafa
| Ashura (ch. 49-51) | Arafa (ch. 52) | |
|---|---|---|
| Date | 10th of Muharram (his view; some say the 9th) | 9th of Dhu al-Hijja |
| Reward | Expiates the year before | Expiates the year before and the year after |
| Divine names | The First (10th) and the Last (9th) | Uniqueness (ahadiyya), via ma'rifa, gnosis |
| Status | Once obligatory, now chosen: two nearnesses, two self-disclosures | Removes and repels |
| Where | Anywhere, with a day before or after to differ from the Jews | Fast it away from Arafa; do not fast it at Arafa |
Chapter 50 adds a gloss on the hadith's careful wording, "a reward is expected from God": the language of hope is good manners, even where the outcome is known. The Prophet, sure of his death, still said at the graves of al-Baqi, "If God wills, we will join you."
Chapter 51 treats Ashura fasted without a night intention, citing the command that whoever had eaten should "complete the rest of his day." It includes a short poem: "I am hungry and I am not fasting." Its legal theme is the difference from the People of the Book: Muslims are told to differ from what Jews and Christians prescribed for themselves, never from their prophets. "We are more entitled to Moses" than his community, since Muslims believe all that he brought. Fasting a day before and after Ashura is the margin of difference. He argues from the traditions that Ashura is the tenth.
Gnosis and uniqueness (ch. 52)
The name Arafa recalls ma'rifa, gnosis. He argues that gnosis takes a single object, so it is "the knowledge of uniqueness," and that knowledge too, rightly understood, grasps a single relation: to know that Zayd is standing is to know one relation, which presupposes recognising Zayd and standing separately. The logicians call the first conception and the second affirmation. A line from Abu al-Atahiyya follows: "He has a sign in everything / which indicates that He is One." Uniqueness and life flow through every existent, the hidden as well as the plain.
At Arafa itself, however, the pilgrim should not fast: the gnostic there knows that fasting belongs to God, and the day of his arrival at this station is his festival. The Prophet drank a cup of milk sent by Umm al-Fadl while standing on his camel. The chain of the hadith forbidding the fast at Arafa includes an unknown narrator, Mahdi ibn Harb, a point Ibn al-Arabi does not hide.
Chapter 53. Six Days of Shawwal
A grammatical observation drives the chapter: the hadith's word for "six" has a form that, strictly, counts nights, not days. Ibn al-Arabi takes this as a hint that continuous fasting, day joined to night, is the better way to keep the six, while noting it may simply be a rare dialect. He cites the Prophet's prohibition of continuous fasting as a mercy and his explanation: "I am not like your form. In the night my Lord feeds me and gives me drink."
Two numerical readings follow: six days times ten (the reward of a good deed) completes the year, mending the six days on which fasting is forbidden; and six days answer the six days of creation, so that we are described by what is His, the fast, as He was described by what is ours, creation.
Chapters 54-55. The Three Days and the White Days
Every month is a guest from the Real, and a guest's right is three days of hospitality, so the Prophet fasted three days each month, preferably at its start, since one hastens food for a guest. Fasting, he adds, is proper to the human organism: angels do not fast, and God is never disclosed to an angel in a witnessing of fasting. A numerology follows: three days counted tenfold make thirty, the month, and the reward is three hundred divine qualities.
The three days of the month are also set against alms. For the common people, the three days stand opposite the alms of the month, as a tenth stands to a harvest; and they fast with the self that demands food, which Ibn al-Arabi calls the plant self, the part that grows, as distinct from the animal self that seeks. That is why the pre-dawn meal is called "food": so that the plant self cannot complain to God that its right was withheld. "Your self has a right against you," and after God's right it is the strongest, because the opponent lives between your own sides.
Chapter 54 also warns against the "animal human being" who amasses beyond need, "anxious and insatiable" (70:20-23), and describes two gardens hereafter, one of the senses and one of meanings, the gnostics plucking both.
The white days (ch. 55), the thirteenth to fifteenth, are "fasting all the time." The full moon is the sun shown in the mirror of the moon, and so the manifestation of the Real in creation, by the name Light. The Prophet is called a light-giving lamp (33:46): a lamp shows the pits, wells, trees and walls on a dark road. Since a hadith says "God is Time," fasting the white days is fasting by representation, and its repayment is the Real Himself.
