Insight Editions · No. 166
Sufi Narratives of Intimacy: Ibn 'Arabi, Gender, and Sexuality
Sa'diyya Shaikh
Sa'diyya Shaikh examines Ibn 'Arabi's teachings on gender, sexuality, divine love, and the complete human being, relating Sufi metaphysics to Islamic feminist debates.
A study guide to Sufi Narratives of Intimacy: Ibn 'Arabi, Gender, and Sexuality by Sa'diyya Shaikh. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
About the Book
Sadiyya Shaikh's Sufi Narratives of Intimacy reads Ibn 'Arabi as a resource for Islamic feminism. It asks what his picture of the human being, of God and of love does to the inherited gender norms of Muslim law and theology.
The book has an introduction, seven chapters and a short appendix of poems. It moves in three stages. The first three chapters set up the tools: the Sufi path and the place of women in early Sufism, Ibn 'Arabi's map of God, the names and the complete human, and the women who shaped his own life. The middle chapters read his gender metaphors: activity and receptivity, the cosmic marriage, and the story of Adam and Eve. The last two chapters turn to the most surprising claims, that God is most perfectly witnessed in women and that sexual union can be a theophany, and then bring the whole study to bear on present-day debates with traditionalist scholars and with feminist approaches based on rights.
In one sentence: Shaikh argues that Ibn 'Arabi both speaks the patriarchal language of his age and "unsays" it, and that his shared human ideal, the complete human (al-insan al-kamil), gives Islamic feminism a ground deeper than rights, in which spiritual equality must show itself in social and legal life.
Three voices on the page
The book weaves three voices, and it helps to keep them apart. There is Ibn 'Arabi, mostly in Shaikh's own translations from the Futuhat al-makkiyya and the Fusus al-hikam. There are the commentators and scholars, premodern exegetes such as Tabari, Razi and Ibn Kathir, and modern ones such as Sachiko Murata, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Michael Sells and Rabia Terri Harris. And there is Shaikh herself, who reads with what she calls a hermeneutic of suspicion and a hermeneutic of reconstruction.
Who this guide is for
1. Introduction: Tales of Contention
The introduction (pp.1-33) opens with women in the pulpit, past and present, and argues that fights over Muslim women's roles are really fights over what a human being is. It then introduces Ibn 'Arabi, the controversies around him, and the feminist method of the book.
- Debates over women leading prayer show that legal rulings rest on hidden ideas of the human.
- Shaikh calls these ideas "religious anthropology" and puts them at the centre of her study.
- Sufism, the tradition of the heart, holds resources for rethinking gender, but is not free of sexism.
- Ibn 'Arabi is a contested figure whose works are both revered and attacked.
- Her method pairs suspicion of patriarchal readings with reconstruction of a usable past.
A woman in the pulpit
The book begins with an imagined scene in fourteenth-century Cairo. Umm Zaynab Fatima bint 'Abbas al-Baghdadiyya, a jurist and the spiritual leader (shaykha) of the Ribat al-Baghdadiyya, preaches from the pulpit. Ibn Taymiyya, who knew her, admits his unease: "It unsettled me that she mounted the pulpit to deliver sermons and I wished to forbid her." Then the Prophet came to him in a dream and said: "This is a pious woman." The story is chosen with care. The jurist best known as a critic of Ibn 'Arabi is overruled, in his own account, by a dream.
The modern scenes follow. In 2005 Amina Wadud led a mixed Friday prayer in New York. Shaikh notes the reactions. A former grand mufti of Marseilles joined a prayer led by another woman, in solidarity. Soad Saleh, a professor of Islamic law at al-Azhar, called such prayers apostasy and said that "the woman’s body, even if veiled, stirs desire." Shaikh also recalls 1994 in South Africa, the year of the first nonracial elections, when Wadud gave a sermon at the Claremont Main Road Mosque. Shaikh was present. Women moved from the balcony into the central space, which felt, she writes, "like stepping into the warmth of the sunshine after a lifetime of being concealed in the shadows".
Against these debates she sets Ibn 'Arabi, who allowed women to lead mixed congregations and wrote that "one should not pay heed to anyone who opposes it without proof." (Part 3 shows that the same passage is translated differently on p.91.)
Religious anthropology
Shaikh's key term is religious anthropology: a tradition's idea of what it means to be human. She pairs it with ontology, the study of "the most fundamental categories of being and . . . the relations among them." Her claim is that "anthropological and ontological assumptions prefigure ethical and legal norms." When jurists bar women from leading prayer because their bodies distract men, they are assuming a split between a controlling male mind and a disruptive female body. Shaikh calls this "Cartesian dualism in Muslim garb", and notes that it casts man as "a perpetual moral adolescent", which is "a dubious notion of moral agency, indeed."
Sufism as a resource, with caution
The three dimensions of religion (islam, iman, ihsan) map onto the limbs, the mind and the heart, and onto jurists, theologians and Sufis. Shaikh turns to the third because Sufism asks about the self, the heart and the purpose of life. She does not romanticise it. Al-Ghazali, she shows, was complicit with male domination, and she states plainly that "Sufism does not automatically cure people of sexism."
Ibn 'Arabi: life and controversy
The book gives his dates: born in Murcia in 1165, he died in Damascus in 1240 at seventy-five. In Spain he studied with women teachers, Fatima of Cordova and Yasmina of Mashena. He travelled in the Maghrib until 1198, began the Futuhat in 1201 on his first visit to Mecca, met Nizam there, and settled at last in Damascus. He worked on the Futuhat for some thirty years; it has 560 chapters. He wrote about 300 works, and the Fusus dates from 1229. Shaikh quotes Alexander Knysh on his style, which "colours the very visions and experiences he endeavors to convey, making it difficult to neatly separate content from form."
He was attacked as well as revered. Ibn Taymiyya in the fourteenth century condemned the doctrine later called wahdat al-wujud. A fifteenth-century jurist, Quri, recorded opinions ranging from infidel to axial saint, and reserved judgment. In the sixteenth century the Ottoman Kemal Pashazade banned public defamation of him, and Sultan Selim I commissioned a defence. In 1979 some members of the Egyptian People's Assembly tried, without success, to ban his teachings. Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab (d. 1792) called him an unbeliever, and Saudi oil wealth spread that view. Shaikh still insists there was "no historically uniform pattern of hostility between Sufism and the lawyers."
| Date (as printed) | Event |
|---|---|
| 1165 | Ibn 'Arabi born in Murcia |
| 1198 | End of his travels in the Maghrib |
| 1201 | First visit to Mecca; Futuhat begun |
| 1229 | Fusus al-hikam written |
| 1240 | Death in Damascus |
| 1792 | Death of Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab, who called him an unbeliever |
| 1973 and 1977 | Beshara School founded in Scotland; Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi Society founded |
| 1979 | Failed attempt in the Egyptian People's Assembly to ban his teachings |
Feminism and method
Shaikh defines feminism as "awareness, activism, and vision". Islamic feminism, for her, is rooted in the God-human relationship and offers a "multiple critique" critical of sexist readings of Islam and of patriarchy in Muslim communities, while also condemning neocolonial feminist discourses on Islam. From Rita Gross she takes the search for an "accurate" and "usable" past, and Gross's point that calling a tradition androcentric and patriarchal "is an analysis, an accurate description, not an accusation". From Gayatri Spivak she takes attention to "another logic haunting its surface", and from Julia Kristeva the idea that "every text is from the outset under the jurisdiction of other discourses which impose a universe on it."
Two moves follow. A hermeneutic of suspicion exposes the male interests in a text. A hermeneutic of reconstruction draws out the egalitarian strands. She prefers to call the result a feminist rethinking of tradition rather than a constructive theology.
The plan of the book
Shaikh closes the introduction by previewing the chapters. Chapter 1 sets the Sufi background and the place of women in it. Chapter 2 maps Ibn 'Arabi's religious anthropology and its legal consequences. Chapter 3 reads his life and relationships. Chapter 4 explains her method of reading and his gendered cosmos. Chapters 5 and 6 study the creation narratives and the theme of witnessing God in women. Chapter 7 engages traditionalist interpreters and sets out what his teachings offer Islamic feminism. In her last line she calls her project a response to the hand of an "Uwaysi" friendship that Ibn 'Arabi extended some seven hundred years ago.
Sufism today and the politics of reading
Shaikh places the book in a present-day contest over Sufism itself. Wahhabi and wider Salafi movements, born in the eighteenth century and after, attacked Sufi practice, and Saudi oil wealth carried their views far. Western images of the howling dervish and the charlatan did similar damage from the other side. Carl Ernst's phrase for the result is the "uncanny alliance between Muslim fundamentalists and European Orientalists", which together narrowed Islam to a legal and ideological system. Meanwhile Sufi groups flourish in new places: Shaikh mentions South African communities, the Beshara School founded in Scotland in 1973 by Bulent Rauf (d. 1987), and the Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi Society founded in 1977. Reading Ibn 'Arabi on gender is therefore not a museum exercise; it enters a living argument.
How to speak of God
A short section addresses language for God. Shaikh weighs arguments for using both "He" and "She", which would break gendered idols, and decides to translate the divine pronoun Huwa as "He" when rendering Ibn 'Arabi. Her reason is to let readers see, unaltered, how his own God-talk unsettles gender. She notes that he uses images of fathers, mothers and pregnancy for God, and that his method is apophatic: it unsays its own images.
