Of love theory and love poetry in Arabic Sufi Literature : An exploration of al –Shushturi Sufi’s Ecstasy as a paradigm

Love, in Arabic term denotes hubb, iskiq, gariimah, wudd and hawaa. It semantically has more than thirty Arabic words denoting the same meaning.1 It has been a symbolic Interactive expression of feeling that has possessed quantum signi-ficance and values over the passage of time in both animate and inanimate beings. Extant research works on love poetry have been carried out by researchers on its quantum purposes and effects in the socio-cultural, anthropological physiolo-gical, psychological, religious and socio-linguistic and literary arena, in both Arabic and westem literary works. However, there has been sparse attention on the exploration of the love theory and love poetry in Arabic Sufi literature, which has created the gaps to befilled by this research. Therefore, this paper aims to explore the love theory in the love poetry of Ara- bic Sufi literature, using Al- Shushturi Sufi’s Ecstasy as a paradigm. Before delving into the main discussion, the contras-tive discourse between the concept oflove theory and love poetry would be examined. Likewise, the concept of Sufism and ecstasy shall be discussed. Al- Shushturi’s biographical account and scholarship including the review and literary analysis of his Sufi’s poetries would be treated.

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Pleasures—Sensual and Spiritual: A Chapter from Nāṣir-i Khusraw’s Pilgrims’ Provision By Shafique N . Virani

This article offers a translation and analysis of Nāṣir-i Khusraw’s seminal discourse on pleasure from his philosophical treatise The Pilgrims’ Provision (Zād al-musāfirīn), illuminating the intricate interplay between sensual and intellectual delights in Islamic thought. It situates Nāṣir-i Khusraw within the broader intellectual tradition, highlighting his critique of Muḥammad b. Zakariyyāʾ al-Rāzī’s Epicurean-influenced conception of pleasure as mere relief from pain. Through rigorous refutation, Nāṣir-i Khusraw advances a framework wherein pleasure is a metaphysical phenomenon rooted in the soul’s ascent toward perfection and its reunion with the Universal Intellect. The chapter explores the gradations of pleasure across the natural, vegetative, sentient, and rational realms, culminating in the infinite joy of intellectual realization. Drawing on symbolic interpretation of the Quran, Nāṣir-i Khusraw redefines paradise not as a realm of corporeal indulgence, but as consummate knowledge, and hell as consummate ignorance. The translation is enriched by historical context, philosophical commentary, and poetic excerpts, offering readers a profound meditation on the nature of human fulfillment and the enduring relevance of spiritual pleasure in an age of material excess.

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Mystical language of love in Hamzah Fansuri’s poetry : Sufi poetics in the 16th-century Malay world By Kris Ramlan

This dissertation examines the mystical poetics of love in the works of Hamzah Fansuri (fl. 16th century), widely regarded as the earliest Sufi poet of the Malay world and a foundational figure in Southeast Asian Islamic intellectual history. Through close textual analysis, lexical comparison, and intertextual study, it demonstrates that Hamzah’s writings are not mere adaptations of universal Sufi themes but constitute a distinctively Malay articulation of Akbarian metaphysics. His plurilingual idiom, shaped primarily through Malay and Arabic with traces of Persian and Sanskrit, serves as a performative medium for mystical ontology. Within this idiom, poetic sound, metaphor, and structural recursion function both as aesthetic expression and as epistemic disclosure. The study is divided into two parts. Part I reconstructs Hamzah’s intellectual formation and literary milieu, reassessing his chronology and situating his work within transregional Sufi networks and manuscript traditions. Part II offers the first sustained reading of love in his corpus, developing a typology across three registers—ontological, transformative, and experiential—each underpinned by a lexical-symbolic stratum. It further reconstructs the semantic field of Hamzah’s love lexicon within the wider Malay literary archive, demonstrates how poetic form itself operates as metaphysical pedagogy, and reframes the translation of Arabic Sufi terminology into Malay as a performative act of interlingual mystical articulation. The study also introduces the concept of symbolic transposition to explain how Hamzah reoriented select pre-Islamic motifs toward an Islamic metaphysics of Being and love. The findings show that Hamzah’s poetics enact rather than merely describe mystical realities. His verse creates a literary space in which divine love is experienced as the mode by which Being manifests, veils, and reveals itself. By transposing Sufi metaphysics into Malay, Hamzah expanded its expressive range as a vehicle for mystical thought and positioned Malay literature within a broader cosmopolitan tradition of Islamic poetics.

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The Fragrant Secret: Language and Universalism in Muusaa Ka’s The Wolofal Takhmīs

Are all languages equal? Does the revelation of the Qur’an in Arabic elevate that language above all others? What is the goal of using language, and particularly of using it Islamically? The early twentieth-century Wolof-language poem The Wolofal Takhmīs takes on these questions in verse. In arguing that Wolof and Arabic are equally viable languages for Islamic poetry, the Senegalese Sufi poet Sëriñ Muusaa Ka intervenes into longstanding theological debates about the provenance and purpose of language. The primary goal of this article is to illuminate Ka’s theory of language through analysis and translation of Takhmīs. Ka implies that the root of all languages is the Ḥaqīqa Muḥammadiyya, the nonphysical reality of the Prophet Muḥammad, and thus he claims that all languages share an equal potential and an ultimate purpose: to regain the “fragrant secret” of their Muḥammadan essence. The Wolofal Takhmīs offers a universalist theory of language that avoids the pitfalls of provincialism and chauvinism. I consider the potential impact of this theory on both intra-Islamic theological debates about language and contemporary academic conversations about the viability of “universalism” after European colonialism.

