S2E2 – Dr. Beatrice Bottomley on Ibn Arabi

Hello, welcome to a new episode of Over Morrow's Library, a podcast series for the Center of Contemporary Arts in Geneva. Today we will develop some of the ideas which we discussed last time when we looked at the philosophy and the vertigenous cosmology of Giovanni Pico della Miranda. As you might remember, Giovanni had been influenced by aspects of Jewish mystical thought, and we will talk about Jewish mysticism more in future episodes.

But today, instead, we will connect Renaissance cosmologies and Giovanni Piccola Miranda with another Mediterranean culture, the culture of Islam, and especially of mystical Islam. To do this, we have joined forces with a scholar of Islamic mysticism, but especially of the thought of the great Andalusian Sufi master Ibn Arabi. So it's my pleasure to welcome on our podcast Beatrice Bottomley from the Warlburg Institute in London. Hello Beatrice, thank you for coming. Hi. Thank you for having me.

So let's begin with your work and your research. You are working on the thought of Ibn Arabi and especially on his idea of existence. Could you start by telling us more about the life and philosophy of Ibn Arabi? Which by the way to my mind is one of the greatest European intellectuals, even though it's never part of a collection of philosophy from the Western world.

Sure. So um the thinker and poet Ibn Arabi was born in Mosya in present day Spain in eleven sixty five and um died in Damascus in twelve forty.

mae'n llawer o'r adalusiaid sy'n gweithio, mae'r adalusiaid sy'n adalusiaid sy'n adalusiaid sy'n adalusiaid sy'n adalusiaid sy'n adalusiaid sy'n adalusiaid sy'n adalusiaid sy'n adalusiaid sy'n adalusiaid sy'n adalusiaid sy'n adalusiaid So despite being identified through his Andalusian origin, Ibn Arabi spends like the latter half of his life travelling through North Africa, Egypt, Iraq and Turkey before settling in Damascus. where he would compose uh his magnum opus, the the Meccan opening.

And so although Ibn Arabi is often depicted as a kind of a lone mystical figure whose only concerns are spiritual. His travels also prompt us to acknowledge the importance of his socio-political context. So by that I mean the transitions fuelled by the Reconquista of Andalusia by Christine Forces. uh the Crusades in the Eastern Mediterranean, um or even the Mongol invasions by the Eastwoods.

Um and also really taking into account the kind of social and educational networks that he was part of across the western and eastern parts of the Islamic world. So Ibn Arabi is best known as a Sufi and this is a word we use in European scholarship to refer to Islamic mystics. Uh arguably Ibn Ari does kind of prioritize thouq. Um so that's like their direct kind of tasting or experience of knowledge. Um he was systematized within the lens of Sufism by later followers.

However, it's kind of like arguable whether Ibn Arabi would have self identified as a Sufi. Within his work we find elements of kind of Greek philosophy, uh theology, linguistics and many other disciplines. And I don't think these are always kind of really accurately reflected within the label Sufi. And this is a term that has been kind of heavily filtered for an Orientalist and perennialist case in European and Anglophone scholarship. And I think this label Sufi

although very useful, has kind of strongly shaped how scholars engage with Ibn Arabi today. So kind of in other words, like how we understand him like within or kind of outside of the development of certain aspects of Islamic thought and like the history of philosophy in more general.

Um Apart from that, I think it's important to take into account like when we're looking at a thinker's work, not only in like their life and the context of production of the work, but also their afterlife in reception and in translation. You mentioned Sufism and I can s and I see the reason behind the challenging the the label as such, but could you give us a little introduction, I know, in just in a few minutes, to what Sufism fundamentally is?

I mean I am probably the not a very good person to do that. Um if people are interested in learning more about Sufism, I would really recommend the works of Leana Sauf, who's done a lot of work on Sufism. Um, I think one of the problems I have with it is that it's such a vast term there's people who are practicing Sufism today in many parts of the world. There but in general, I think what characterizes Sufism is an approach to knowledge which is about direct tasting, experience, revelation.

certain institutions, so kind of like madrasas that are led by Sufi Shaykh. And it's also, you know, attached like to certain thinkers as well. So, you know, Ibn Arabi kind of gave birth to a current of thought that is strongly associated with Sufism. I don't know if that helps.

Yes. And let's stay with Ibn Arbi. You are researching in particular his idea of existence, wujud, which is translated loosely in English as existence. But what does it mean to research the idea of existence? And also is he actually talking about existence? Is that a right translation of Bujud, the word he uses? Yeah, I mean it's a good question. Um

I'm not a philosopher, I'm a translator in background. So kind of in my current project I I'm thinking about the relationship between language and existence or more broadly between language and ontology.

