Insight Editions · No. 168
Sufis of Andalusia
The Ruh al-Quds and al-Durrat al-Fakhirah
Ibn al-Arabi · Translated by R. W. J. Austin
Ibn al-Arabi recounts the lives and teachings of Sufi men and women in twelfth-century Andalusia and North Africa.
A study guide to Sufis of Andalusia by Ibn al-Arabi, translated by R. W. J. Austin. 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: a short foreword, Austin's long introduction on the two works, on Ibn al-Arabi's life and on the Sufi Way, then seventy-one portraits of men and women, most of them from twelfth-century Spain and North Africa. Quotations are short and exact; everything else is paraphrase.
Argument Map
Chapter Map
| Part | Book section | Pages | What it covers |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. The Two Books and the Man | Foreword; Introduction: the works, Ibn al-Arabi's life and work | 11-50 | Manuscripts, the Durrah problem, a life from Murcia (560/1165) to Damascus (638/1240) |
| 2. The Sufi Way | Introduction: The Sufi Way | 51-60 | Ego, grace, three stages, stations and states, invocation, orders |
| 3. The Seville Circle | Sketches 1-8 | 63-90 | al-Uryani, al-Kumi, al-Adawi, al-Sharafi, al-Sinhaji, al-Shubarbuli, Ibn Qassum, al-Martuli |
| 4. Powers, Jurists and Kings | Sketches 9-26 | 90-131 | The two brothers, al-Shakkaz, the uncle, al-Mawruri and the jurists, al-Qattan, the hidden Supports, al-Fakhkhar at Ceuta |
| 5. The Brief Lives and the Two Women | Sketches 27-55 | 132-145 | Short notices; Shams of Marchena; Fatimah of Seville |
| 6. From the Precious Pearl | Sketches 56-71, other shaikhs | 146-160 | Ibn al-Mujahid, Zainab al-Qal'iyyah, the khirqah of al-Khidr, al-Habashi's death |
Page numbers are the book's printed pages, as read from its cross-references and index; they are approximate at the part boundaries.
Ten Ideas in Brief
- The book is a counter-argument. Ibn al-Arabi wrote these lives to prove that his age, for all its corruption, was not empty of saints.
- Holiness is ordinary in its setting. The masters sell opium, sift henna, make caps, mend shoes, caulk ships and teach children the Qur'an.
- Concealment is a virtue. The best of them ask God to remove their good name, hide their rank and flee when found out.
- Invocation is the axis. One master moves his tongue in remembrance while asleep; another greets every prayer as converse with his Lord.
- Provision follows trust. A capmaker throws his shears down a well; a box of a caliph's gold sits unopened for twelve years.
- The master shapes the pupil by holding back. Affection is hidden, questions are left to ripen for four years, praise is given to others.
- Power over the world is real but secondary. Rain, healing, honey from an empty jug and walking on water appear on almost every page, and are never the point.
- Rulers are suspect. Their food is refused, their offices declined, their viziers rebuked to their faces.
- The jurists are not the enemy; worldly jurists are. Ibn al-Arabi defends the Law and condemns its use for fame.
- Women are among the greatest. Two of his teachers, Shams and Fatimah, were in their eighties and nineties, and he served them.
Reading Paths
- Twenty minutes: this overview, the life timeline (Figure 2), the frameworks table and the takeaways.
- For the life of Ibn al-Arabi: Part 1 and the people boxes throughout.
- For Sufi practice: Part 2, then the sketches of al-Kumi, Ibn Qassum and Ibn al-Mujahid.
- For the argument with the jurists: the al-Mawruri digression in Part 4 and the closer look.
Part 1. The Two Books and the Man
Before a single master appears, Austin spends forty pages on what the reader is holding and on who wrote it. This part follows him: the short foreword, the story of two manuscripts, and a life of travel from Murcia to Damascus told largely in Ibn al-Arabi's own words.
The Foreword
The foreword, unsigned in this copy, makes two claims. First, the Ruh al-quds is probably easier to read than anything else of Ibn al-Arabi's that has survived, and had been available in Spanish for nearly forty years but never in English. Second, it corrects a common Western picture of him as a "philosopher" rather than a "mystic": these pages show a disciple serving old men and women, not a system-builder. The foreword closes with a passage from Frithjof Schuon on how every religion, some centuries after its founding, has a "second youth", and how the age of Ibn al-Arabi was such a flowering in Islam.
Two Works, One Purpose
The Ruh al-quds was written in Mecca in 600/1203-4 as a letter to an old friend, Abu Muhammad Abd al-Aziz al-Mahdawi of Tunis. It has three parts:
- a complaint about the abuses and deficiencies Ibn al-Arabi saw in the Sufism of his time;
- by way of compensation, portraits of some fifty-five Sufis who had taught him or whom he had met, translated here in full;
- a discussion of the obstacles on the path, illustrated from his own experience (not translated).
The purpose of the middle section is stated by the author himself: to show that, despite the abuses, there were still Sufis of high attainment in the Islamic world. He says it again at the end of one sketch: he has written of all of them "only to show that our times are not completely lacking in Saintly men."
Austin translated from an Istanbul University manuscript dated 600/1203-4, read aloud to Ibn al-Arabi and corrected in his own hand, with nine certificates of hearing at the end. With a source that good, he did not consult other copies.
The Durrat al-fakhirah is a harder case. What survives is only a synopsis, written in Damascus for a friend because the author had left the full book behind "in the West". The one known manuscript, in an untidy hand, is dated 1006/1597-8, nearly four centuries after the original. Austin gives only those Durrah passages that add to the Ruh.
| Ruh al-quds | al-Durrat al-fakhirah | |
|---|---|---|
| Written | Mecca, 600/1203-4 | Original before 600 H; synopsis in Damascus, after his arrival there |
| Manuscript used | Autograph-corrected copy, 600/1203-4 | Single copy, 1006/1597-8, often illegible |
| Persons | 55 | 42 (26 shared with the Ruh, 16 new) |
| Together | Some seventy-one persons, four of them women | |
A Life in Journeys
Austin's life of Ibn al-Arabi is built from the author's own reports, mostly from the Futuhat. What follows keeps only dates printed in the book.