Key passage
Note. This short clause carries the whole book. If it is right, legal reform that leaves the underlying picture of the human untouched will be fragile, and theology, mysticism and metaphysics become practical. Part 8 returns to this point in Shaikh's critique of rights-based feminism.
- Why does Shaikh open with a story in which Ibn Taymiyya, of all people, is corrected?
- What hidden picture of men and women lies behind the argument against women's imamate?
- Can a tradition be both a source of sexism and a resource against it?
2. Craving Completion: The Sufi Path and Its Women
Chapter 1 (pp.35-60) is, by Shaikh's own account, a less analytical review chapter. It sets out the Sufi psychology of the self, the debates over marriage and celibacy, and the women of early Sufism, and it shows how gender worked in that history in two directions at once.
- The Sufi path aims at purifying the lower self (nafs), and its tools are available to men and women alike.
- Early ascetics were divided over marriage; some saw women as a danger, the Prophet's example pointed the other way.
- Women of Basra and Syria were teachers, ascetics and lovers of God, and some taught famous men.
- Praising a holy woman as "a man" both honoured her and kept maleness as the standard.
- Love mysticism opened a path from human love, including love of women, to love of God.
The self and its stages
Sufi psychology works with three terms: nafs (the self or lower soul), qalb (the heart) and ruh (the spirit). The Qur'an gives three states of the nafs: "the soul that incites to evil" (12:53), "the blaming soul" (75:2) and "the soul at peace" (89:27). The path moves from the first to the third. Umm Talq, an early woman Sufi, sums up the discipline: "the nafs is king if you indulge it, but is a slave if you torment it."
Shaikh draws a gender lesson. Striving is coded masculine and receptivity feminine, but both are demanded of every seeker. And the Sufi critique of egotism can be turned on male pride: the inciting self becomes a provocateur of male chauvinism. Abu Talib al-Makki (d. 996) even pictured the three souls as three kinds of women, licentious, righteous and virtuous.
Marriage or celibacy?
The Prophet's example favoured marriage: "I fast and I break fast, I pray and I sleep, I also marry women. This is my example. Those who are averse to my example are also averse to me." Yet after the luxury of the Umayyad and early Abbasid courts, a movement of renunciation (zuhd) grew. Hasan al-Basri (d. 728) likened the world to a venomous snake. Abu Sulayman al-Darani (d. 830) held that disciples who married fell back. Sufyan al-Thawri warned that "It will never go well for one who accustoms himself to the thighs of women." Ibrahim ibn Adham (d. 776 or 790), a celibate, still told a married man: "Your concern for your dependents is preferable to all which I now enjoy."
The women of early Sufism
What we know of Sufi women comes mostly from collections of lives (tabaqat) written by men. Al-Sulami (d. 1021) wrote a book on women devotees, rediscovered in 1991 and translated by Rkia Cornell in 2000, with 82 entries. Ibn al-Jawzi (d. 1201) included 240 women in Sifat al-safwa, and criticised Abu Nu'aym al-Isfahani (d. 1039), whose Hilya had only 28.
Shaikh describes two early schools. In Basra in the eighth and ninth centuries, Mu'adha al-'Adawiyya, a wife and mother, prayed through the night and told herself: "Oh, soul! Eternal sleep is ahead of you." In Syria in the ninth century, Hukayma of Damascus taught love (mahabba), intimacy (uns) and fear (khawf). Rabi'a al-'Adawiyya (d. 801) is the best known of all.
| Woman | What the book records |
|---|---|
| Rabi'a al-'Adawiyya (d. 801) | Pure love of God; refused marriage; taught Sufyan al-Thawri |
| Rabi'a bint Isma'il | Spiritual marriage with Ahmad ibn Abi al-Hawari (d. 851); paid dowries for his other wives |
| Umm 'Ali Fatima (d. 849) | Proposed marriage to Ahmad Khidruya; frank companion of Bayazid |
| Fatima of Nishapur | Taught Bayazid and Dhu'n-Nun |
| Hukayma of Damascus | Teacher of love, intimacy and fear |
| Umm Harun | Walked from Damascus to Jerusalem |
Umm 'Ali Fatima once lifted her veil in Bayazid's presence. When her husband grew jealous, she answered: "You are intimate with my physical self. Abū Yazīd is intimate with my spiritual way." Dhu'n-Nun called Fatima of Nishapur "a saint from among the friends of God, the Glorious and Mighty. She is also my teacher [ustādhī]."
Praised as men
Bayazid said that in all his life he had seen only one true man and one true woman, and the woman was Fatima of Nishapur. Of her it was said: "If any man desires to see a true man hidden in women’s clothes, let him look at Fāṭima." In 'Attar's version, "When a woman becomes a man in the path of God she is a man and one can no longer call her a woman." Farid al-Din Ganj-i Shakar (d. 1265) called a holy woman "a man sent in the form of a woman." Shaikh reads these as double-edged. They recognise women's attainment and open the category of "man" (rajul, rujuliyya) to them, but they keep the male as the measure.
Women's counter-voices survive too. Rabi'a told Hasan al-Basri: "All that is true, but egoism and self-worship and ‘I am your Lord’ have never sprung from a woman’s breast." And when he threw his prayer rug onto a lake to impress her, she threw her prayer mat into the air, flew up to it, and taught him that fish do what he did and flies do what she did: "The real work transcends both these tricks."
Love mysticism
Rabi'a's love of God was so complete that she refused marriage. Later masters disagreed on human love. Hujwiri held that women caused much mischief; Junayd (d. 910) said "I need sex like I need food."; Sahl al-Tustari (d. 896) observed that the Prophet loved women and that "The love of parents and children does not drive out the love of God". Khwaja Mir Dard of Delhi (d. 1785) wrote, "I love my wife and my children dearly." Ahmad al-Ghazali (d. 1126), 'Ayn al-Qudat (d. 1132) and Ruzbihan Baqli (d. 1209) developed a mysticism of beauty, and the hadith "God is beautiful and loves beauty" runs through it.
Spiritual marriage and friendship
Some of the most moving material concerns couples who joined devotion and intimacy. Rabi'a bint Isma'il married Ahmad ibn Abi al-Hawari as a spiritual partner, paid the dowries of his other wives and perfumed him for them. When Ahmad took another wife, Rabi'a's teacher Hukayma asked acerbically how, given his good judgment, his heart could be distracted from God by two women. Umm 'Ali Fatima proposed marriage herself and persisted until Ahmad Khidruya agreed. Annemarie Schimmel's phrase, quoted by Shaikh, names a recurring motif: "spiritual friendship destroyed by a worldly glance". Fatima ended her friendship with Bayazid when he remarked on her henna-stained hands.
Women also passed on the virtue of spiritual chivalry (futuwwa). Ibn 'Arabi treats the related quality of rujuliyya, "manliness", as open to women. Shaikh notes this with approval but keeps the double edge in view: the vocabulary of virtue stays male even when the virtue does not.
Four Sufi principles
Shaikh closes the chapter by drawing out four principles that bear on gender, despite all the variety she has described.
| Principle | Gender consequence |
|---|---|
| The inner state outranks outer markers of identity | Gender and status count for less than the heart |
| The struggle with the inciting self is the same for all | Purification is ungendered |
| Claims of superiority are traps of the ego | Male pride is a spiritual danger |
| The path makes equal demands on everyone | All can reach its final goals |
These principles, she argues, allowed Sufi women to live unconventional lives and reach the heights, and allowed some Sufi men to recognise and defend them. They are also tools for criticising sexism within Sufism itself.
Key passage
Note. The saying grants women full spiritual standing, which is radical, but it does so by renaming them. Shaikh returns to the problem with Ibn 'Arabi, who uses rijal (men) for female aspirants too. Her answer is not to ban the word but to ask what reality it points to: a quality of the soul open to anyone.
- Why might renunciation movements have been especially hostile to women?
- What does Rabi'a bint Isma'il's spiritual marriage suggest about how intimacy and devotion were understood?
- Is calling a woman "a man" in spiritual terms praise, erasure, or both?
3. Charting Ibn 'Arabi's Religious Anthropology
Chapter 2 (pp.61-94) is the book's map of Ibn 'Arabi's thought: how knowledge comes, how God is known through the names, what the complete human is, and how this vision shapes his rulings on women in law, sainthood and prayer.
- A woman, Nizam, corrects Ibn 'Arabi on love, and the scene sets the tone for the chapter.
- Reason reaches only so far; real knowledge comes by unveiling and taste.
- God loved to be known, and the divine names are both veils and bridges; the complete human gathers them all.
- Beauty (jamal) and mercy take priority over majesty (jalal) and wrath.
- Ibn 'Arabi draws legal conclusions: women may be axial saints, may lead mixed prayer, and their bodies are not shameful.
Nizam at the Ka'ba
The chapter opens with Ibn 'Arabi circling the Ka'ba and reciting a verse: "Lovers remain perplexed in love, exposed to every peril!" A young woman, Nizam, rebukes him. Real love, she says, "puts the senses to sleep, ravishes the intelligences, does away with thoughts, and carries away its slave in the stream of those who vanish." So "Where then is there room for perplexity?" and "It is unworthy of you to say such things!" Shaikh reads the story through Elizabeth Clark's distinction between the "social logic" and the "theological logic" of texts about women. Nizam is a historical person and also a figure of wisdom.
