INTRODUCTION: Orbits of Desire

The poems in Translator, ibn Arabi tells us in the preface to the book, is inspired by a young woman called Nizam, daughter of a Persian scholar. Not surprising. Great artists have muses; poets have an attractive woman or two, whom they desire, from a distant and sometimes close-up. During ibn Arabi’s time, it was not unusual for young man like him to hang around the Sacred Mosque in Mecca, looking for potential what we may call in contemporary parlour – ‘dates’. Once a desirable subject was spotted, she would be pursued.

The most well-known accounts of such unholy behaviour in the Sacred Mosque comes from Umar ibn Abi Rabiah (d.712), whose ghazals are less interested in loss and sorrow and more focussed on conquests – many and frequent!

It is perfectly possible that ibn Arabi met, during his younger days, Nizam – the ‘Persian Girl’

in such circumstances. He got to know her well and fell in love with her. She probably rejected him, as according to his own account, did most women he seemed to have met. Anyway, he was truly inspired by her and penned Translator as a homage. However, when The Translator of Desire was published it caused an outrage. The ulama – religious scholars –were scandalised. It was mercilessly attacked by the shariah-complaint brigade.

Yet, there was no lack of such works in Mecca and the Arab world during ibn Arabi’s time. The pre-Islamic romantic verse, the Udhri love poems, was in abundance.The most famous poem from this tradition was penned by the seventh century poet Qays ibn al-Mulawwah: the tragic story of ‘Laila and Majnun’.The poet himself – Qays – falls in love with Layla binti Mahdi (d. 688), his childhood friend. But Layla’s parents object to their marriage. She is hidden from Qays; and then forced to marry someone else. Unable to console himself, Qays retreats to the desert and wonders naked. His tribe give him the epithet of majnun – crazy, possessed by love. Qays dies in despair, followed soon by Layla. In such stories – including the Persian Khosrow and Shrin (in Urdu version, Shirin Farhad), the Panjabi Heera Ranjha and Sohni Mahiwal by the great Waris Shah (1722-1798), and the more recent Ali and Nino by ‘Kurban Said’, explored so brilliantly by Boyd Tonkin in this issue of Critical Muslim – ‘desire endures, but union does not’.The Udhri tradition served as a background for the emergence of the ghazal, the unsurpassed poetry of desire. The ghazal tradition was well established by the time Translator was published. Later, it would be embraced by Urdu, Panjabi, Persian,Turkish, Hausa, and Fulani languages.

There was also a great deal in the popular culture of the time to fume about. A few centuries before the arrival of Translator, Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani (897–967) published The Book of Songs. Al-Isfahani was a writer, historian, poet, and a pioneer musicologist. He was also, in contrast to the pious ibn Arabi, a debouche par excellence. He observed no social etiquette and is described by his contemporaries as unclean and gluttonous. The Book of Songs is full of stories, anecdotes, songs, ghazals, biographies, and musical numbers about all variety of sexual desires – including some which should be left to the imagination of the individuals who have them! Much of it is basically abuse and attack of one poet to another. A rather mild sample anecdote: ‘in her advanced age, the songstress was asked about her sexual prowess. She said: “the sexual desire is there but the tool is exhausted and it not unsalable anymore”’. It only gets worse from here with poems devoted to large penises and how vaginas are like pomegranates, as well as homosexual encounters and practices.Yet, it was widely read and quoted in Mecca as well as in other metropolitan cities of the Arab world. Indeed, tunes from The Book of Songs were played and sung in Mecca, both by resident and visiting musicians and singers.The ulama, it seemed, were not outraged.

