Glimpses of Ibn 'Arabi's youth (1): Fatima of Cordova

By Henry Corbin · March 14, 2024 · 4 min read

Contents

Part one: the teaching of Fatima of Cordova

The earthly existence of Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn al-’Arabi (a name shortened to Ibn ’Arabi) began at Murcia, in the south-east of Spain, where he was born on 17 Ramadan 560 of the Hegira, corresponding to 28 July 1165. Ibn ’Arabi’s sobriquets are well known: Muhyi’ddin, ‘reviver of the religion’; al-Shaykh al-Akbar, ‘the greatest of masters’; Ibn Aflatun, the ‘son of Plato’, or the Platonist. From the age of eight, the young boy came to settle in Seville; there he studied, grew up, became an adolescent, led the happy life his noble and well-to-do family could provide, and contracted a first marriage with a young girl of whom he speaks in terms of respectful devotion, and who seems indeed to have exercised a real influence on the orientation of his life towards Sufism.

The vision of Surah Ya-Sin

It was at this time that Ibn ’Arabi’s visionary gifts were already manifesting themselves. He fell gravely ill; the fever brought on a state of profound lethargy. He was thought dead, while he himself, in his inner world, saw himself besieged by a band of threatening, infernal-looking figures. But now a being of wondrous beauty appears, exhaling a sweet fragrance, and drives back the demonic figures with invincible force.

‘Who are you?’ he asks. ‘I am Surah Ya-Sin!’ comes the reply.

And indeed, his wretched father, anguished at his bedside, was reciting at that very moment this surah (the thirty-sixth of the Qur’an), the one intoned above all for the dying. That the spoken Word should emit enough energy for the personal form corresponding to it to take shape in the subtle intermediate world is no unusual occurrence for religious phenomenology. It marks here one of Ibn ’Arabi’s first penetrations into the ’alam al-mithal, the world of real and subsisting images, the world of subtle bodies and apparitions.

Fatima of Cordova, spiritual mother

The event was not long in repeating itself. Ibn ’Arabi’s adolescent memories seem to have been specially marked by two feminine spiritual friendships, a twofold filial friendship for two venerable Sufi women, two shaykhas: one was Yasmina of Marchena, the other Fatima of Cordova. The latter was for him a spiritual mother, whose teaching, tending towards a life of intimacy with God, he recounts for us with devotion¹. Their relations are invested with an extraordinary aura. This venerable shaykha, despite her very advanced age, was still possessed of such beauty and grace that she might have been taken for a girl of fourteen (sic), so much so that the young Ibn ’Arabi could not help blushing when he had to look her in the face. She had many disciples, and for two years Ibn ’Arabi was among them.

Among the other charisms divine favour had bestowed on Fatima of Cordova, she had ‘at her service’ Surah al-Fatiha (the one that opens the Qur’an). On one urgent occasion, when merciful help had to be brought to a woman in distress, Ibn ’Arabi and Fatima recite Surah al-Fatiha together, thus giving it its consistent, personal and bodily form, albeit a subtle and ethereal one. The surah fulfils its mission, after which the holy woman Fatima recites a prayer of profound humility. Ibn ’Arabi himself will give us the explanation of these events in pages describing the effects of the creative energy produced by the concentration of the heart (himma). We shall do well to remember this episode too when studying Ibn ’Arabi’s ‘method of theophanic prayer’, that dialogue of a prayer which is creative because it is at once the prayer of God and the prayer of man.

‘I am your divine mother’

Often the venerable shaykha would say to her young disciple: ‘I am your divine mother and the light of your earthly mother.’ Indeed, he relates further, ’my mother having come to pay her a visit, Fatima said to her: “O Light! this one is my son” (designating Ibn ‘Arabi), “and he is your father. Treat him with filial piety; never turn away from him!”’

These are the very words we shall hear again, applied to the description of the state of the mystical soul, at once mother and daughter of the God present in her ecstasy. It is the very qualification, ‘mother of her father’ (umm abi-ha), that the Prophet Muhammad gave to his daughter, Fatima al-Zahra, Fatima the radiant. For the venerable shaykha of Seville, namesake of the Prophet’s daughter, to have greeted Ibn ’Arabi’s mother in this way, she must have had a premonition of the peerless spiritual destiny reserved for her young disciple.

Henry Corbin

This article was published in June 1958 in issue no. 126 of the journal “La Table Ronde” (Plon), under the title “Ibn ’Arabi et les funérailles d’Averroès”.

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