And I think at the basis of this problem was this kind of more, well, a problem that can seem quite abstract was my more kind of concrete and everyday experience as a translator. It's often quite like over caffeinated and under hadn't slept enough and I I would kind of find myself early in the morning wondering like what does language do. And in early well in most modern European scholarship of language, the approach tends to be dominated by langu uh by logic.

So we tend to see language as kind of purely a vehicle for thought. Um and I was really interested in seeing if we could go beyond this. So in the pre modern Islamic tradition, you have a kind of intellectual current that explores the nature and structure and meaning of the universe by studying text, uh, creation and order. And Ibn Arabi is quite representative of that. He really explores kind of questions of language and existence in detail in the Meccan openings.

So I started out thinking about language and ontology, um, language and creation, being existence, but I was using all of these words without really thinking about what they meant. They didn't really feel very comfortable, like it wasn't sitting comfortably with me and I and I think the cause of that is I didn't really want to project a kind of modern European ontological framework onto Ibn Arabi's work.

So I guess here is kind of where you find that intersection between the act of the historian, the act of the translator. And so I felt like I really had to go back to the text and see what terms Ibn Arabi himself was using. And the word that kept coming up was wujud, which you well you haven't mentioned yet actually. But yeah, so wujud is a word that is not mentioned in the Quran and that acts as kind of a source book for a lot of Arabic language.

And it's thought to have appeared out of contact with classical Greek philosophy and its evolution within pre-modern Islamic thought. Uh today we tend to translate wijjud as existence or being when we're looking at philosophy, but um it also is a verbal noun, uh an active and passive verbal noun. So it incorporates and the meaning's finding and being found. Its root is wajadah to find.

Um so it really has this like strong epistemological sense as well as ontological kind of meaning. Um and I really felt like I was faced with a problem. You know, you don't ask the same questions of being as you do of existence or finding or being found. So a kind of a large chunk of my project was thinking about how how do you negotiate the between these different meanings.

But yeah, I guess for today I'll kind of stick to the word existence, but I think it's really important to also remember those meanings finding and being found. And for Ibn Arabi he kind of describes existence as having these four levels so kind of extra mental, uh mental and spoken.

And these last two oh and written, sorry, and these last two levels, kind of written and spoken, mark a really interesting development from the like mental and extra mental existence that we find in the work of many key philosophers of the period, um, notably Avicenna. And even Ibn Abi goes further, so he kind of describes existence as just letters and words. So

Language becomes this means of bringing things into existence and ordering them within or kind of as a universe. And it also acts as a tool for intervening within that existence. I like this idea of finding and being found as part of of existence and it makes me think also of the way in which you look for a secret meaning in a word, for example, but you have a feeling that that secret meaning was waiting for you to a certain extent or looking for you.

And in our previous episode we were looking at one aspect of Jewish mysticism, for example, that influenced Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and that has to do with secret meaning of words and of letters, especially the letters of the sacred text.

They usually are endowed with special powers of their own. I was wondering if there is something similar in Islam, this work on the letter. Yeah, totally. Um, yeah, so as I mentioned kind of earlier, in pre modern Islam like pre modern Islamic thought.

Scholars across disciplines were looking at the nature, um, structure and meaning of the universe by looking at this kind of nexus of language, text, creation and order. And There was a particularly kind of strong current, or I mean this was manifested kind of in a technique which was called Ilmar Khuruf, the science of letters. Um so this is a pre modern Islamic technique that explores um the different levels of signification of letters and numbers um in order to employ

uh their power and actions. And so that really draws on um yeah, letters also in scripture. So um letters in the Quran, you have like isolated letters at the beginning of some chapters in the Quran. Um and these were kind of analyzed and used to create this whole system. So really we kind of tend to associate this technique with thinkers like Ibn Arabi who looked at like the more theoretical aspects. Albuni for like the more practical aspect and they were both associated with Ibn Masara.

So these are all kind of people who had their origins in Andalusia. Um and there's some really good work on that by kind of Sarah Sviri, Pierre Lorne, Noah Gardiner. And if you look at us, you notice so many points of kind of correspondence between Kabbalah is quite strange. Um, maybe not that strange at the same time, because they were both co-evolving in Andalusia, but not much kind of research has been done into that co-evolution.

