The desert, poetry and Ibn ʿArabī

This study presents a view of the desert as a dynamic tapestry of subtle detail and immense divinity. Beginning with pre-Islamic poetry and continuing through medieval Sufi poetry, the desert has been a site and source of poetic creation, embodying endurance through the aṭlāl motif, shifting sands, and transient features—a testament to spatial and temporal evanescence. While this essay sheds light on the literary legacy of the early Arabic poetic tradition through the muʿallaqah of Labīd (560–661), as reflected in the Sufi poetry of Ibn ʿArabī (1165–1240), it also highlights their points of divergence. Ibn ʿArabī’s Tarjumān al-ashwāq, which elucidates a sublime spiritual experience beyond the earthly realm, draws extensively on early Arabic verses that chant the traces of lost love within the desert landscape. Particularly significant are the ways in which the concept of the trace is understood in Sufi thought and the inherent untranslatability of the Sufi experience.