Reason and unveiling
The meeting with Ibn Rushd (d. 1198) frames the question of knowledge. Asked by the philosopher whether unveiling agrees with reason, the young Ibn 'Arabi answered yes and no: "Between the ‘yes’ and the ‘no,’ spirits take flight from their matter and necks become detached from their bodies." Ibn Rushd turned pale and recited the formula "There is no power and no strength but in God". Peter Coates calls his reaction an "existential wobble": the philosopher was suddenly unsure of what reason could reach. In a later vision Ibn 'Arabi saw the philosopher across a veil of light, absorbed in thought and unaware of him, and concluded: "His deliberation does not lead him where I am myself." Shaikh notes that Ibn 'Arabi still honoured him, and calls Ibn 'Arabi "both a philosopher and a mystic."
Reason gives a negative theology: it can say what God is not. Knowledge by "openings" (unveiling, tasting, witnessing) goes further. Its centre is the heart, prepared by retreat (khalwa) and remembrance (dhikr).
Hidden treasure, names and the complete human
The hadith of the hidden treasure grounds the cosmology: "I was a Hidden treasure and I loved to be known so I created the world in order that I might be known." The essence (dhat) is unknowable and needs nothing. It is known only through the names, which veil it as well as reveal it: "If the divine names were to be taken away, the veils would be lifted". The names are "the mediators or isthmus [barzakh] between us and the One named." Ibn 'Arabi goes further still: "In reality, there is nothing in existence but his names."
The cosmos is the great human, a mirror not yet polished; the human being is the small world. The complete human (al-insan al-kamil) is the human potential realised: prophets and saints embody it, and the cosmos lasts only while such a person exists. Behind this stands the Reality of Muhammad: "I was a prophet even while Adam was between water and clay".
Beauty before majesty
The names fall into two families. Names of beauty (jamal) bring God near and match the theology of similarity (tashbih); names of majesty (jalal) keep God far and match incomparability (tanzih). For Ibn 'Arabi they are not equal: "My mercy precedes my wrath." A seeker who takes on jalal for himself overreaches. Iblis did so when he said, "I am better than he." So does any man in authority who sees "himself as superior to others, failing to recognize that such superiority belongs to the position that he has been established in." Such a person "is an ignorant fellow characterized by repugnant negligence."
Shaikh calls this a hermeneutic of mercy. It points to an ethics of care and a critique of masculinist power grounded not in modern theory but in the doctrine of the names.
Law: saints, testimony and prayer
Ibn 'Arabi's rulings follow from this anthropology. Reading the list of virtues in Qur'an 33:35, he writes: "In each of these categories which we are speaking of there are men and women." And: "There is no spiritual qualification conferred on men which is denied women." Even the highest rank is open: "Both men and women participate in all of the levels, even in being the axial saint [Quṭb]".
| Question | Ibn 'Arabi's position (as Shaikh presents it) |
|---|---|
| Sainthood | All levels open to women, including the axial saint |
| Legal precedent | Hajar's running between the hills became a rite for all believers |
| Testimony | In some cases one woman counts as two men |
| Prophecy | Maryam and Asiya were prophets; men keep only "superlative perfection" |
| 'Awra (what must be covered) | Only the genitals; covering is for modesty, not shame |
| Imamate | Women may lead men and women in prayer |
On the body he is blunt: "In our opinion, the only parts of her body that are ʿawra are her genitals", and if women still cover, "it is for the sake of modesty, and not because their bodies are shameful." On prayer: "Some people allow the imamate of women absolutely before a congregation of men and women. I agree with this". Anyone who forbids it without proof, in this translation, "he should be ignored."
On prophetic rank, men are given "superlative perfection" (akmaliyya), the station of messenger. Shaikh notes that since no messenger comes after Muhammad, this priority has become "entirely theoretical or rhetorical".
The forgetful witness
One argument shows Ibn 'Arabi's daring as an exegete. The Qur'an asks for two women witnesses in place of one man, so that if one forgets, the other may remind her. Ibn 'Arabi notes that Adam forgot (20:115), and asks what follows if one of the two women never forgets. Then she bears a divine attribute, the one Moses names: "My Lord never errs, nor forgets." (20:52). Shaikh calls this a Qur'anic argument for women's superiority drawn from the very verse used to limit their testimony. She identifies three of his roles at work in such passages: legal technician, Sufi, and exegetical virtuoso.
A woman as axial saint
Shaikh quotes Souad Hakim's description of what a woman's tenure as the axial saint would mean: "Around her the world turns: she arranges its governance and the needs of the entire world rest upon her." and "She is the highest veil." The hadith that a people who give governance to women will not prosper is answered by a distinction Ibn 'Arabi draws: what God grants is not the same as what people delegate.
Key passage
Note. Shaikh's whole case rests on this kind of sentence. Spiritual equality here is not a private matter. Ibn 'Arabi draws from it rulings on testimony, prayer and the body. That link between inner and outer is what she will defend against the traditionalists in Part 8.
- Why is it significant that the chapter opens with a woman correcting the Shaykh?
- How does the priority of mercy over wrath bear on questions of authority in families and states?
- Is men's "superlative perfection" a real limit or, as Shaikh says, rhetorical?
4. Mysticism and Gender: A Hermeneutic of Experience
Chapter 3 (pp.95-112), the shortest, turns from doctrine to biography. It gathers what Ibn 'Arabi tells us about the women in his life, as teachers, peers, disciples, relatives and wives, and asks how this experience shaped his thinking about gender.
- For about eighteen years Ibn 'Arabi disliked women and sex; the change came as a divine gift tied to the Prophet's example.
- His two great women teachers in Spain were elderly, powerful and spiritually commanding.
- He praised many women peers, and thirteen of the fourteen disciples he names as receiving his cloak were women.
- His family life shows warmth toward mother, sisters, wives and daughters.
- Two trends, one egalitarian and one patriarchal, coexist in his attitude, and Shaikh reads them dialectically.
From aversion to love
Shaikh begins with the feminist maxim that the personal is political. Ibn 'Arabi reports that when he entered the path he intensely disliked women and sex, a state that lasted about eighteen years. It frightened him, because the Prophet had been made to love women. He prayed, and the aversion lifted. He then writes: "And God made them lovable to me, and I am the greatest of all creation in compassion toward them and in guarding their rights, because in this matter I am acting on insight [baṣīra]". Love here is joined to justice. Loving women means guarding their rights.
Two women teachers
In Spain he studied with Fatima bint Ibn al-Muthanna of Cordova and Yasmina, called Shams, Umm al-Fuqara', of Marchena of the Olives. Yasmina was in her eighties. Of her he wrote: "Among people of our kind I have never met one like her with respect to the control she had over her soul". Fatima, a woman of ninety, saw herself as his spiritual mother. He confesses he was almost ashamed to look at her face, "it was so rosy and soft." She often told him: "I am your spiritual mother and the light of your earthly mother."
Peers and disciples
Among his peers was the slave girl of Qasim al-Dawla, of whom he said: "I have never seen one more spiritually chivalrous in our time." Zaynab al-Qal'iyya, whom he visited in Seville and Mecca, had renounced beauty and wealth; he calls her a "foremost ascetic of her day," who was said to levitate. In the Diwan he names fourteen people he invested with the khirqa, the Sufi cloak that marks initiation; thirteen were women. One of them, Zumurrud, he criticised for abandoning it (Part 9 gives the poem).
Then there is Nizam, daughter of the Meccan scholar Makin al-Din, whose aunt Fakhr al-Nisa' declined to teach him because of her age. Nizam inspired the Tarjuman al-ashwaq. In its preface he insists: "Whatever name I mention in this work it is to her that I am alluding."
Family
His mother visited Fatima of Cordova. He refused help from the "Prince of the Faithful" in marrying off his two sisters, and mourned the younger. He names wives: Maryam bint Muhammad bin 'Abdun al-Bija'i, and Fatima bint Yusuf, who may have been the mother of Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi. Of another he wrote only: "I had a wife whom I loved, but time separated us." His small daughter Zaynab, seeing him after an absence, cried out: "Mummy! It’s Daddy!!"
When his younger sister died he wrote to the elder, calling the dead sister the "best of ladies," a "white diamond", and addressing the survivor as "the honored mother-sister,". In a vision of the Day of Resurrection, God grants him entry to paradise, and the first people he asks to intercede for are all women: his sisters, his wife and another woman. Only then does he ask for his companions and relatives, and for everyone his gaze falls on. Shaikh finds it telling that the only people he names are women he loved.
| Relationship | Women named | What it shows |
|---|---|---|
| Teachers | Fatima of Cordova; Yasmina (Shams) | Women as spiritual authorities over a young man |
| Peers | Zaynab al-Qal'iyya; Qasim al-Dawla's slave girl; Nizam | Admiration across class and status |
| Disciples | Thirteen women given the khirqa | Women in the line of initiation |
| Family | Mother; two sisters; wives Maryam and Fatima; daughter Zaynab | Tenderness and duty |
Two trends and how to read them
Ibn 'Arabi was still a man of his age. Shaikh sets him beside Ibn Hazm, who also defended women in mosques, and notes that few Andalusian women appear in the scholarly dictionaries. He advised a male disciple not to befriend women until his soul had become "feminine" in receptivity. So two trends compete in him: one egalitarian, one patriarchal.
How should experience and doctrine be related? Shaikh rejects the perennialist view, from William James onward, that all mystics share one pure experience. She also finds Steven Katz's view, that experience is wholly built by language and tradition, too one-sided. She prefers Frederick Streng's dialectical approach, in which experience and context shape each other, and calls it the approach most consistent with a tawhidic theology.