The dream about al-Ghazzali
Chapters 56-59. The Days of the Week
| Day | Ruling | Figure and meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | Recommended; deeds are presented to God | Adam: knowledge of the names; joins truth and creation |
| Thursday | Recommended; same hadith | Moses: compassion (fifty prayers reduced to five); guards the four directions of Satan (7:17); the twelve springs |
| Friday | Not alone; add a day before or after | Adam created on it; the most perfect day; its hour; not singled out out of respect |
| Saturday | Disputed: fast in fear, refrain in hope | Day of the hereafter; rest; fasting to differ from idolaters |
| Sunday | Fast to differ, or in thanks for the first day of creation | ahad, one: incomparability |
The Monday and Thursday chapter rests on Usama ibn Zayd's report that on those days deeds are presented to the Lord of the worlds, and the Prophet wished his deeds to be presented while fasting. The Lord sets right what is corrupt, including doubts about whom the fast belongs to. Moses' staff struck the rock and twelve springs gushed: knowledges of life, showing that the stone and the plant are alive and glorify God. The heart is vaster than mercy: man, created from God's mercy, can contain what mercy cannot (ch. 57).
Chapter 59 ends with physiology. Fasting brings heat and dryness against nature's demand; the spirit manages the body and denies the proud natural self food, drink and sex so that nature learns it is subject. Denying the body for health is protection, not fasting, though it is rewarded if the aim is a body fit for worship.
Part 5. The Moment, the Feasts, the Night and the Retreat
The last thirty chapters move from the calendar to the inner clock. The moment rules the Sufi; the festival days forbid the fast because they mark the line between servant and Lord; the Night of Power and the retreat in the mosque gather the whole treatise into the practice of staying with God.
Chapter 60. The Child of the Moment
Ibn Abbas, asked whether a crescent was two or three nights old, cited the Prophet: God set its length by its sighting, "and so it belongs to the night in which you saw it." From this Ibn al-Arabi draws one of the classic Sufi formulas.
Chapter 61. Testimony About the Moon
Why accept one witness for the start of Ramadan but require two for its end? Ibn al-Arabi's answer is psychological. When a ruling goes against the self's desire, one outward witness suffices, because the second witness is the inner command to oppose the self. When the ruling pleases the self, as breaking the fast does, two outward witnesses are needed, so that the faster breaks his fast as worship and not for appetite. Each act of worship, like a syllogism, needs two premises. He then lists the reports on sighting so that the reader "will not need another book," noting that one of them, in al-Daraqutni, is weak.
Chapter 62. Watching the Lord, Not the Self
The faster must keep looking at his Lord, since the fast he performs is ascribed to God. Slander breaks the fast even if he eats nothing, because an act that takes him out of the defined fast leaves no fast to ascribe to God. The repayment is God Himself, read through the story of Joseph's cup (12:75): the faster comes looking for his baggage and is told that God has taken it. A report that looking at a woman's form breaks the fast is set aside as weak, on the authority of his teacher Abd al-Haqq.
Chapters 63-65. Days on Which Fasting Is Forbidden
| Day | Ruling | Reason given |
|---|---|---|
| 16th of Shaban (ch. 63) | Forbidden in his view, one of six forbidden days | On the night of mid-Shaban the angel of death marks the year's dead; the one who witnesses this is ready for the next world, and responsibility ends with death |
| Days of tashriq (ch. 64) | Not to be fasted | Days of eating, drinking and remembrance: a divine report not subject to abrogation; "Fasting is His and not-fasting is yours" |
| Fitr and Adha (ch. 65) | Forbidden by agreement | These days mark the distinction between servant and Lord; resembling God by fasting on them would be untruthful |
On the sixteenth of Shaban he defends a hadith through a long chain and against critics, concluding that "whoever claims consensus here has lied." He follows Abu Muhammad's reasoning from the Muhalla that the prohibition after mid-month must at least cover the sixteenth.
