Andalusia Invisible
.
At the beginning of this year, I found myself gripped by an enthusiasm I might as well go ahead and call mosque lust. In January I’d spent a few weeks in Istanbul, where I developed a passion for the city’s many extraordinary mosques. I’d dwell for hours in stunned appreciation inside these magnificent structures, whose domes and minarets beautify the skyline over the Bosphorus. Some of the grandest mosques on the planet are in Istanbul – the Blue Mosque, Hagia Sofia and the Suleymaniye Mosque, to name just three – many of them designed by Sinan the Architect for Suleyman the Magnificent in the Ottoman sixteenth century. Newly interested not only in Islam’s places of worship, but in the thought, culture and history of a religion I’d always regarded warily, I told myself I’d see more of the world’s great mosques when I could. And so, in the spring, my partner Roisin and I travelled to Seville with the aim of visiting the famous historic one in the nearby city of Córdoba.
I’m not a Muslim. I’m not an anything, really – I was raised a Catholic in the 1980s when the Church still held sway in Ireland, but except for an engagement with Buddhism in my early twenties, it’s been a long time since I’ve practised any kind of formal religion. Now that I’ve entered my forties, though, I’ve become intensely curious about religious thought and experience. I flew to Seville in the heat of a fascination with esoteric Islam, and in particular with the great Andalusian mystic philosopher Ibn ‘Arabī. Born in the town of Murcia in the twelfth century, when ‘Al Andalus’ was still part of an Islamic empire, Ibn ‘Arabī – known in the Muslim world as the Shaykh al-Akbar, the Greatest Master, and also as the Muhyī al-dīn, the Reviver of Religion – moved with his prominent family to Seville at the age of eight, and lived there for nearly three decades before embarking on long wanderings through the Islamic world, finally settling in Damascus, where he died in 1240 (638 in Islam’s ‘Hijri’ calendar, which begins in 622 AD, the year the Prophet Muhammad migrated from Mecca to Medina). A metaphysical thinker of the most penetrating subtlety, Ibn ‘Arabī wrote books in the hundreds; his key work, a summa of Islamic thought titled The Meccan Revelations, alone contains thousands of pages. As a poet, he wrote tens of thousands of verses. Only a fraction of this oceanic oeuvre has so far been translated into English. To one of his most important Western exegetists, Henry Corbin, Ibn ‘Arabī is ‘a spiritual genius who was not only one of the greatest masters of Şūfism in Islam, but also one of the great mystics of all time’, his vision of a depth and complexity ‘radically alien to literal, dogmatic religion’.
For all his vast influence on the history of Islamic thought – the equivalent, say, of Thomas Aquinas’s to Christian philosophy – until recently I’d never heard of Ibn ‘Arabī, or if I had heard of him his name had quickly sunk into that foreign sea of Ibns, Abus and al-s that fill out a daunting philosophical tradition of which I, like many educated Westerners, had long been totally ignorant.
Islamic thought never underwent that secularisation by which Western philosophy and theology split into separate disciplines.
At this point I should sketch out my modest silsila – the chains of transmission by which Islam’s gnostics chart their lineage of masters all the way back to Mohammad – to show how I came to the foothills of Ibn ‘Arabī’s dizzying mountain range of work.
A couple of summers ago in Berlin, I happened upon a book first published in 1979 by the late American depth psychologist James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld. It hit me with the force of revelation. Building on from the two major dream-theories of the twentieth century – those of Freud and Jung – Hillman wrote of the dreamscape as Hades itself, the land of the dead, a zone of pure psyche where the disembodied ‘night soul’ roams while the body sleeps. My intense reaction to Hillman’s book wasn’t a matter of my being persuaded, exactly. Rather, I experienced that mysterious sense of being shown what I already knew but had never before articulated in thought. Reading more of Hillman’s work – and coming to regard him as a modern sage – I learned that among his key influences was the French Iranologist and scholar of Islam, Henry Corbin.
While hardly a household name, Henry Corbin is himself an intensely intriguing figure – a professor at the Sorbonne who was the first French translator of Heidegger’s Being and Time, and who in later life moved to Iran, the better to immerse in the work of the great masters of Islamic thought. Corbin’s preferred term for such thinkers as Ibn ‘Arabī or Suhrawardi is ‘theosophers’: Islamic thought, he points out, never underwent – and, for reasons inherent to Islam’s essence, never could undergo – that secularisation by which Western philosophy and theology split into separate disciplines. Theosophia – divine wisdom. The profoundest philosophical minds in the era when Islamic civilisation was the most advanced on earth (while Western Europe languished as a Dark Ages backwater) were engaged in mapping out the architecture of the Absolute, describing the atmospheres and nature of God.