Spain: a family, a wife, two old women
He was born in Murcia, then ruled by Ibn Mardanish, and grew up in Seville after the Almohad conquest. His father was a man of standing, a friend of Ibn Rushd (Averroes), and later in government service. Two maternal uncles were Sufis, one of them a former king of Tlemcen who wept, dismounted and gave up his throne when a holy man laughed at his question about praying in fine clothes and compared him to a dog that eats carrion but lifts its leg to keep clean.
He married Maryam bint Muhammad b. Abdun, who shared his aspiration. She dreamed of a guide who told her she would reach the Way through "trust, certainty, patience, resolution and veracity," and her husband told her that this was indeed the method of the Folk.
The meeting with Ibn Rushd is the most famous episode. The philosopher greeted the youth with "Yes!"; the youth answered "Yes" and then "No". Asked whether illumination agreed with speculative thought, he said "Yes and no. Between the Yea and the Nay the spirits take their flight beyond matter," and the old man turned pale.
Austin then shows a young man with an innate authority that made his relations with his masters ambiguous. He secluded himself among the graves; when al-Kumi came to see what he was doing, it was the shaikh who could not raise his head from the strain, and the youth who asked him which of the two of them had really been communicating with the dead Yet he could also be wrong: al-Khidr told him that al-Uryani, not he, had judged a certain person rightly.
Two of his masters were women of great age. Shams of Marchena was one of "the sighing ones". Fatimah bint Ibn al-Muthanna of Cordova, whom he served for years when she was over ninety, played the tambourine for joy in God and told his mother that her son was her own spiritual son and the mother's "father". He built her a reed hut with his own hands.
North Africa: signs and a summons
In 590/1193, at thirty, he crossed to Tunis. There, seasick in harbour, he saw a man walk to him over the moonlit water, stand first on one dry foot and then the other, and stride to a lighthouse two miles off; next morning a stranger asked how his night with al-Khidr had gone. Back in Seville, a stranger recited to him a poem he had composed in Tunis and shown to no one.
In Fez in 591 a friend showed him, by the numerical value of the letters in "clear victory", that the Almohads would win that year; the total was 591. In 593, praying in the Azhar mosque, he lost all sense of front and back and saw as if spherically, his position only a hypothesis. In 594, in Fez, he learned of the Seal of Muhammadan Sainthood.
In Seville in 592, finding his hosts stiff with respect, he offered to expound a chapter of his treatise on flouting the usual courtesies, then pushed his foot into his host's lap and asked him to massage it. Everyone understood and relaxed.
At Cordova in 595 he watched Ibn Rushd's coffin loaded on one side of a beast and his books on the other to balance it, and wrote two lines on the sight: here is the Imam, there are his works, and would that I knew whether his hopes were fulfilled.
In 597 came two experiences. He entered the station of Proximity and found no one else in it, and resolved not to feel alone, "since homesickness is the lot of every being in existence." And in Marrakesh he saw the Throne on pillars of light, the Treasure beneath it which was Adam, and a bird that told him to take a companion east: Muhammad al-Hassar of Fez, who had prayed to be taken there. He took him, and al-Hassar died in Egypt.
The East: Mecca, Konya, Damascus
In Mecca from 599 he found the household of Zahir b. Rustam, whose daughter Nizam inspired the Tarjuman al-ashwaq. At the Black Stone he met "the youth steadfast in devotion", who said of himself "I am knowledge, the known and the knower." In a dream he saw the Kabah built of gold and silver bricks with two missing, and saw himself set in their place; he took it as a sign that he stood to the saints as the Prophet to the prophets. He wrote the Ruh al-quds here and began the Futuhat.
Cairo in 603/1206 nearly killed him. Accused of heresy, he was saved by Abu al-Hasan of Bugia, who interpreted his words as the speech of mystical fervour, for which the intoxicated are not to blame.
In Konya in 607/1210 the ruler gave him a house worth 100,000 dirhams, and he gave it to a beggar because it was all he had. There Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi became his closest disciple, and through him, Austin argues, his teaching reached the great Persian Sufis. He told a painter that his life-size partridge, which a falcon had attacked, had legs very slightly too long; the painter kissed his head.
At Aleppo, al-Malik al-Zahir heard 118 cases in a day and resolved to execute a courtier; Ibn al-Arabi shamed him into pardon by asking how a subject could forgive any sin against himself while a king could not forgive this one. The same ruler told him every abuse in his kingdom was backed by a jurist's decree, one of which had let him fast Ramadan in any month he liked.
He settled in Damascus in 620/1223 and died there in 638/1240, aged seventy-six. His daughter Zainab, at one year old, answered a point of law about ablution, and later cried "There is my father!" across a caravan.
What he wrote, and why it matters
He listed 251 of his own works; Austin cites a modern count of 846 possible titles, of which only some seventy-one had been printed and sixteen translated. He said he had never written with a set purpose: flashes of inspiration came and nearly overwhelmed him until he put them on paper.
Part 2. The Sufi Way
Austin's last introductory section is a compact primer on Sufism, written so that a reader who meets a shaikh praying all night or a disciple trembling before his master knows what is going on. It is Austin's own synthesis, drawing on al-Sarraj, al-Hujwiri, Burckhardt, Schuon and Lings, and it frames everything that follows.