Remembrance is greater (ch. 64)
The verse that remembrance of God is greater (29:45) gives the core of chapter 64: in any act of worship, the remembrance of God in it is greater than its movements and words. God sits with the one who remembers. Some see Him; others sense Him by belief, like a blind man who knows he is sitting with Zayd. One Sufi, asked to remember a friend in his retreat with God, replied: "If I remember you, I am not in retreat with God."
Chapter 64 ends with a typology of speakers that is worth keeping. When someone says something that sounds like a great saying, he may be above what he says (a realised gnostic using plain words), level with it, or below it. Those below fall into two groups that sound alike: those at the furthest reach of knowledge, who know that what they say falls short of God, and those at the furthest distance, who know only the outward forms of this world. They share the name of knowledge and are separated by the One their knowledge is about. On the days of tashriq, the people of remembrance may forget to eat; that, he says, is a state that prevents eating, not an act of worship.
Chapter 66. Invited to Eat While Fasting
The jurists' range is wide: say "I am fasting" and pray for the host (Abu Hurayra); pray but do not eat (Anas); eat and make up; eat and do not; eat only before noon; make it up if one wishes. Ibn al-Arabi sorts the answers by station.
| Who is invited | What he does |
|---|---|
| The wayfarer | Keeps the contract he made with God by starting the fast: "render not your actions untrue" (47:33) |
| The great gnostic, ruler of himself | Sees God as the only speaker on the tongues of creatures, and looks at the inviter's state |
| Inviter who invites "by his Lord" | The gnostic may eat if it delights the host; "The perfect always has choice in the will" |
| Inviter who invites by himself | Has invited only someone like himself; the guest completes his fast |
The self objects that the invitation was for it, not for him. He answers that the self should have joined the fast at the start; having entered it, the duty to complete it binds. "The best charity is the charity which you give to yourself." If he must break, he breaks for the right of his self and the host, and replaces the fast with prayer, since the Prophet said a fasting guest should pray.
Chapters 67-68. Perpetual Fasting; David, Mary and Jesus
Fasting all the time is not possible for anyone but Time itself (ch. 67). Dahr, time, is a name of God, and the year contains days on which fasting is forbidden. "If it belongs to God, it does not belong to you."
The fast of David, a day on and a day off, is "the best and most just of all fasting": one day for oneself, one for one's Lord. Mary fasted two days and broke one, reasoning that men have a degree over women and that two women's testimony equals one man's; by doubling she reached the station of men, and the Prophet testified to her perfection. Jesus fasted always and prayed all night, manifesting the name Time by day and al-Qayyum, the Self-Subsisting who neither slumbers nor sleeps, by night. That, says Ibn al-Arabi, is why divinity was claimed for him. Those who said God is the Messiah are called kafir, ungrateful or concealing, not mushrik, associators, for they did not set a second god beside God: they saw God in the human form of Jesus. He calls it "a sea of Endless Time" in which the one who drowns is not rescued.
Chapters 69-71. The Wife, the Traveller, the Count
- A wife's voluntary fast needs her husband's permission (ch. 69). Inwardly, the woman is the believing self and her husband is her belief in the divine law: she should begin no act without its judgment.
- The traveller (ch. 70): "It is not part of piety that you fast during the journey." It is no piety to claim as one's own what one knows is not one's own.
- The count (ch. 71): obligatory fasting comes to 226 days plus vows, through Ramadan, the three sixty-day expiations, and the three-day fasts of the pilgrimage and of oaths. Every fast is an expiation. He declines to spell out the hidden correspondences: the people of the path must stop at the divine commands.
Chapter 72. The Tooth-stick and the Breath
Some jurists dislike the tooth-stick after noon, to preserve the faster's breath, which God loves. Ibn al-Arabi allows it all day and calls the objection "defective thought." The breath comes from the stomach, so the stick does not remove it; to confuse the two is to mistake the he-camel for the she-camel. The tooth-stick "purifies the mouth and is pleasing to the Lord."
"God is Beautiful and loves beauty": everything has the beauty proper to it. Prayer with the tooth-stick is said to be worth seventy without it; he reads this as your prayer by your Lord is better than your prayer by yourself. Abu Madyan, he recalls, blamed those who isolate either end, inward or outward; the perfect one joins the two ends.