To the literary critic Harold Bloom, Henry Corbin was ‘a wisdom writer of the highest eminence’ (the compliment appears in Bloom’s preface to Corbin’s extraordinary book Alone With the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabī). Another commentator perfectly sums up Corbin’s intellectual work as ‘visionary scholarship’. In one published dialogue, James Hillman describes watching Corbin enter into states of transport: ‘When he talked, towards the end of his lectures his eyes would go up and you could feel he was these visions of Suhrawardi or whoever he was doing’. Elsewhere, Hillman writes, ‘In him, imagination was utterly presence. One was in presence of imagination itself.’
Reading Corbin is a strange and intoxicating experience: his lofty, formidably erudite writing feels as if it’s pitched not just to a scholarly but to a spiritual elite, an in the gno cohort who don’t even bother trying to convince the wider world of their vertiginous insights. How thrilling to read a writer who casually tosses around phrases like ‘Zoroastrian angelology’ and ‘Ismaili Gnosis’ without so much as checking who’s keeping up. Writing about ‘the situation of esotericism’ as if reporting on the most pressing current events, he works himself into bouts of passion over arcane doctrinal disputes and hair-splitting metaphysical controversies from bygone millennia. He’s always drumming up support, setting esoteric factions against one another, casting aspersions, championing or upbraiding obscure and long-dead thinkers. When he writes at full pelt on the mystical visions and intuitive splendours of Ibn ‘Arabī, the distinct impression arises that Corbin – like all the writers grouped in this personal silsila – is no mere scholar, but above all a mystic, a gnostic, a visionary, privy to mysteries that confound reason and humble logic.
The link between Henry Corbin and, in one direction, James Hillman, and in the other, Ibn ‘Arabī, is the concept that Corbin calls the mundus imaginalis or the Imaginal World. And here we get to the heart of my fixation with this stuff. Essentially, the Imaginal World is Hillman’s underworld of dreams, and perhaps of the afterlife – an ontologically real zone of suspended images that exists in between sense perception and intellective intuition, between the corporeal and the spiritual. Corbin insists that this ‘interworld’ of the imaginal ought not to be confused with the merely imaginary: the latter denotes simple fantasy, making things up, whereas the imaginal, as propounded in the gnostic philosophies of Suhrawardi and Ibn ‘Arabī, is at least as real and objective as the material world we navigate in our waking lives, and ‘retains all the spatial extension and colour of the physical world, but in a spiritual state.’
Harold Bloom remarks that gnosis ought not to be defined by ‘knowledge’ but by ‘acquaintance’ (or: if you gno you gno). On becoming acquainted with the notion of an Imaginal World, I had the same experience I’d had while reading The Dream and the Underworld: I recognised it, I knew this realm existed, I had glimpsed it for myself.
*
With all my talk of mosques and mysticism, I’m making it sound as if we went to Seville purely for research purposes. We also just wanted to go on holiday. Roisin especially needed a break. Right until boarding our flight, she was on her laptop chasing deadlines and juggling duties in her multiple professional roles – writer-editor-teacher. She kept repeating the phrases mental health crisis and burnout till the words became drained of all urgency. Personally, I’d never had a mental health crisis because I’d never been out of one. Nor had I any fear of burnout because my vision of the writing life was essentially parasitical, centred around seclusion and dope-smoking. I often annoyed Roisin with my sanctimoniously intoned motto: You can’t burn out if you’ve dropped out. But I was very much into this idea of going on holiday, which was something we hadn’t done in so long it felt more novel and exotic than it probably should have. These days I was big on doing normal things: it offset my weed-stoked anxiety that my hermetic lifestyle was alienating me from common concerns, enabling me to withdraw into a working solitude as into a cave or a desert.
Preoccupied as I was by Andalusian Islam, it hadn’t dawned on me that we were flying into Seville at the commencement of Semana Santa, the extravagant Catholic celebration held every year in the week before Easter. We’ve all seen images of Semana Santa: processions of figures in hooded KKK robes march through narrow, incense-veiled streets bearing elaborate floats of the tortured Christ or the weeping Madonna. These brotherhoods of ‘penitents’ proceed from each parish church – there are as many churches in Seville as there are tapas bars – to the city’s vast Cathedral, each brotherhood bearing a more or less bizarre name. Some of those we would see included Jesus Stripped, the Bitterness, the Black People, the Fifth Anguish, the Silence, the O, the Puppy, the Three Falls of Saint Buenaventura and – Roisin’s favourite – the Macarena.