Roots in Scripture
Austin opens with the Qur'anic verse on men whom neither trade nor selling diverts from the remembrance of God and argues that one need look no further than the Qur'an and the Traditions to find the foundations of Sufi teaching. The Sufis kept alive the immediate experience of the first "poor in God" who lived beside the Prophet, and were the leaven of the community in troubled times. Need for expression grows when a thing is in danger of being lost; hence a tenth-century Sufi's quip that Sufism had become a name without a reality, where once it had been a reality without a name. Austin calls this an exaggeration. Even so, the essential teaching still passed in person, from master to disciple.
The Doctrine in Four Lines
- There is no reality but the Reality. All other realities are relative to and dependent on God's.
- The cosmos is a manifestation, many worlds and planes, ranked by their awareness of the one Reality.
- Man is the microcosm, the link (barzakh) between creation and Creator, God's vice-regent, under obligation to recognise his Source.
- The Way leads from the ego to the realisation of one's essential identity, in answer to the Qur'anic call to "Say God" and leave the rest.
The Obstacle and the Help
The supreme obstacle is the ego, the "soul which commands evil": a resilient complex of images, desires and aversions that chains us to time, space and multiplicity. Awareness and resolve are useless without grace, so the aspirant must become empty of himself and receptive. Grace comes directly as inspiration or indirectly through scripture and rites. The Prophet's saying about returning from the lesser war to the greater is the charter.
Stations and States
Stations are earned and stay; states are given and pass. Austin follows Abu Nasr al-Sarraj.
| Stations (maqamat): permanent grades | States (ahwal): passing graces |
|---|---|
| Repentance (tawbah) | Self-vigilance; Proximity (qurb) |
| Self-restraint (wara') | Love (mahabbah) |
| Abstinence (zuhd) | Fear; Hope (raja') |
| Poverty (faqr) | Longing (shawq) |
| Patience (sabr) | Intimacy (uns) |
| Reliance (tawakkul) | Tranquillity; Contemplation (mushahadah) |
| Acceptance (rida) | Certainty (yaqin) |
Seven stations, ten states; the rows pair them only for layout. The states come by grace alone, not as a result of the servant's efforts.
Invocation, the Rite of Rites
Knowledge is one pole of the Way; right action is the other, and its essence is the remembrance of God's Name (dhikr). Austin cites the verse "Prayer indeed prevents lustful acts and grave sins, but the Invocation of God is greater" (29:45) and the saying that the world and all it contains is accursed except the invocation of God. In the end the world itself ceases to be a veil and becomes revelation.
The other rites are read more deeply: ablution purifies the heart of all that is other than God; prostration is extinction; sitting is subsistence. Ramadan is a chance to kill the ego through indigence; the retreat in the mosque at its end becomes, for Sufis, the regular practice of seclusion (khalwah), and night prayer (tahajjud) runs through the sketches.
The Orders
Only in the twelfth century did disciples begin to form orders to carry a particular master's method. Austin names the Qadiriyyah, the Mevlevis and the Shadhiliyyah, and branch orders such as the Darqawiyyah. These were not sects but groupings for different temperaments.
| Role or element | What it is |
|---|---|
| Shaikh / murshid | Head of the order; a murshid can also advance disciples along the Way |
| Khalifah or deputy | Stands in for the shaikh in absence or illness |
| Muqaddam | Runs a distant lodge (zawiyah) in the shaikh's name, may receive members |
| Fully initiated members | Pledge poverty and obedience, not celibacy; bound by a code of conduct (adab) |
| Initiation of blessing | For those who seek the order's grace without following the Way |
| Majlis | Regular session: invocation, litanies (wird), prayer, sometimes a silent meal, music or sacred dance |
| Women members | Meet separately, usually under the shaikh's wife, guided spiritually by the shaikh |
Part 3. The Seville Circle
The first eight sketches are the heart of the book: the men the young Ibn al-Arabi sat with in and around Seville. They teach the reader how to read the rest. Each portrait mixes a few facts, a characteristic saying, one or two wonders and a moment in which the master corrects or shapes the pupil. The pupil is never the hero.
How a Sketch Works
1. Abu Jafar al-Uryani of Loule
He came to Seville when Ibn al-Arabi was a beginner and read his visitor's need at a glance. The first exchange is a small catechism:
The servant may resolve ... God Who decides the issue
Then the instruction: if he would shut out the world, sever all ties and take the Bounteous alone as his companion, God would speak with him with no intermediary at all. He was an illiterate countryman who could not write or use figures, yet his teaching on Unity showed his rank; always in ritual purity, facing the qiblah, invoking.
Captured by Christians, he arranged his ransom of five hundred dinars and refused to collect it from two or three rich men: he wanted a little from as many as possible, because God had told him that in every soul weighed on the Last Day there is "something worth saving from the fire." He walked eight days to pray for rain at a fortress that shut him out; the rain fell everywhere except on his disciple, who had forgotten to remember God at the fortress.
Blind in old age, told that a boy knew the whole Qur'an by heart, he answered that it is the Eternal that carries the transient: the Qur'an supports the boy, not the boy the Qur'an. To his early question whether worship or work came first, his wife's scolding over a year's food of eight sacks of figs was answered by twenty loads arriving before sunset.
The Durrah adds that his tongue moved in invocation while he slept, that a jinn plagued the village that expelled him until they begged him back, and that he refused a drink from a copper jug, since the word for copper shares a root with ill luck.
2. Abu Yaqub Yusuf al-Kumi
A companion of Abu Madyan, who said he was to the Way what a safe anchorage is to a ship. He had refused the governorship of Fez, gave alms in secret, honoured the poor and humbled the rich, frowned at everyone except a poor man, whom he might take into his lap.
He hid his love for his pupil. He praised others, took Ibn al-Arabi to task in public and kept a distant manner, until the companions thought little of the young man. "I alone of the whole group," the author notes, achieved real success with him, as the shaikh later admitted. In his presence Ibn al-Arabi trembled like a leaf.
