Here's your Daily Poem from the Poetry Chaikhana --
Unveiling herself revealed (from The Poem of the Sufi Way) By Umar Ibn al-Farid English version by Th. Emil Homerin
Unveiling herself revealed
 / Photo by Elena Lagaria / |
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Hi Omss -
Unveiling herself revealed
existence to my eye,
so in everything seen
I perceived her.
Such an important reminder to us all: When looked at properly, deeply, free from the filter of the petty self, all of existence smiles back at us with the face of the Beloved.
But more than that--
My attribute is hers
since we are not called two;
her shape is mine
since we are one.
We don't just see the Eternal everywhere except within ourselves. When we really, courageously look, we see the Eternal absolutely everywhere -- including within ourselves. Not just "within" ourselves, but as ourselves, our true Self. There is no other self.
Every other form of small identity and ego is seen as just a story we've told ourselves about who we are. And that story fades away as unnecessary when our true identity is finally known.
When that curtain separating lover and Beloved falls away, the lover does not rush to embrace the Beloved. No, instead, we find that the Beloved alone has only ever existed within us. The lover is merely the Beloved returning to herself.
and so my rank is high above
all who cling to difference.
==
The poetry of Shaykh Umar Ibn al-Farid is considered by many to be the pinnacle of Arabic mystical verse, though surprisingly he is not widely known in the West. (Rumi and Hafiz, probably the best known in the West among the great Sufi poets, both wrote primarily in Persian, not Arabic.) Ibn al-Farid's two masterpieces are The Wine Ode, a beautiful meditation on the "wine" of divine bliss, and The Poem of the Sufi Way, a profound exploration of spiritual experience along the Sufi Path and perhaps the longest mystical poem composed in Arabic. Both poems have inspired in-depth spiritual commentaries throughout the centuries, and they are still reverently memorized by Sufis and other devout Muslims today.
Ibn al-Farid's father was a judge and important government official in Cairo.
When he was a young man Ibn al-Farid would go on extended spiritual retreats among the oases outside of Cairo, but he eventually felt that he was not making deep enough spiritual progress. He abandoned his spiritual wanderings and entered law school.
One day Ibn al-Farid saw a greengrocer performing the ritual Muslim ablutions outside the door of the law school, but the man was doing them out of the prescribed order. When Ibn al-Farid tried to correct him, the man looked at him and said, "Umar! You will not be enlightened in Egypt. You will be enlightened only in Mecca..."
Umar Ibn al-Farid was stunned by this statement, seeing that this simple greengrocer was no ordinary man. But he argued that he couldn't possibly make the trip to Mecca right away. Then the man gave Ibn al-Farid a vision, in that very moment, of Mecca. Ibn al-Farid was so transfixed by this experience that he left immediately for Mecca and, in his own words, "Then as I entered it, enlightenment came to me wave after wave and never left."
Shaykh Umar Ibn al-Farid stayed many years in Mecca, but eventually returned to Cairo. He became a scholar of Muslim law, a teacher of the hadith (the traditions surrounding the sayings and life of the prophet Muhammed), and a teacher of poetry. Unlike many other respected poets of the age, Ibn al-Farid refused the patronage of wealthy governmental figures which would have required him to produce poetry for propaganda, preferring the relatively humble life of a teacher that allowed him to compose his poetry of enlightenment unhampered.
Ivan
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Ivan M. Granger's original poetry, stories and commentaries are Copyright © 2002 - 2010 by Ivan M. Granger.
All other material is copyrighted by the respective authors, translators and/or publishers.
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