Universalism is out of fashion in the Euro-American academy. This is not new: twenty-five years ago, the Ghanaian philosopher Kwasi Wiredu was already writing that “there is…increasingly skepticism regarding… the possibility of universal canons of thought and action.” 1 This skepticism is historically well-founded, as “more often than not, the alleged universals have been home-grown particulars. Not unnaturally, the practice has earned universals a bad name.” 2 Wiredu is referring to the longstanding (and still ongoing) tendency amongst Euro-American thinkers to treat Western cultures as universal reference points to which all others ought to aspire – a stance summarized by Hegel’s famous claim that Western Europe is “the land of the elevation of the particular to the universal.” 3 This chauvinistic faux-universalism was (and is) frequently tethered to assumptions about the superiority of European languages. Per Souleymane Bachir Diagne, the line of thinking goes as follows: “we can stipulate that a given language is universal and thereby overarches all the others. This stipulation involves declaring that the Greek language [and its supposed European descen- dants] is the Logos (simultaneously the Word, Reason and Being)

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Was That Layla’s Fire?: Metonymy, Metaphor, and Mannerism in the Poetry of Ibn al-Fāriḍ

Regarded as one of the greatest poets of the Arabic language, and the greatest and most influential Arabic Sufi poet, ‘Umar ibn ‘Alī ibn al-Fāriḍ, set the standard for Arabic Sufi poetry after him. Known as the “Sultan of the Lovers” (Sulṭān al-‘Āshiqīn), ibn al-Fāriḍ’s works inspired numerous commentaries, especially amongst the school of Ibn al-ʿArabī, many of which are considered masterpieces of Islamic metaphysics. Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s poetry continues to be sung, taught, and commented upon down to the present day and is considered one of the greatest expositions of spiritual realization, Sufi metaphysics, and psychology. This article will consider the role of the figure of Layla in some of Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s poetry, exploring the relationship between the exquisite form of his poetic language and the meanings to which they allude in an attempt to understand an aspect of how the “licit magic” of his poetry works to express and inspire realization. That is, of all the various genres and modes of expression, why did so many Sufi figures find the genre of the romantic or even erotic Arabic ghazal, especially the exquisite verses of Ibn al-Fāriḍ, to be so felicitous for expressing the deepest truths they had realized.

Regarded as one of the greatest poets of the Arabic language, and the greatest and most influential Arabic Sufi poet, ʿUmar ibn ‘Alī ibn al-Fāriḍ, set the standard for Arabic Sufi poetry after him. His poetry was famous and commented upon even in his own lifetime, and several commentators even claimed that while non-poetic language was perfected in the inimitable Qur’an, six centuries later, Arabic poetry was perfected in the inimitable verse of Ibn al-Fāriḍ. 1 Known as the “Sultan of the Lovers” (Sulṭān al-‘Āshiqīn), Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s works inspired numerous commentaries, especially amongst the school of Ibn al-ʿArabī, many of which are consid- ered masterpieces of Islamic metaphysics. Saḍr al-dīn al-Qūnāwī (d. 673/1274), Ibn al-ʿArabī’s stepson and successor taught Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s magnum opus, the 760-verse qaṣīda, Naẓm al-Sulūk (“The Poem of the Sufi Way”) to his circle of students, two of whom, Sa‘īd al-dīn al-Farghānī (d. 699/1300) and ‘Afīf al-dīn al-Tilimsānī (d. 690/1291) published commentaries upon the work

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Foreword to Oludamini Ogunnaike, The Book of Clouds (Fons Vitae, 2024) – Mohammed Rustom

“As the blessed Prophet’s words indicate, the cloud is connected to the “space” wherein God resides, and which transforms into the rain of mercy (raḥma) that pervades all things. As a metaphysical reality, Ibn ʿArabī explains that the primordial Cloud (ʿamāʾ) is the ontological, basis of the Muhammadan Reality (ḥaqīqa Muḥammadiyya) and directly corresponds to the Breath of the All-Merciful (nafas al-Raḥmān) within and through which all of God’s words—the stuff of the cosmos are articulated and formed. In its vapor-like state, a cloud is both here and not here, and hence denotes the principle and substance of manifestation which is simultaneously absent and present throughout the created order”

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Rumi: Swallowing the Sun – Poems Translated from Persian

Abstract:

“The extraordinary success and influence of certain translations and adap- tations of Persian poetry into western languages – those by Sir William Jones, Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Rückert, August von Platen, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edward FitzGerald, Basil Bunting, Robert Bly, Coleman Barks and Dick Davis – makes the burden of the translation past and present especially weighty. A meta-translation question must therefore be resolved in the mind of any would-be Persian translator before they begin: who is the intended audience of this translation, and”

Rumi, Swallowing The Sun (trans. Lewis)Download