So why the uproar about Translator? Largely because by now ibn Arabi was regarded as a Sufi sage with a growing reputation. How can a man, who describes himself as the ‘seal of saints’, known far and wide, write such erotic verse? Is he the same person who wrote such masterpieces of spirituality and mysticism as the thirty-seven volumes of Meccan Illuminations? Why is he hiding the true nature of the poems in some metaphoric shroud? Some even suggested he was giving a nod of approval to ‘fornication’. Soon, the great and the good – scholars, jurists, writers, poets – gathered to decide on the matter. Ibn Arabi was brought before them to present his defence. It must have been quite a meeting. But we know little about it except that – somehow – ibn Arabi convinced the gathering that TheTranslator of Desire was an expression of Sufi love for God

Bollocks. There is little that can truly be described as allegorical in Translator. There is nothing allegorical about the girl with henna hand, honey’d tongue, who is ‘dissolved in desire’; of the poem ‘In the Ruins of My Body’; or the lady ‘with the flashing smile’, who needs to be covered and hidden, of ‘Your wish’; or the women of beauty ‘far beyond compare’, who the poet rides at moonlit nights, and ‘whispers love’ to! These are unashamedly love poems, pure and pleasurable. And I love them. ‘Bewildered’ is a typical poem from the collection, which reads, in Sells’s translation:

After the mock trial, Ibn Arabi sets about to justify the allegorical nature of the poems.The new preface to the book, transports Nizam, the ‘Persian Girl’, to Anatolia, and transforms her into a mystical critic.While reciting his poems near the Haram (Sacred Mosque), the celebrated sage tells us, ‘a hand softer than undyed silk’ touched his shoulder. It was yet another maiden, who proceeds to ‘fiercely criticises each of the four verses, refuting each part of them’; and rebukes the Sheikh al-Akbar for penning verses beneath his stature. Ibn Arabi asks her name and she answers Qurrat al-Ayn, a nickname meaning ‘comfort for the eye’. In his commentary on Translator, ibn Arabi goes to some length to argue that the poems are not erotic but allegorical and use ordinary words to convey mystical ideas. So, bosoms and killer glances, shining teeth and fragrant breath, scents of flowers and the dance of peacocks, now acquire higher spiritual value. Even though much of it is justified with illusions to the Qur’an, it is hardly convincing. When ‘she longs for her one and only’, I am afraid, she longs for her man and not for union with God. In one way, by turning lovely love poems into some entangled mystical chatter, ibn Arabi undermines his very own human desire; and thus, one could argue, his humanity.

Sometimes it is much better to see things as they are. Desire is not one dimensional. It is perfectly natural for one person to desire erotic love as well as love of God. As an ordinary mortal ibn Arabi simultaneously desired amorous love and dissolution in the love of God. Or perhaps, given the opaque nature of his thought, he was telling us that we need the first to get to the second. Ibn Arabi, as Jeremy Henzell-Thomas notes in his contribution to this issue, asked his Lord to nourish him not with love, but with ‘the desire for love’.

‘Desire has no boundaries’, notes Henzell-Thomas. And that’s where the problem arises.The great al-Ghazali (1058–1111), whole-time theologian and part-time philosopher, sought to confine desire within reasonable limits. In his principal work, Ihya ulum al-din – The Revival of Religious Sciences – al-Gazali argues that two main desires lead us towards destruction: the desire for food and the desire for sex.‘The ego is constantly fed with both’, writes Luke Wilkinson, ‘but never fully satisfied. It is like a swelling tapeworm within us that, if not fed, feels like it will consume our insides’. The end result is an ‘imbalance in ever-widening levels of space, from the locus of character all the way to the whole of society’. To restrain these desires, and maintain a balanced life, al-Ghazali ‘recommends a simple practice: listen to the ego, feel what it desires, and then set an intention to enact with our bodies the opposite of what the ego seeks’.