Why the aversion?
Shaikh weighs three readings of his eighteen years of aversion: that it concerned sexuality only; that his later claim of love was defensive; or both together. She does not choose firmly, but notes that the change was tied in his own account to compassion and rights, not only to desire. The episode also shows him willing to report an unflattering stage in his growth, which gives weight to his later praise of women.
The Tarjuman and its critics
Male contemporaries accused him of dressing up erotic love as mystical verse to protect his reputation. Ibn 'Arabi answered with a commentary, insisting that the beloved stood for divine realities. In the preface he calls Nizam "the object of my Quest and my hope, the Virgin Most Pure" and says that "this young girl knew perfectly what I was alluding to." Shaikh reads the episode on two levels at once, the human relationship and the symbol, without letting either swallow the other.
Key passage
Note. The word chivalry (futuwwa) was a male virtue in Sufi manuals. Applied to a slave girl, it crosses two lines at once, gender and status. The sentence is small, but it is the kind of evidence on which Shaikh builds her case that his inclusive language was meant.
- What does the eighteen-year aversion suggest about Ibn 'Arabi's early spiritual formation?
- Why might Ibn 'Arabi link loving women with guarding their rights?
- Does knowing a thinker's life help or distort the reading of his doctrine?
5. Reading Gender and Metaphor in the Cosmos
Chapter 4 (pp.113-139) has two halves. The first sets out Shaikh's way of reading, which she calls a mystical hermeneutic of subversion. The second follows Ibn 'Arabi's gendered metaphors through God, nature and the human being, showing a cosmos built on marriage.
- Ibn 'Arabi's style "unsays" every fixed statement, and gender is no exception.
- Activity is called male and receptivity female, but these are positions, not biological sexes.
- Every act that brings something new into being is a marriage (nikah): fathers act, mothers receive, children result.
- The same pattern runs from God's intention to create, through sky and earth, to speech and craft.
- The body is honoured: the human is "spiritual-bodily", and the soul loves the body as its means of knowing God.
Unsaying gender
Shaikh draws on Michael Sells's work on apophatic language: "Apophasis is a discourse in which any single proposition is acknowledged as falsifying, as reifying. It is a discourse of double propositions, in which meaning is generated through the tension between saying and unsaying." She proposes an "apophasis of gender". Ibn 'Arabi warns against binding God to any one form, and his short poem makes the point:
If you affirm immanence you define
If you affirm both
You hit the mark
You are an imam and a master in the spiritual sciences.
Readers must therefore stay supple. Fatemah Keshavarz's remark (so spelt on p.115) on Rumi applies to Ibn 'Arabi as well: "Searching for patterns in his work, will more often than not, lead to patterns that were created to be dismantled or transformed."
Shaikh also uses Paul Ricoeur on metaphor's "the power to re-describe reality." She concedes that Ibn 'Arabi was a product of his era, and that his legacy on gender is mixed. Reading him today calls for a reciprocity that Ebrahim Moosa describes as "a transformation and deepening of each language in the mirror of the other".
Male and female as positions
Ibn 'Arabi calls the active principle male and the receptive principle female. But nothing in creation acts without first being acted on, so: "Other than the Creator, there is not in this universe a male," and those called males are all "really female". The scheme extends everywhere: "everything that exercises an effect is a ‘father,’ and everything that receives an effect is a ‘mother,’ while the fruit of their relationship is the ‘child.’"
Speech is one example: "The speaker is a father. The listener is a mother. The speech discourse between them is a marriage." Shaikh notes the subversive result when the scheme is applied to Ibn 'Arabi's own teachers. Shams and Nuna Fatima, as active givers of knowledge, "fathered" his learning.
The cosmic marriage
For Ibn 'Arabi marriage is the root of everything that comes to be: "So intercourse is the root of all things. Therefore it has comprehensiveness, superiority, and priority." He even wrote a work, now lost, on the sexual act that pervades all atoms. At the divine level: "The first of the high fathers is the known. The first of the low mothers is the thingness of a possible but not yet existing thing, the first sexual act is the intent to do something." God is father, mother and child at once, and the high and low carry no superiority. Creation is pictured as labour, and the breath of the All-Merciful (nafas al-rahman) relieves the distress of the not yet existing.
| Level | Father (active) | Mother (receptive) | Child |
|---|---|---|---|
| Divine | The known | Thingness of the possible | Existence of that thing |
| Nature | Spirits; sky | Nature; earth | Bodies, plants |
| Speech | Speaker | Listener | Understanding |
| Discipleship | Teacher (even a woman) | Disciple | Learning |
Nature is a mother "inasmuch as nature is a place [maḥall] of transformation [istiḥāla]". The earth is patient and receptive: "Therefore, it is the mother from whom we come and to whom we return."
The earth passage reverses the usual value of receptivity. The earth is "the most powerful [aʾazz] of the bodies", and "she is the patient one [ṣabūr], the receptive one [qābila], the immutable one, the firm one." Receptivity here means strength and stability, not weakness. The mountains that anchor her are God's way of steadying her when she trembles in awe. Ibn 'Arabi names the earth al-Sabur, the Patient One, which is one of the ninety-nine names of God, so the receptive earth reflects a divine quality.
The body honoured
Ibn 'Arabi describes himself as born of "fathers, pure spirits and of mothers, elemental souls." Against the dualism of Suhrawardi (d. 1191), he gives the body a high place. In his commentary on the Tarjuman: "The soul loves the body because all of her knowledge of the Truth is gained through her imprisonment in the body and through her making use of it in order to serve God." The human is "spiritual-bodily [rūḥiyya badaniyya]", and in some respects higher than the angels, who lack the emotions that the body brings.
Female images of the divine
Shaikh compares Ibn 'Arabi with the feminist thinker Luce Irigaray, who argued that women need female images of the divine to reach full subjectivity. Ibn 'Arabi's maternal images, labour, pregnancy and the breath that relieves distress, supply such images from within Islam. Shaikh is careful not to overstate the effect: feminine images of God are no guarantee of egalitarian practice. But ruptures in a male picture of God, she argues, are still significant.
Women among the angels
Ibn 'Arabi's poems on his disciples carry the same pattern. One maiden's cloak elevates her "to the station of men". Another poem praises Safiyya, who "embodied the epitome of the names" and is called "Little sister of the Virgin", visited nightly by angels. The language of names and stations, used in the cosmology, is applied directly to living women.
Key passage
Note. This one line does much of the work of the book's middle chapters. If maleness in the full sense belongs only to God, then every man is "female" before God, and the male-female pair stops mapping onto men and women. Shaikh's critics might say the gendered vocabulary still privileges the active pole. Her reply, developed in Part 8, is to keep the insight and question the vocabulary.
- What is gained and lost by calling activity "male" and receptivity "female"?
- How does the marriage pattern change if a woman teacher is the "father"?
- Why might honouring the body matter for a theology of gender?
6. The Poetics and Politics of Adam and Eve
Chapter 5 (pp.141-172) is the book's longest reading of a single theme. It compares the Qur'an's creation story with the later exegetical tradition, then shows how Ibn 'Arabi both repeats and transforms the inherited ideas of Eve from the rib, the male "degree" and female deficiency.
- The Qur'an speaks of one soul and its mate; it names neither Eve nor a rib.
- Later hadith and exegesis brought in the rib, Eve's guilt and readings of the male "degree" that grew steadily more hierarchical.
- Ibn 'Arabi grants men a degree, but denies it in respect of shared humanity and reduces it to activity and receptivity.
- He turns the rib into a sign of love, and makes Eve "a second father".
- His Adam is three things at once, the androgynous first human, the male, and the archetype, and maleness and femaleness are "merely accidents".
The Qur'an's story
The Qur'an begins with unity: "O humankind! Be conscious of your Sustainer, who has created you from a single soul and from it created its mate" (4:1). Riffat Hassan notes that the soul (nafs) is grammatically feminine and its mate (zawj) masculine. Amina Wadud speaks of "two co-existing forms of a single reality". In the garden both are warned and both are tempted (7:20-22), though Adam is singled out afterwards (7:23-27). Shaikh borrows Daniel Boyarin's phrase for such texts, a "powerful example of androcentricism at the same time that it subverts misogyny."
What the tradition added
Hadith and the tales of the prophets (qisas al-anbiya') filled the gaps, often drawing on Jewish and Christian material (isra'iliyyat). Eve was made from Adam's left rib. A famous hadith counsels: "I advise you to deal gently with women, for woman was created from a rib". Tabari and Tha'labi tell how Eve gave Adam wine before he ate; Ibn Kathir has the line "But for Ḥawwāʾ no female would be a traitor to her husband!"
The verse "But the men have a degree over them." (2:228) shows the drift. Following Karen Bauer, Shaikh traces it.
| Exegete (dates as printed) | What the "degree" means |
|---|---|
| Tabari (d. 923) | Five readings, from inheritance and jihad to the right to command, dowry, men's granting of rights, and beards |
| Razi (d. 1209) | Rationality; men as imams and judges; concubines |
| Ibn Kathir (d. 1371) | Superiority in creation, morals, status, obedience, spending and the next world |
| Biqa'i (d. 1408) | Men's calmer minds |
The hadith of deficiency completes the set. On a feast day, the Prophet is reported as telling women, "I have not seen anyone more deficient in intelligence and religion than you".
