The Isthmus

A Murcia-born Sufi describes a realm that is neither spirit nor body: the barzakh, where imagination is a world, not a mistake.

Damascus, after Andalusia and Mecca
Thirteenth-century Islam
33.51°N 36.29°E

A shore that is not land or sea. What do you put in the interval?

Sacred Traditions Philosophy

Listen · Eve

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Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240). Al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya (The Meccan Openings) and Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam (The Bezels of Wisdom). Barzakh is an isthmus: the imaginal world (ʿālam al-khayāl) in which meaning takes form. This is not “just imagination” as English dismisses a fancy.

Source

Ibn ʿArabī, The Meccan Revelations. Partial English: Pir Press. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge (SUNY, 1989), is a scholarly door. Treat later “oneness of being” slogans as later.

Suhrawardī’s light is another Islamic philosophy of seeing. Ibn ʿArabī’s barzakh is a metaphysics of the between. They are not one illumination. Rumi’s reed is a poem. Keep the offices.

Interpretation

A modern reader may hear Jung’s psychoid. That is analogy. It is not Ibn ʿArabī’s vocabulary.

Question

Whether a world of images is less real than stone, or another mode of the real, is the claim the isthmus makes.

Distant echoes

Echo

Twelfth-century Syria · Aleppo

Illumination

Suhrawardī also writes a world of seeing. The schools are not one.

One question remains

Perception · What does sensing give us?

If an isthmus is neither shore, what kind of knowing can stand there without pretending to be land?