Chapters 73-75. The Host, the Guest, the Week
Whoever gives a faster something to break his fast has the like of his reward without diminishing it (ch. 73): breaking the fast completes the fast, and the helper takes on the divine name al-Fatir. Wearing one part of a thing gives the good of the whole, as some who are not prophets will be envied by prophets on the Day of Rising.
The guest (ch. 74) should not fast voluntarily without his host's permission. The Sufis are guests of God and act only by His leave.
Seven fasting days a month (ch. 75), spread over different weekdays, dress every day of the week with fasting, so that each day will testify for the servant. The chapter widens to the spheres: the planets' "months" run up to about thirty years; the sphere of the constellations governs the people of the Fire but revolves around the people of the Garden without cutting through anything.
The days boast over one another by what the servant does in them, so the virtuous servant tries to give each day of the week, month and year some act of nearness, and fills next week what he missed this week, until every day can praise him before God.
Chapters 76-77. Night Prayer in Ramadan
In Ramadan the names Ramadan and al-Fatir share authority; each divine name is a chamberlain that veils the others, according to the power of the moment. The Prophet tied his wrapper tight when Ramadan began. A poem has God say: "This fasting is Mine. So where are My individuals?"
Ibn al-Arabi says again that he has tasted the state of being fed by his Lord in the night while outwardly fasting. A continuous faster without that state "is wearing two false garments." Chapter 77 adds that the outward of the servant converses with the name the Inward and his inward with the Outward; God tests "until We know" (47:31) not for His own knowledge but so that no one can argue against Him, which is the meaning of the name the Aware (al-Khabir). He reports that God told him directly, at Mecca and at Damascus, "Advise My servants."
Chapters 78-81. The Night of Power
| Theme | His reading |
|---|---|
| Who seeks it | One who stands for the Night stands for himself; one who stands for the name that raised him stands for God. "Those have their wages and servants have their light" (57:19) |
| Better than a thousand months | Better without limit: like a life extended past its natural term into an unknown length |
| Why at night | Determination is unseen; the command descends whole and is then divided, as speech is one and its kinds many (44:4) |
| Why it moves | So every month and weekday gets a share, as the lunar Ramadan visits every solar season and the alms-year begins on any day |
| Its sign | The sun rises the next morning without rays, like a disc, its light effaced by the Night's light |
| Odd nights | The Odd protects the seeker from ascribing the good to the night instead of to God |
| Not the first ten | No report of a self-disclosure in the first third; "first-ness is yours," you are the proof |
| In a group | The night of gathering: the Prophet praised people praying behind Ubayy ibn Kab, "They are right" |
| Its reward | Past and future sins forgiven; "a hastened garden" |
The month, in its real sense, is the perfect servant, through whose stages the name Light passes as the moon passes through twenty-eight mansions. A short poem compares the servant to the tongue of a balance whose pans rise and fall.
Sahur as success (ch. 79)
Abu Dharr reports that the Prophet led the night prayer so long that they feared missing "the success," which turned out to mean the pre-dawn meal. Ibn al-Arabi finds this wonderful: success is going-on, abiding. Man fasts by something accidental and eats by his essence; in the hereafter he eats and drinks for the days he fasted. The self-subsistence of the Lord is by essence; the servant's is by what he eats. "Enough for the son of Adam are some morsels with which he keeps his back straight."
Chapters 82-89. The Retreat in the Mosque
The retreat (itikaf) means staying in one place with the intention of nearness. Ibn al-Arabi's rulings and readings form a compact theory of presence.
