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Denis E. McAuley: Ibn Arabī’s Mystical Poetics.

(Oxford Oriental Monographs.) ix, 255 pp. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2012. £70. ISBN 978 0 19
965954 8.

Th. Emil Homerin

Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies / Volume 76 / Issue 03 / October 2013, pp
505 - 507
DOI: 10.1017/S0041977X13000566, Published online: 09 October 2013

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0041977X13000566

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Th. Emil Homerin (2013). Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 76, pp
505-507 doi:10.1017/S0041977X13000566

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 REVIEWS 505

Mariam Rosser-Owen and Antony Eastmond explore new ways of looking at

these caskets in their papers on a casket at the V&A and on the St Petroc casket
respectively. They avoid traditional stylistic and iconographical comparisons
which tend to lead to a discussion about Christian versus Muslim motifs, in favour
of detailed studies of how the objects were made and how they might have been sold
and dispersed.
Indeed the analysis of the production and consumption of the ivories in this
volume indicates that the caskets were made in workshops that were independent
of the twelfth-century royal Norman court of Roger II in Sicily. They seem to
have been made for a speculative market in which they would have been constructed
and even painted to order, before being sold on by individual merchants.
Objects move, and in the medieval Mediterranean world, they moved a lot.
Textiles, ceramics, rock crystal and ivories were all traded and exchanged, greatly
influencing decorative styles in the various production centres. The notion of a
shared artistic language within a wider region and the movement of objects is
well illustrated in Finbarr Barry Flood’s contribution on Ghaznavid figural imagery
and the circulation westward of manuscripts.
The volume’s editor David Knipp rightly points out in his introduction that the
term “Siculo Arabic ivories” is a misleading one. It suggests that this is a straight-
forward group of painted and gilded ivory containers made in Sicily by Muslim
craftsmen. The papers in this volume reveal a much more complicated story, in
which the identify of the craftsmen as Muslims is far from certain – in fact I
would suggest that their religious faith is not particularly relevant. Perhaps a new
term needs to be found to describe these objects, one which focuses on their
Mediterranean origins rather than prioritizes the supposed faith or ethnic identity
of their makers. Cutler argues convincingly that the term only distracts from the
more interesting and productive questions about how, why and for whom the con-
tainers were made – questions which are comprehensively addressed in this impress-
ive volume.

Anna McSweeney
Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin

DENIS E. MCAULEY:
Ibn ʿArabī’s Mystical Poetics.
(Oxford Oriental Monographs.) ix, 255 pp. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2012. £70. ISBN 978 0 19 965954 8.
doi:10.1017/S0041977X13000566

Denis McAuley is to be commended for his recent study of Ibn ʿArabī’s Dīwān, a
formidable collection of poems composed in a number of meters, forms, and styles.
McAuley pays careful attention to Ibn ʿArabī’s poetics and his mystical doctrines,
giving each their due. In his introduction, he reviews previous scholarship on Ibn
ʿArabī’s verse, and the Dīwān in particular, which some scholars have regarded
as “cold and mannered” (p. 3). McAuley is more nuanced when he notes: “Most
of the poetry of the Dīwān is not lyrical. It is directly concerned with mystical doc-
trine, but it is too elusive to act as a teaching tool” (p. 12). In chapter 1, McAuley
provides an overview of Ibn ʿArabī’s theosophy in which God uses His many names
to bring about creation in a series of emanations. Hence all of creation partakes of
Absolute Existence if only in a limited way, and this paradox of the One and the
506 REVIEWS

many is a persistent theme throughout the Dīwān. McAuley points out that Ibn
ʿArabī links the twenty-eight heavenly mansions with the twenty-eight letters of
the alphabet, thereby linking his cosmology to language which, then, has magical
powers of its own. Ibn ʿArabī alludes to these and other themes in his Dīwān, shift-
ing between love lyrics and Sufi terms, often with a syntactic ambiguity.
In chapter 2, McAuley examines Ibn ʿArabī’s views on poetry, including his
comments on the Quran’s condemnation of poets. Like others of his time, Ibn
ʿArabī understood this passage as being against the use of poetry for immoral pur-
poses, but not a condemnation of poetry itself. For Ibn ʿArabī and his contempor-
aries, poetry was linked to the imagination and so might bring forth forms that
order the world and make moral truths more intelligible. Ibn ʿArabī endorsed the
notion that poetry could be useful for teaching, but he also stated that poetry was
a code to hide spiritual knowledge from the unworthy. Such poetry is akin to rev-
elation as it has a divine source, and McAuley cites a fascinating account by Ibn
ʿArabī of his dream of an angel who gave him a piece of white light:

I said, “What is this?” It was said, “Sūrat al-Shuʿarā”. I swallowed it, and
felt a hair sprouting from my chest, through my throat and into my mouth
as an animal with a head, a tongue, two eyes and two lips. It grew out of
my mouth until its head hit the two horizons, the East and the West. Then
it shrank and returned to my chest; so I knew that my speech would reach
the East and the West. I returned to my senses, speaking poetry without
deliberation or thought. Inspiration (imdād) continued to reach me in the
same way (pp. 47–8).

