Events reports
Unified Vision – Unified World?
October 27th-28th, 2007, Berkeley, CaliforniaThe US Symposium of the Ibn 'Arabi society held in Berkeley in October marked the twentieth anniversary of the first Symposium held in the America in 1987, also on the Berkeley Campus, a stone's throw from the current location at the Faculty Club. It also marked of course, as John Mercer mentioned in his opening remarks, 20 years since the death of Bulent Rauf, founding fellow and honourary life president of the Society. The first US Symposium, held a few weeks after Bulent's death, was dedicated to him as also was this year's.
The 2007 Symposium was excellent in its essentials if a little wooly in the details. The week-end was very well attended and well-supported by a lively and engaged audience and the speakers talks were extremely good. We were very short staffed as a result of a series of unforeseen circumstances so not everything proceeded as smoothly as we would have liked but for the most part speakers and attendees were gracious and understanding.
The first of the excellent talks was given by Suha Taji Farouki on the influences of Ibn 'Arabi in modern day Syria. Next Peter Yiangou spoke of an Akbarian vision towards movements of the 21st century: globalization and macro-economics in particular. Pilar Garrido gave a marvelous talk on the Divine letters in the writings of Ibn Massarra. At the end of Saturday the symposium followed the recent procedure in Oxford and in America and broke into seminars led respectively by Peter Yiangou, Pablo Beneito and Pilar Garrido, and Barbara Amodio who each led lively discussions.
Sunday morning began with an exceptionally sweet talk by Angela Jaffray on water as a underlying unifying element as described in the Koran, Hadith and other sacred writings. Next Barbara Amodio, who had graciously stepped in at the last minute to replace Vincent Cornell, spoke of resonances between Ibn 'Arabi and Eastern religious thought. Abdallah Lipton gave a very clear talk after lunch on Muhibb Allah Mullahabidi's commentary on Ibn 'Arabi and its relevance. The symposium concluded with a dynamic talk by Pablo Beneito on what he termed lexical inter-reference in Arabi roots - showing that the analogous rather than analytical basis of the Arabic language was intrinsic to the thought of Ibn 'Arabi.
Few of us who were involved in the first American Symposium in 1987 would have imagined we would still be here, in Berkeley no less, 20 years on. We look back on all of this with gratitude for the tremendous help we have received over the years, amazement that such a phenomenon has taken place, exhaustion at the effort involved and I think a healthy urge to rethink how to proceed in future years.
International Symposium on Mawlana Jalaluddin Rumi
8-12 May 2007, Istanbul-Konya, TurkeyThe year 2007 marks the 800th anniversary of the birth of Mawlana Jalaluddin Rumi. To celebrate this occasion the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism organized an International symposium. The symposium was held on 8-12 May in Istanbul and Konya. More than 150 scholars participated in the symposium from countries as diverse as America, Mexico, France, Spain, Turkey, Iran, Indonesia, Singapore, Egypt, Syria, Bangladesh and Pakistan. To name some of the most prominent participants: Dr. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, William Chittick, James Morris, Carl Ernst, Omid Safi, Abdulkarim Soroush. The scholars from Pakistan included Dr. Javed Iqbal, Mr. Suheyl Umar, Dr. Shahzad Qaiser, Dr. Arif Naushahi and Dr. Safir Akhtar. Read the full report by Qaiser Shahzad.
“Know Yourself ”
Worcester College Oxford, May 2006"Know Yourself" in Oxford this May proved thought-provoking and well attended. The multitude of aspects that this title implies and includes brought a wide range of personalities and papers to the fore.
We were fortunate to have Jim Morris to chair the first and last sessions. His tenure in Exeter has come to an end, as he has just taken up a new chair in Boston this fall – for which congratulations – so his wit and wisdom will not be 'on tap' in Oxford in quite the same way. He reminded us to distinguish between levels of knowledge:
(1) The always knowing soul – good or bad – you are always knowing your Lord
(2) Knowing the Self – the spirit. As in Suhrawadi's saying "Go back to yourself"
(3) Whoever knows himself, already knows his Lord – who is the Knower.
Ibrahim Kalin (Associate Professor of Islamic Studies, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, USA) made a significant contribution to the symposium in his paper "Knowing the Self and the Non-Self: Towards a Philosophy of Non-Subjectivism". In this he leant heavily on Molla Sadra, the Persian proponent and developer of Ibn 'Arabi's ideas, but also referred to well known philosophers such as Socrates, Goethe, Heidegger, Galileo, Descartes and Hobbes – as well as the modern philosopher Charles Taylor. Kalin's main thrust was to contrast the self-knowledge that is based on seeing the self as divorced from existence and giving itself and existence meaning through thought, and the self that is integral to existence which turns inwards to meet presence and turns outwards to encounter the world and universe as no other. Continued: Full report of the UK Symposium 2006
“Know Yourself ”
Berkeley, California, October 2006The 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. Continued: Full report of the US Symposium 2006
Time & Non-Time, Worcester College, Oxford, May 14th to 15th, 2005
The symposium was presaged by the death and funeral of the scholar Martin Lings. Jane Clark in her introduction to the symposium paid homage to his great contribution to the understanding of Islam in the West. She went on to remind the eighty or so delegates that Oxford had witnessed the unfolding of many changes in consciousness from mediaeval scholasticism to post modernism, and that grappling with the concept of Time could be seen in this context. Clark introduced the central idea of the "horizontal" axis of time between the past and the future that meet in the "now" and link "vertically" to the eternal or non-time. Her references were to the chapter of Moses in the Fusûs al-Hikam and the seminal paper "Time and Non-Time" written fifteen years ago by Dom Sylvester Houédard, one of the founder fellows of the Society and a man well ahead of his time.