Allama Mohammad Iqbal (1877–1938), undoubtedly the greatest poet- philosopher of the twentieth century, would have doubts about al-Ghazali’s prescription. Not all ego, he argued, can or should be suppressed. Even though many consider him to be a Sufi, he didn’t think much of Sufism, and even less of ibn Arabi. He would have agreed with Henzell-Thomas that if you cease all desire for the world, ‘then you have not ceased all desire’; rather, replaced a single all-consuming desire with all others,‘one species of desire by another’. He found the Sufis to be self-contented. An expert on Persian Sufism, Iqbal declared that Sufism was not totally useless. It serves as ‘opiates, narcotics’ that a community needs to recover from trauma, or after a great period of activity. He was not in favour of traditionalists like al-Ghazali either, and rejected their outdated theology. As Peter Mathews Wright notes in his contribution to this issue, Iqbal challenged ‘inherited metaphysical assumptions about the nature of the self’. Wright quotes Iqbal:

‘Doctors of Divinity’ with their traditional theology, Iqbal declared, can do nothing more than make ‘flowery’ pronouncements. One could argue that it was conventional theology of dead metaphysics, however perverted, that produced the likes of ISIS. As Anonymous tells us in their article on the ISIS Prisons Museums, ‘the simplest of desires can lead to the most terrible of fates’. That’s what happened to Zahida al-Ahmad, a hospital cleaner in Raqqa, Syria, who went out for a smoke after finishing her night shift. She was abducted by ISIS thugs, beaten and tortured, for not being Islamic enough.‘Her greatest desire had been to have a child.Well, God had finally answered her prayer – and ISIS had murdered the answer’. ISIS, of course, had the murderous desire to force everyone to adopt their myopic version of Islam. So, every other Muslim was fair game for rape, torture, and execution, including the Sufis who were declared ‘grave- worshippers’.The ISIS type myopic desire is now exhibited in the rise of the far right in US and Europe. The goal is the same: to assimilate all difference, to eradicate the Other.

There is one mystic that Iqbal admired: Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207-1273). Mainly because Rumi declared: ‘reason is the light and the guide, but not the goal’. Iqbal concurred. Pure intuition without reason was not of much use in building a civilisation.The goal, Iqbal’s ultimate desire, was to free the ummah from the shackles of the West, which he thought was literally destroying the world:

Iqbal argued that the Western ideals of untruth – and we may add post- truth – are everywhere. They reappear freshly disguised in every age, in fresher and newer forms. Now in the form of imperialism, capitalism, and nationalism. Now as power and territory. Now as glamour and fame. Now in the shape of modernity.We could bring Iqbal’s list of isms up to date with the additions of postmodernism and populism. Indeed, untruth now feeds an insatiable smorgasbord of unsavoury desires: from naked nationalism, racism, and xenophobia to AI generated fake news and deep fake, to landscapes saturated with neon lit advertisements, most of which are lies, and all of which are designed to induce one or other type of desire. Indeed, in the age of surveillance capitalism, desire is the main commodity and principal product of consumption. One illustration of this is the plethora of third grade novels available in airports, online, and what’s left of bookshops. In an age when everyone thinks they can write and everyone is his or her own publisher, there is no shortage of self-published tomes. There is now a huge production line of self-published Islamophobic popular fiction. But here is the burb for one simply called Desires, which for some reason, Amazon’s algorithms chose to send my way:

No way! She hasn’t read al-Ghazali!
Even if you ignore all this and can dodge adverts hitting your eyesight

from every corner, and turn off social media, you cannot escape desires altogether – for they lurk in other not so obvious spaces. In his journey to Europe from his Australian homeland, Liam Mayo experiences desire in multiple forms: as yearning for the family he is leaving behind and his craving to shrink the space between them, lack of time in trying to catch his flight, power and repression when he unquestionably follows the commands of the ground and flight crew, and in heterotopia - all ‘other spaces’ that deviate from the societal norm. Fortunately, Mayo manages to control his desires; and hence his autonomy. But there are circumstances in which one desire is controlled by another which one does not wish to have, a situation that can lead to loss of autonomy. Much like Stacie’s undesirable love for Dan! Or, the simultaneous desire to lose weight and eat rich, sugar saturated cakes. Or a drug addict who wants to kick his habit but ardently desires another fix. Desires clash; the stronger one wins. Not all desires undermine autonomy, though. I love a good biryani; and it has never affected my autonomy.

