5 thoughts on The Translator of Desires: poems by Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi
Over the course of Ramadan during 2024 and 2025, I read The Translator of Desires, poems by Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi, born and raised in Al-Andalus, which is now southern Spain, during the Islamic Golden Age. I am not an expert on him, his poetry, or Islam, but I found the book powerful and reflective. Here’s some thoughts I had as I read:
Muslims are often characterized as against sexual experience and pleasure but Ibn Arabi proves why this is incorrect. His erotic sensibility is universal and relates to the broken-hearted even today: “I’m in bad/way, lost/ in the languor/of her eyes/Say her name/and heal me —/Recalling her’s/my only cure”.
In fact, he was criticized at the time of writing the sequence of poems, which are all erotic in some way, but he then responded in academic form with explanatory notes of his symbols and meaning, which are included in the Princeton University Press version I read. This seems foreign to our Western, 21st century ears; we think of poets as purely inspired and free from the restraints of having to explain what they meant. More poets should explain what their poems are saying and why they matter, then maybe we wouldn’t have everyone talking shit on poetry.
Ibn Arabi takes his honest takes on eroticism to the furthest lengths, even describing the speaker’s lustful thoughts about women as he passes them while circulating the Kaaba, the most holy worship site in Islam, which all Muslims are required to visit, if they’re materially able, during their lifetime. A lesser poet would stop short and avoid this taboo, but Ibn Arabi insists that his poetry show our full humanity in the holiest of contexts.
In the poem “Just a Flash”, he asks the rhetorical question: “Who will guide me/through the thrall/and throes of this/unending love”. The answer is God. He continues: “I’d ‘ve concealed/the anguish but tears/and bleary eyes/gave me away/Just a glance?/I ask but they say/we hold back only/out of compassion/Never will/a glance release you/It’s only a flash/crackling the night”. While a glance may be all that one thinks they need when they’re in the throes of heartbreak or lust, the truth is that a glance will never resolve the pain that is oozing from our hearts. Only the one true god can do that.
At the heart of Ibn Arabi’s poems, I find a an imaginative and logical response to nostalgia. There is a pain within the poet’s heart that can’t be cured by memories and is almost only perpetuated by memories. It is the lightning bolt of love that we can feel that can bring us relief and peace, and it is this very act of nature which is a sign that God exists. In the end, Ibn Arabi demonstrates how Sufi philosophy can embrace both pure human emotion but also pure human reason in order to find the one and only higher power. Much like Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, which was one of my favorite books as a college student, Ibn Arabi demonstrates how both imagination and logic can lead us to peace, as well as to a pure monotheism that removes all the idols we create for ourselves as we glance around the world and into our memory.