Seville is conscious of its Spanishness, but in the way a proud and elegant woman is conscious of her beauty.
We were in town for a week, with a plan to take a high-speed train to Córdoba in a few days’ time. Meanwhile, we visited Seville’s marvellously ornate, sixteenth-century baroque churches, walked around the historic centre and the narrow, white-walled Jewish quarter of Santa Cruz and ate a lot of tapas.
‘“Andalusia and everything in it belongs to God.” That’s what one Sufi poet had to say about the region’, I told Roisin as we sat on the Plaza Dona Elvira in the afternoon sun (Seville is a mosaic of plazas, criss-crossed by pedestrian streets that are essentially longer plazas you can walk down from one plaza to the next). ‘“Spain and Russia – two countries pregnant with God”’, I said. ‘That’s from Cioran’. My head was full of quotes – not knowing what to do with them, I flung them at whoever was around.
‘Seville is the most Spanish city I could have imagined,’ Roisin said, less constricted by quotation. ‘It’s Spain squared. Spain times itself. It’s all my dreams and fantasies about Spain condensed into one place. Seville is conscious of its Spanishness, but in the way a proud and elegant woman is conscious of her beauty. She welcomes foreigners like us who come to admire her but, being secure in herself, feels no need to put on a gaudy display.’
‘Unlike Ireland,’ I added with customary sourness, ‘which wears its Irishness the way a cheap whore wears makeup. Ireland doesn’t just sell you itself – it forces itself on you.’
‘The desert of the reel.’
Sevillanos, it was clear, had their priorities straight: sitting out on the plaza in the orange-scented air, sipping cañas of beer and basking in the warmth of a spring that probably lasted all year. Seville was a city suspended in an ether of dream – a dream of the good life, the life that changed little down the centuries because it had already attained its happiest form. It was conservative in the felicitous sense of knowing that progress often meant stumbling along a road to nowhere. When you entered Seville, life’s ugliness and noise fell away, and not only because the bars and eateries weren’t flooded with crap, tinny, grating music that nobody wanted to hear. Little wonder that during our time there, Roisin repeatedly described an experience of falling out of the world, a subtle crossing over into another mode of reality. It happened in the startling baroque churches, in the white alleyways of the Jewish Quarter, in front of a painting by Murillo in the Museum of Fine Arts. During the Semana Santa processions, she reported feeling as if these zones of extra-mundane experience were spilling onto the streets, flooding reality with something that exceeded it.
I knew what she meant. Each morning, I would walk down to the Bar El Comercio, a fantastic old-fashioned joint with Iberian hams hanging from the ceiling, azulejo tiles on the walls, a swarm of servers and an incessant stream of diners who, like me, took their breakfast standing at the bar. I always ordered the same thing: churros with chocolate, cafe con leche, and orange juice. It’s tempting at this point to ditch the whole Islamo-gnostic business and launch instead into an ecstatic beat-poet rhapsody to those churros. What delirious pleasure they gave me! I could even bring in Allah though the back door, declaring the churros proof of Ibn ‘Arabī’s assertion that the face of the Divine is to be encountered right here, in the moment-by-moment theophany of renewed creation. The Bar El Comercio must have kicked off on TikTok or something because each morning, jostling among the locals was a preponderance of cute Asian girls who ordered churros to use as props in expertly posed selfies. As I broke the fast, I liked watching the serving staff in their white aprons and blue hats. I marvelled at how they pulled off this frenzied choreography – the bombardment of orders they processed while squeezing juice, making coffee, serving up toasted sandwiches and churros, all the time racing from one end of the long bar to the other. They were like the tightly trained crew of a submarine – one slip-up and the whole thing would implode. The place was a wild shouty bustle, a noisy tornado. But then, every so often, without prior sign, a mysterious hush would alight, a palpable serenity, as if everyone present, staff and diners alike, recognised in the same instant the bloom of a living presence, full and immaculate, a state of pure being. We hung there, without desire or sorrow, suspended in light, bonded in the contemplative calm. And then, imperceptibly, the moment would pass, the noise and flurry would resume, and no one had time to notice or remark upon what had just not even happened.