Shaikh notes that not every early authority accepted these readings. Sufis such as al-Sulami resisted the trope of deficiency by describing women savants as exalted in religion and intellect, the very terms of the hadith. A few premodern women were jurists and hadith scholars. The record of women teachers in Part 2 sits uneasily beside the hadith. The exegetical tradition, in other words, was a choice among possibilities, and later exegetes generally chose the more hierarchical ones.
Three positions in Ibn 'Arabi
Ibn 'Arabi builds a "house of mirrors" from these texts. Shaikh finds three positions in his work: men's superiority, the shared humanity (insaniyya) of both, and women's superiority. Part 7 shows how they fit together.
His long reading of 2:228 runs in four steps, which Shaikh maps in her own Figure 1.
Step A grants equality at the root: "Given that “humanity” [insāniyya] is a reality shared by both male and female, then with respect to “humanity,” men do not possess an advantage [daraja] over women." Step B admits that Eve came from a short rib, and yet says "the woman can never reach the level [daraja] of the man, despite the fact that she is choicest [naqāwa] of the epitome." Step C praises the womb: "Indeed, man only casts semen into the womb. Nothing else. The womb is the locus of engendering and creation." Step D rereads deficiency as a matter of activity and receptivity. The degree that remains is ontological, a difference that "does not disappear."
Eve as second father
A second passage gives Eve a surprising title: "Then [God] separated from him a second father for us and named him a mother". Any priority Adam has is God's doing: "all precedence is from the hand of God." The rib itself is reread as love: "She was [created] from the rib because ribs are characterized by the quality of bending [inḥināʾ]", and so "The love of Eve is love for a place of origin [homeland] and the love of Adam is love of himself." Since she was him in essence, his love for her is a love of himself, and her love for him is a yearning for home.
The Fusus: triplicity
The chapter on Muhammad in the Fusus begins from the hadith in which women, perfume and prayer are made lovable to the Prophet. From the saying "Whosoever knows his soul knows his Lord." Ibn 'Arabi builds a chain: God loved the human, created in His image, and man loves woman, drawn from him. "Thus triplicity is manifest: God, man, and woman."
Read with suspicion, this can make men "divine intermediaries if not demigods", standing between women and God. Shaikh names this reading "benevolent and romanticized patriarchy", and does not let Ibn 'Arabi off the hook. But she argues that other passages undo it.
Three Adams
The undoing begins with Adam himself. Shaikh distinguishes three senses.
In Naqsh al-fusus Ibn 'Arabi says he means by Adam "the existence of the human microcosm." And in 'Uqlat al-mustawfiz: "Maleness and femaleness are merely accidents and do not belong to the essence of insāniyya, which is one." Rabia Terri Harris adds: "Without women there is no dynamic."
| Inherited idea | Ibn 'Arabi's transformation |
|---|---|
| Eve from a crooked rib | Rib as bending, inclination and love |
| Men's degree over women | None in shared humanity; a difference of activity and receptivity |
| Women deficient in religion and intellect | Explained by receptivity; woman as "choicest" |
| Adam as the male first human | Adam as androgynous whole and as archetype |
| Eve as derivative | Eve as "a second father" |
The Prophet's longing
The Fusus passage on love adds a surprising divine voice. God longs for those who long for Him: "O David, I long for them even more." Love runs from God to the human and back, and man's love for woman, drawn from him, repeats the pattern. Shaikh reads this as the root of the triplicity, and also as its limit: if love originates in God, then neither man nor woman owns it. As the Fusus says of the Prophet's love of women, "He did not say “I loved” from himself."
The triplicity reconsidered
Ibn 'Arabi's passage on number gives the triplicity a further turn: "Know that nothing is produced from the One [al-aḥad]. The first of the numbers is two", and the smallest combination that produces is three. On this view God, man and woman form the smallest productive unity, and none can be removed without loss. Read this way, woman is not the bottom of a ladder but one of three terms without which nothing comes to be.
Key passage
Note. In the language of philosophy, an accident is a property a thing can lose without ceasing to be what it is. To call sex an accident of humanity is to say that whatever is said of the human as such, including the capacity for complete realisation, applies fully to women. Every later argument in the book leans on this sentence.
- Why does the Qur'an's silence about the rib matter so much for Shaikh?
- Does Ibn 'Arabi's four-step reading abolish the "degree" or only shrink it?
- How does the idea of an androgynous first Adam change the meaning of Eve's creation?
7. Witnessing God in Women
Chapter 6 (pp.173-202) gathers Ibn 'Arabi's boldest statements: that the divine source is feminine, that God is most perfectly witnessed in women, that sexual union can be a theophany, and that creation has more than one gendered pattern. It ends with Shaikh's map of his three ways of speaking about gender.
- In Arabic grammar the essence, attribute, power and cause are feminine, and Ibn 'Arabi reads this as the priority of the feminine.
- A man witnesses God most perfectly in a woman, because there he sees God as both active and receptive.
- Men need women: without the part, the whole cannot be called whole; and the strength of women counters even angels.
- Sexual union, grounded in love, can be a total annihilation in which the lover returns to God.
- Four modes of creation (Adam, Eve, Jesus, everyone else) break the idea that only men are active.
The feminine before all
The hadith of the three things made lovable to the Prophet (women, perfume, prayer) opens the discussion. Arabs normally let the masculine prevail in grammar, yet the Prophet used a feminine form for "three". Ibn 'Arabi comments: "How insightful he is about the reality of things! How careful he is to protect the observance of rights!" Perfume, the masculine noun, stands between two feminine ones, just as man stands between the divine essence (al-dhat, feminine) and woman. Whatever source one names for the cosmos, essence, attribute (sifa), power (qudra) or cause ('illa), "you will find that the feminine takes priority, even for those who claim that God is the cause of the cosmos".
Elsewhere he finds a female "degree" in a single letter: God calls the man mar' and the woman mar'a, adding a syllable, so "Therefore the female has a degree [daraja] over the man in this station [maqām] that the man does not have".
The most perfect witnessing
The central passage explains why. When a man witnesses God in himself, he sees God either as active or as receptive. In a woman he sees both, because Eve came from him and receives from him, while God is her source. "Hence his witnessing of the Real in the woman is the most complete and most perfect". And since God cannot be seen apart from some material form, "the witnessing of the Real in women is the greatest and most perfect witnessing."
Shaikh asks the obvious question: if the man is the witness and the woman the witnessed, where is female subjectivity? She answers with Rabia Terri Harris that woman is the locus of the "breath of the Merciful" through which humanity is born. A woman, too, can contemplate God in all of human creation, whether or not she bears children; Shaikh is careful to include the celibate women of early Sufism. Ibn 'Arabi himself notes that the Prophet loved women "although he had few children."
Root and branch, whole and part
The womb (rahim) shares its root with the All-Merciful (al-Rahman). "God created Adam in the form of the merciful one." Ibn 'Arabi then reverses the usual picture of male self-sufficiency: "As for women, it is the yearning of the part for its whole, and of the branch for its root and of the stranger for its home. And the yearning of the man for his wife is the yearning of the whole for its part because with it he can be truly called the whole and without it, this name [the whole], does not really belong to him." Shaikh concludes that each is a part needing the other.
The strength of women
In a discussion of the divine name al-Qawi, the Strong, Ibn 'Arabi writes: "There is nothing in the created universe greater in power than women." The seeker is needy, the sought has might. His proof is Qur'an 66:4, where God, Gabriel, the believers and the angels are named as the Prophet's supporters against two of his wives, 'A'isha and Hafsa: "All of this is to counter the strength of two women!" Shaikh calls this one of his most astounding subversions: a rebuke becomes praise of female strength.
Love and sexual union
Love between men and women comes from their single origin, so it draws them toward God: "That which brings him closer to his Lord is made lovable to him." Sexual union is the "most complete union possible in love." In the Futuhat the lover "dissolves [yafnī fanāʾ] in her with a real annihilation and sincere love." "There is no part in him that is not in her." At the end he says, "I am the one I desire and the one I desire [ahwā] is I," and his witnessing turns him back to God.
Shaikh draws ethical conclusions. If marriage and sex are sites of the sacred, then coerced marriage, abuse and casual sex become unthinkable. She contrasts al-Ghazali, who valued marriage partly for gaining a housekeeper. For the axial saint, Ibn 'Arabi says, the pleasure of sex is "a delicious overpowering" that teaches servanthood, and calling it an "animal" appetite only proves its nobility: animals are named for life, and "What is more noble than life?"
Two cautions follow. Qushayri saw women's "weakness" as a spiritual advantage, and Sachiko Murata agreed; Shaikh warns this can excuse social inequality. And Ibn 'Arabi's frame is heterosexual, though one passage, which lists a slave boy among those whose love can absorb the lover wholly, opens a door to other sexualities.
Other creation stories
In one passage God carves Eve like a carpenter and breathes spirit into her directly: "So Adam rested in her and she rested in him, and she was a garment for him and he was a garment for her." Adam was moulded like a potter's clay. Ibn 'Arabi also limits the "degree": "That woman’s degree is below man has nothing to do with attainment of completion".
Mary's case reverses Eve's: "Hence Mary settled into the station of Adam, while Jesus settled in the station of Eve." And so "Hence, Jesus and Eve are two siblings, while Adam and Mary are their two parents." Ibn 'Arabi says he sets out the four kinds so that "one who is weak in intellect" does not tie divine creativity to one pattern. Since the rest of humanity comes from both parents, neither sex holds activity alone.
Three mappings of gender
Shaikh closes with her own map.