They were.
3. Salih al-Adawi the Berber
He never had a house, stored nothing for the morrow, prayed in a single shirt on cold days and still sweated, and in years of company spoke so few words to his pupil that they could almost be counted. Forty years in the wilderness and forty in Seville; his manner of life was like that of Uwais.
In the Durrah he goes pale with shame during ablution, asking how else one should look who prepares himself, "full of sin though he be, for converse with his Lord." Then the decisive counsel: once you have tasted the honey, "taste no more of vinegar." He foretold the deaths of Ibn al-Arabi's father and of his sister's betrothed, and told him not to return to the world to support his family. The prophecy came true, the family pressed him, the caliph offered him office and husbands for his sisters; he declined, left for Fez, married off his sisters himself and was free. When the shaikh died, his disciples buried him secretly by night, and the whole city followed.
4. Abu Abdallah al-Sharafi of Aljarafe
He prayed every prayer in the mosque of Udais, earned his living selling opium he gathered in season, and sold it only to upright buyers with honest money, lived forty years in one house without light or fire, and never prayed twice in the same spot, so that those who wanted his blessing tried to stand beside him and say their petition aloud for his Amen. He once took young Ibn al-Arabi by the ear away from a crowd gawping at the local madman: "Is this the sort of thing you indulge in?"
5 and 6. al-Sinhaji and al-Shubarbuli
Abu Yahya al-Sinhaji, old and blind, was buried on a mountain never free of wind; on the day of his burial the winds dropped, and when the mourners left they rose again.
Abu al-Hajjaj al-Shubarbuli, a villager who lived by his own hands until too weak, is one of the warmest portraits.
- On missed time. He found his shaikh Ibn al-Mujahid repairing a wall and mistaking Friday for Thursday; the shaikh wept that one job had cost him his reckoning of days. So, he said, do the brethren grieve "for any opportunity they have missed" for practising the presence of God.
- On being sought out. Old and housebound, he wept that people came to him: he would rather visit them in their homes.
- On rulers. When the Sultan's men came, he said they were God's assistants in the affairs of the world, and deserved prayers that God would show forth truth through their work.
- On attention. He had lived for years beside a large olive tree at his well and never noticed it.
His black cat recognised the saints, rubbing against some visitors and fleeing others; it embraced al-Uryani on sight. When Ibn al-Arabi brought one of Abu Madyan's companions to him, he smiled and said that only yesterday Abu Madyan had been with him. Abu Madyan was at Bugia, forty-five days away. Thieves who robbed him while he prayed could not find the door until they put everything back.
7. Ibn Qassum
Ibn al-Mujahid's successor, a Maliki, a man of both knowledge and action, with whom Ibn al-Arabi studied purity and prayer. He kept a written record of his deeds every day and reviewed it at night, praising God for the good and seeking forgiveness for the bad.
Finding six dinars left at his door, he threw his capmaker's shears down a well, saying that God and he shared charge of his livelihood, and telling the shears that his provision would now seek him, not he it. Austin's translation then gives his whole day, prayer by prayer: lamps lit, adhan called, Qur'an read with a finger following the letters so that, as he explained, each limb might take its share. He used salt only on Mondays and Fridays. By night he read the Qur'an on several planes at once, the transcendental, that of Paradise, the rational and the legal, as the verses indicated, learning from it things he had not known.
8. Abu Imran al-Martuli
He lived in the same house for sixty years without leaving it once, and wrote a couplet to himself: he was Musa son of Imran the evil-doer, certainly not the Musa son of Imran who spoke with God. After Ibn al-Arabi dreamed of his rise and it came true, the author himself received tidings of Paradise of which he was certain, except that he could not know whether the fire would touch him first.
In the Durrah, al-Martuli, the imam of a small mosque, faced a preacher who denied the saints' wonders. Ibn al-Arabi asked him to leave the man to him and argued from the hadith of the dishevelled man in rags whose oath God would honour: the Prophet did not say what the oath might concern, so every wonder is possible. The preacher fell silent. Al-Martuli sold his books, one by one, to feed those in need, calling them the cast-off remnants of his life, and died when the last was gone.
Part 4. Powers, Jurists and Kings
Sketches nine to twenty-six widen the circle: to Egypt, Granada, Ronda, Fez and Ceuta, to the hidden servants of the saintly hierarchy, and to two running quarrels, with the jurists and with the rulers. The wonders multiply here, and so do the arguments about them.
9 and 10. The Tailor and the Potter
Two brothers of Seville, Abu Abdallah al-Khayyat and Abu al-Abbas Ahmad al-Jarrar, set out for Mecca in 590/1194; later both settled in Egypt, where Ibn al-Arabi stayed with them and fasted Ramadan with them. Al-Khayyat had taught him the Qur'an as a boy and was his neighbour; his heartbeat in prayer could be heard at a distance. Four friends used to meet and share equally whatever insight was given them: "I never knew better days."
The brother Ahmad, known in Egypt as al-Hariri, received divine speech "from behind a veil." In the Durrah, honey pours from an empty jug and wells up in a dish of pancakes.
11. Ibn Jumhur
He stopped his ears at a tambourine, wore himself out reciting at night and, lying down at last, would say: "my cheek, since you cushion yourself so softly now," you will lie on rock after death, and leap up again. When he was buried, a large rock was found in the grave and set under his cheek. On journeys he insisted on being leader, only so as to carry everyone's load.
12. Abu Ali al-Shakkaz
He never said the word "I". His tears rotted the mat he prayed on. Offered a bride, he said he was already married and would produce his bride in five days; on the fifth day he died. After death he told his brother in a dream that God gave him each day "work enough for eight" days, as the book has it. Seville's witty women tried to make him say the nickname of his trade, which also meant a man with no use for women; he answered "I soak what is dry," soften what is stiff and pluck what is hairy, and they admitted he had outwitted them.