Professor Mahmud Kiliç developed these ideas in his paper "The Spirituality of Time in the Akbarian Tradition", beginning with a quote from St. Augustine: "In time, all events are linked to each other through time". It is their integration and sense of unity that connects the soul to what lies "beyond time". Here time becomes "the measurement of being rather than duration", which explains the allusions in Ibn 'Arabî's writings to days being equivalent to a thousand years, and to cyclical durations (days, weeks, months, years) having correspondences to degrees of being (the Tablet, the Pen, etc). Kiliç also laid down the fundamental differences of degrees of non- and relative time and drew attention in particular to the quality of waqt (the concrete "now" as opposed to the zaman (the continual relative flow of time from past to future). The waqt is the state you are in - either with God or with the world, joyful or sad. As Sahl al-Tostârî said; "Sufism is nothing but the silence of the waqt." It is the changing state of the waqt in the heart that brings the Sufi to the station of "son of time" (ibn al-waqt) and to the state which is free of change - the "father of time" ('ab al-waqt). Kiliç described how Ibn 'Arabî saw waqt flowing from the past (the remembered now) to the future (the projected now) and ended by quoting Rûmî. Continued: Full report of the UK Symposium 2005
"Time and Non-Time", New York, 2005
Report by Jane Carroll
In October the Ibn 'Arabi Society of America left the leafy glades of Berkeley, Ojai and Seattle, where recent symposia have been held, and headed across the country to the heart of New York City where the 2005 symposium was held on the campus of Columbia University. The hustle and bustle of the busiest city in America was exhiliarating, exhausting or both depending on the disposition of the attendee. But whatever the surroundings, the talks this year were exceptional. 2005 being the year of Einstein, and the centenary year of the publications which shattered previous concepts of time in the West, many correspondences were found between Ibn 'Arabi's thought and the findings of modern physics although it was repeatedly pointed out that Ibn 'Arabi's value transcends these correspondences.
Caner Dagli opened the Symposium with his talk "Levels of the Soul and the levels of Time" describing various models of time from the medieval geocentric cosmology of Ibn 'Arabi's era to the period of Newtonian physics and classical mechanics to the New Physics in which the scientist makes no absolute statement about what we can know. This has had the paradoxical effect of returning the human to an understanding of the world based on his real experience.
For Ibn 'Arabi who asserts that time and space have no essential reality but are modes of revelation of the eternal unchanging Self, the spiritual journey consists of aligning the self which experiences time and movement, with the non-temporal self so that the former can be transfigured by the latter.
Ibrahim Kalin continued the theme of "experienced" time in his paper, "Temporal and Eternal Time in Ibn 'Arabi and Mulla Sadra". The modern concept of time as an even continuum which can be measured by a clock denies our experience of its different qualities. Both Ibn al-'Arabi and Mulla Sadra speak of time (zaman) as subjective and "imaginary" the experience of which alters according to state. The "Eternal Now" is the essential reality of the changing things and the path of the sufi is the preparation of the soul for participating in this.
Alison Yiangou's talk "There's no Time like the Present" dealt with the matter from the human perspective. As each instant is a "coming into being" of the singular ever present Reality in one of the forms of its possibilities, from our point of view this instant is the gift, or present, of existence in the form of our own possibility. We are necessarily an image of our time and our time is an image of us. In both senses of the word, there is literally no better time than the present.
In the early evening Rafi Zabor read from his just published book I Wabenzi a section relating to his first studies of Ibn 'Arabi in the early 70's and also a section describing his own experience of a timeless moment in attempting to practise the Mevlevi turn. To hear the description of a personal experience of time and timelessness so convincingly rendered provided an original end to the day.
On Sunday morning Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila delivered a paper on "Ayan thabita and Ibn 'Arabi". He suggested that Ibn 'Arabi's concept of time as an organising principle between events having no existence in itself corresponds in many respects to modern physic's view of time as a fourth dimension. The changing things of this world whose reality is the ayan thabita or immutable entities are analogous to modern scientists' description of things moving through time and space in spacetime worms.
Gerald Elmore's paper "The Sun of Religion Meets its 'Reviver'?" was a speculation on the relationships between Shams-i Tabrizi, and by extension Rumi, and Ibn 'Arabi. The possible connections in time and space of these great saints and their differing but complementary legacies was explored in history and legend. Given the theme of the symposium, their connection outside of time was shown to be indisputable.
Stephen Hirtenstein completed the symposium with a paper entitled "The Mantle of Khadîr, mystery, myth and meaning" which extracted Ibn 'Arabi's writings on Khidr, his interpretations of his meaning and his descriptions of his own encounters with him. Ibn 'Arabi tells us that at the level of Khidr, which he calls the Station of Closeness, is a prophethood which is fundamentally esoteric, unconditioned by people, place and time. It was entirely appropriate that this symposium should conclude with a description of a guidance to the inner reality of man from a station unconstrained by time.