Quote:
Originally Posted by Gail White
This may be a good place to insert a favorite medieval Arabic poem by an unknown author:
I used to shun my companion
if his religion was not like mine;
but now my heart accepts every form.
It is a pasturage for gazelles, a monastery for monks,
a temple of idols, a Ka'ba for the pilgrim,
the tables of the Torah, the holy book of the Qu'ran.
Love alone is my religion, and whichever way
its horses turn, that is my faith and creed.
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Gail, I love that quote too! It comes from Ibn al-‘Arabi:
"My heart has become capable of every form.". He could say this because, like Blake, he saw the world as a continual theophany, or self-revelation of God in every form.
The key for him, as for Rumi and the other great Sufis, was their view of the creative imagination, which they understood much as Blake understood it. That’s why they could “see through” religious forms, as Mark says.
The great scholar of Islamic esotericism, Henry Corbin, writes about them:
“The theophanic perception is accomplished in the
’alam al-mithal, whose organ is the theophanic Imagination. . . . Since the Imagination is the organ of theophanic perception, it is also the organ of prophetic hermeneutics, for it is the imagination which is at all times capable of transmuting sensory data into symbols and external events into symbolic histories.”
This of course has nothing to do with subjectivism or relativity in the current sense. They saw the Imagination as an organ that mediates between the intellectual and the sensory realms, so that form takes on meaning and meaning takes on form.
In order to keep Imagination from degenerating into “fantasy”—the unreal or the merely imaginary—Ibn ‘Arabi and others said that a spiritual discipline was necessary, which for them was Islam and the study of the Quran and the hadith (the oral tradition of Islam). For Blake it was Christianity. They didn't throw out tradition, but they did see through it. They understood that the great religions are basically local dialects of a universal language.