- Ibn al-Fāriḍ
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▪ Arab poetborn March 22, 1181 or March 11, 1182, Cairodied Jan. 23, 1235, CairoArab poet whose expression of Sufi mysticism is regarded as the finest in the Arabic language.Son of a Syrian-born inheritance-law functionary, Ibn al-Fāriḍ studied for a legal career but abandoned law for a solitary religious life in the Muqaṭṭam hills near Cairo. He spent some years in or near Mecca, where he met the renowned Sufi al-Suhrawardī of Baghdad. Venerated as a saint during his lifetime, Ibn al-Fāriḍ was buried in the Muqaṭṭam hills, where his tomb is still visited.Many of Ibn al-Fāriḍ's poems are qaṣīdah (“odes”) on the lover's longing for reunion with his beloved. He expresses through this convention his yearning for a return to Mecca and, at a deeper level, a desire to be assimilated into the spirit of Muhammad, first projection of the Godhead. He developed this theme at length in Naẓm as-sulūk (Eng. trans. by A.J. Arberry, The Poem of the Way, 1952). Almost equally famous is his “Khamrīyah” (“Wine Ode”; Eng. trans., with other poems, in Reynold Alleyne Nicholson's Studies in Islamic Mysticism [1921] and in The Mystical Poems of Ibn al-Fāriḍ, translated by A.J. Arberry [1956]). This long qaṣīdah describes the effects of the wine of divine love. Although Ibn al-Fāriḍ's poetry is mannered in style, with rhetorical embellishments and conventional imagery, his poems contain passages of striking beauty and deep religious feeling.
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Universalium. 2010.