It was on Palm Sunday that we endured a full-force blast of Spain’s ecstatically mournful Catholicism. Our rented apartment was right in the middle of the old town, which meant that once we set foot outside, we were confronted at every turn by another procession of hooded penitents bearing staff-sized candles and crucifixes, their hoisted platforms sailing past while marching bands filled the air with extravagantly grave, loud quiet-loud dirges. Following a stroll in the Parque de Maria Luisa, we thought we’d head home for a rest. Not so easy. The centre of Seville was rammed – the streets around the Cathedral were blocked off with temporary seating, while cops herded crowds through narrow straits. We were hot and thirsty and for a while it seemed there was simply no way to get home. It was as if we were in an elaborately Catholic sequel to Escape From New York – Get Back to the Flat. We ducked under crucifixes, ran the gauntlet through rows of Ku Klux penitents. At one point we found ourselves effectively kettled in a tight alley, the street ahead blocked off by a red-robed militia guiding an enormous Christ-on-his-knees, the street behind crammed with their purple-robed counterparts hoisting an anguished Madonna.
‘You should put this in your essay,’ Roisin shouted over the blare of criss-crossing marching bands. ‘“I came to Andalusia seeking Islam… only to be waterboarded by Catholicism.”’
So there we were in Seville, living it up, hemmed in every which way by Catholic weirdness. But where was Ibn ‘Arabī? For all his towering stature in Islamic thought, there wasn’t a trace of him, at least none that I could find, in the city where he’d spent nearly thirty years. To us, Seville was agreeably small and remarkably pleasant, but according to his biographer, in Ibn ‘Arabī’s time it was ‘a gigantic city, overpopulated, swarming with people, noisy, gaudy. Arabs mixed with Berbers and Andalusians, Muslims with Christians and Jews.’ Seville back then was reportedly a debauched city of wine and women, but also one rich with saints and holy men. In the twelfth century contemplatives flourished, sharing the traditions and techniques by which mystics ascended through stages to the divine, attaining exotic states such as fana – annihilation in God. While Andalusia formed his mystical sensibility and it was in the region that he sought out many of the gnostic masters who would set him on his course – one of his books bears the wonderful title Sufis of Andalusia – Ibn ‘Arabī’s outward life can be divided neatly in two, the first half unfolding in the Islamic West, the second in the Islamic East. Like the wandering poets of old Japan or the restless American beat writers of the twentieth century, Ibn ‘Arabī inherited a tradition in which roaming the world went hand in hand with inner voyaging. Siyáha is the name Islam gives to the practice Ibn ‘Arabī would define in The Meccan Revelations as ‘travelling across the earth to meditate on the spectacle of the vestiges of centuries gone by and nations that have passed away.’ To give just a flavour of Ibn ‘Arabī’s gnostic itinerary, he underwent the ‘great vision of Córdoba’ in 1190; entered the splendorous realm of ‘God’s Vast Earth’ in Tunis in 1194; ascended to the ‘Abode of Light’ in Fez in 1196, and had something called the ‘Vision of Divine Ipseity’ in Syria in 1230.
There are realms where science falls silent, zones of experience that can only be approached by a language of poetry, image, psyche, vision.
Writers on Ibn ‘Arabī and his mystic kin frequently invoke the ‘stations’ by which gnostics ascend on their Path (or Quest or Way) towards ever greater divine knowledge. I liked this idea that there are clearly defined stages on the interior voyage – it reinforced the sense in which gnosis, Islamic or otherwise, resembles a vast, open-world, multiplayer video game that unfolds across multiple dimensions and celestial realms, with figures beaming through time and space, delivering messages and transmitting doctrines. Moreover, I’d come to view my own vocation – the writing of novels – in a not dissimilar light. Now that I was several books into the game, I understood that each work represented not only an evolution on the level of formal and artistic mastery, but was both husk and monument to a newly attained stage in inner, spiritual development. The labour of writing each novel was a labour of soul-building, of lifting consciousness up to ever higher levels. Of course, you wanted to make a splash, attract more than your fair share of readers, get your name in the media and reap the benefits-in-kind of literary success. But, really, it wasn’t about that. That wasn’t primary, wasn’t even essential. The true work, the true import of the work, took place invisibly – you had no one to answer to but yourself, and the silent intelligence Henry Corbin would call (in a way that somehow skirts New Age cringe) your Angel – or even your ‘personal Lord’. Corbin is fond of quoting a hadith – the sayings attributed to Mohammad – with emphasis on the possessive: ‘He who knows himself knows his Lord’.