The danger of praising weakness
Shaikh treats the praise of weakness with care. Qushayri read the "degree" in 2:228 as men's excellence and women's advantage of weakness, since weakness reveals dependence on God. Sufism does value spiritual poverty: the seeker is called faqir, "the poor one". But to praise women's inner advantage while ignoring the outer inequality it rests on is, she says, dangerous, because it can turn into an apology for injustice. The answer is not to drop the Sufi insight but to insist on social spaces where authentic female and male selves can form on the basis of equality and respect.
Garments for one another
Shaikh draws out the Qur'anic image of spouses as garments. Garments are close to the skin, as marriage is close; they cover what is private; they protect from the elements; they beautify. Spouses, by the same image, protect, nurture and honour each other. She also notes the limits of the model. Ibn 'Arabi's bond with Nizam was neither marital nor sexual, and celibate women such as Rabi'a reached the highest states. His praise of marriage, she concludes, offers one path, not a rule for everyone.
Key passage
Note. The sentence sounds like flattery until one sees the argument: the one who seeks is poor, the one sought has might. Ibn 'Arabi then reads a Qur'anic rebuke of two wives as proof of their strength. It shows his method at its most daring: a hierarchical text turned inside out without being denied.
- Does the "most perfect witnessing" passage honour women or make them objects of male contemplation?
- How does Shaikh's answer, drawn from Harris, restore female subjectivity?
- Why do the Jesus and Mary stories matter so much for the question of activity and receptivity?
8. Ibn 'Arabi and Islamic Feminism
Chapter 7 (pp.203-228) sets Shaikh's reading against two leading traditionalist interpreters, Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Sachiko Murata, and then states what Ibn 'Arabi offers Islamic feminism: a critique that reaches below rights to the foundations of value and meaning.
- Nasr ties majesty to the male body and beauty to the female, and from this derives male authority.
- Ibn 'Arabi's priority of mercy and his ungendered stations refute that move.
- Murata accepts a "theological patriarchy" in law and a "spiritual matriarchy" on the path; Shaikh rejects the split.
- Ibn 'Arabi himself linked spiritual equality to law: testimony, precedent, prayer.
- Rights-based feminism treats symptoms; Sufism lets feminism ask why, not only how.
Nasr: complementarity and hierarchy
Nasr, a scholar of Sufism and a shaykh of the Maryamiyya order in the United States, holds that men and women share humanity but differ ontologically. For him majesty is manifested in the masculine state and infinity and beauty in the feminine, and so "The male body itself reflects majesty, power, absoluteness; the female body reflects beauty, beatitude and infinity." From this he derives social roles. Complementarity, he writes, "was rooted in equity rather than equality", and recognised "the role of the male as the immutable pole around which the family was constructed". He even argues that "The revolt of the female sex against the male did not precede but followed in the wake of the revolt of the male sex against Heaven."
Shaikh's objection is that Ibn 'Arabi's "masculine" and "feminine" are modes of activity and receptivity, not bodies. Nasr grants that each sex has something of both principles, but returns to the rule that "in men, the male principle, and in women, the female principle, is dominant."
A rejoinder from Ibn 'Arabi
Ibn 'Arabi opens every spiritual station to women, so the realities of those stations are ungendered. More than that, he ranks the names: beauty over majesty, mercy over wrath. Unrefined majesty is dangerous; claimed for oneself, it is Iblis's error. Rabia Terri Harris puts it well: "One half ounce of pure gold is worth a small mountain of unrefined ore." "The real question is, ‘How will they be used?’" If men were all majesty and women all beauty, neither would have kamal, the completeness that makes a human being complete.
| Question | Nasr | Murata | Shaikh's Ibn 'Arabi |
|---|---|---|---|
| Are majesty and beauty gendered? | Yes, in bodies | As principles, yes; not always in persons | No; every seeker must integrate both |
| Which comes first? | Complementary | Feminine at the peak of reality | Mercy precedes wrath |
| Social order | Male as pole of family and law | Patriarchy in law, matriarchy on the path | Spiritual equality enacted in law |
| History | Timeless tradition | Shari'a idealised | His language is of his time |
Shaikh links Nasr's view of men as sole guardians of God's law to the treatment of women after the 1979 Iranian Revolution, a context, she notes, equally inhospitable to Nasr.
Murata: patriarchy below, matriarchy above
Shaikh calls Murata's The Tao of Islam a landmark and says she is profoundly indebted to it. Her objection is to its social conclusions. Murata writes: "On the social level Islam affirms the primacy of God as King, Majestic, Lord, Ruler. It establishes a theological patriarchy." On the spiritual level, by contrast, "Here they establish a spiritual matriarchy." And: "The patriarchal view of God is normal for the Sharīʿa that pertains to all Muslims but the matriarchal view pertains to the spiritual path, the Ṭarīqa, so not everyone can appreciate it." She does not see her work as criticising the law: "But to bring out the feminine stress of Islamic spirituality does not necessarily mean criticizing the masculine stress of the Sharīʿa and Kalām."
Shaikh's reply has three parts. First, calling mercy feminine and majesty masculine reinforces the idea that women are to be loved and men feared, and this is not socially innocent. Second, the idea of a masculine Shari'a ignores its history and its present use against women. Third, Murata omits the very passages in which Ibn 'Arabi draws social conclusions: Hajar as a source of law, women's testimony, and women leading mixed prayer. By leaving them out, Shaikh says, Murata "effectively censors and suppresses an impetus toward social justice".
The Qur'an itself joins inner and outer: "The Believers, men and women are protecting friends of one another [awliyāʾ]" (9:71). Laury Silvers, a former student of Murata, traces her "statically relational and hierarchical" view to her teachers, Nasr and Henry Corbin. Nasr's other writings speak of castes and races, and of people whose "virtue it is to follow and to be led."
Silvers notes that these scholars, idealising the past, see "pre-modern racial, gender and class distinctions [to] reiterate a harmonious celestial order." Shaikh shows the point holds for Nasr, who writes that humanity is divided into "castes and races, both of which must be understood in their essential reality", and who speaks of four races as aspects of the human condition. For traditionalists of this kind, she concludes, hierarchy belongs to the nature of reality, so feminist campaigns for social justice look like a falling away. Her own reading of Ibn 'Arabi, she argues, opens far more liberating possibilities.
What Ibn 'Arabi offers
Shaikh sees two dimensions in his writing. Where he uses patriarchal images, the "degree", the active male, the word rijal for women, he speaks the language of his time. Where he inverts them, the strong wives, the feminine source, he opens new ground. Both must be read together.
Three dualities are undone. Between God and humanity, maternal images of pregnancy and birth replace the king who commands "Be", and need runs both ways. Between men and women, the rib becomes shared humanity and love, and each needs the other. Between spirit and body, embodiment becomes the condition of completeness. On 2:228, Shaikh says, Ibn 'Arabi "effectively domesticates, circumscribes, and defangs" the verse.
Beyond rights
Many Muslim feminist legal scholars work within a discourse of rights, recovering what classical law granted women. Shaikh calls this necessary but limited: it treats the symptoms of patriarchal structures without asking about their roots. Rights won this way are vulnerable when identity feels threatened and patriarchal law becomes a badge of authenticity. A deeper critique asks what the law assumes a human being, a society and God to be, and it distinguishes Shari'a from fiqh, the historical human effort to interpret it.
Secular feminism has its own gap. Drawing on Germaine Greer's The Whole Woman, Shaikh argues that without a grounded idea of the self, feminism is open to capture by consumer capitalism. Grace Jantzen warns that privatised spirituality leaves justice to the secular, "seeing it as having nothing to offer in the work for structural change."
Greer, as Shaikh reads her, shows how fashion, pharmaceutical and pornographic industries, working with older male dominance, turned women into objects of profit. Any feminism, secular or Islamic, that lacks a grounded account of the self and of human value risks being captured by such forces. Mysticism, Shaikh argues, has resources for that account, provided it is not shut up in private devotion.
Sufism, Shaikh concludes, asks the deepest questions (Who am I? Why am I here? What are my criteria for value?) and sets one ideal, the complete human, for all. In that ideal, gender is ultimately irrelevant, and legal and social structures are to be held to it. The book ends: "By offering a closer look that sees with both eyes, embracing the contextual and the transcendental, Ibn ʿArabī’s teachings offer a twenty-first-century audience Copernican possibilities for transformation."
Shari'a and fiqh
A structural critique, Shaikh argues, begins by asking questions that a rights discourse leaves aside. What follows from using the words Shari'a and fiqh as if they meant the same thing? How did context and history shape the formation of Islamic law? What ideas of "human being", "society" and "God" lie beneath the dominant rulings? Most legal scholars accept in theory that fiqh is human and historical, but popular speech and some religious leaders merge it with the divine law, with harmful results for women.
She is clear about what she is not doing. She is not reopening the old debate over whether the law or the path comes first. Her claim is that certain Sufi discourses may read the Shari'a, and its assumptions about human nature, more faithfully than the dominant fiqh does. Sufism's priority of mercy, in which majesty must always be held within beauty, could help shape a more humane legal system.
Key passage
Note. Harris's image grants, for argument's sake, that men may have more raw majesty, and then makes it irrelevant. Spiritual worth lies in refinement, not starting material. It is the clearest statement of the chapter's case against any hierarchy founded on nature.
- Is Murata's separation of law and path a fair reading of the Sufi tradition, or a modern compromise?
- Why does Shaikh think rights-based feminism is fragile under political pressure?