In chapters 3–8, McAuley offers close readings of poems from the Dīwān,
beginning with a series of poems, each on one of the 114 sūras of the Quran.
Ibn ʿArabī claimed that the poems came to him “by the inspiration of the
moment (wārid al-waqt), without addition and without the operation of thought
or deliberation” (p. 59). I find this statement compelling, for much of Ibn
ʿArabī’s verse in the Dīwān reminds me of automatic writing among nineteenth-
century spiritualists, as images and syntax morph over lines, many with awk-
ward or unexpected enjambements. In the case of the sūra poems, Ibn ʿArabī
finds a word or theme in a sūra that inspires his poems and their esoteric com-
mentaries on the Quran. In chapter 4, McAuley considers poems in which Ibn
ʿArabī imitated or replied to earlier poets including Ḥ assān ibn Thābit,
al-Ḥ allāj, and Imru’ al-Qays, demonstrating Ibn ʿArabī’s knowledge of the
Arabic poetic tradition while asserting his own status within it. In chapter 5,
McAuley examines a series of poems in one of Ibn ʿArabī’s favourite rhyme
schemes, -rī, in the meter basīṭ, while in chapter 6, McAuley, discusses
poems with an “ultra-monorhyme”, often the word Allāh. McAuley shows
that such poems are by no means unique, and are often found in ascetic poetry
as a kind of litany or a riddle, and in Ibn ʿArabī’s case, as a way to speak about
creation’s relation to God to whom all things return, just as each verse ends in
the word “God”.
In chapters 7 and 8, McAuley takes up the muʿashsharāt, ten-line poems “in
which each poem represents one letter of the alphabet, each verse of the poem in
question beginning and ending with that letter” (p. 160). McAuley examines earlier
examples of this form, which address themes of love or moral exhortation, and then
 REVIEWS 507

compares them to Ibn ʿArabī’s poems full of Sufi paradox and metaphysical specu-
lations. McAuley then concludes his study in terms similar to an earlier study of Ibn
ʿArabī by Michael Sells, namely that the heart of the perfect Sufi comprehends
God’s shifting forms, “and Ibn ʿArabī’s poetry seems to be geared towards doing
precisely that” (p. 209).
In his book, McAuley does not offer poetical translations of Ibn ʿArabī’s poems,
focusing instead on content over form. He provides the Arabic texts to his trans-
lations in an appendix, though with few vowel markers. Some readers may question
specific translations. For example, McAuley begins one translation: “God’s call
answers the one who calls out”; however, the Arabic should probably read
yulabbī nidā’a-l-ḥaqq, which is an allusion to an idiom yulabbī nidā’a rabbihi,
“to be called away by the Lord”, in this case presumably in mystical annihilation.
So a better translation would be: “The one who prayed answered the True
Reality’s call”.
To McAuley’s extensive bibliography should be added two earlier studies of Ibn
ʿArabī’s verse: Michael Sells’ Stations of Desire (2000), and al-Ḥ ubb Illāhī fī Shiʿr
Muhyi al-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī by ʿAbd al-Fattāḥ al-Damāsī (1983).
This aside, Denis McAuley is to be commended for his achievement.

Th. Emil Homerin

University of Rochester

JEAN-CHARLES DUCÈNE (ed. and trans.):

Les tables géographiques du manuscrit du sultan rasūlide al-Malik
al-Afḍal. Edition, traduction et commentaire.
(Academica Scientiarum Fennica.) 137, 62 pp. Helsinki: The Finnish
Academy of Science and Letters, 2013. ISBN 978 951 41 1082 5.
doi:10.1017/S0041977X13000578

Over the past decade, Jean-Charles Ducène has provided students of medieval
Arabic–Islamic geography with editions and translations of several lesser-known
texts, such as Dalā’il al-Qibla of Ibn al-Qaṣs,̣ and comparisons of several manu-
scripts of the same geographical work, such as the maps of the Nile Delta by Ibn
Ḥ awqal. Together, his editions and translations bring us closer to understanding
the geographical corpus as a developing discourse, which is not limited to a
group of canonical texts. By focusing on the manuscripts that have been overlooked,
we get a much better feel for the ways in which geographical knowledge and cat-
egories were transmitted across the Islamic world over time and space.
Ducène’s current contribution is an edition and translation of a geographical
work attributed to the Rasulid sultan al-Malik al-Afḍal (r. 1363–77). The work,
beyond opening a rare window into geographical knowledge available in the med-
ieval Yemen, is of particular importance for the development of the genre of math-
ematical geography. Unlike the more familiar tables of co-ordinates, which consist
only of numerical data on longitude and latitude, each of the 515 localities in this
treatise also receives a brief textual account of the population and main commercial
products. This is a marriage of the zīj – purely mathematical tradition, with an
emphasis on astrological and astronomical uses – and the tradition of administrative
and commercial geography. It seems to precede similar geographical tables com-
piled by Abū al-Fidā’, and to represent a new genre of geographical literature that
became popular from the twelfth century onwards. It is an interesting variation