If religion is, in the poet Wallace Stevens’ phrase, a ‘Supreme Fiction’, or if, like Borges, we are to enjoy metaphysical and theological writings as a branch of fantastical literature, then reading Henry Corbin or Ibn ‘Arabī is to enter into a frequently astounding imaginative space where scholarly language belies worlds of transcendental strangeness, mysterium tremendum. Suhrawardi, Corbin, ‘Ibn Arabi, Hillman: these and other names formed the nucleus of a constellation of visionaries who had strengthened my belief that I was living in a fundamentalist civilisation, one whose reigning meta-paradigm – scientific materialism – was inadequate to the true nature of things (inadequate, I sometimes thought, even to science). Immersing myself in the metaphysics of ecstasy and imagination had convinced me that materialist philosophers are the prison guards in the same cosmic jail in which they are also incarcerated. It wasn’t a question of denying science, but of acknowledging that there are realms where science falls silent, zones of experience that can only be approached by a language of poetry, image, psyche, vision. It felt natural that it was around the age of forty when my engagement with these matters really caught fire. Entering my forties felt like coming out at the end of a long war. These were years of great inner advancement, renewed intellectual adventure. In Kabbalah, the esoteric tradition in Judaism, it’s recommended to wait till age forty before studying its mystical complexities. Sufism, ‘the mystical dimension of Islam’ in the words of one scholar, advises the same. Forty, in fact, holds great symbolic importance in Islam more broadly. It’s the age at which Mohammad began receiving divine transmissions via the Archangel Gabriel, which would continue for two decades and whose prophetic revelations constitute the Quran. To Muslims, forty is the age at which a man reaches his full maturity; it’s also the age of accountability, of no longer getting off the hook. I might have added: at forty, you’re as close to death as you are to your birth. The sexual obsession relents; all that genital agitation can rise towards higher regions, activate an expanded vision. Finally, by forty, life will in one way or another have brought you to your knees – you find yourself, conveniently enough, in the age-old posture of humility, entreaty, devotion.
I knew I’d be reading and thinking about these subjects for the rest of my life. This wasn’t really something that had happened before. I’ve had lots of intellectual fascinations, but typically these have run their course, burned themselves out while leaving behind a husk of spent passion in the form of an essay, chapter or book. After the infatuation, each of these subjects typically recedes into the background of my mental life, like a lover who I’d once been mad for but was now just a friend I waved at in the street. This passion felt different in that it dwarfed, it contained all the other passions – it was the meta-subject, the one the others had been leading towards, the one they were framed by.
Then again – it struck me as I stayed up till 4am reading Ibn ‘Arabī’s Contemplation of the Holy Mysteries while Roisin slept beside me – wasn’t this just classic addict-talk? What was God if not the ultimate stage in a lifelong pursuit of the sublime high? Wasn’t this constant yearning to get back to the realm of indescribable splendour I’d glimpsed in visions in Ramsgate, in Berlin, in Ireland, the same old restlessness and dissatisfaction that had drawn me so powerfully to alcohol, narcotics, all forms of heightened sensation and altered consciousness? And really, wasn’t all this homesickness nothing other than the love for death, the craving to be done with it all? I’d gone about as far as I could go with drugs, art, travel, pleasure. Short of suicide, what was left but the high of highs, the high so hard you need never come down again? My friends were starting to suggest, almost seriously, that I was on the cusp of an outright conversion, set to become the most puritanical Muslim in Europe. The world abounds with such ironies. On a group chat with those same friends, a long-running in-joke had played up the notion that I was in fact a virulent Islamophobe. Lately, as I’d vainly urged the men to check out long YouTube videos explaining Ibn ‘Arabī’s concept of the ‘Unity of Being’, or podcasts examining Suhrawardi’s mystical science, a consensus had formed that my performative mockery of Islam had all along amounted to negging. My ostensible derision, insisted my mates in digital chorus, was the sign of a long-unacknowledged attraction, as in a romantic comedy whose star crossed lovers at first annoy the hell out of one another.
