Denis McAuley is to be commended for his recent study of Ibn ʿArabī’s Dīwān, a formidable collection of poems composed in a number of meters, forms, and styles. McAuley pays careful attention to Ibn ʿArabī’s poetics and his mystical doctrines, giving each their due. In his introduction, he reviews previous scholarship on Ibn ʿArabī’s verse, and the Dīwān in particular, which some scholars have regarded as “cold and mannered” (p. 3). McAuley is more nuanced when he notes: “Most of the poetry of the Dīwān is not lyrical. It is directly concerned with mystical doctrine, but it is too elusive to act as a teaching tool” (p. 12). In chapter 1, McAuley provides an overview of Ibn ʿArabī’s theosophy in which God uses His many names to bring about creation in a series of emanations. Hence all of creation partakes of Absolute Existence if only in a limited way, and this paradox of the One and the many is a persistent theme throughout the Dīwān. McAuley points out that Ibn ʿArabī links the twenty-eight heavenly mansions with the twenty-eight letters of the alphabet, thereby linking his cosmology to language which, then, has magical powers of its own. Ibn ʿArabī alludes to these and other themes in his Dīwān, shifting between love lyrics and Sufi terms, often with a syntactic ambiguity.

In chapter 2, McAuley examines Ibn ʿArabī’s views on poetry, including his comments on the Quran's condemnation of poets. Like others of his time, Ibn ʿArabī understood this passage as being against the use of poetry for immoral purposes, but not a condemnation of poetry itself. For Ibn ʿArabī and his contemporaries, poetry was linked to the imagination and so might bring forth forms that order the world and make moral truths more intelligible. Ibn ʿArabī endorsed the notion that poetry could be useful for teaching, but he also stated that poetry was a code to hide spiritual knowledge from the unworthy. Such poetry is akin to revelation as it has a divine source, and McAuley cites a fascinating account by Ibn ʿArabī of his dream of an angel who gave him a piece of white light:

In chapters 3–8, McAuley offers close readings of poems from the Dīwān, beginning with a series of poems, each on one of the 114 sūras of the Quran. Ibn ʿArabī claimed that the poems came to him “by the inspiration of the moment (wārid al-waqt), without addition and without the operation of thought or deliberation” (p. 59). I find this statement compelling, for much of Ibn ʿArabī’s verse in the Dīwān reminds me of automatic writing among nineteenth-century spiritualists, as images and syntax morph over lines, many with awkward or unexpected enjambements. In the case of the sūra poems, Ibn ʿArabī finds a word or theme in a sūra that inspires his poems and their esoteric commentaries on the Quran. In chapter 4, McAuley considers poems in which Ibn ʿArabī imitated or replied to earlier poets including Ḥassān ibn Thābit, al-Ḥallāj, and Imru’ al-Qays, demonstrating Ibn ʿArabī’s knowledge of the Arabic poetic tradition while asserting his own status within it. In chapter 5, McAuley examines a series of poems in one of Ibn ʿArabī’s favourite rhyme schemes, -rī, in the meter basīṭ, while in chapter 6, McAuley, discusses poems with an “ultra-monorhyme”, often the word Allāh. McAuley shows that such poems are by no means unique, and are often found in ascetic poetry as a kind of litany or a riddle, and in Ibn ʿArabī’s case, as a way to speak about creation's relation to God to whom all things return, just as each verse ends in the word “God”.

In chapters 7 and 8, McAuley takes up the muʿashsharāt, ten-line poems “in which each poem represents one letter of the alphabet, each verse of the poem in question beginning and ending with that letter” (p. 160). McAuley examines earlier examples of this form, which address themes of love or moral exhortation, and then compares them to Ibn ʿArabī’s poems full of Sufi paradox and metaphysical speculations. McAuley then concludes his study in terms similar to an earlier study of Ibn ʿArabī by Michael Sells, namely that the heart of the perfect Sufi comprehends God's shifting forms, “and Ibn ʿArabī’s poetry seems to be geared towards doing precisely that” (p. 209).

In his book, McAuley does not offer poetical translations of Ibn ʿArabī’s poems, focusing instead on content over form. He provides the Arabic texts to his translations in an appendix, though with few vowel markers. Some readers may question specific translations. For example, McAuley begins one translation: “God's call answers the one who calls out”; however, the Arabic should probably read yulabbī nidā’a-l-ḥaqq, which is an allusion to an idiom yulabbī nidā’a rabbihi, “to be called away by the Lord”, in this case presumably in mystical annihilation. So a better translation would be: “The one who prayed answered the True Reality's call”.

To McAuley's extensive bibliography should be added two earlier studies of Ibn ʿArabī’s verse: Michael Sells’ Stations of Desire (2000), and al-Ḥubb Illāhī fī Shiʿr Muhyi al-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī by ʿAbd al-Fattāḥ al-Damāsī (1983).

This aside, Denis McAuley is to be commended for his achievement.