13. The Uncle
Ibn al-Arabi's paternal uncle came to the Way in his eighties, through a boy who knew nothing of the Way himself. In the Durrah the boy asks for "white nigella" at a herb shop; the old man laughs at his ignorance, and the boy replies: "uncle, my ignorance in this matter will do me no harm" before God, while your heedlessness will. The uncle served him from then on. He would say "The dawn has come" from inside a closed room, because a wind from beneath the Throne reaches every true believer at dawn. He foretold that he would outlive his wayward son by a fixed number of days, and did; his great hernia vanished at death.
14. Abdallah al-Mawruri, and the Jurists
A servant of Abu Madyan, who once confided in him: he was weary of calling people to God and finding no response, and wanted to retire with him to a mountain cave. Al-Mawruri dreamed that Abu Madyan preaching was the sun and silent was the moon.
In a vision of the stations, Ibn al-Arabi saw al-Mawruri motionless at the centre of the station of Reliance, which turned round him like a wheel round its hub.
Then comes the longest argument in the book. A Qur'an teacher of Carmona, summoned to Marchena by al-Mawruri's concentration, later fell in with the jurists of Seville, began to deny the brethren and even pretended not to know al-Mawruri at his own door. Ibn al-Arabi added a note in his own margin to make his position exact.
In the Durrah, a vision in a dark room: each person sat in a light from his own essence, and a messenger declared that good is existence and evil non-existence, that man was made according to the divine Names and loses sight of this by regarding his own essence, and ended: "He is He and not you." Al-Mawruri saw Ibn al-Arabi composing verses on it in silence and said his eye was open, setting the hunter's net; the author answered that only what has life is caught in the net, and speech has no life unless it is of God.
15. al-Baghi al-Shakkaz of Granada
Ibn al-Arabi's custom on visiting a shaikh was to give him all the money he had; here it was a single dirham. This shaikh hated small sins as he hated unbelief, had reached the station of Preservation, and drove away every disciple by demanding his own standard. Told that the Companions were gentler with themselves, he answered that if they had nothing to their credit but the company they kept, "when could we ever hope to attain to their station?" Ibn al-Arabi compares him to Abu Muslim al-Khawlani, who beat his tired legs with sticks.
16. al-Qattan, Scourge of Tyrants
A Cordovan who quoted only the Qur'an and thought compilers of books would face a heavy reckoning, since the Book and the Traditions should suffice.
Invited to Ibn al-Arabi's home, he rounded on the author's father, who was in the sultan's service: how long would he keep company with oppressors? "There is a lesson for you in your son," a young man who had subdued his appetites. The father wept. This is one of the few places where the author shows his own family judged.
17. Ibn Jadun the Henna Sifter
He died in Fez in 597/1200-1. He was one of the four Supports (awtad) through whom God preserves the world, and had asked God to remove his good repute from people's hearts: absent, he was not missed; present, no one asked his advice. Ibn al-Arabi, hiding from admirers in the mosque at Fez, was approached by this stranger with a book of al-Muhasibi, recognised him by inspiration and named him. "Be most discreet about this," the shaikh said; "Your purpose is sound." He had a tied tongue but recited the Qur'an perfectly. In the Durrah the roles are sharper: Ibn al-Arabi threatens to reveal him unless he stops testing him.
18. al-Rundi, One of the Seven Substitutes
He kept to mountains and coasts for nearly thirty years, wrote in the dust while contemplating, gathered camomile for a living, and stood in prayer on a mountain near Moron as a pillar of light someone saw by night. At Rota, finding young Ibn al-Arabi singing verses and beating his breast in a mosque, he asked whether he was hiding who he was; the young man asked whether the shaikh was not doing the same.
He refused to undress for brigands, saying he would not help them disobey God; they fled at his look. He lit a lamp from a handful of grass by touching it. He wept because he had once cursed a man who then died, and had sworn never to curse again. In the Durrah he points out the qiblah outside Marchena and the company see the Kabah itself until the prayer ends.
19 and 20. al-Sadrani and Makhluf
Musa al-Sadrani of Tlemcen, another Substitute, came into Ibn al-Arabi's room in Seville straight from praying the sunset prayer with Abu Madyan at Bugia, forty-five days away. His message: a meeting in the spirit was well and good, but in the flesh God would not permit it. Chained and locked up on the way to Fez, he was gone by morning and knocking at Abu Madyan's door, who said: "come in and fear not, for you are safe from the oppressors." He had been told, says al-Kumi, that every creature, even the serpent coiled around Mount Qaf, knew and loved Abu Madyan.
Makhluf of Cordova invoked each of four formulas a thousand times a day and prayed for everything in heaven and earth, even the fish. A foreign prisoner sent to dig his well became a Muslim after the shaikh prayed for him all night. Ibn al-Arabi dreamed of all the prophets from Adam to Muhammad descending on horseback to visit him; Makhluf fell ill that night and soon died.
21 to 25. Cobbler, Boy, Soldier, Musk, a Name
| Sketch | Who | The lesson |
|---|---|---|
| 21 | Salih al-Kharraz, cobbler of Seville | Worked only for strangers lest friends think well of him; charged an eighth of a dirham and refused more once he had earned enough for the day; rebuked the author for setting up a test |
| 22 | A boy of ten or eleven at the mosque of Udais | The young author tried to appear his equal and felt a fraud; the boy told him to be diligent, for blessed is he who knows what he was created for, and vanished. "Some of the masters are young, some old." |
| 23 | Ahmad b. Hammam | Thrown out by his father for taking the Way, he went to fight on the frontier at Jerumenha |
| 24 | Abu Ahmad al-Salawi | Eighteen years with Abu Madyan; rays of light between him and the sky as he slept; his tears smelled of musk |
| 25 | Ibrahim b. Tarif, earthenware seller | Called a man "the man with the diseased throat" and was rebuked by God for knowing His servants only by their afflictions; he died of the same disease |
26. al-Fakhkhar at Ceuta: Expediency and Principle
Here the Ruh al-quds stops naming at length: the author has kept the list short, he says, and given a whole book, the Durrah, to the rest.
