US Symposium 2006
"Know Yourself"
The 19th US Symposium, held on the weekend of October 14th-15th, returned to its home ground at the Faculty Club at the University of California in Berkeley this year. Partly due to the pleasantness of these surroundings - the redwood paneled meeting room looking over the wooded Berkeley campus - partly due to the ease of organizing a symposium on known ground, and entirely due to sheer grace, this was an exceptionally good weekend.
Once again the relatively small membership of the Ibn 'Arabi Society in America (80 at present, spread throughout the country), through extreme generosity, underwrote the costs of the Symposium such that there was no fixed entrance fee. The spirit of this impulse clearly affects the good atmosphere of the symposium and, so long as it is possible, is something to which the Society in the US is committed. The weekend was very well attended by old friends and new and the atmosphere was easy, warm but very focused.
Speakers came from near and far. Those we had not met before included Samer Akkach, from the University of Adelaide (originally from Damascus where he lived within 10 minutes of the Muhyiddin district) who opened the weekend with an excellent talk on self knowledge and self consciousness. This was followed by a more meditative treatise on Sufi thought by Suleyman Derin from Istanbul. A good friend of the Society in San Francisco, Olga Louchakova spoke in the afternoon from the perspective of trans-personal psychology. Laury Silvers, from Skidmore University gave an electrifying talk on Ibn 'Arabi's liberating perspective on difficult religious issues, specifically the apparent order for wife beating. Elizabeth Roberts from Scotland, via the Beshara School, gave a wonderfully clear explanation of the subject "Know Yourself" and the symposium was completed by the Society's good friend James Morris with an extraordinary translation, completed moments before and delivered at great speed and with extremely helpful off-the-cuff commentary from passages in the Futuhat dealing specifically with the injunction to self-knowledge.
This, and all of the papers, deserve a long second or third reading and will, it is hoped, be published in time in the Journal. In the meantime it is the intention of the Society to make at least some of the talks available as pod casts so the delights of the weekend can be relived at home, at work, in the car or wherever else the attention can be focused! Nick Yiangou has begun the process of making the recordings of the symposia more widely available and the first talks by Michael Sells and Caner Dagli from previous years are already available (check the web-site).
The US symposium followed the example of the English one again this year by arranging two seminars each afternoon. These smaller groupings worked very well in opening up the conversation and giving the very attentive audience an opportunity to participate in a way that the plenary session, abandoned this year, never quite achieved. When the full body of the symposium, speakers and attendees, work so well together, when the intent is shared to delve deeper into the wisdom of Ibn 'Arabi and when such nourishing "fresh meat" is brought to the table by the speakers everything comes alive and seems easy to arrange. May it be so again!
Jane Carroll