- What would it mean to hold legal structures accountable to the ideal of the complete human?
9. Appendix: Poems from the Diwan
The appendix (pp.229-232) gives Shaikh's translations of short poems that open Ibn 'Arabi's Diwan, in which he records investing his female disciples with the Sufi cloak (khirqa). She notes that, to her knowledge, they had not been translated and published before.
The poems in brief
| Disciple | What the poem says |
|---|---|
| His daughter Dunya | Adorned with the garment of faith; advice on drinking the water of life |
| Siti al-'Aysh | Wrapped in the same khirqa he received; beyond reproach if she wears it as the virtuous do |
| The daughter of Zaki al-Din | Given his mantle after a refining discipleship; may pass it on to his followers |
| Zumurrud | Asked for the khirqa, went to Egypt with her daughter, then deserted it |
| Jamilah | Given a momentous khirqa; her actions now beautiful |
| His daughter Safari | Clothed in a robe of piety; told to follow his path and legal school |
| An unnamed woman | Wrapped in piety "that raised her above gender"; robes of al-Khidr |
Notable lines
The poem to Siti al-'Aysh stresses the line of transmission: he wrapped her in the "Same khirqa of God’s friends / Which the people of piety and bounty / Had enveloped me within." The cloak a woman receives is the cloak the master received.
The poem on Jamilah turns modesty into doctrine. Her good conduct is not his doing: "If truth be told, it is not my teaching / That is the catalyst." The real caretaker is God.
The poem to Safari carries his signature: "My way is the Sharīʿa of the Arab Hashemite prophet." and "I say this and I am Muḥammad Ibn al-ʿArabī." A woman disciple is instructed in his legal school as well as his path.
The last poem gives the most striking phrase. He wrapped her "in the raiment of piety, / That raised her above gender." She received from the robes of al-Khidr all beautiful qualities, and the pledge between them is that she will not reveal these gifts.
10. Notes on the Text
Page numbers are printed pages. The list covers the main text and appendix; the endnotes and index were consulted for dates and names but not proofread line by line.
| Page | As printed | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| 2 | Shakhya Fāṭima | Letters transposed; Shaykha elsewhere |
| 10 and 91 | Two renderings of the imamate sentence | Same passage, different wording |
| 35 | superogatory | For supererogatory |
| Ch.1 | Tadkhirat / Tadhkhirat | 'Attar's title spelt two ways |
| 63 | Clarke suggests | The scholar is named Clark elsewhere |
| 70 | coincidenta oppositorum | Misspelt Latin phrase |
| 107 | Fāṭima of Cordoba | Cordova elsewhere |
| 115 | Fatemah Keshavarz | Fatemeh in the bibliography |
| 123 | between and active and receptive principles | Extra "and" |
| 136 | Ibn ʿArabī’s presents us | Stray possessive |
| 150 | Ibn Arabī (heading) | Missing 'ayn sign |
| 154 and later | "until finally a completed person emerges" | "finally" dropped when requoted |
| 166 and 181 | "making him" / "turning him" into one of a pair | Same Fusus line, two wordings |
| 177, 189 | coincidenta oppositorium | A second, different misspelling |
| 193 | the two different process | For processes |
| 200 | nongeneralizablity | Letter dropped |
| 201 | is a not a binary opposition | Stray article |
| 231 | Line repeated in the last poem | Possible duplication |
On the book's vocabulary
Where such a word occurs inside a passage, the passage has been reported in plain speech rather than quoted.
11. Synthesis
Twenty-four takeaways
- Debates about women's roles in Islam are, at bottom, debates about religious anthropology: what a human being is.
- Legal norms rest on assumptions about the human; reform that ignores them is fragile.
- Sufism, the tradition of the heart, holds resources for rethinking gender, though it "does not automatically cure people of sexism."
- Early Sufi women were teachers, ascetics and lovers of God; some taught the most famous men of their time.
- Calling a holy woman "a man" honoured her but kept maleness as the measure.
- Ibn 'Arabi's cosmology starts from a God who loved to be known, and who is known only through the names.
- The complete human gathers all the divine names; this ideal is the same for men and women.
- Mercy precedes wrath, so beauty (jamal) takes priority over majesty (jalal) for every seeker.
- Claiming superiority from one's social position is, for Ibn 'Arabi, "repugnant negligence".
- Ibn 'Arabi opens every spiritual rank to women, including the axial saint.
- He draws legal conclusions: women may lead mixed prayer; covering is for modesty, not shame; in some cases one woman's testimony equals two men's.
- His own life was shaped by women teachers, peers and disciples, and his love of women was tied to guarding their rights.
- "Male" and "female" in his cosmology name activity and receptivity, not biological sexes; before God every creature is female.
- Every act of bringing into being is a marriage, from God's intention to speech and teaching.
- The Qur'an tells of one soul and its mate; the rib and Eve's guilt came later.
- Exegesis of the male "degree" grew more hierarchical over time.
- Ibn 'Arabi denies men any degree in respect of shared humanity and reduces the degree to activity and receptivity.
- He rereads the rib as love and calls Eve "a second father".
- Maleness and femaleness are "merely accidents" of the one human essence.
- God is most perfectly witnessed in women, because there both divine modes appear.
- Men need women as the whole needs its part; women embody divine strength.
- Sexual union grounded in love can be a theophany, which rules out coercion and abuse.
- Four modes of creation (Adam, Eve, Jesus, all others) break the link between maleness and activity.
- Traditionalist readings that split spiritual equality from social hierarchy leave out Ibn 'Arabi's own social and legal conclusions.
The book in six paragraphs
Method. Shaikh reads with suspicion and with reconstruction. She accepts that Ibn 'Arabi spoke the patriarchal language of his age, and she looks for the places where he unsays it. Her guide is Michael Sells's idea of apophasis: meaning comes from the tension between saying and unsaying.
Foundations. The early chapters build the frame. The Sufi path asks the same purification of all; early Sufi women show what that meant in practice; Ibn 'Arabi's map of God, names and the complete human gives a single ideal for every person.
Metaphor. Activity and receptivity, father and mother, are positions in a cosmic marriage. They run through God, nature and speech, and they do not match men and women. A woman teacher can "father" a man's learning.
Myth. The Adam and Eve chapter shows the Qur'an's restraint, the tradition's additions and Ibn 'Arabi's transformation. He grants a degree, then shrinks it; he keeps the rib, then makes it love; he keeps Adam, then multiplies him.
Witnessing. The most daring chapter places the feminine before all, makes women the most perfect place to witness God, treats sex as a possible theophany, and uses Mary and Jesus to break the pattern of male activity.
Application. Against Nasr and Murata, Shaikh argues that spiritual equality must show itself in law and society, as it did in Ibn 'Arabi's own rulings. Against a feminism of rights alone, she argues for a critique of foundations: what the law assumes about the human, society and God.
Five passages to remember
| Passage | Where | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| "There is no spiritual qualification conferred on men which is denied women." | Part 3 | Spiritual equality as a principle |
| "Other than the Creator, there is not in this universe a male," | Part 5 | Gender terms become positions |
| "Maleness and femaleness are merely accidents and do not belong to the essence of insāniyya, which is one." | Part 6 | Sex is not the essence of the human |
| "There is nothing in the created universe greater in power than women." | Part 7 | Inversion of the usual hierarchy |
| "Hence, Jesus and Eve are two siblings, while Adam and Mary are their two parents." | Part 7 | A second creation pattern that reverses the first |
How the book's arguments depend on one another
The book is cumulative, and its later claims rest on earlier ones. The critique of Nasr in Chapter 7 depends on the ranking of the names in Chapter 2: if mercy did not precede wrath, assigning majesty to men would not look like a spiritual error. The reading of Adam and Eve in Chapter 5 depends on Chapter 4's claim that male and female are positions; without it, the "degree" would remain a fact about men and women rather than about activity and receptivity. And the case against Murata depends on Chapter 2's legal material, which shows Ibn 'Arabi himself drawing social conclusions from spiritual premises. A reader who doubts any of these foundations will find the later chapters weaker; a reader who accepts them will find the conclusions hard to resist.
Reading paths
For a short reading of the book itself, take the introduction, the second half of Chapter 2 (on law), Chapter 5 and the closing section of Chapter 7. These give the method, the evidence, the central transformation and the conclusion.
For students of Ibn 'Arabi, Chapters 4 to 6 are the core. They gather and translate many passages from the Futuhat and the Fusus on gender, marriage and creation, some of which are hard to find elsewhere in English.
For readers interested in Islamic feminism, Chapter 7 can be read first and the earlier chapters used as evidence. The argument against a feminism of rights alone is the book's most portable contribution.
For readers interested in the history of Sufi women, Chapter 1 and Chapter 3, together with the appendix, form a short history in their own right.
What the book does not claim
It is worth stating what Shaikh does not argue, since the book is easily misread. She does not claim that Ibn 'Arabi was a feminist in a modern sense, nor that his writing is free of hierarchy. She does not claim that Sufism as a whole was egalitarian; Chapter 1 shows the opposite strands clearly. She does not propose abandoning the Shari'a; she argues that some Sufi readings may be more faithful to the Qur'an's picture of the human than dominant fiqh. And she does not offer a finished legal programme. Her claim is narrower and stronger: that the resources for a different gender ethics are already present in one of the most authoritative bodies of Muslim thought, and that reading them requires holding the contextual and the transcendent together.
