Love

In one of his long answers on love, Ibn Arabi admits it can't be pinned down:

فَمَنْ حَدَّ الْحُبَّ مَا عَرَفَهُ ، وَمَنْ لَمْ يَذُقْهُ شُرْبًا مَا عَرَفَهُ ، وَمَنْ قَالَ رَوِيتُ مِنْهُ مَا عَرَفَهُ ، فَالْحُبُّ شُرْبٌ بِلَا رِيٍّ

"Whoever defines love has not known it. Whoever has not tasted it as a drink has not known it. Whoever says 'I've had my fill of it' has not known it. Love is drinking without ever quenching." (Fut. II.111, ch. 73)

So the restless, never-quite-done feeling of love isn't a flaw. It's how love is built. If you feel you can never love enough, or be loved enough, you are not broken. You are thirsty in the right way.

He sets two sayings side by side. Someone once boasted: "I drank one draught and was never thirsty again." Abū Yazīd al-Bisṭāmī answered:

الرَّجُلُ مَنْ يَحْسِي الْبِحَارَ وَلِسَانُهُ خَارِجٌ عَلَى صَدْرِهِ مِنَ الْعَطَشِ

"The real one drinks down whole seas, and his tongue still hangs out on his chest from thirst." (Fut. II.111, ch. 73)

It's an image you can almost draw: a person with an ocean inside, still panting with thirst. Love doesn't make you full and finished. It makes you wide, and still wanting.

In a long list of questions he answers, one is simply: "What is the cup of love?" His answer:

الْقَلْبُ مِنَ الْمُحِبِّ ، لَا عَقْلُهُ وَلَا حِسُّهُ

"The lover's heart: not his mind, not his senses." (Fut. II.113, ch. 73)

Because the heart turns from state to state, just as the Beloved is "every day about some new task" (Q 55:29). The heart, he says, is "like a clear white glass cup that changes with the changing of the drink poured in it", and so "the lover's color is the color of his Beloved" (فلون المحب لون محبوبه, Fut. II.113). Your shifting moods are not instability. They are a cup taking on color.

The Fuṣūṣ chapter on Shuʿayb opens with a bold claim about the heart:

اعْلَمْ أَنَّ الْقَلْبَ ، أَعْنِي قَلْبَ الْعَارِفِ بِاللهِ ، هُوَ مِنْ رَحْمَةِ اللهِ ، وَهُوَ أَوْسَعُ مِنْهَا ، فَإِنَّهُ وَسِعَ الْحَقَّ جَلَّ جَلَالُهُ ، وَرَحْمَتُهُ لَا تَسَعُهُ

"Know that the heart, I mean the heart of one who knows the Real, comes from the mercy of the Real, and is wider than it. For it holds the Real, and His mercy does not hold Him." (Fus. 119, Shuʿayb)

The organ you feel tight with stress is, in his picture, the widest place in the cosmos.

In Seville he served an old woman, Fāṭima, for years. She was over ninety-five. He could hardly look at her face, it was so rosy and fresh. And she had no patience for gloomy love:

عَجِبْتُ لِمَنْ يَقُولُ إِنَّهُ يُحِبُّ اللهَ وَلَا يَفْرَحُ بِهِ ، وَهُوَ مَشْهُودُهُ

"I marvel at someone who says he loves the Real and is not glad in Him, when He is always in plain sight." (Fut. II.347, ch. 178)

Those who weep all the time, she said, how can they claim to love? He is closer than anyone. "So over whom are they weeping?" (فعلى من يبكي). Then she'd turn: "My son, what do you say?" And he would answer: "Mother, what you say is right" (Fut. II.347; paraphrase of the exchange).

In Mecca, his teacher Makīn al-Dīn of Isfahan had a daughter called al-Niẓām, "Harmony", whom Ibn Arabi praises as one of the most devout and learned women he met. He gave her the title "Eye of the Sun and of Splendor" (عين الشمس والبهاء). In the preface to his love poems, The Interpreter of Longings (ترجمان الأشواق), he says she was the image behind them: every lovely name and every beloved in those poems, he writes, points through her to something higher (Tarjumān, preface; paraphrase).

He wrote his own commentary on these poems, Dhakhāʾir al-aʿlāq, so readers would hear each beloved as a window.