The In-Between

His clearest definition of the barzakh is something you can see on any sunny afternoon:

اعْلَمْ أَنَّ الْبَرْزَخَ عِبَارَةٌ عَنْ أَمْرٍ فَاصِلٍ بَيْنَ أَمْرَيْنِ لَا يَكُونُ مُتَطَرِّفًا أَبَدًا ، كَالْخَطِّ الْفَاصِلِ بَيْنَ الظِّلِّ وَالشَّمْسِ

"Know that the barzakh is something that divides two things and never goes to either side, like the line between shade and sun." (Fut. I.304, ch. 63)

Look for that line on a pavement. It belongs to neither the sun nor the shade, yet it is what lets you tell them apart. He links it to the Qur'an's two seas that meet, "between them a barzakh they do not overstep" (Q 55:19–20). If you feel neither here nor there, between jobs, between cities, between versions of yourself, you are on the line. The line is a real place.

How can something be neither there nor not there? He points to a mirror:

الْخَيَالُ … لَا مَوْجُودٌ وَلَا مَعْدُومٌ ، لَا مَعْلُومٌ وَلَا مَجْهُولٌ

"Imagination is … neither existent nor nonexistent, neither known nor unknown." (Fut. I.304, ch. 63)

When you see your face in a mirror, you know for certain you saw your face in one sense, and you know for certain you didn't, in another (Fut. I.304; paraphrase). You can't touch it, yet it is plainly you. That is the in-between in miniature: every memory, every dream, every picture of the future you carry around. Not fake. Not solid. Real in their own way, and worth taking seriously.

In the middle of this chapter he drops in a short verse that sounds like a love song to imagination:

لَوْلَا الْخَيَالُ لَكُنَّا الْيَوْمَ فِي عَدَمٍ ، وَلَا انْقَضَى غَرَضٌ فِينَا وَلَا وَطَرُ

"If not for imagination, we would be nothing today, and no wish or longing in us would ever be fulfilled." (Fut. I.304, ch. 63)

Everything you have ever wanted first lived in this in-between world, as a picture, before it was anything else. The meal before you cook it, the letter before you write it. Imagination isn't escape. It is the workshop where every next step gets built.

Usually we call light whatever lets the eye see. Ibn Arabi gives that honor to imagination itself:

فَالْخَيَالُ أَحَقُّ بِاسْمِ النُّورِ مِنْ جَمِيعِ الْمَخْلُوقَاتِ الْمَوْصُوفَةِ بِالنُّورِيَّةِ

"Imagination has more right to the name 'light' than every created thing called luminous." (Fut. I.306, ch. 63)

Its light, he says, "reaches into pure nothing and gives it the form of being" (ينفذ في العدم المحض فيصوره وجودا, Fut. I.306). So when people dismiss something as "only imagination", he would answer: the eye of imagination saw correctly. The mistake, if any, lies with the judge who reads it, not with the light (Fut. I.306; paraphrase).

How can you tell when you are seeing with the eye of imagination rather than the eye of the senses? He gives a test. If the thing you're looking at keeps changing form, and yet you never doubt it is the same thing,

كَالنَّاظِرِ إِلَى الْحِرْبَاءِ فِي اخْتِلَافِ الْأَلْوَانِ عَلَيْهَا

"like someone watching a chameleon as its colors change," (Fut. I.305, ch. 63)

then you are seeing with imagination. Your feelings about one person can shift from tender to angry in an afternoon, and you still know it's them. That's the chameleon. Knowing this can loosen a hard day: the colors are changing, and the one you love is still there.

He gives a saying of the Prophet: "People are asleep, and when they die they wake up" (الناس نيام فإذا ماتوا انتبهوا, Fut. II.313, ch. 177). What we perceive here, he says, is like a sleeper's perceiving. And waking at death is like dreaming that you woke up (Fut. II.313; paraphrase). He even writes: "whoever does not know the rank of imagination has no knowledge at all" (ومن لا يعرف مرتبة الخيال فلا معرفة له جملة واحدة, Fut. II.313).

In the twentieth century, Henry Corbin coined the word imaginal for this world, so no one would mistake it for the merely imaginary.