| Chapter | Question | Ruling | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| 82 | What acts belong to it | Any act of piety that does not take one out of the place; Aisha: no funerals, no visiting the sick | Staying with God by God is possible anywhere (57:4); staying by oneself for God needs a fixed place |
| 83 | Where | Anywhere; but outside a mosque intercourse is allowed, inside not; must be able to attend Friday | Mosques are God's houses, free of nature's portions; intercourse is the intellect returning to witness the self |
| 84 | Its end | The Prophet kept the last ten; after missing a year, twenty nights | "Praise be to God in every state" is the most complete remembrance |
| 85 | When to enter | After the dawn prayer, before sunrise | General retreat (seeing Him in everything) and limited retreat (with one name) combine at the "rising of the sun" |
| 86 | What staying is | A matter of the heart, as facing the qibla is | Aisha combed his hair while his head leaned out: judge by what predominates |
| 87 | Fasting in retreat | The Prophet told Umar: retreat and fast | Stay with God by an attribute of God |
| 88 | Visitors | The Prophet walked Safiyya to the door | Every movement comes from a divine name arriving |
| 89 | A woman with irregular bleeding | May keep retreat, as one of his wives did | Put each thing in its place |
The circle and the forgetting (ch. 85)
"The divine command is circular," and so everything in the world inclines to the circle, mountain, tree, leaf and stone; the sphere is the best of shapes. Entering the retreat at dawn rather than at nightfall keeps the gap short, because man forgets: "Adam forgot, so his progeny forgot." Selves differ as sunlight differs on polished and on dull bodies; forgetting and remembering are both natural to the constitution.
The friends who remind (ch. 87)
Asked who the friends of God are, the Prophet said they are those who, "when they are seen, remind people of God." This is the station the Prophet asked for in "Make me light." Ibn al-Arabi then reads Bilqis's words about her throne, "as if it were it," as the veil of distance: she should have said "it is it." The Prophet's "I am a mortal like you" (18:110) is the cure for those who deified Jesus.
The last word (ch. 89)
Every food harms one body and nourishes another, as a doctor knows; so there is no tongue of absolute praise or absolute blame in the world. The root is the divine names, which stand opposite one another. The treatise ends where its opening poem began, with nothing absolute in the world of possibility.
Part 6. Al-Ghazzali's Plain Account (Appendix A)
The editor added al-Ghazzali's short treatment of fasting from The Alchemy of Happiness, in Jay R. Crook's translation, as "the simplest explanation" of the rules. Read beside Ibn al-Arabi, it shows what the longer treatise assumes, and where the two masters part ways.
Why Fasting Is God's
Al-Ghazzali begins with the same sacred saying: every good deed is repaid tenfold up to seven hundred, "except the fast which is particular to Me." He gives two reasons why fasting deserves this relation, as the Ka'ba is called God's House though the whole world is His.
- Its reality is not-doing. It is inward and hidden from eyes, so there can be no hypocrisy in it.
- It defeats Iblis, whose armies are the appetites. "Satan flows about inside a person as blood does in the body"; hunger makes his passage difficult. "Fasting is a shield."
The first reason is Ibn al-Arabi's non-action in a single sentence. The difference is what each builds on it: al-Ghazzali an ethic of discipline, Ibn al-Arabi a metaphysics of likeness.
The Rules in Brief
| Six obligations | Six practices of the Prophet |
|---|---|
| Seek the new moon; one just witness for Ramadan, two for the Festival; a sighting more than sixteen parasangs away does not bind | Delay the pre-dawn meal |
| Declare the intention every night | Hasten to break with dates or water before the prayer |
| Let nothing enter the body's interior on purpose (cupping and kohl are harmless) | Use the tooth-stick (the text mentions after the sun declines) |
| No intercourse during the day | Be generous with alms and food |
| Do not induce emission | Read much Qur'an |
| Do not induce vomiting | Retreat in the mosque, especially the last ten nights |
He gives the Night of Power as one of the odd nights from the twenty-first to the twenty-ninth, with the twenty-seventh the most probable.
Three Degrees of Fasting
- The common fast restrains belly and genitals: the lowest degree.
- The fast of the select restrains every limb. Its perfection lies in six things: guarding the eye ("A glance is an arrow from among the arrows of Iblis, moistened with poison"), the tongue, the ear, the hands and feet; eating nothing forbidden or doubtful at the breaking and not overeating what is lawful; and afterwards hanging between fear and hope over whether the fast was accepted.
- The fast of the elite restrains the soul from every thought but God. Thinking about worldly matters, even lawful ones, breaks it; some say that planning the evening meal does, since it shows doubt about God's promised provision. This is the degree of the prophets and the truly righteous.
