Following the Religion of Love: A Poetic Comparison of William Blake and Mohammad

Ibn al-Arabi
Zaina Ujayli, The University of Virginia, Charlottesville, U.S.A, zu7hu@virginia.edu

Hello everyone – thank you for having me today. I want to start with the final stanzas of

two poems.

The first, “The Divine Image”, is by William Blake, who was one of the seminal writers

of the Romantic period.

And all must love the human form,

In heathen, Turk, or Jew;
Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell
There God is dwelling too.

The stanza in Blake’s poem speak to a faith which transcends the practice of orthodox

institutions, a religion of love where the divine dwells within human flesh.

Mohammad Ibn al Arabi, like Blake, was celebrated for his mystical view of religion,

though, like Blake, he never referred to himself as a mystic. Today he is one of the most famous

Sufi poets of the Arabic canon. For those of you who are unfamiliar, Sufism is not considered a

branch of Islam, but is rather understood “as both a doctrine and practice” embedded in the

religion in which practitioners seek closeness to God (Irwin 293). While Ibn al Arabi was born

five hundred years before and three thousand miles away from William Blake, his poetry shares

the same theme of a religion of love which supplants orthodoxy and exists in human bodies. He

writes in one of his poems:

My heart has become capable of every form: it is a

Pasture for gazelles and a convent for Christian monks,
And a temple for idols and the pilgrim’s Ka’ba and the
Tables of the Tora and the book of the Koran.
I follow the religion of Love: whatever way Love’s
Camels take, that is my religion and my faith.
If we set the biographies of William Blake and Mohammad Ibn al Arabi side by side, the poets

appear diametrically opposed. And yet their poems resonate when they appear together on the

page. This presentation explores those resonances. I’m going to tease out the individual and

intimate perspective of religion which allows Blake and Ibn al Arabi to find faith beyond their

own orthodoxy, and how this theological perspective is allegorized in their poetry.

First, I want to gesture to why it’s not so surprising that poets writing in such different

contexts voiced similar theological perspectives. There is a growing body of scholarship linking

the English Romantic poets and the 12th and 13th century Arab and Persian Sufi poets. One of the

reasons that scholars have found so much in common between the poets is that there is

meaningful overlap in the texts which influenced them. In Natural Supernaturalism, M.H.

Abrams argues that the similarities between the European Romantic writers stems not from their

“mutual influence” but rather from their shared historical contextual experiences and their

“grounding in a common body of materials – above all in the Bible, especially as expounded by

radical Protestant visionaries, many of whom had assimilated a modicum of Neoplatonic lore”

(Abrams 256). While the Sufi poets of the 12th and 13th centuries obviously did not share the

Romantics historical experiences, they did share materials. As the Romantics drew from the

Bible, the Sufis drew from the Quran, which while distinct, shares a similar metaphysical

worldview, characters, and stories. The Sufis also inherited Neoplatonic thought from the vast

body of philosophical work which translated, preserved, and commented upon the works of

Aristotle, Plotinus, and Plato (Lewisohn 17). Plato’s synthesis of beauty and the divine saturates

many Sufi poetics, and later, Romantic verses (Lewisohn). In other words, the Sufis and

Romantics shared a “grounding in a common body of materials”, which situates the two bodies
of writers, rather than separate and distinct, as inheritors of a similar pool of sources which

defined not only how they approached literature, but religion.

Many English Romantics also read Sufi poetry. For example, both Shelley and

Tenneyson imitated ghazal poetry by the Sufi poet Hafiz (Lewisohn 16) and Byron lists the

Quran and the poetry of Sadi and Hafiz in his list of favorite texts, and during his travels,

actually encountered Sufi orders (Blackstone 330). However, unlike many of his peers, we

currently have no evidence that Blake read Arabic or Persian literature; however, he’s frequently

included in comparisons with Sufi poets because of the perceived mystical quality of his poetry

which pairs well with the Sufi mystic tradition. I want to bring Blake into conversation with Ibn

al-Arabi because they both used seemingly secular poetry to allegorize the divine. When

religious scholars accused Ibn al-Arabi’s book of poetry, The Interpreter of Dreams, of

celebrating “profane love”, Ibn al Arabi responded: “In these poems I always signify Divine

influences and spiritual revelations through sublime analogies.” (Al-Arabi 4). Ibn al-Arabi states,

not uncertainly, that while his poems may be perceived as superficially romantic, they carry

religious meaning. Similarly, Blake alludes to the religious connotations throughout his work.

Blake once said that “all he knew was in the Bible,” and referred to the Bible as “The Great Code

of Art” (Abrams 33).

But what does this comparison actually look like in practice?

