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‘At Your service, O Allah, at Your service! You have no partner. Praise and blessings are Yours as well as the kingdom. You have no partner.’
Our Lord give us good in this world’s life and good in the Hereafter and save us from the punishment of the Fire.”
This is beautifully illustrated by an anecdote related by both ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Sulamī (d. 412/1022) and Ibn ʿArabī,[6] regarding the eminent 10th-century Sufi, al-Shiblī (d. 334/945). One of al-Shiblī’s disciples had just returned from the ḥajj:
Al-Shiblī asked me: ‘Did you remove your clothes [in order to put on the pilgrim’s robe, iḥrām]?’ ‘Yes,’ I replied. He asked me: ‘Did you at the same time remove all your own acts?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘Then,’ he said, ‘you did not divest yourself of your clothing!’ Then he asked: ‘Did you purify yourself with a full ablution?’ ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘And did you purify yourself from all your faults?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘Then you did not perform the full ablution!’… Then he asked me: ‘When you said “Here am I, O God, here am I” (labbayka), did you hear the [divine] call to which you were responding?’ ‘No.’ ‘Then you did not utter the labbayka … And when you entered the Mosque, did you enter the Divine Closeness?’ ‘No.’ ‘Then you did not enter the Mosque! And when you saw the Kaʿba, did you see the One whose House it is?’ ‘No.’ ‘Then you did not see the Kaʿba!…’ After a few more questions on each of the pilgrimage rituals, al-Shiblī concludes: ‘Well, all in all you have not performed the pilgrimage. So go back and do so!’
For the mystic, the physical Kaʿba in the world represents the human spiritual heart, the ‘place’ within the human being where the Divine dwells, where the true human being (insān) meets the Divine face to face. In fact one can say that the Kaʿba and the heart are not really two things: the real Kaʿba is the perfect human heart, the original source of prayer, and whoever brings their heart to that state of perfection and prays from there is praying from the Kaʿba. Then the celestial Temple comes to circumambulate the Human Being.
However, knowing of this place within each of us is one thing. It is quite another to undertake the journey to reach it, and to overcome the obstacles on the road. To set off on the journey towards the inner heart, we each start from where we are, more or less distant from the central pole of the Heart. We have to undertake a particular journey, with its own particular route. We carry our own baggage, light or otherwise. We may stop en route, to rest and pick up provisions, but if our intention is clear enough, these stopping-places are temporary – we shall not mistake them for our destination. It is essential to always bear in mind what that final destination is like – which makes it equally essential to listen to those who have arrived, who bring news of the true nature of Heart.
We may note two important points in this uncompromising passage. Firstly, the heart properly belongs to God; He is the Owner of the heart, and it is through this heart that all good comes to the soul. In the Arab mind, and particularly for Ibn ʿArabī, the heart is not the place of emotions or feelings, as we might think of it today. It is primarily the house of real know?ledge: it is the place where God Himself is known and the temple in which God already dwells. In reality it is His Heart, not ours. Secondly, the usurper that ‘intervenes’ between the heart and its Owner, which has misappropriated the Temple that God has chosen for Himself, is not a thing, not an ego, not a self – it is simply ignorance of the true state of affairs, or rather, an absence of knowledge of the Real God. If we do not know God, we can say that we do not have a living heart, or that our heart is dead
The Heart’s Pilgrimage
There are two distinct complementary and apparently opposed (in intellectual terms) aspects regarding the Way to Truth. On the one hand, it is a journey to the Heart-Kaʿba, a journey that can only be achieved through purification and polishing. As Ibn ʿArabī writes, ‘the Real seeks from you your heart and gives to you all that you are. So purify and cleanse it [the heart] through presence (ḥuḍūr), watchfulness (murāqaba) and reverential fear (khashya).’[9] Sometimes he uses the traditional metaphor of the heart as a reflective mirror which needs polishing – the mirror emphasising the ultimate nature of the heart as completely and infinitely receptive to the Divine revelation.