Two stories stay in the mind. Two women fasting from lawful food but feeding on slander vomited congealed blood, "the flesh of the people they have devoured." And Hasan Basri, passing people laughing on the festival day, said that Ramadan was a field where God's servants race; if the veil were lifted, the accepted would be busy with their happiness and the rejected with their grief, and no one would be laughing.
Where the Two Masters Differ
| Question | Al-Ghazzali (Appendix A) | Ibn al-Arabi (Chapter 71) |
|---|---|---|
| Spirit of fasting | To become like the angels, who have no appetite: an approach "in attributes, not in station" | Fasting is proper to the human organism; angels do not fast and never witness God in fasting |
| Traveller who fasts | Fasting is preferable unless he lacks strength | It does not count; he must make it up; not piety |
| Pregnant and nursing women | Make up and pay the expiation | Feed the poor, no make-up |
| Delayed make-up past next Ramadan | A mudd of food for each day | Make-up only |
| Night of Power | An odd night of the last ten, probably the 27th | Moves through the whole year; seen in Shaban and Rabi |
| Tooth-stick | The text mentions using it after the sun declines | Allowed all day without limit |
| Purpose | Weakening appetite and purifying the soul | Wearing a divine attribute and returning it |
Al-Ghazzali ends with advice Ibn al-Arabi would share in spirit: once a person understands that fasting serves the purification of the soul, he must watch his soul, and sometimes breaking the fast will be more meritorious than keeping it. The Prophet's own pattern, fasting until people asked if he would ever stop and then not fasting until they asked if he would ever fast, "was not discernible." Crook's endnotes explain terms (the parasang, about six kilometres; the Night of Doubt; the mudd) and note that local sighting is still the custom in some places.
Part 7. Synthesis
What the treatise establishes, the frameworks it offers, where it is strong and where a careful reader should hesitate, the people it names, and what its patterns can teach outside their original setting.
Twenty-Five Takeaways
- Fasting is defined by absence. It is a refraining, so it is invisible and cannot be displayed.
- God claims the fast alone among acts ("It is Mine") and repays it Himself.
- "No like" is said of God and of the fast for opposite reasons: He is the existent without equal, the fast a non-existent with no equal.
- The faster wears a borrowed attribute. He holds it for a day and returns it at sunset; claiming it is the real breach.
- Abstention and elevation go together: the word for fasting means both.
- Unveiling never cancels the law. Al-Qabbab removed the food even after God's word in a dream.
- Every chapter has two floors: a legal ruling and an inner reading, and the second rests on the first.
- Rival opinions are given homes, not refuted. Each describes a real state of some traveller.
- Ibn al-Arabi often rules for the plainest text, and sometimes for leniency: calculation in cloud, no added penalty for late make-up, no make-up for deliberate eating.
- The Book and the Sunna are the two witnesses to any spiritual claim.
- Illness is inclination and travel is wayfaring; the excuses map the path.
- There is no purely permitted act for the people of God; everything leans somewhere.
- The moment rules. The Sufi is the child of the moment, and a missed moment cannot really be made up.
- The right of God comes before the right of creatures, in debts, in prayer before food, in penalties.
- Choice bewilders a servant; choosing the obligatory fast relieves it.
- At sunset, hasten. The joy of breaking is the Muhammadan station of release; lingering is the Yusufi station of confinement.
- Each country, and each body, follows its own moon. No one stands in for another.
- The doubtful must be named as doubtful; the false dawn is the wolf's tail.
- The trial of the names argues mercy as due process: no conviction on the act alone, verdict deferred to the end.
- The language of hope is good manners, even when the outcome is known.
- Fasting is human, not angelic: angels do not fast, and man is the more complete organism.
- Remembrance is greater than the acts that carry it.
- Nothing is absolute in the world of possibility; every food harms one body and feeds another.
- Mercy precedes and outlasts wrath; punishment is contingent and not to be called eternal.
- Al-Ghazzali asks what fasting does to the self; Ibn al-Arabi asks whose act it is.