Part 5. The Brief Lives and the Two Women
From sketch twenty-seven the portraits shrink to a few lines, many addressed to al-Mahdawi as "your" friends and servants. Then the Ruh al-quds ends with its two most remarkable figures, both women, both old, both his teachers.
The Hidden Hierarchy
Several of these men are named as members of an unseen order of saints. Austin's notes explain it, and the sketches use it without explanation.
Notes from Twenty-Eight Lives
| No. | Person | What the book records |
|---|---|---|
| 27 | Ibn Takhmist | A jurist of Fez thought to be a Substitute; a locked door of the Qarawiyin mosque opened when he murmured |
| 28 | al-Sakhkhan | A Substitute who had fallen from grace and spoke to no one; the author was kind to him |
| 29 | Abu Yahya al-Sinhaji | A wanderer and recluse for whom the author wrote The Fabled Phoenix, on the Seal of Saints |
| 30 | Ibn Tajah | Eyes ulcerous from weeping; the young author read the Qur'an to him daily; taught that "knowledge is a light which may only be had from the light which is the Qur'an" |
| 36 | al-Mahdawi of Mahdiyah | Never turned his back on the qiblah for sixty years; the author pressed on him in the prayer row to test him and was told "Behave yourself" |
| 38 | Yahya b. al-Saigh of Ceuta | A Traditionist and a Sufi, "a truly amazing combination" |
| 39 | Ibn al-As al-Baji | A jurist and an ascetic, "an unusual combination" |
| 40 | Ibn Zain of Evora | Struck blind while reading Ibn Hamdin's attack on al-Ghazali; sight restored when he swore never to read it again |
| 41 | al-Qazzaz | Imam of the diseased at Cordova; from them he smelled only "the perfume of musk" |
| 43 | Abd al-Salam al-Aswad | Never settled; "found a good spiritual state in moving about" |
| 45 | Ahmad b. Mundhir | A Maliki who saw Malik himself solve his hard problems; poor, but returned money thrown to him |
| 48 | al-Burjani | Explained why the People of the Book recite it as it should be recited: it came to them after grace had already been given |
| 51 | Maimun al-Tunisi | Gathered kermes; nursed in his last illness by Zainab, wife of Ibn Ata Allah |
| 52 | al-Kinani, surgeon of Tunis | The author walked to him barefoot in the heat, as his shaikhs had; a messenger met him halfway to say put your sandals on, the food is ready |
| 53 | The Seven Persons | Met at Mecca by Zamzam; they did not blink; no word passed; "an almost unimaginable calm" |
Austin's note on sketch 38 is worth keeping in view: Traditionists and jurists were not usually sympathetic to the Sufis, which is why a man who was both strikes the author as rare.
54. Shams, Mother of the Poor
She lived at Marchena of the Olives. Ibn al-Arabi says he never met anyone of their kind with such control over her soul. She hid her state but revealed it to him in secret because she knew his. Her mark was a rare combination: fear of God together with His good pleasure in her. In the Durrah, met in her eighties, she suddenly called across the room for "Ali" to go back for the kerchief he had left by a stream more than a league away; an hour later Ali arrived and said he had heard her and gone back.
55. Fatimah of Seville
Those who took her for a simpleton, the author adds, would have been answered that he who knows not his Lord "is the real simpleton". A muezzin struck her with his whip in the mosque; next morning, hearing him call to prayer, she asked God not to blame her for resenting a man on whose lips her Beloved was named, and not to censure him. When the sultan nearly had the same muezzin punished, she said her prayer had saved him.
The Durrah adds more. Her spinning finger was crippled the day she tried to earn by hand-spinning, so she lived on scraps. She had nursed a leper husband for twenty-four years. Hungry, she thanked God for treating her as He treated His prophets: "how can I deserve this great position" among His loved ones? When her lamp ran dry, water in a bucket turned to oil. Asked to pray for a deserted wife, she said "I will make no supplication", and instead sent "The Opening" after the husband, who turned back from his second wedding in Jerez with a sudden darkness in his heart, leaving his baggage behind.
At this point, Austin notes, the biographical portion of the Ruh al-quds ends.
Part 6. From the Precious Pearl
The last sixteen portraits come only from the synopsis of the Durrah, written in Damascus long after the events. They range wider: to Ronda, Tunis, Mecca, Jerusalem and Malatya, and they include the death of the author's companion of twenty-three years.
56. Ibn al-Mujahid: The Leader of the Order
Austin's arrangement places here the master behind the Seville circle, the one through whom, the Durrah says, Ibn Qassum, al-Martuli and many of the righteous of Seville came to the Way. A Maliki jurist, he lived by the hadith of reckoning with oneself before the Reckoning: he noted his thoughts, words and deeds, and every night compared them with what the Law required, repenting of some and giving thanks for others.
Whenever he wished to converse with his Lord he took up the Qur'an; with the Prophet, the Traditions; with the Followers, their lives. The caliph Abu Yaqub left him a box of a thousand gold dinars; told that all but God have needs, the shaikh agreed, and asked "why not return it to its owner who has more need of it than" he, implying it was wrongfully taken. The box stayed unopened in the middle of the room for nearly twelve years, until he died. Then it was paid to his needy relatives "according to their condition", not by the ordinary rules of inheritance.
A stranger who followed him home was found inside the locked house: "I am no man but an angel," sent to protect him. It stayed with him until his death.
