Quran by Bruce; Lawrence

Author:Bruce; Lawrence [Lawrence, Bruce;]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books Ltd
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Yet not all the Divine Names are beautiful, at least by human standards. Some of the Divine Names are majestic or severe: God as the Punisher, as the Avenger, as the Exacter, as the One who commands death. Ibn ‘Arabi does not flinch from seeing the full spectrum of Divine Names as the treasure given to the servant, with the human acknowledging God and submitting to Him. They are an invitation to return to one’s origins, to know one’s true self.

For Ibn ‘Arabi, remembering the Divine Names is a collective homage to the Lord of all worlds. Ibn ‘Arabi interprets the Qur’anic verse to mean: To God belong the Most Beautiful Names, and even though the essence of God is unknowable and invisible, the observable world – the planets and stars, the earth, and all of nature – can manifest those same Names; it can partake of the Divine Names as physical and tactile, visible and sentient. However, the Unseen only unfolds its mysteries, it only becomes manifest to human beings when individuals, recognizing the Names as the Most Beautiful Names, make those nominal traits their own actual traits. This requires more than book knowledge or good behaviour. It comes through patience, persistent patience on the path. Patience yields experience of the Divine depth, an experience that shatters and transforms those humans, the best of humans, who strive to appropriate God’s Names as their own.

How many names are there? God has innumerable Names, perhaps as many as 300. There are 300 saints, according to Ibn ‘Arabi, and each of them corresponds to one of the 300 Divine traits. Yet even for the saints it is not the Names in themselves that are important, but rather the parallel between the holy person who invokes a Name and the subsequent experience of living that Name without residual attachment to one’s own needs or desires.

Only the deeply sincere, those who have achieved insight and persisted with patience, become known as saints. While saints, like others, make the spiritual journey from mundane, ordinary existence, they journey within God as the Prophet Muhammad did.

To journey within God means, of course, that it is God who incites the seeker as well as guides him to the highest destiny. ‘Thus when God makes the spiritual seeker, or saint, travel through His Most Beautiful Names to the other Names and ultimately to all the Divine Names,’ explains Ibn ‘Arabi, ‘he comes to know the transformation of his states and the states of the whole world. And when he has completed his share of the journey through the Names and has come to know the Signs that the Names of God gave him during that journey, he retraces his steps. On his return, he continues to pass through the different sorts of worlds, taking from each world that aspect of himself which he had left there and reintegrating it in his self, until he arrives back on earth.’

Ibn ‘Arabi was granted his own parallel to the Night Journey and Ascent of the Prophet Muhammad.

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