Frameworks Table
| Framework | Where | Elements | Use |
|---|---|---|---|
| Three ranks of fasting | Ch. 1 | Body; limbs (self); heart vast enough for God | Diagnose which "fast" a practice is really keeping |
| The four-step chapter | Throughout | Text; disagreement; "I say"; interpretation | Reconcile opinions by assigning each a context |
| Names of the day | Ch. 7, 42, 76 | Withholder at dawn; Ramadan by day; Originator at sunset | Read time as a sequence of governing principles |
| Two witnesses | Ch. 6, 45, 61 | Book and Sunna; outward witness and inner opposition to the self | Test claims by two independent confirmations |
| Abu Bakr and Uthmani stations | Ch. 5 | See God before the thing; see God after it | Distinguish intuition from inference |
| Muhammadan and Yusufi stations | Ch. 42 | Release and expansion; confinement by love | Know when holding on is a virtue and when it is a loss |
| Trial of the names | Ch. 45 | Avenger, Merciful, Just, Believer, Transformer | Model competing principles and a fair procedure between them |
| Doubt with two faces | Ch. 45-46 | Toward truth, toward falsehood; return to the root | Handle ambiguity without forcing it |
| Three fasts | Ch. 68 | David (alternate), Mary (two for one), Jesus (perpetual) | Balance, compensation, excess |
| General and limited retreat | Ch. 85 | Seeing Him in everything; staying with one name | Combine broad awareness with focused attention |
| Three degrees (al-Ghazzali) | App. A | Common, select, elite | A practical ladder from rules to attention |
Where Ibn al-Arabi Departs from the Majority
| Question | Majority as reported | Ibn al-Arabi | Chapter |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cloudy night at month's end | Complete thirty days | Calculate; consult astronomers | 3-4 |
| Lone sighter of the Shawwal moon | Does not break alone | Breaks on his own sighting | 6 |
| Sick or traveller who fasts anyway | Counts | Does not count; must make up | 16 |
| Fainting and madness | Various make-up rules | No make-up for either | 23 |
| Make-up delayed past next Ramadan | Make-up plus expiation | Make-up only | 25 |
| Pregnant and nursing | Various; some make-up and feeding | Feeding only; verse not abrogated | 27, 40 |
| Deliberate intercourse | Make-up and expiation | No make-up; expiation recommended | 29 |
| Deliberate eating | Make-up (some add expiation) | Neither; much voluntary fasting | 30 |
| Purpose of fixed penalties | Deterrence | God's right, which cannot be waived | 32 |
| Fasting Arafa at Arafa | Disputed, kindness to pilgrims | Not fasting there is higher, as sunna | 52 |
| 16th of Shaban | Permitted | Forbidden; "whoever claims consensus here has lied" | 63 |
| Tooth-stick after noon | Disliked by some | Allowed all day | 72 |
| Night of Power | Last ten, odd nights | Moves through the year | 78 |
The pattern is not simple leniency. He is strict where a text is strict and the act is God's (penalties, the sixteenth of Shaban), and lenient where a burden is added by inference (extra expiations, make-ups). His most frequent tools are a sound hadith read literally, the refusal to prescribe what God did not, and the principle that a missed moment is gone.
Questions for Reflection
- If fasting is a non-action, what other non-actions in a life might belong to God in the same sense?
- Is giving every rival opinion a context a form of tolerance, or a way of never being wrong?
- When should good manners with the rule outrank a private certainty, as with al-Qabbab?
- What would it mean in practice to treat each moment as having its own judgment?
- Where does the trial of the names succeed as an argument for mercy, and where does it only restate a hope?
- Al-Ghazzali wants the faster to resemble the angels; Ibn al-Arabi says angels cannot fast. What is at stake between them?