The chapters at a glance
| Chapter | Main question | Main answer |
|---|---|---|
| Introduction | Why do debates on women's prayer leadership matter? | They expose the picture of the human beneath the law |
| 1 Craving Completion | What did early Sufism offer women? | A shared path, real women teachers, and a male vocabulary of virtue |
| 2 Religious Anthropology | What is the human in Ibn 'Arabi's map? | A gatherer of names, with mercy first; equal in law where it counts |
| 3 Mysticism and Gender | How did his life shape his views? | Through women teachers, peers, disciples and family |
| 4 Gender and Metaphor | Are male and female biological in his cosmos? | No; they are positions of activity and receptivity in a cosmic marriage |
| 5 Adam and Eve | What happens to the rib, the degree and deficiency? | Each is kept and transformed; sex is an accident of the human |
| 6 Witnessing God in Women | Where is God most perfectly seen? | In women; and in love, and in a creation with four patterns |
| 7 Islamic Feminism | What does this mean now? | Spiritual equality must be enacted socially; critique must reach foundations |
Ten questions for discussion
- Can a legal ruling be judged by the picture of the human it assumes?
- Is it possible to keep Ibn 'Arabi's gendered vocabulary without its social consequences?
- Which of Shaikh's three modes of gender seems strongest in the passages quoted here?
- Does the "most perfect witnessing" passage honour women or objectify them?
- How far should a modern reader distinguish an author's context from his insight?
- Is Murata's split between law and path a reading of the tradition or a defence of the present?
- Could the priority of mercy over wrath serve as a principle of institutional design?
- Does praising spiritual weakness risk excusing social weakness, as Shaikh warns?
- What would a feminist critique "below rights" look like in a particular law or policy?
- What does the Jesus and Mary model add that the Adam and Eve model cannot?
Frameworks table
| Framework | Source in the book | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Religious anthropology | Introduction | Exposes the picture of the human beneath legal norms |
| Hermeneutics of suspicion and reconstruction | Introduction, after Gross and others | Critique and recovery held together |
| Three states of the nafs | Chapter 1 | A single path of purification for all |
| Jamal and jalal | Chapters 2 and 7 | Ranks mercy over power; critiques domination |
| Complete human (al-insan al-kamil) | Chapters 2 and 7 | A single ungendered ideal |
| Dialectical approach to experience | Chapter 3, after Streng | Experience and context shape each other |
| Apophasis of gender | Chapter 4, after Sells | Every gender statement is unsaid |
| Cosmic marriage (father, mother, child) | Chapter 4 | Activity and receptivity as positions |
| Four-step reading of 2:228 | Chapter 5 | Shrinks the "degree" to a narrow difference |
| Three Adams | Chapter 5 | Separates the human from the male |
| Four modes of creation | Chapter 6 | Breaks the link between maleness and activity |
| Three discursive modes of gender | Chapter 6 | Holds superiority, equality and female priority in one view |
| Rights versus foundations | Chapter 7 | Moves critique from symptoms to roots |
A closer look
Strengths. The book's greatest strength is that it argues from within. Shaikh does not ask Ibn 'Arabi to be modern; she shows that his own texts contain the material for change, and she translates much of it herself. Her map of three discursive modes is honest: it does not hide the hierarchical passages, it places them. Her critique of Nasr and Murata is precise, pointing to passages they omit rather than to values they lack. And her insistence that spiritual equality must have social consequences is backed by Ibn 'Arabi's rulings on prayer, testimony and the body.
Questions a reader might raise. First, selection. Shaikh accuses the traditionalists of selectivity, and a critic could ask whether her own emphasis on the subversive passages is not also selective. Her answer, the three-mode map, helps, but the weighting among the modes remains a judgment. Second, vocabulary. She argues that "masculine" and "feminine" for activity and receptivity are socially harmful and should be questioned. Yet much of Ibn 'Arabi's daring, such as the feminine essence or the female degree from the letter of mar'a, depends on precisely that vocabulary. Removing it might remove the inversions too. Third, subjectivity. The "most perfect witnessing" passage is written for a male witness. Shaikh's reconstruction of female subjectivity, through Harris and the breath of the Merciful, is persuasive but is her extension rather than his statement. Fourth, sexuality. She admits the heterosexist frame and points to one passage as an opening; the evidence there is thin, and she presents it as a question, which is fair. Fifth, practice. The book argues that Sufism grounds a better law, but it does not show in detail how a legal system would be rebuilt from these principles. That is perhaps a task for others, and she names it as such.
Overall. The book is a careful and original contribution that changes the question from was Ibn 'Arabi a feminist? to what does his anthropology make possible? Its readings of the Adam and Eve material and of the Jesus and Mary counter-model are its most valuable parts.
Who's Who
Dates are given only where the book prints them.
| Person | Role in the book |
|---|---|
| Ibn 'Arabi (1165-1240) | Andalusian mystic, subject of the study |
| Nizam | Meccan woman who inspired the Tarjuman al-ashwaq |
| Fatima of Cordova; Yasmina (Shams) | His elderly women teachers in Spain |
| Zaynab al-Qal'iyya | Ascetic woman peer, met in Seville and Mecca |
| Rabi'a al-'Adawiyya (d. 801) | Early woman mystic of pure love |
| Umm 'Ali Fatima (d. 849) | Early Sufi woman, companion of Bayazid |
| Hasan al-Basri (d. 728) | Early ascetic |
| Junayd (d. 910); Sahl al-Tustari (d. 896) | Early masters on love and marriage |
| Abu Talib al-Makki (d. 996) | Pictured the souls as kinds of women |
| Al-Sulami (d. 1021) | Compiler of a book of Sufi women |
| Ibn Rushd (d. 1198) | Philosopher whom the young Ibn 'Arabi met |
| Tabari (d. 923); Razi (d. 1209); Ibn Kathir (d. 1371); Biqa'i (d. 1408) | Exegetes of the "degree" |
| Ibn Taymiyya | Fourteenth-century critic of Ibn 'Arabi; troubled by a woman preacher |
| Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab (d. 1792) | Declared Ibn 'Arabi an unbeliever |
| Amina Wadud | Scholar; gave the Friday sermon at the Claremont Main Road Mosque in 1994, led a mixed Friday prayer in New York in 2005 |
| Seyyed Hossein Nasr | Traditionalist scholar; gender complementarity |
| Sachiko Murata | Author of The Tao of Islam; spiritual matriarchy, theological patriarchy |
| Michael Sells | Scholar of apophatic language |
| Rabia Terri Harris | Contemporary Sufi and scholar, often quoted |
| Laury Silvers | Critic of Murata's traditionalism |
| Grace Jantzen; Germaine Greer | Critics of privatised spirituality and consumer culture |
12. Glossary
Arabic and technical terms as the book uses them, in simple transliteration.
| Term | Meaning in the book |
|---|---|
| akmaliyya | Superlative perfection; the station of messenger, reserved for men |
| apophasis | Unsaying; language that undoes each statement it makes |
| 'awra | The parts of the body that must be covered |
| barzakh | Isthmus; something that both separates and joins |
| daraja | Degree; the "degree" men have over women in Qur'an 2:228 |
| dhat | The divine essence; grammatically feminine |
| dhikr | Remembrance of God; a core Sufi practice |
| fana' | Annihilation of the ego in God; also used of sexual union |
| fiqh | Jurisprudence; the human interpretation of the Shari'a |
| futuwwa | Spiritual chivalry |
| Futuhat al-makkiyya | The Meccan Openings, Ibn 'Arabi's largest work (560 chapters) |
| Fusus al-hikam | The Bezels of Wisdom, written in 1229 |
| hermeneutic of suspicion | Reading to expose a text's hidden interests |
| ihsan | Excellence, worshipping God as if one sees Him; the domain of Sufism |
| al-insan al-kamil | The complete human, who gathers all divine names |
| insaniyya | Humanity; the shared human essence of men and women |
| isra'iliyyat | Material drawn from Jewish and Christian lore into Muslim exegesis |
| jalal | Majesty; the names of power and wrath |
| jamal | Beauty; the names of mercy and love |
| kamal | Completeness or perfection |
| khalwa | Spiritual retreat |
| khirqa | The Sufi cloak given at initiation |
| mahabba | Love, especially of God |
| nafas al-rahman | The breath of the All-Merciful, through which creation unfolds |
| nafs | Self or soul; the lower self that must be purified |
| naqawa | The choicest part; used of woman |
| nikah | Marriage or intercourse; any act that brings something new into being |
| qutb | The axial saint, highest rank of the friends of God |
| religious anthropology | A tradition's idea of what a human being is |
| rijal | Men; also used for advanced seekers of either sex |
| Shari'a | The divine law, distinct from its human interpretation (fiqh) |
| rububiyya | Lordship; the divine side of the relation of lord and servant |
| 'ubudiyya | Servanthood; for Ibn 'Arabi the highest human state |
| tanzih | Incomparability of God |
| tariqa | The Sufi path |
| tashbih | Similarity of God to creation |
| tawhid | Divine unity; Shaikh's word for an integrated, non-dualist view |
| uns | Intimacy with God |
| Tarjuman al-ashwaq | The Interpreter of Desires, poems inspired by Nizam |
| wahdat al-wujud | Unity of being; a term later attached to Ibn 'Arabi's thought |
| zuhd | Renunciation of the world |
About this book
Sufi Narratives of Intimacy: Ibn 'Arabi, Gender, and Sexuality by Sa'diyya Shaikh, 2012. 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