الإسلام والغرب: نحو عالم أفضل

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Pathways to an Open World

longitudes, gave it an amplitude . In this context of geographical extension and expansion, I think also, with pleasure and gratitude, of that ‘master of sea-knowledge’ ( mu’allim al-bahr ), Ibn Mâjid, who sailed the Indian ocean in the fifteenth century, who wrote one pilot-poem ( urjûza ) after another (‘in all the climates of the earth, along all the shores of the sea’), gathering them into his Kitab al-fawâïd . If ever a seaman corresponded to the portrait of the pilot-bodhisattva as contained in the old sanskrit text, Jâtaka-mâlâ , it was Ibn Majid : ‘He knows the stars ; he knows the regions of the Ocean by the fish, by the birds, by the colour of the water ; he has a good memory and is in full possession of his faculties ; he can stand heat, cold, rain, fatigue ; he gets to the other shore.’ In that Sanskrit text about the bodhisattva (a being on the way to enlightenment) geography is a metaphor for a way of being in the world, a dimension of the mind. Several Arab texts point also in that direction. Let me refer first to Ibn Arabi, known in the traditional West as Doctor Maximus. Born in Spain, at Murcia, originally engaged in law, he felt himself more and more closed in, more and more opposed to the established order, more and more dissatisfied with the existing models, and decided to get out ‘on the way’. Physically, he moves through Egypt, Palestine, Bagdad, Damascus, Anatolia… mentally, he seems to go in all directions, purposely avoiding anything like systematic method. But gradually there emerges both a mental cartography and an intellectual grammar, with its own particular lexicon. Ibn Arabi’s way is an opening on to the universal. Thanks to spiritual practices lying way outside anything like habitual, orthodox religion, be it that of the people, that of the theologians, or that of the philosophers, he engages himself, body and soul, but above all with acute intelligence, on a high road towards the Real, with ardent desire at its inception, and the radiant light of the Logos at its culmination.

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