57 to 63. Seven Short Portraits
| No. | Person | What the book records |
|---|---|---|
| 57 | al-Munhanali (a conjectural reading) | Fasted day and night for twenty-five days; in July heat he smiled: "God is kind to his servants," and that afternoon the streets ran with rain |
| 58 | Ahmad al-Sharishi | Fell into fire as a boy in ecstasy, unharmed; won his father's leave for the Pilgrimage by asking whether he had intended his existence |
| 59 | al-Ghillizi | Slaughtered his cow to give its liver to a midnight caller; made ablution where a man had urinated and the water was found sweet; died after fifteen days of agony that showed him his past deeds |
| 60 | Abd al-Majid b. Salmah | Servant of Shams; visited at night by Muadh b. Ashras, a Substitute, who named the four bases of their rank from al-Makki's Sustenance of the Hearts |
| 61 | Ibrahim al-Hinnawi of Ronda | Sent a greeting saying he longed to see a friend, then ran after the messenger weeping: "I am a liar myself and I have asked you to lie for me" |
| 62 | al-Ashall al-Qabaili | The Pole of his time, as a dream told the author; on being recognised: "It is no longer good for me to stay in this town, now that you know who I am" |
| 63 | Ibn al-Hakim al-Kahhal | Preacher in Tunis who caught the author in a forbidden place: "The door of repentance is open"; once fell from the sky into the courtyard, late back from circling the Kabah |
The Women of the Durrah
The slave girl of Qasim al-Dawlah, who lived near Mecca, could cover great distances quickly and greeted mountains, rocks and trees with "Welcome, welcome!" The author says he never saw anyone more chivalrous in his time.
Zainab al-Qal'iyyah gave up beauty and wealth for a life near Mecca, kept company with many masters, and rose thirty cubits into the air when she sat to invoke. Ibn al-Arabi travelled with her from Mecca to Jerusalem and never saw anyone stricter about the times of prayer; she was one of the most intelligent people of her time.
66 to 70. Correction, Punishment, Seclusion, Investiture
- al-Tartusi of Tlemcen seemed to look down on Abu Madyan for his illiteracy, and the author cooled towards him. That night the Prophet asked him in a dream why he could not love the man for his love of God and His Apostle. Next morning the author brought gold and fine clothes and told his dream; al-Tartusi wept and dropped his criticism. The rebuke falls on the author, not the critic.
- Ibn Jafar, met in Africa, was punished on the spot for an impurity, stuck head first in the earth until his shaikh had him repent. He warned an Almoravid prince that the Arabs of Africa would betray him; the prince wept and agreed.
- Umar al-Qarqari kept only what he needed from his wages. When he sat awkwardly in a session and the author told him he could leave, he wept: "a gathering for the sake of God is something which ought to be taken full advantage of," but useless if it makes him conscious only of himself. He was buried in a striped garment the author gave him.
- Ali b. Abdallah b. Jami of Mosul showed the author where al-Khidr had sat when he invested him with the cloak (khirqah) by placing a small cap on his head. The author asked him to do the same for him, and has invested others in the same way ever since.
- Abd al-Haqq al-Warraq foretold that the Franks would take Jerusalem and that his wife, who refused to leave it, would be carried to Acre, return and die there. It happened as he said.
71. Abdallah Badr al-Habashi
Others He Met
The book ends with a list: Yusuf b. Sakhr at Cordova, a Substitute with the gift of prophecy; Ibn Saidabun in eastern Spain, an equal of Ahmad al-Rifa'i; one of the forty Rajabis, who spoke wonders in the month of Rajab and became like other men when it ended; al-Hawwari, who died at Mecca in 600/1203; and seventy-two saints met on a single day in Mecca, in each of whom he saw wonders.
Synthesis
What the seventy-one lives add up to, what to borrow from them, where to push back, and how their patterns travel into three modern fields.
Twenty-Five Takeaways
- The book is evidence, not hagiography for its own sake. It answers the claim that the age had no saints.
- Judge the many by the many. The reply to the Alexandrian judge is an argument about samples.
- Sanctity hides in trades. Opium seller, capmaker, cobbler, potter, henna sifter, caulker, surgeon, teacher of children.
- Concealment protects the work. The Supports ask God to erase their repute; the recognised Pole leaves town.
- A good teacher can withhold praise. Al-Kumi's public coldness was a form of love.
- Some questions need years. Al-Rundi's four-year question shows that timing is part of teaching.
- Counsel depends on the counsellor's state. Al-Martuli and al-Uryani gave opposite advice, and both were right.
- The master does what he prescribes. Al-Kumi performed every exercise he set.
- Keep a daily account. Ibn Qassum and Ibn al-Mujahid wrote down their deeds and reviewed them each night.
- Provision follows trust, not grasping. The shears went down the well; the box of gold stayed shut.
- Small, many contributions beat a few large ones. Al-Uryani's ransom took the good in every soul.
- Charity can be disguised as trade. The fennel basket was bought, not given.
- Enough is a price. Al-Kharraz refused more than he needed for the day.
- Refuse what compromises you, without forcing others. The sultan's food was left for those who thought it lawful.
- Expediency is fine until it spends the capital. Principle is the capital.
- Speak truth to power, but not for show. Al-Qattan returned the gifts and kept the pardon.
- Do not reduce people to their afflictions. Ibn Tarif died of naming a man by his disease.
- Love a person for his love, not his credentials. The Prophet's rebuke over al-Tartusi.
- Wonders are told plainly and never made the point. Conduct is the point.
- Women can be masters. Shams and Fatimah taught the author; he served them.
- Be wholly present. Fatimah preferred the visitor who came with all of himself.
- Missed time is a real loss. Ibn al-Mujahid wept over a day lost to a wall.
- Distinguish the role from its abuse. The Law is noble; worldly jurists are the problem.
- Two accounts can disagree honestly. The Ruh and the Durrah differ, and the book says so.