*
After a few days jostling in the Semana Santa crowds, we took a train to Córdoba. Passing through the Andalusian countryside, I read a chapter of Claude Addas’s biography Quest For the Red Sulphur (I was particularly impressed by Ibn ‘Arabī’s daughter, Zaynab, who ‘even as a small baby was capable of issuing fatwas’), then more from Contemplation of the Holy Mysteries. Ibn ‘Arabī’s writing is allusive, densely symbolic, often perplexing, and humming with the sort of paradox I more readily associate with the philosophical religions of the Far East. Everything is always turning into its opposite, seeming polarities folding into oneness:
Non-existence is real and there is nothing else; and existence is real and there is nothing else.
Which is just a short metaphysical hop from the Heart Sutra’s mesmeric mantra:
Form is empty, emptiness is form. Form is nothing other than emptiness, emptiness is nothing other than form.
The aforementioned theosophical doctrine for which Ibn ‘Arabī is best known, the so-called ‘Unity of Being’ (Wahdat al-wujūd in Arabic, that Duneiest of languages), is itself an endlessly recursive mystical paradox: God, the Real, is the one and the only Being, therefore all that exists is God. But this should not be taken to mean that the sensible world is pantheistically identical with God. Rather, God is always transcendent even to his own creation that is nothing other than God – and meanwhile, the universe is ‘an illusion within an illusion’. It was all so confusing, and moreover it flagged the danger inherent in plunging into all of this gnosis: I was shaping up to spend the second half of my life engaged in an ever subtler analysis of absolutely nothing, parsing thin air, vivisecting the invisible. Maybe I should ditch it all and go have a real midlife crisis, seek the divine in the bodies of much younger women.
Ibn ‘Arabī did not suffer from low self-belief. His was the sort of messianic sense of destiny that can get other men into trouble.
Like many towns, Córdoba appears like nothing much as you walk into it from the train station, which is located in a drab area out on the fringes. Its charm is unveiled as you approach the heart of the old town, which is another white-walled, evocatively timeless Jewish quarter. And then, of course, you encounter the Great Mosque, the Mezquita – which turns out to be a very active Cathedral, where Christians have held daily mass going on for a millennium. The Mosque – let’s call it a mosque, though as we’ll see, there’s not much left of it that’s especially mosquey – dominates old Córdoba. I arrived there anticipating a degree of disappointment – nothing outside of Mecca could compare to those masterpieces of Istanbul – and sure enough, the Córdoba Mosque was something different, more diluted. For one thing, amid its noisy, museum-flow crowd, it took the sight of a skull-capped Muslim dad singing softly to his kids to alert me to how very few of his co-religionists were present. The Mezquita was striking for the thoroughness with which Christianity had effaced Islam from within its room-thick walls (just as the original Byzantine Cathedral at Hagia Sofia had been ruthlessly Islamised). The history of Andalusia circa Ibn ‘Arabī is a sloshing back and forth of power between Christianity and Islam, a saga of conquests and reconquests with Judaism – represented by Córdoban philosopher Maimonides – huddled haplessly in the middle (in fact, the Jews fared better under Muslim rule than they did under either the Christians, who eventually booted them all out, or the earlier Visigoths, who treated them so roughly that the Jews welcomed the ascent of the Caliphate of Córdoba). Whereas the great mosques of Istanbul instil a consciousness expanding sense of space and meditative repose – the gaze drawn up towards the exalted dome, which holds in its centre no image of a white haired Patriarch deity, but an exquisite calligraphic swirl that deepens the mystique of an invisible, all-pervading presence – the Mezquita was a vast, low, dimly lit expanse, divided by rows of columns topped by arches of red and white. The place had seen a lot of history, been subject to the whims of a parade of more or less enlightened rulers. There was plenty of religious art on display, but as it was almost exclusively Christian, I had little current interest in seeing it. Essentially, I was there for the mihrab – the ancient mosque’s perfectly preserved focal point, which faces towards Mecca and whose gilded niche once amplified the voice of the Imam as he led the faithful in prayer. The mihrab did not disappoint. It stood at the far end of the structure like a portal to another universe; I hovered close by for quite some time, getting my fill of Moorish splendour. Even with the forest of outstretched phone hands all around me, I was able to fall into a revery of appreciation. I peered up at the inner dome with its intricacies of symbol and ornament – those breathing, swirling, pulsating geometric patterns through which Islam, sagely prohibiting figurative representation, gestures towards the Absolute… and as I did, the hubbub of voices fell away. Time came to its senses; everything was stilled. There was the mihrab, and the one who beheld it. I was, momentarily, alone with the alone, standing aside of time, free from wanting. It occurred to me then that Ibn ‘Arabī himself had visited this mosque, may even have knelt in prayer right here where I was standing. I imagined him, alive and actual as me, bowing and pressing his forehead to the cool floor – just as I had felt myself compelled to do in Istanbul. It was here at the Mezquita, while accompanying a prince in his early youth, that Ibn ‘Arabī was so struck by his royal friend’s devotion that he realised, ‘this lower world is nothing!’, and thereafter renounced all worldly possessions. I thought of the Islamic concept of Baraka, spiritual grace, which is said to emanate like charisma from the persons of mystics and sages, so that simply being in their presence can bestow its blessing on others. Baraka is said to endure after death in the physical remains of saints and gnostics, hence the custom of pilgrims visiting their graves in hope of gaining some of their light. Ibn ‘Arabī is buried in Damascus, his mausoleum an important site of pilgrimage to Muslims. But it was here in Córdoba where he received the most important revelation of his life, the ‘great vision’ wherein it was disclosed that he was the prophesied ‘Seal of Mohammedan Sainthood’, the ‘supreme heir of Mohammad’ who exists but once in human history, after whom direct access to the Mohammedan reality is forever closed.
