The majority of these questions had me smelling a rat. "Even if we were to sit down," I said in order to put a stop to the apparent flow, "there would be no point in giving short answers to your questions. The only way of dealing with this is for the warden of the mosque to bring permission in writing from the governor. If that happens, I will schedule a series of sessions with you. After each question has been duly assessed, it will deserve a separate session that will be held between sunset and evening prayers. God alone shows us the proper path."
These questioners and others insisted that I give them answers, even if it was after the prayer. The whole thing turned into a noisy debate. The warden came rushing over and asked what was going on. After listening to what the questioners had to say and then to my request for written permission, he gave a reply that strongly suggested collusion. "No, no, master," he said, "a major scholar such as yourself doesn't need any kind of license. So give them the benefit of your wisdom and do not stint in responding to your questioners."
Once he had had his say and gone away, I soon realized that the whole thing was a trap. While I was still making up my mind about what to do, I found myself surrounded by a group of young men, one of whom whispered in my ear that they were friends of my Andalusian students. He then shouted to the gathered assembly that they should wait till the prayer was concluded and then something would happen. When the call to prayer came, everyone entered the mosque, but my rescuers lagged behind. They confirmed that my suspicions were correct, in that a group of practicing jurists had hatched a plot against me and were inciting fundamentalist people against me. They accompanied me to where my horse was tethered and strongly suggested I go home. That is exactly what I did.
When Fayha' came to greet me, I was still looking very worried. She asked me if anything bad had happened to Hafsa, and I told her what I had found out about her and what I had done. I made a particular point of the fact that it was absolutely forbidden to visit her grave. She burst into tears and prayed that God would grant her repentance and thereafter forgiveness.
19
AS RAMADAN BEGAN, I confided in my wife that I intended to spend most of the blessed month in my retreat on Jabal Musa. She acceded to my wishes, pointing out, as she put it, that she wanted me to feel happy and serene. Next day at dawn my baggage was packed on my horse, and every member of the household was there to say farewell. I hugged Fayha'. "Just remember," I whispered in her ear, "that you are what has replenished my eye and my soul!" With that I entrusted her to the two servant-women and Hamada, then got on my horse and rode away.
When I reached the mountain zawiya, the warden, 'Abd al-Barr, gave me a warm welcome. He allowed me to choose between two rooms in the wing dedicated to silence, and I selected the one that was better lit and quieter. I explained to him the principal purpose of my month-long stay and asked him to take on whatever necessary chores I had. He understood me completely, but postponed answering my questions about the general state of the zawiya and its facilities and went on his way.
In my baggage I was carrying books that would suit the time and place, the most apposite of which was probably Al-Tawhidi's Divine Signs and Spiritual Breaths. The sessions that I had previously devoted to a perusal of this masterpiece and his other work had served as my own introduction to the rainbowlike beauty of their contents. The sense of harmony that they offered had broadened more and more, crystallizing in their author's statement that "worship of God as one is the very life of the soul," and in his supplication where he says, "0 Thou within whom everything is one and existent in everything."
This mode of access that you have provided, Abu Hayyan, is no matter of "incoherence" or illusion, nor does it result from a conscious fatigue. To the contrary, it comes from experience and experiment, involving the need to write in the very hardest of circumstances, just like the poet al-Mutanabbi, only more so. You suffered through an era of great turbulence, enough to bring tears to the eyes. You made your living by being a copyist, dismal trade that it is, and as a guard at the 'Adud al-dawla asylum. Scoundrels robbed your house, and the authorities and pseudojurists of the time declared you a heretic, evicted you, and showed you their contempt. When your despair was at its very height, you decided to burn all your works in case you and they fell victim to the corrupt times in which you were living or came into the clutches of frivolous fools and phony scholars. Your justification for doing such a thing provides me with a spark of initiative, a cogent argument, namely that you are that "strange person," one who "when he recalls the truth, he is abandoned; when he is called to the truth, he is upbraided; when he holds firm, he is called a liar; and when he manifests himself, he is tortured." If only the people who drove you out and tortured you had any knowledge of the true nature of knowledge and appreciated your genuine worth, they would have rolled in the dirt at your feet and covered their faces in dust, begging your pardon and forgiveness.
The purest water of sincerity courses over your truth. You are someone who lived with no family or friends save those righteous and reverent souls who were already dead. So I beg you, dear friend, to accept me as a loyal successor, separated by neither time nor space, as is the case in the gardens of Eden where I will be searching for you next after the Lord of the Prophets himself. Accept me as a true and loyal devotee. From the pages of your works that have survived you pour out your own spirit, which hovers on the air. Thus you are able to provide me with words that are the best and most effective, duly released from the trammels of tradition and attribution, and allow me to compose my own sentences and associations that are profound and rich. They are all illuminated by your always dynamic fragments of thought and your brilliant rhetorical flair, far removed, oh how far removed, from the obscurities and barbarisms committed by Arab pseudo-Aristotelians.
Your greatest weapon is your courageous, forthright pen, which you use to probe the inner workings of the soul and the loftiest reaches of the truth. With it you scoff at the foibles of ministers and notables, resist poverty, screen your purpose, and brazenly, almost flippantly, flirt with death. The fact of the matter is that you made use of your pen to compile a mass of pleas and complaints, pouring out the flaming oil of your own story with God, to such a degree that at one point you went right over the top and blasphemed by saying, "0 God, to You I complain about what You have brought down upon me; by Your truth, you have strengthened the bonds, tightened the noose, and waged war…"
How can I possibly not take pity on you and ask the Creator to grant you forgiveness?
After all this how can I not call upon you to give me your help?
I am in need of something to relieve me of your never-ending tensions and your permanent state of anxiety as you function amid the gaze of other people and the illusions of adjuncts. So protect my back!
Now I aspire to surpass you in ridding myself of yearnings, struggles, rancor, and enmity, anything in fact that would impair my exposure to wafts that emanate from the surging flood of truth. So protect my back!
I am now on my path toward the single totality, investigating both essence and meaning, aspiring to rise to other heights of perfection among the gradations of profundity and comprehension. So protect my back!
I have immersed myself in some of your writing: in Divine Signs, that lofty text; in Treasures in Insights; and in whatever Epistles I have managed to acquire. I have then proceeded to look at Al-Niffari's Book of Stations, the Lamiyya of Ibn Sina, and the Nazm al-Suluk by Ibn al-Farid* as well as his famous Khamriyya poem. In addition I've looked at the collection Litanies by al-Shadhili al-Ghumari* and similar works, all of which quenched my thirst for more knowledge and sharpened my mind with a rush of inspiration. After all that, I perused some literary works in both prose and verse. They all managed to bolster my initiative by using styles that adhered to both sense and fingers and have become an essential part of my inner self. After all, refined and lofty literature is the conduit that provides life with its value and purpose. How else could we appreciate the contents of sacred texts and establish the bases of the Qur'an's miraculous nature and the divine oath: "Nun, and the pen, and what they write" [Sura 68, v. 1].