At the same time, it is a journey of the heart (safar al-qalb) to the Heart, of the mystic’s heart to the reality of Heart.[10] It is a movement, therefore, away from considerations of ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘my heart’ to concentration on God alone, His Heart, away from the usurper to the true Owner, from ignorance to witnessing and Knowledge. It can also be described as a journey from being a limited vessel to becoming what is depicted in the Christian tradition on the walls of the Chora Church in Istanbul as ‘the container of the Uncontainable’. For Ibn ʿArabī the ‘journey’ is really the heart facing towards God in remembrance.[11]
As Ibn ʿArabī succinctly puts it,
when God created your body, He placed within it a Kaʿba, which is your heart. He made this temple of the heart the noblest of houses in the person of faith (muʾmin). He informed us that the heavens, in which there is the Frequented House (al-bayt al-maʿmūr), and the earth, in which there is the [physical] Kaʿba, do not encompass Him and are too confined for Him, but He is encompassed by this heart in the constitution of the believing human. What is meant here by ‘encompassing’ is knowledge of God.[12]
Here Ibn ʿArabī is of course referring to the famous ḥadīth qudsī, the words of God upon the tongue of the Prophet Muhammad, which he quotes often: ‘Neither My heavens nor My earth encompasses Me – but the heart of My believing servant does encompass Me.’[13]
Ibn ʿArabī delves further into the notion of the heart when discussing its cubist nature. In Chapter 362 of the Futūḥāt, he explores the ‘prostration of the heart’, which unlike prostration of the body in prayer, is constant (another way of describing the inner heart or fuʾād). Discussing how God created the world with an exterior and an interior, making one visible and the other invisible, he distinguishes between two aspects of the human viewer, the heart and the ‘face’:
He made the heart from the world of the Invisible (ghayb) and the ‘face’ [of the heart] from the world of the Visible (shahāda). For the face He specified a direction in which to prostrate, naming that His ‘House’. She [the House] receives him whenever the heart turns its face in that direction in prayer… For the heart He specified His own Self, glory to Him, so that it shouldn’t seek other than Him: He orders it to prostrate to Him, and if it prostrates due to an unveiling, then it will never lift its head again from its prostration in this world or the next. One who prostrates without unveiling lifts his head [again], and the lifting means heedlessness of God and forgetting God in the midst of ‘things’. He who does not raise his head when his heart prostrates is one who constantly witnesses the Real in everything, so that he does not see a thing without seeing God before that thing. This is the condition of Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīq. Do not suppose that [there was a time when] he used not to prostrate and then he prostrated – rather, he was always in prostration, for prostration for him was an essential matter. Now some of the world has had its prostration unveiled to it and knows Him, while others do not possess the unveiling of its prostration, so they are ignorant of Him, imagining that they rise and prostrate and can do as they wish.[36]
The Faces of Oneness
While Ibn ʿArabī is so often associated with the Oneness of Being, it should never be forgotten or ignored that he stresses just as much the other face of Oneness, the non-stop, never-repeating revelatory effusion of that same One, expressing Itself in infinitely diverse images and forms. It is this magnificent oneness and diversity that the heart is capable of receiving. ‘Truth has come’ in the heart of Man, not as a monolithic ideal of a better ‘idol’ than all others, but in all Its intrinsic singular diversity and variegation of image. As Ibn ʿArabī points out, ‘falsehood (al-bāṭil) is the same as non-being’ and ‘all of being is Real, nothing in it is unreal’.[43] Perhaps this is how we are to understand the Prophet’s action in Mecca when he caused the idols to prostrate, rather than destroying them. This is not the drama of Moses destroying the Israelites’ golden calf as an example of the annihilating fire of Divine Majesty, but the returning of an image to its rightful place in relation to the Origin, which is re-enacted in every circumambulation of the Kaʿba. It is a simultaneous bowing-down in the face of Reality and the passing-away of self-illusion and unreality in vision of the omni-directional (and ultimately spherical) Face of the Real
Nevertheless, at the same time, let us note carefully that it is not really the physical qibla that determines the direction of prayer – it is the singleness of Reality.
When God created your body, He placed within it a Ka‘ba, which is your heart. He made this temple of the heart the noblest of houses in the person of faith. He informed us that the heavens… and the earth, in which there is the Ka‘ba, do not encompass Him and are too confined for Him, but He is encompassed by this heart in the constitution of the believing human. What is meant here by “encompassing” is knowledge of God (Futuhat ch. 355).
For the next three days, participants must not smoke, swear, shave, cut their nails, or have sex. Fighting and arguments are banned, and participants are prohibited from hunting or killing anything. All must avoid scented cologne, perfume, makeup, and soaps.
They then begin reciting an invocation:
Here I am, Oh God, at Your command! Here I am at Your command! You are without associate! Here I am at Your command! To You are all praise, grace and dominion! You are without associate!
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