Clearly, Ibn ‘Arabī did not suffer from low self-belief. His was the sort of messianic sense of destiny that can get other men into trouble. But although he would become a fiercely polarising figure in the centuries to come – there are still periodic calls to burn or ban his books – Ibn ‘Arabī wrought no Trumpian or Hitlerian harm on the world. He saw himself rather as the ‘Unlimited Mercifier’, and wrote with Nietzschean nobility, ‘Thanks be to God, I am not one of those who love punishment and vengeance’. When, during his north African travels, he experienced the climactic ‘Journey by Night’, living inwardly Mohammad’s ecstatic ascent amid splendours of divine light to the Throne of God, he concluded that, ‘I was a pure servant, without the least trace of sovereignty’. This coexistence of supreme self-assurance and self-abnegating ethical groundedness displays, in suitably amplified form, the watermark of all genuine mystical experience: it instils at once a cosmic confidence – a sense of being so much more than one had taken oneself to be – and an authentic humility. Islamic gnosis is rooted in an acknowledgement of our ontological indigence, yet it’s this very admission that draws away the veil of false selfhood, allowing us to see with the eyes and hear with the ears of what Ibn ‘Arabī calls Al-Haqq, the Real. The paradox of a humility rooted in unbelievable power is captured in the koanic ouroboros of a hadith: ‘The master is at the service of those over whom he is master.’ In other words, the gnostic, the mystic, is one who gets out of his own way and becomes the nothing that is all.
The thought came out of nowhere, or perhaps it came through the mihrab: what if Ibn ‘Arabī had led me here? What if all of the minor accidents and inklings – the coming into my hands of certain books at certain moments, the impulses that arose with seeming spontaneity – were in truth the manipulations of this great gnostic spirit, conducting me from the invisible world? What if I was among the ‘thousand spiritual children’ Ibn ‘Arabī was told, in a late vision, that he would beget, and who would disseminate his teachings throughout the ages? Were there not signs, if only I chose to see them? That intimate little flamenco theatre where we’d stopped in the previous evening and bought the last two remaining tickets – it was named Baraka. Or now, on the very night I’ve finished writing this essay, as I type these words the radio is playing a long piece of music I find enchanting, a piece that evokes the atmosphere of heaven. As it ends, I listen to the DJ and learn it was a piece by Harold Budd, a track whose title sounds something like… ‘Bismillahi ‘Rrahmani’ ‘Rrahim’. A search reveals that the phrase translates as, ‘In the name of God, the most Gracious, the Most Merciful’ – the words that begin each verse of the Quran.
All of this is a coincidence, but coincidences can be meaningful. Henry Corbin, echoing Suhrawardi, warns that mystical experience without prior philosophical training risks schizophrenia. But he insists too – I love this part – that any philosophy that does not culminate in a metaphysic of ecstasy is vain speculation. I knew the euphoria, in writing, of standing aside and letting the voices talk through me. At certain vertiginous moments in my life, I’d had the distinct sense of being authored. No wonder it was proving quite easy to believe, or to imagine (the two no longer seemed distinct), that I was writing now as a servant, a quill – that my hand was being guided. ‘The universe is nothing more than His words,’ wrote Ibn ‘Arabī, who may yet turn out to be a dream in the night of Borges. ‘We are letters and He is the meaning.’ I thought of the worldwide Society of Ibn ‘Arabī, whose existence I’d recently become aware of, dedicated to promoting and translating his work. Could it be that Ibn ‘Arabī was controlling all our minds, overriding our individual wills from another dimension? The idea did not disquiet me. Ibn ‘Arabī wasn’t in this for himself, having already gained everything. He too was serving a higher lord – we all had our orders. I’d follow mine to the letter, trust in the plan.