And we see Jewish Kabbalah kind of move forward, like move northwards, and we see that develop into Christian Kabbala with Pico. We also see The kind of Islamic science of letters move eastwards with the departure of people like Ibn Arabian Al Buni towards the east. And um it becomes kind of it develops into quite a popular science in the early modern Islamic East. So it's quite widespread in like Safafid and Mughal courts. Um Matt Melvin Kushki's done some really cool work on that as well.

But yeah, what I find really interesting is actually kind of in the science of letters or kind of similar disciplines or techniques like Kabbalah and later in kind of the universal languages developed by people like John Wilkins or um

or John Dee, is not only kind of the way they open up the semiotic understanding of the universe, a semiotic approach to how we uh are in the world, but they also kind of throw into question the nature of language itself. So we start to rethink what language does, but we also rethink what meaning is and how it's kind of produced between a negotiation of of like form and content and of the textual and and of the visual.

Another aspect of meaning that we found in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in general in the Renaissance was connected with the interpretation of the stars. The Renaissance was in love with the Zodiac. And it feels like almost that they invented it in the West, although that's not actually the case because the the science of the Zodiac uh dates to a long, long time before the Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, especially in the eastern part of the Mediterranean world.

I would like to know if you have is as part of your research, you have looked into the way in which the Zodiac was studied in or interpreted in the Islamic world in the Islamic world. Yeah, definitely. I mean, astronomy and astrology were these kind of key sciences that really underpin the the worldview of many scholars of the time. Charles Burnett has done some great work on that, looking at Abu Masher and his kind of transmission into the Latin West.

I mean in Europe we tend to kind of focus on the solar zodiac and the solar zodiac divides the ecliptic of the sun into twelve sections. So these are all marked by constellations that we know as signs of the zodiac. But there was also an alternative zodiac that developed out of the encounter of kind of Islamic, um, Bedouin and Indian cultures. And that was centered on the well, on the revolution of the moon around the earth.

And it was divided into 27 or 28 sections, uh each marked by small star clusters. So um, which you can still see. I went to go see them with a friend last week. We spotted four. Um and in the pre-modern world, lunar mansions sort of like the solar zodiac were used to to keep time, um, also to predict the weather, uh navigate. predict the future as well and make talismans.

And a lot of these techniques were kind of transmitted into the Latin West by translations made by people like Flavius Mifridates, Pico's Hebrew teacher. And yeah, I've actually been looking at this really beautiful manuscript of Flavius Mephidati's compilation and translation of a text on the lunar mansion. And uh oh well, the text was apparently written by Ibn al-Khateen, who was an Andalusian astrologer. And I think the text is really interesting because.

it really acts as this kind of visual and material witness to this interaction between different cultures. It's really beautifully illuminated uh by like a flor and it has these little Florentine kind of miniatures. But yeah, and the lunar mansions also played like a really important role in the science of letters.

So uh for example in the Meccan openings um Ibn Arabi describes a system in which each letter of the alf that corresponds to a level of being in the universe, um a lunar mansion, and sometimes also a prophet or the day of the week. And also a letter. And he explains that there are twenty-eight letters because there are twenty-eight lunar mansions. And so in this way he kind of imbues the letters with this power to order the universe.

but also, as he kind of alludes to elsewhere in the text, intervene within the universe.

All these things we are discussing at the moment, the science of letters and the the lunar mansions and the zodiac have a esoteric taste to them. A lot of the things that feature in this podcast have an esoteric taste. So I wanted to know what you think about the the notion of esotericism or esotericism, how it applies to things like the Zodiac or even to the work of Ibn Arabi, who is uh Opico della Mira Miranda, who are philosophical.

But also if it makes sense still to talk about esotericism today, if there is space for Yeah. Uh it's I mean it's an interesting question. Um I've never really been sure what esoteric means. I think often it's used to refer to kind of hidden or secret knowledge which is only available to people who've been initiated. And I think it's also come to kind of apply to many other uh approaches to knowledge, techniques, tech.

And like Liana Saif and Sajad Ribsi have also done some really great work on kind of Islamic esotericism and how it has been received in European thought, um, especially within the context of colonialism. And I guess, you know, elements of Iban Arabies White could be considered as esoteric, but it's not really a term that I feel the need to draw on.

Partially because some of the techs and techniques associated with esotericism are in fact very popular or were very popular and widely spread. So they weren't really just limited to an intellectual elite. And partly also because you know, modern European scholarship has kind of historically prioritized uh what is perceived to be rational over what is perceived to be esoteric. And um I don't really think like the boundaries between the two are so clear. And this is something

you see uh kind of in the scholarship of like Francis Yates, um her scholarship of the Renaissance, where she looks at early modern science, um, and finds so many traces of magic. Um Yeah, and I think there's often this uh slippage between

the esoteric, the scientific, the logical. And yeah, I mean I think an example of this can also be found in kind of points of crossover between the science of letters again, cryptography and kind of later universal languages that were really important in the development of early modern European science.