- Read the translator's frame as a frame. Austin's perennialist primer is helpful and also an interpretation.
Frameworks Table
| Framework | Source in the book | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
| The portrait pattern: who, discipline, encounter, sign, death, second account | Every sketch | Reading any of the seventy-one lives quickly |
| Three stages: fear, hope, knowledge | Austin, The Sufi Way | Placing a practice on the path |
| Stations earned, states given | al-Sarraj via Austin | Telling progress from passing experience |
| Four bases: hunger, wakefulness, silence, seclusion | Muadh b. Ashras, sketch 60 | A minimal rule of discipline |
| Pole, Supports, Substitutes | Austin's notes; sketches 17-19, 27, 62 | Reading the hidden hierarchy |
| Nightly self-accounting | Ibn Qassum; Ibn al-Mujahid | Personal review and correction |
| Sample-size reply | The Alexandrian judge, sketch 14 | Answering generalisations from too few cases |
| Two rewards, one reward | Hadith on judgement, sketch 14 | Valuing honest reasoning even when it errs |
| Role versus abuse | The marginal note on jurists | Criticising a profession fairly |
| Capital and expediency | The Ceuta food, sketch 26 | Deciding when to compromise |
| Ripening question | al-Rundi, sketch 18 | Teaching by leaving a problem open |
A closer look
Who's Who
Dates are only those printed in the book.
| Person | Role in the book | Dates as printed |
|---|---|---|
| Ibn al-Arabi | Author | Born 27 Ramadan 560 H (7 August 1165), Murcia; died 28 Rabi II 638 H (16 November 1240), Damascus, aged 76 |
| Abd al-Aziz al-Mahdawi | Addressee of the Ruh al-quds, in Tunis | Visited 590 and 598; the Ruh dated 600/1203-4 |
| Abu Madyan | Master of many of the masters, at Bugia; widely regarded as the Pole | Died 597/1200-1 (introduction); a footnote prints AD 1197-8 |
| Ibn Rushd (Averroes) | Philosopher, friend of the author's father | Died 595, Marrakesh; buried at Cordova |
| Ibn Jadun | Henna sifter, one of the four Supports | Died in Fez, 597 H |
| al-Harith al-Muhasibi | Early Sufi; his book on gnosis appears in sketch 17 | Died Baghdad, 243/857 |
| al-Malik al-Zahir | Ayyubid ruler of Aleppo | Died 613/1216 |
| Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi | Closest disciple, met at Konya | Konya visit 607/1210; received the author's list of works in 627/1230 |
| Muhammad al-Hassar | Companion on the journey east | Taken east in 597; died in Egypt |
| al-Hawwari | Shaikh met in Mecca | Died in Mecca, 600/1203 |
| Abdallah Badr al-Habashi | Companion of 23 years | Died at Malatya (no year printed in the sketch) |
| Shams; Fatimah bint Ibn al-Muthanna | The two women teachers | No dates; ages printed: Shams in her eighties, Fatimah over ninety-five (introduction), ninety-six (Durrah) |
Glossary
| Term | Meaning in this book |
|---|---|
| abdal | The Substitutes, an order of hidden saints; the book names seven |
| adab | Code of conduct governing members of an order and their shaikh |
| Audition (sama') | Listening to music or poetry to awaken inner states |
| awtad | The four Supports through whom God preserves the world |
| baraka | Spiritual grace or blessing that attaches to a holy person or thing |
| barzakh | Isthmus or link; man as the link between creation and Creator |
| Term | Meaning in this book |
|---|---|
| Chivalry (futuwwah) | For Sufis, putting others before oneself in all things |
| Concentration (himmah) | Spiritual power of aspiration able to act on people and events |
| Contraction and Expansion (qabd, bast) | States of spiritual stress and of ease, from God's Rigour and Beauty |
| dhikr | Invocation or remembrance of God's Name; the central Sufi rite |
| Durrah | al-Durrat al-fakhirah, The Precious Pearl; survives only as a synopsis |
| fana', baqa' | Extinction in God and subsistence in Him |
| Term | Meaning in this book |
|---|---|
| faqr | Poverty; indigence before God |
| the Folk (al-qawm) | The Sufis' name for themselves |
| ghaflah | Heedlessness, the opposite of remembrance |
| khalwah | Spiritual retreat in seclusion |
| al-Khidr | The immortal guide of souls, whose direct investiture bypasses any order |
| khirqah | The cloak or cap given as a token of initiation |
| Term | Meaning in this book |
|---|---|
| Malamiyyah | Those who court the blame of men while seeking God's approval |
| maqam, hal | Station (an earned, lasting grade) and state (a passing grace) |
| muhasabah | Self-examination; calling oneself to account |
| muhtasib | Local official supervising markets and public conduct |
| muqaddam | A shaikh's representative over a distant lodge |
| murshid | Spiritual guide able to advance disciples on the Way |
| Term | Meaning in this book |
|---|---|
| al-nafs al-ammarah | The soul which commands evil; the ego |
| Pole (qutb) | Head of the hidden hierarchy of saints in a given time |
| Preservation | A station of near-freedom from sin |
| Proximity | A station of nearness to God that Ibn al-Arabi entered in 597 |
| Ruh al-quds | The Spirit of Holiness in the Counselling of the Soul, written at Mecca in 600 H |
| Seal of Muhammadan Sainthood | The last direct spiritual heir of the Prophet; a title Ibn al-Arabi claimed |
| Term | Meaning in this book |
|---|---|
| silsilah | Chain of masters through whom initiation descends |
| tahajjud | Prayer by night |
| tawakkul | Reliance on God |
| wisal | Fasting day and night without break |
| zawiyah | A lodge or cell of an order |
About this book
Sufis of Andalusia: The Ruh al-Quds and al-Durrat al-Fakhirah by Ibn al-Arabi, 1971. 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