In a kind of interior judo throw to turn the gnostic paranoia back on itself, there, before the otherworldly mihrab, I imagined writing a novel about Ibn ‘Arabī. It would be a work in the vein of Marguerite Yourcenar’s audacious Memoirs of Hadrian, in which the French author gave voice to the great Roman Emperor. I would write, I would speak in the living voice of Ibn ‘Arabī. I would speak of my childhood in Murcia; my adolescence in Seville; my summons to Córdoba to meet the philosopher Averroës; my visions and theophanies; my long wanderings in the East and my circumambulations of the holy Ka’ba. I would write of the awesome night when a blaze of comets streaked across the Meccan sky, as I and those who were circling with me around the Black Stone stopped and peered at the heavens. People were stunned; never had anyone seen a night with so many comets. They lasted throughout the night until the break of day. There were so many of them traversing each other like sparks from a fire, so that the stars could no longer be seen. When we beheld this, we said to each other that it must be a herald of an event of some gravity.
The novel would never get written. I’d have to learn Arabic, spend decades travelling the lands through which the wayfarer Ibn ‘Arabī had passed, from Córdoba to Palestine, Fez to Cairo, researching every last detail of twelfth and thirteenth century Islamic civilisation. Only then, like Yourcenar with ‘one foot in scholarship, the other in magic arts’, could I hope to enter fruitful deliriums and mystically ‘participate in that which has been’. No, it would never happen – but that didn’t prevent me from dreaming up my Ibn ‘Arabī novel, right there at the mihrab. I wouldn’t just write as Ibn ‘Arabī: I would be… I am the Shaykh al-Akhbar, here at the twilight of Islamic Europe. I see, in a blaze of theophanies, the seven heavens and the secrets of reality. I see my destiny, and the ripples of my teachings as they race outwards across time and space, transfiguring the earth in the gnosis of countless mystics. I see Robert Michael Doyle, a lesser gnostic, a humble servant, an innocent who stumbled into the stream of light, stunned and overcome, a man far out of his depth, appealing to the Sultan of Gnostics on an April day in the Islamic year of 1446. Perhaps I would write the novel – but write it in the sense of living it, participating in it, just as every Sufi sought to live for themselves Mohammad’s glorious ascent on the Journey By Night. To write the novel, to be the novel, I would become the word made flesh – I would convert to Islam. Converting would be as easy as reciting aloud, with conviction, the four-line Shahada etched on the brass plate displayed at the foot of this pillar to which, without conscious will, my feet had in fact just led me… Suddenly I felt, as Henry Corbin and others must have felt, that I really was an instrument, a vessel through which Ibn ‘Arabī, present beyond death in a subtle realm of image and light, was flowing in order to extend the chain of transmissions into our desperate age.
‘Let’s go get a bowl of salmorejo,’ said Roisin, appearing beside me as I peered, tranced out, at the words of the Islamic credo. ‘It’s wonderful here, but you were standing there for hours.’
I let her lead me away. Towards dusk on that fine spring day, we walked over the bridge on the Guayaquil river to the Moorish tower that rises on its opposite shore, whose rooftop views span the white streets of old Córdoba and the green hills of Andalusia beyond. In the museum gift-shop inside the tower, I finally found a material trace of the Greatest Master, the Sultan of Gnostics, the Reviver of Religion, the Unlimited Mercifier.
Roisin bought me that pencil, adorned at the eraser-end with a brass-coloured bust of Ibn ‘Arabī.
.
.
Rob Doyle is the Dublin-born author of four internationally acclaimed books: Threshold, Autobibliography, This Is the Ritual and Here Are the Young Men, which has been adapted for film. His work has been translated into several languages and nominated for various prizes. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Observer, The New Statesman, Dublin Review and many other publications. His new novel, Cameo, will be published by W&N in January 2026.
To read this and more, buy our latest print issue here, or subscribe to receive a copy of The London Magazine to your door every two months, while also enjoying full access to our extensive digital archive of essays, literary journalism, fiction and poetry.