And so, you know, if you take, for example, um Raman Lord's Art Combinatoria, which was like a paper machine um operated by rotating these concentric circles in order to combine a symbolic alphabet. Um and kind of produce answers to kind of any subject of inquiry, you know, Ramalul is seen as this kind of like mystical thinker, but there's machine was actually very inspirational for Leibniz and his

like how he developed his thought around logic. It also was inspirational for Pico de la Miranadola and for another key Renaissance thinker, Leon Battista Alberti, who developed the Sifidus. Which is really seen as kind of like this. foundational object in the history of crypto cryptography, but also in later computer science. So

Yeah, I don't know. I mean it's also been suggested that Lowe's Arts Combinatoria was in itself it's inspired by um the Sefayetsirah, um so a work of Jewish Kabbalah, um and the Za'ijra, so Ibn Khaldun a um fifteenth century, uh well fourteenth, fifteenth century um historian writing in Arabic describes the Za'idra as this method for kind of employing combinations of letters, numbers and stars to give answers to questions in the form of poetry.

And I think, you know, these kind of three objects are like the Za Idra, Los Ars Combinatoria and Alberti Cypher Dis. Which all kind of use the production of combinations of symbols for rotation. Like these three objects really offer kind of like interesting insights into like these. the surprising correspondences and interactions between what we could consider as like more logical or more esoteric, um also kind of interesting reflections on like the mechanization of reality.

and this kind of shift from divination towards kind of permutation and prediction. I think the term esoteric can be useful, but I think what I find more use like more interesting or more rich is um what where it slips up, what it what is between esoteric and what, yeah, it's the slippage between it and other things. And on the wave of this syncretism between esotericism and other normal things, I would like to ask you my last question, which is the usual question that I ask to our guests.

As you know, we are creating here a virtual library for the day after tomorrow. So a library on worlding, worlds ending and new worlds coming into being.

Could you contribute to the library with a few virtual books to add on our shelves? Um yeah, I'll try. Uh hopefully you haven't already got them um on your shelves. But I think I'd like to recommend one book and a poem or like a recording of a poem being read.

So the the book would be Michel Foucault's Les Mont et les Choses, uh translated into English as the Order of Things. And As probably a lot of people know, this book in this book Foucault kind of discusses how language is used to validate and order the production of objects of knowledge and how this kind of underlies the structure of the humanities as a discipline, a practice and an institution. And he frames this within

this idea of kind of the archaeology of the human sciences. And I thought that would be kind of a useful guide to future beings as they kind of unearth traces of our human culture. And I mean this question also made me think of um in which kind of a large part of the of humanity is is wiped out. So you have like a few survivors who are passengers of a cruise to the Galapagos Islands. And these survivors evolve into these sleek furry creatures with flippers.

and very small brains. And the only thing that remains from this kind of so-called big brain culture of uh the earlier humans is the mandarack.

It's a small personal computer that contains 20,000 kind of quotations in thousands of languages. But not none of like none of the new humans can understand any of these languages. And so kind of that problem of the Galapagos made me think that it would be good to include something that could be understood by someone who doesn't necessarily understand the content of the word.

So I thought of poetry and I thought of uh Fred like well I yeah,'cause I think in poetry you can kind of do philosophy with sound, with image and it doesn't necessarily rely purely on the content of the words. And So yeah, in that way I kind of think of Fred Moton as a as a philosopher who writes philosophy and poetry. And I thought of his poem Dance Warm. And there's a really nice kind of recording of him reading it at the loot and drum series in twenty fifteen.

Uh which is on the the Pen Sound website. Yeah, and I think kind of in this poem it is i it's like snapshots of kind of like intimacy. Um you hear a little like you hear people laughing at the poem. It's a really nice a nice insight into kind of the more Yeah, the in more intimate aspects of human existence. And I think you can really understand it like not just through

It's the kind of semantic content of the words, but also the effect it has, like how it makes you feel. And it the poem Dance Rome ends with this really beautiful line about babies making grammarless babies. And I think that would be a really good place to start the the creation of a new world. Thank you Beatrice. Thank you for being with us today and also thank you for the recommendation.

So I invite the listeners to go to the Penn website to listen to the poem and then to come back for the next episode of Overmorrow's Library, which will be here next time, still in the Center for Contemporary Arts in Geneva. Thank you.