Literary and Sufi Analysis of Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s Poem “al-Tā’iyyat al-kubrā”: A Philosophical Educational Approach

Abstract

The present paper offers a new approach to the poetry of the Egyptian Sufi poet ‛Umar Ibn al-Fāriḍ (576-632AH/ 1181-1235AD). This approach is based on the text of Ibn al- Fāriḍ’s Great Sufi Poem, al-Tā’iyyat al-kubrā, in which the poet expresses in full his spiritual experience. First, the basic hermeneutical question is discussed, e.g., what is the way of approaching a literary text in order to understand the experience of the poet? Also, it deals with a Sufi text, its context and the relationship between text and experience. To what extent does the author express his inner world verbally? In the end, there is a distance between the interior experience of a Sufi and his verbal expression. Eventually, this method is applied to the poetry of Ibn al-Fāriḍ. He describes his Sufi experience as a journey through three steps: from separation (farq) to unity (ittiḥād) to universal union (ǧam‛). On such a partition, ten basic units are highlighted, forming the structure of his Sufi poem.