A closer look
Who's Who
| Name | Dates as printed | Role in the book |
|---|---|---|
| Ibn al-Arabi | 1165-1245 (preface); 1165-1240 and 1165-1242 in the back advertisements | Author; jurist and gnostic of Chapter 71 |
| al-Ghazzali | 1058-1111 | Author of Appendix A |
| Aisha Bewley | none printed | Translator; also of the other pillars in the series |
| Laleh Bakhtiar | preface dated Chicago 2009 | Editor |
| Seyyed Hossein Nasr | foreword dated June 1997 | Series editor |
| James Morris | none printed | Scholar quoted in the preface |
| Jay R. Crook | none printed | Translator of Appendix A |
| Abu Yaqub Yusuf al-Kumi | event dated 586 AH | The one shaykh who disciplined Ibn al-Arabi |
| Abu Ishaq ibn Tarif | event at Algeciras, 589 AH | "I only see the Friends of God" |
| Musa ibn Muhammad al-Qabbab | none printed | Companion at the Meccan minaret; good manners with the law |
| Abu Madyan | none printed | Ibn al-Arabi's shaykh; the guest of three thousand years |
| Ahmad al-Sabti | none printed | Son of Harun al-Rashid; met in the circumambulation |
| al-Junayd | none printed | "Master of this Group"; knowledge bounded by Book and Sunna |
| Abu Yazid al-Bistami | none printed | Ecstatic sayings; interceding for those who harmed him |
| Abu al-Abbas al-Sayyari | none printed | No pleasure in witnessing |
| Abu Talib al-Makki | none printed | "Whoever finds in his journey, that is his repayment" |
| Abd al-Haqq | none printed | Teacher cited on weak hadith |
| Abu Hurayra, Aisha, Ibn Abbas, Ibn Umar | none printed | Chief transmitters of the hadith discussed |
| Ubayy ibn Kab | none printed | Led group prayer in Ramadan |
| Hasan Basri | none printed | In Appendix A, on laughter at the festival |
| Husayn | AH 61 / 680 CE (Crook's note) | Named in the note on Ashura |
| Abdullah ibn Amr al-As | at Hunayn, AH 8 / 630 CE (Crook's note) | Asked about the best fast |
Glossary
Terms as the book uses them, in simplified spelling.
| Term | Meaning in this book |
|---|---|
| Sawm | Fasting; abstention, and also the day at its height (elevation) |
| Samadiyya | Timeless self-reliance; the attribute God claims in "the fast is Mine" |
| Tanzih | Incomparability; declaring God beyond likeness |
| Mumsik | The Withholder, divine name ruling the start of the fast |
| al-Fatir | The Originator of heavens and earth; the name ruling the breaking of the fast |
| Barzakh | Interspace; the imaginal zone where vision and speech can meet |
| Suluk | Wayfaring through stations and names; the inner meaning of travel |
| Himma | Concentrated spiritual strength |
| Ma'rifa | Gnosis; knowledge of uniqueness, linked to the day of Arafa |
| Ahadiyya | Uniqueness, oneness |
| Tasawwur, tasdiq | Conception (of single terms) and affirmation (of a relation) |
| Sahur, sahar | The pre-dawn meal; the mixed light before dawn |
| Iftar | Breaking the fast at sunset |
| Wisal | Continuous fasting through the night |
| Itikaf | Retreat, staying in the mosque with intention of nearness |
| Qayyumiyya | Self-subsistence; God's by essence, the servant's by food |
| Dahr | Time; also a divine name ("God is Time") |
| Laylat al-Qadr | The Night of Power; for Ibn al-Arabi it moves through the year |
| Ashura | The 10th of Muharram, a fast once obligatory |
| Arafa | The 9th of Dhu al-Hijja, day of the pilgrims' standing |
| Tashriq | The three days after the Day of Sacrifice; days of eating and remembrance |
| White days | The 13th, 14th and 15th of the lunar month |
| Kaffara | Expiation: freeing a slave, two months' fast, feeding sixty |
| Fidya | Redemption by feeding, for those excused from fasting |
| Qada | Making up a missed obligation |
| Mudd | A measure of food given per day of fidya |
| Siwak | Tooth-stick |
| Istihada | Irregular, non-menstrual bleeding |
| Kafir, mushrik | One who conceals or denies; one who associates partners with God |
| Muhammadan station | Release and expansion, as in hastening to break the fast |
| Yusufi station | Remaining in confinement out of love, as Joseph in prison |
| Child of the moment | The Sufi who knows that each moment carries its own judgment |
| Futuhat al-Makkiyya | The Meccan Revelations, Ibn al-Arabi's great work; this book is its Chapter 71 |
About this book
On the Mysteries of Fasting by Ibn al-Arabi, 2009. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
Insight Editions · rajeshrmahapatra.com/insight-editions