The poems, “The Birds” by William Blake and “I respond with diverse notes” by Ibn al

Arabi, work well as a place to start comparing the two poets because not only do they share

sentence-level similarities, by they allude to the shared thematic journey of seeking the divine:

He. Where thou dwellest in what Grove
Tell me Fair one tell me love
Where though thy charming Nest doth build
O thou pride of every field
I respond with diverse notes of grief to
every cooing dove
Perched upon the bough in a grove.
She weeps for her mate without tears, but
from my
Eyelids the tears of sorrow are streaming.
I say to her, when my eyelids have shed
their abundant
Tears in token of my inward state,
Hast thou any knowledge of those whom I
She. Yonder stands a lonely tree
Here I live & mourn for thee
Morning drinks my silent tear
And evening winds my sorrows bear
He. O thou Summers harmony
I have livd & mournd for thee
Each day I mourn along the wood
And night hath heard my sorrows loud.
- William Blake, “The Birds” (Blake 494)
Almost every verse finds its reflection in the other poem. Like many of the poets’ other verses,

they write in, of, and to nature and apply a language of lamentation. Superficially, we can read

the poems as romantic love verses dedicated to separated loved ones. However, when read using

an anagogic lens, the language of grief and separation which characterizes the poems lends the

verses another reading: the poems lament separation from God.

Sufi and Romantic poets commonly figured separation from God through the language of

a missing loved one as part of a larger allegorical journey seeking the divine (Abrams 194). M.H.

Abrams argues that Romantic poetry describes a “circuitous journey and quest, ending in the

attainment of self-knowledge, wisdom, and power” (Abrams 255). Similarly, the Sufi’s primary

motivation is to attain self and divine knowledge through an inner journey (Ezzeldine 122). Sufi

and Romantic journeys are, as Abrams argues, circuitous because they begin and end in paradise,

in other words, with God.

Ibn al Arabi renders the journey to God almost explicitly in his poems. Many of Ibn al-

Arabi’s poems evoke pre-Islamic poetry, which was characterized by journeys through the desert

searching for lost loved ones. Like in “I respond with diverse notes,” his poems often begin with

lamentations to nature about this lost love, frequently a woman, and then describe his journey

trying to reach her. However, whereas the pre-Islamic poet mourned for an actual lover, Ibn al
Arabi mourns in his poems for his soul’s separation from the divine. The physical journey the

pre-Islamic poet embarked on to find his lover, for Ibn al-Arabi, was his spiritual journey to God.

If we read Blake’s poems through the lens of an inner journey for God, we can tease out

thought-provoking readings of his more obscure poems. In Blake’s beautiful “The Voice of the

Ancient Bard,” a Bard asks a youth to come and see “the image of truth new born”:

Youth of delight come hither:

And see the opening morn,
Image of truth new born.
Doubt is fled & clouds of reason.
Dark disputes & artful teazing.
Folly is an endless maze,
Tangled roots perplex her ways,
How many have fallen there!
They stumble all night over bones of the dead,
And feel they know not what but care
And wish to lead others, when they should be led (Blake 79).

In the context of the poem, “truth new born” represents the knowledge the bard attained by

navigating an “endless maze”. Blake insinuates that the maze is internal rather than external by

describing that “tangled roots perplex her ways,” rather than “tangled routes”. The internal

quality of the maze lends itself to reading the journey as individual, ending with truth and

freedom from doubt, recalling Abrams’ claim that the Romantics sought self-knowledge in “a

circuitous journey and quest” (Abrams 255). We can read “The Voice of the Ancient Bard” using

the understanding of an implicit journey: a poet achieves truth by means of an internal quest

which ends with a child, evoking circuity. This circuity, in line with Abrams’ identifying the

Romantic’s journey as circuitous in that it begins and ends in paradise, can thus be read also as a

journey seeking a return to God.

When Blake and Ibn al-Arabi write laments to lost loved ones and speak of journeys

seeking them, the subject of the poems is often a woman. Blake refers to a black-eyed maid in a
village in his Songs (Blake 13-14), and in his poems, Ibn al Arabi speaks of a Persian Bedouin

girl he fell in love with during a pilgrimage (Irwin 297). However, its likely the women are

allegories. Falling in love with a woman on the hajj had been a stock theme in Arabic poetry, and

Blake’s idealized lover lived in a village far from the metropolitan city where he himself lived.

Furthermore, they characterize the women as divine. The women shapes the poet’s world and

provide life and divine protection. For example, “Nothing impure comes near” where Blake and

his woman walk in one poem, and she turns the spaces they inhabit into holy, calm paradise

(Blake 13). Likewise, Ibn al-Arabi’s woman in one poem peoples and waters the desert,

brightens meadows, and turns wine into water, a play on Jesus’s miracle (Al-Arabi 116-117).