There are other things in life than biryani and sex. As Mayo suggests, ‘we can get the same satisfaction that we get from sex from any number of activities, like talking, writing, or painting’.There is ‘a short circuit between the ontological (how we exist in the world) and epistemology (how we know the world), meaning that sexuality and knowledge are symbiotic, interconnected in complex ways’. Thus, ‘desire (as a component of sexuality) is not just a biological or personal feeling, but something that interacts with our understanding of existence (ontology) and our acquisition of knowledge (epistemology). It also suggests that our desires can influence, and be influenced by, our understanding of the world and ourselves’.

Indeed, the world around us is enveloped in epistemologies of desire. Virtually all disciplines as they exist today promote one or other kind of perpetual desire. Economics is based on the desire for everlasting growth, even though it will take us the resources of several planets to continue in our present trajectory.The economy itself is detached from all moral and ethical concerns and devours all aspects of society.There is now a‘market of desire’ in which ‘the sexual and emotional relationships we build today’, writes Tamara Tenenbaum in The End of Love, ‘responds to the logic of the market, of decentralisation and disorganisation’. Thus our ‘erotic encounters’ become ‘trade transaction’. Management promotes corporate desire for more and more profit even at the expense of the planet itself. Science, seen by many as omnipotent, encourages the desire of some scientists to acquire God-like power. Technology innovates unendingly whether we actually need the new gadgets or not; and seeks freedom from reality based on an unsatiable desire for escaping our own nature, for individual immortality, and for technological omniscience. Medicine treats old age as a disease, rather than a natural process of biological change, to be cured. Death is seen by some not as a natural conclusion of life but something to be conquered.You can clone your pet so you have the same (genetic?) pet for the entire span of your life. Soon humans will be cloned too! But it is not good enough to be human anymore (not even in cloned form!); we must become transhumanist, fuse our biology with technology to enhance physical abilities, longevity and cognition. Higher education, where knowledge is for sale, tends to inculcate desire. Our dominant paradigms of knowing, our social and virtual ways of being, our basic ways of doing anything, however trivial, are enslaved to unethical desires.This is the gift of modernity and postmodernism, the bedrock of conceptual epistemological and ontological categories that have shaped our world.

This makes desire complex. As Scott Jordan suggests, in contemporary times, ‘it is perhaps the first brush we humans experience with the truly complex. Desire breaks the mould, taking us beyond our more infantile feelings of hunger, pain, fear, comfort, or joy. Desire is complex as it is not only subject to change but also competing against other desires, both to the self and in relation to the desires of others’.We are confronted with a veritable tsunami, endless temptations, of enumerable desires, the likes of which we have never faced in history, and which cannot be resolved with binaries.They require simultaneous efforts against vengeful capitalism and its thirst for consuming everything on the planet, replacing zombie disciplines based on lethal epistemology with more appropriate and sustainable ones, and creating a more humane and equal societies. And, then, Jordan points out:‘of course there is the colonising nature of desire’.

This colonising desire is best expressed by Hank MacLean, the father of the protagonist, Lucy, in the Amazon Prime series Fallout. Hank justifies nuclear holocaust and genocide because, he desires, he says, to ‘make the world us. Only ours to shape’.The mechanism through which this goal is obtained is quite simple. We learn this from a native American female lawyer in the Paramount series Yellowstone. She tells Chief Thomas Rainwater, whose community much like Indians before him, faces decimation:

We can see echoes of this in the current behaviour of the US and Europe, particularly in regard to Palestine. Iqbal too saw this in his time. During his adolescence, he learned about the 1957 Mutiny and the absurd trial of Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal Emperor, his forced exile to Burma and death in destitution. Zafar was himself an admired and accomplished poet. Iqbal was most assuredly aware of his most famous poem:

This must have stirred his soul, just as it does mine. No doubt, Iqbal witnessed the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of April 1919, where British troops killed 1,500 people who were protesting against the arrest of pro- independence activists. He saw modernity as ravenous, mutating like a virus, changing and adjusting itself so it can continue to conquer and devour other cultures. He witnessed the alienation of technological culture with nature, which he saw as a source of serious reflection and a springboard for full realisation of our human potential. (In some of his poems, mountains tell the story of time, the sun is a metaphor for the light of truth and sustainability, and the moon feels the pain and sorrow of loneliness). He was aware that the major achievement of western civilisation was presenting never-satisfied and never-ending desire as normal and hence universal.The world made in the image of theWest was not for him for it is based on insatiable desire to colonise and assimilate. In his famous poem, ‘Pathos of Love’, the separation of lover is not just romantic love, but the West’s alienation with nature, estrangement with Others, and distance from God:

Within this desolate panorama, the Muslim themselves are in a state of slumber:

‘Disappointments’ because Muslims solicit rather than create or innovate.Whereas love – ishq – fortifies the ego, asking deteriorates it.The son of a rich man who inherits the wealth of his father is an asker. So are all those who rely on the thoughts of others, or worse, think the thoughts of others. Muslims excel at imitation, what Rene Girard, French American literary critic and philosopher of social science, calls ‘mimetic desires’, the major tool of contemporary enslavement.‘Mimetic desire’, writes Girard, ‘makes us believe we are always on the verge of becoming self-sufficient through our own transformation into someone else. Our would-be transformation into a god, as Shakespeare says, turns us into an ass’.

This is a result, says Iqbal, of the loss of ‘Self’. By losing their Self, Muslims have not only lost their ability to produce new thought but also their ethical and moral bearing. Enough of obscurantist theology, dopy mysticism, and imitations – of our own imagined past or of the present and future of the West. It’s time to walk on fire:

The term that Iqbal uses for Self, which will lead to the awaking of the ummah, is khudi. It is usually translated as ‘ego’ or Self, and it is also used as a technical term for tasawwuf – mysticism. But Iqbal uses khudi as an amalgam of selfhood, individuality, and personality. Khudi is bound by ishq, usually translated as love but used by Iqbal as desire for (self)control.When khudi and ishq come together, spirituality fuses with ethics, intellect with love, and the lover realises that the struggle between good and evil is constant. Both khudi and ishq cannot be acquired by belief alone, which by itself is not enough. Nor can they be acquired by pursuing good with unethical means. Or by intellect or institution alone. All must be combined: belief, intellect, and intuition together must be used in the pursuit of ethical goals with ethical means.

The ideal Muslim is one who embodies this wholistic Self, which is like steel. But Iqbal’s ideal Muslim is not to be confused with Nietzsche’s ‘superman’ as some have suggested. Rather, the momin, one who submits to God, is a person who personifies truth and integrity:

Iqbal, much like ibn Arabi, wrote masterpiece after masterpiece. But most of his philosophy can be found in two volumes: Asrar-i-Khudi, a Persian philosophical epic, translated as The Secrets of the Self, and the follow-up volume, Rumaz-i-Bakhudi, rendered as The Mysteries of Selflessness. The first deals with the individual in society. Iqbal argues, contrary to Sufi thought, that the religious and moral desires of humans is not self-negation – losing oneself in God – but self-affirmation.We all are individuals, want to be individuals, and recognised as individuals.We desire to become more and more individual, more and more unique. Indeed, this is an innate desire. God Himself is the ultimate individual. We enhance our individuality by achieving complete self-affirmation; and by submitting to the Supreme Individual.

