The Turbidity of the Pools

In the last post I quote a verse by ibn el-Arabi (1165-1240), the Arab but Spanish-born mystic. Ibn Arabi is one of the greatest Sufi masters, one of the outstanding poets in the Arabic language, and a prolific writer. For that reason, I will borrow his own commentary on the verse I quoted, taken from Chapter 276 of one of his monumental works, The Meccan Illuminations (Al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya). I have this quote from William C. Chittick’s work, The Self-Disclosure of God, State University of New York Press, 1998, p. 347.

What I mean by these lines is that when the lover who has this attribute [turbidity] falls in love, the beloved exercises a ruling property over him and transfers him to the beloved’s self. The beloved drapes him in its own clothing and brings him out of the turbidities of the obfuscation required by the world of nature—this is when the beloved is knowledge. If the beloved is deeds, turbidity derives from doubts and the unlawful; if the beloved is a spirit disengaged from matter, it derives from natural appetites; if the beloved is an angel, it derives from mortal humanity; and if the beloved is God, it derives from everything other than God. Thus the truthful lover is he who is transferred to the attribute of the beloved, not he who brings the beloved down to his own attribute.

Now despite what I assume to be Chittick’s excellent translation from the Arabic, this sampling will make clear to any reader the problems of understanding a twelfth, thirteenth century mystic writing in another language.

The verse itself speaks to something in us that we grasp at some level. The explanation suggests an entire cosmology, hierarchically arranged. Above is clarity, light, and perfection. At the bottom is the turbidity of nature, which Ibn Arabi renders as a pool. He pictures it as water, clear and translucent at its highest levels but made murky by the settling of material at its bottom—where any action can cause the turbidity of matter to hide the light.

The explanation also produces different aspects of the higher: higher knowledge, action, spirit, angel, and then God at the peak. All of these, in poetic compression, are the she of the poem. The force of attention directed upward—love for the higher—is shown as lifting us up, out of the turbidity of the pool. Thus our attention turned to the heights is answered by an action that lifts us into clarity—provided that we are sincere. We don’t do it. She does it. If our motives are low, we pull the high down into the confusions of materiality, stain and obscure it, and lose whatever grace it can bestow. Part of Ibn Arabi’s purpose in this chapter is to show that rational reflection cannot and does not reach the heights. Its own activity merely increases the turbidity in the pools. That is, come to think of it, the unambiguous message of all mystics. You don’t think your way to the heights. It is a response to the vision of beauty. But that vision itself, arguably, cannot arrive if the murk is too dark.