If Blake and Ibn al-Arabi allegorized God as a woman in their poetry, they were hardly

unique among their peers. Both Sufis and Romantics often figured God as a woman with whom

the goal is an erotic reunion, a configuration potentially derived from Plato’s belief that souls

engaged in loving contemplation of the divine through terrestrial beauty (Lewisohn 31). Erotic

unions signified Romantic and Sufi aspirations to attain true unity with the divine. Blake argued

that this unity could be achieved through the cancellation of selfhood through prayer. Likewise,

Sufis used prayer to achieve union through god through the annihilation of the self. Blake and

Ibn al-Arabi’s allegorizing of the divine elucidates not only their poetry, but therefore their

theological perspectives. Both long allegories – that the poets imagine faith as an individual

journey and God as a woman – privilege the unique perspective of faith and its practice as

intimate and individual. In other words, spirituality exists outside of churches, mosques, and

synagogues.

This, of course, does not mean that Blake was not as devoutly Christian as Ibn al Arabi

was devoutly Muslim, rather, they believed that you could practice faith outside of the confines
of orthodox institutions and rules. Ibn al Arabi once told his disciples: “Do not attach yourself to

any particular creed exclusively, so that you disbelieve in all the rest (Al-Arabi x). His words

follow those of other Sufis who preached the Unity of Religions (Lewisohn 38). Ibn al-Arabi

derives his interpretation of the Unity of Religion from the Quranic verse: “Wheresoever ye turn,

there is the face of God” (Al Arabi x). Understood from the Sufi perspective, it follows then that

“all things are a manifestation of divine substance” and therefore “God may be worshipped in a

star or a calf or any other object” (Al Arabi x). Consequently, as Ibn al-Arabi writes, “no form of

positive religion contains more than a portion of the truth” (Al-Arabi x), epitomized in the

following poem:

When she kills with her glances, her speech restores to

Life, as tho’ she, in giving life thereby, were Jesus.1
The smooth surface of her legs is the Tora in
Brightness, and I follow it and tread in its footsteps as tho’ I were Moses.
She is a bishopess, one of the daughters of Rome, unadorned:
Thou seest in her a radiant Goodness.
Wild is she, none can make her his friend; she has
Gotten in her solitary chamber a mausoleum for remembrance.
She has baffled everyone who is learned in our religion,
Every student of the Psalms of David, every Jewish
Doctor, and every Christian priest (Al-Arabi 49).

If we follow the use of woman as an allegory for God we discussed previously, in this poem Ibn

al-Arabi not only characterizes God through multiple faiths but argues that religions are

insufficient in understanding her.

The Romantics expressed a similar concept of Unity of Religions, noting that all religions

were similar albeit hiding under superficial differences. In his series of aphorisms, “All Religions

are One”, Blake writes that a human’s purest form of truth and knowledge stems from a Poetic

genius which exists universally across all people regardless of creed. Religions derive from the

Poetic Genius and are received from an individuals’ Poetic Genius, and consequently, “As all
1
You can listen to a rendition of the poem here (Ensemble Ibn Arabi).
men are alike (tho’ infinitely various) so all Religions; and as all similars have one source the

True Man is the source” (Blake 55). Blake proffers a universal religion in which, at its core, the

divine and access to God exists in every human.

I want to now rewind and look at the two poems I began with.

In “The Divine Image”, Blake writes that human beings in distress all pray to love, the

human form divine(Blake 74). Consequently,

And all must love the human form,

In heathen, Turk, or Jew;
Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell
There God is dwelling too (Blake 74).

The human form divine, as Blake writes in an earlier verse, is love. Humans pray to love, and

when they pray they pray to the human form because God dwells there. For that reason, there is a

unity in religions because humans all pray to the same source.

Ibn al-Arabi’s poem makes a similar argument. He questions religious orthodoxy and

privileges the divine human form: “What is the rank of the temple in comparison with the dignity

of man?” He also discussed one dyed with henna, a veiled gazelle, both allegories for woman

who is likely an allegory for God. God exists not outside, but within human breast-bones and the

bowels. Like Blake, Ibn al Arabi finds the divine in human form. In the last lines, he invokes the

famous lovers of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, claiming that religion is found in the “pattern” of

great lovers.

Reading the religion of love in Mohammad Ibn al-Arabi and William Blake’s poems only

begins the possible comparisons between the two poets. While the two men are each enormously

influential in their own traditions, those traditions, like themselves, are not beyond meaningful

comparison. Regardless of the time, language, and space separating the Sufi and Romantic poets,

their shared allegories and theological views demonstrate that rather than existing in literature as
separate groups they instead take part in a shared global literary tradition. The Sufis of the 12th

and 13th centuries inspired the Romantic poets just as the Romantic poets inspire Sufi writers

today, continuing a cycle of exchange and conversation which began with Plato, passed

throughout the Christian and Islamic worlds, rested, however briefly, in the hands of William

Blake and Mohammad Ibn al-Arabi, before moving beyond them, leaving us to listen for the

echoes.