If you read The Secrets of the Self on its own you may be led to believe that Iqbal is advocating unbridled egoism and ‘self-actualisation’, reminiscent of the hippies and the zeitgeist of the 1960s. Or he is perhaps advocating a cult of oneself or some libertarian cause.That would be a mistake!To get the complete picture, you must read it together with The Mysteries of Selflessness.There we learn that Iqbal is not really interested in individualism for its own sake, or for the sake of self-realisation. He is simply acknowledging that we desire to define who we are. He is much more concerned with the evolution of a community.The individual must be selfless and committed to community, understand its traditions, and be concerned about its future. The community, in turn, must allow the individual to be a self-affirmative individual. As the distinguished British scholar, A J Arberry notes in his translation of Rumaz-i-Bakhudi,

The true individual, Iqbal asserts, cannot be lost to the world. Rather, it is the world that should be lost in the individual: ‘in his will that which God wills become lost’. Or, as R A Nicolson, another British scholar, notes in his translation of Asrar-i-Khudi,‘the ego attains freedom by the removal of all obstructions in its way. It is partly free, partly determined, and reaches fuller freedom by approaching the individual who is most free – God. In other words, life is an endeavour for freedom’.

We do not attain freedom from desire. Indeed, we cannot liberate ourselves from desire as life itself is an outcome of competing desires.To fulfil our desires, we need to start thinking our own thoughts, move ourselves into action, to fortify our Self, and wrap our desires with love. Iqbal is emphatic: all ideologies that claim to be exclusive, the only solution and only answer, the only way of knowing and doing, lead to decay and death. All isms – nationalism, imperialism, sectarianism, authoritarianism, Islamism, and even mysticism – distract us from building humane and sustainable communities, and ‘rob us of paradise’.

What I love most about Iqbal is his appreciation of the complex nature of desires, his emphasis on individual agency and integrative action, and his insistence that we must ‘reconstruct’ much of what we have taken as conventional, normal religious thought.

There is a space between tradition and modernity, fanatism and relativism, between total denial of the world and its unabashed embrace, where ideal desires flourish and where humane societies evolve. It is not where contemporary modernity is to be found for which Iqbal did little respect. As he tells us himself:

He taught us that the ultimate human desire is for Life – glorious, exuberant, compassionate, innovative, and joyful, based on love and mutual respect, passion for nature, and trust in each other. It is through love of and obedience to God that a person ‘of no worth is made worthy’.

This is how we gain freedom. 

What else is there to desire?

Citations

Ibn Arabi’s The Translator of Desires is beautifully translated by Michael Sells (Princeton University Press, 2021). The ‘comfort for the eye’ quote is from pxxiii.The Book of Song quote is from George Dimitri Sawa, Erotica, Love and Humor in Arabia: Spicy Stories from the Book of Songs of al-Isfahani (McFarland and Co, Jefferson, 2016), p38; and Umar ibn Abi Rabiah poem is from Roger Allen, An Introduction to Arabic Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2000) p104.

All the poems by Allamah Muhammad Iqbal mentioned in the essay can be found on-line. But I have used Bang-i-Dara: Call of the Marching Bell, translated with commentary by M A K Khalil (Lahore, 1997), The Mysteries of Selflessness, translated by A J Arberry (John Murray, London, 1953) pxi; and The Secrets of the Self, translated by R A Nicholson (Macmillan, London, 1920), pxvi.

The quote from Tamara Tenenbaum is from The End of Love: Sex and Desire in the Twenty-First Century (Europa Edition, London, 2019) p100; and from Rene Girard is from All Desire is A Desire for Being (Penguin, 2023) p263. ‘Make the world us. Only ours to shape’ is from Episode 8, of Fallout (Amazon Prime); and the words of the Native Indian female lawyer to Chief Thomas Rainwater are taken from Yellowstone, Season 5, Episode 8 (Paramount).

Desires by Holly J Gill and Nikki Blaise, self-published, and available, for those who desire such things, at Amazon.

See also: Mustansir Mir, Iqbal (Iqbal Academy Pakistan, Lahore, 2006); Muhammad Munawwar, Iqbal: Poet Philosopher of Islam ((Iqbal Academy Pakistan, Lahore, 1985); and Muhammad Iqbal, Tulip in the Desert, translated and edited by Mustansir Mir (Hurst, London, 1990).