Ibn al-ʿArabī and Joseph Campbell

Akbarian Mythology and the Metaphysics of

Contemporary Art

Ali Hussain

There is something magical about films. The person you are look-
ing at is also somewhere else at the same time. That is a condition

Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabi Society, Vol. 63, 2018

of the god. If a movie actor comes into the theater, everybody
turns and looks at the movie actor. He is the real hero of the occa-
sion. He is on another plane. He is a multiple presence.
What you are seeing on the screen really isn’t he, and yet the
‘he’ comes. Through the multiple forms, the form of forms out of
which all of this comes is right there.1

When God provides someone with a love for Him that is like
His love for that person, He bestows upon him witnessing and
He gives him bliss through witnessing Him in the forms of the
things.2

Indeed, how vast is the presence of imagination, wherein appears

the impossible. Rather, nothing appears in it save the impossi-
ble. For the necessary existent, which is God may He be exalted,
is above delimitation through images and yet manifests in such
forms in this presence!3

The fluctuations of the heart are reminiscent of the divine mani-

festations in various forms!4

1. Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (New York, Anchor Books/

Random House, 1991), p. 20.
2. Ibn al-ʿArabī, al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya (Egypt, 1911) IV:260. Also
William Chittick, ‘The Divine Roots of Human Love’, in Journal of the
Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabi Society (JMIAS) 17 (1995).
3. Fut.II:312.
4. Fut.I:289.
72 Ali Hussain

The contemporary relevance of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s thought has

not been lost on specialists and enthusiasts alike. Works like
Coates’ Ibn ʿArabi and Modern Thought5 and Almond’s Sufism and
Deconstruction6 highlight the similarities between the Andalu-
sian mystic’s writings and those of various foundational phi-
losophers and thinkers in modernity, from Carl Jung to Jacques
Derrida. Meanwhile, Hirtenstein’s The Unlimited Mercifier,7
Morris’ Orientations8 and numerous other articles emphasize the
continuous relevance the Shaykh’s Weltanschauung has for our
religious, social and political challenges in modernity.
In this article, I would like to journey into the pertinence

Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabi Society, Vol. 63, 2018

of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s divine illumination for our understanding of
contemporary art and culture, especially as outlined in Joseph
Campbell’s seminal work, The Power of Myth. We will have
recourse to highlight the importance of this thinker and his
influence on modern film and philosophy of art in general.
For now, it is worthwhile mentioning the lacuna that exists in
Ibn ʿArabī studies pertaining to the relevance of his vision of
khayāl (imagination) as a means for appreciating the sacrality of
modern art and culture.9 Harold Bloom provides an instance of
this affinity by stating that ‘Ibn ʿArabī and the other Sufi sages
… help us to define the imaginal realm in Shakespeare’.10
One creative attempt by an academic specialist to engage
the Andalusian mystic’s thought with modern film emerges in
Ogunnaike’s ‘Inception and Ibn ʿArabi’. As the author describes,
he creatively presents Christopher Nolan’s movie Inception and

5.  Peter Coates, Ibn al-ʿArabi and Modern Thought: The History of Taking
Metaphysics Seriously (Oxford, Anqa Publishing, 2002).
6.  Ian Almond, Sufism and Deconstruction (New York, Routledge, 2004).
7. Stephen Hirtenstein, The Unlimited Mercifier (Oxford, Anqa
Publishing, 1999).
8.  James Morris, Orientations (London, Archetype Publications, 2010).
9.  In this regard, particular mention should be made of the contribu-
tions of MIAS-Latina and the annual Barzaj Prize they award to artists who
produce works that engage the Shaykh’s thought.
10. Henry Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ʿArabi
(Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1969), preface by Harold Bloom,
p. xiv.
 Ibn al-ʿArabī and Joseph Campbell 73

the writings of Ibn ʿArabī as ‘mirrors in which to contemplate

each other’.11 As expected, Ogunnaike focuses on key themes
common to both Ibn al-ʿArabī’s thought and Nolan’s master-
piece, such as imagination, dreams, reality and interpretation.
As a rare contribution in this genre, ‘Inception and Ibn ʿArabi’ is
groundbreaking not only in its comparative analysis, but also in
the case it makes for more needed work in this area of research.
In this light, by comparing Ibn al-ʿArabī’s vision with
Campbell’s The Power of Myth, my objective is not to engage
the Andalusian mystic’s thought with any single film or art
work, but rather to use it as a lens through which modern art

Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabi Society, Vol. 63, 2018

generally can be appreciated as a resurgence of the pre-modern
‘sacred art’ and genuine medium for engaging divinity through
ʿālam al-khayāl (the imaginal realm). In turn, this attempt will
hopefully furnish the theoretical foundation for a later, more
extensive, comparative study between Akbarian metaphysics
and specific instances in the fine, moving and auditory arts of
our time.12
For many, the notion of a sacred modern art might seem
absurd, or even contradictory. This sentiment is expressed suc-
cinctly by René Guénon in The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of
the Times:

All art is in its origin essentially symbolical and ritual, and only
through a late degeneration, indeed a very recent degeneration,
has it lost its sacred character so as to become at last the purely
profane ‘recreation’ to which it has been reduced among our
contemporaries.13

11.  Oludamini Ogunnaike, ‘Inception and Ibn ʿArabi’, in Journal of

Religion & Film, Vol. 17, Issue 2 No. 10 (2013), p. 44.
12. This, in fact, is my ultimate objective behind writing this article: to
briefly explore the theoretical pertinence of the Shaykh’s writings as a lens
through which to appreciate the sacred nature of modern art. In this light, the
research presented here will be an introductory section in a larger monograph
where Ibn al-ʿArabī’s concepts are compared with specific examples from
contemporary media productions. These include film, music, video games,
poetry, painting and sculpture from both eastern and western cultures.
13.  René Guénon, The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times (New
York, Sophia Perennis, 1995), p. 149.
74 Ali Hussain

And yet, we are reminded of the fascinating anecdote involv-

ing Ibn al-ʿArabī, mentioned by Claude Addas in Quest for the
Red Sulphur, wherein the Shaykh states: ‘I was carrying some-
thing disgusting in my hands … a foul stench of salt fish was
emanating from it.’ Once reprimanded by his peers for carry-
ing such a foul thing that contended with his ‘social rank’, he
responded by saying: ‘I saw that God, in spite of His Greatness,
did not disdain to create such a thing. How then am I to disdain
to carry it?’14
Addas correctly presents this anecdote as proof that, for the
Andalusian mystic, ‘there is not one single substance (jawhar

Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabi Society, Vol. 63, 2018

fard) in the entire universe – at however high or low a level –
which is not linked to a divine reality (ḥaqīqa ilāhiyya)’.15 How
can modern art, then, which often contrasts with its pre-modern
counterpart in its non-religious – sometimes even sacrilegious –
content and style, akin to the foul object the Shaykh carried,
be perceived as something ‘linked to a divine reality’? As Ibn
al-ʿArabī enjoins us always, the key to such an insight resides in
liberating our appreciation of contemporary art from the con-
tending forms, or even the varying intentions of the artists, and
focuses instead on the underlying spirit which hearkens to the
same tajalliyāt (manifestations) appearing then and now.
In order to provide an example of such an appreciation, I
would like to recount a personal experience while visiting the Art
Institute in Chicago during the summer of 2010. While there, I
stumbled upon a large biographical work on Henri Matisse and
his philosophical approach to painting. Included within was a
dialogue between Matisse and one of his students. The master
and disciple seemed to disagree on the proper way to approach
an object of painting, which in this case was a fish – an ironic
homage to Ibn al-ʿArabī’s anecdote above. Matisse wanted his
student to master the fish’s spirit by painting it according to
his own imagination. Meanwhile, the student wanted to stand
aloof, as an observer, and hearken for that moment when the

14. Claude Addas, Quest for the Red Sulphur (Cambridge, UK, Islamic
Texts Society, 1993), p. 48.
15. Ibid.
 Ibn al-ʿArabī and Joseph Campbell 75

fish reveals its true self to the artist. In other words, he wanted
to be a listener and not a voice who speaks on behalf of life.
After a lengthy debate, Matisse sought to inculcate in his
student a powerful message that circumvented their rela-
tionship as teacher and student. He informed his disciple
of Cézanne’s recommendation to any beginning artist: that
they should visit the Louvre and stand solemnly at each and
every work of art and listen respectfully until the deceased spirit
of the artist speaks through the traces of their works and accepts
the seeker  as a student. This mystical anecdote was enriched
by my having recently read of the passing of Leonardo da

Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabi Society, Vol. 63, 2018

Vinci, who was embracing his masterpiece ‘Mona Lisa’ at that
moment. The king is said to have instructed his guards to keep
the painting close to the artist’s bosom, at least until the latter’s
spirit was fully transferred to the art work.
The epiphany I had upon contemplating my interactions with
da Vinci and Matisse was that a museum is essentially a modern
reincarnation of the mausoleum complex, a place where seekers
go to communicate with the spirits of saints and search for a
type of identity. Engseng Ho assigns this precise purpose to the
shrine complex of Zanbal, in the valley of Ḥaḍramawt, Yemen.
There, muwallads (descendants of the interred saints) return,
from the Indian subcontinent, to perform a pilgrimage at the
tombs of their ancestors, a journey that ‘deepens [their] ances-
tral and religious identity’.16 Interestingly, Louis Ruprecht high-
lights in ‘Caught between Enlightenment and Romanticism’
that a similar discourse on ‘national identity’ ‘was housed most
effectively in modern public art museums’.17
Ruprecht recounts the ‘pilgrimages’ of poets like Keats to pri-
vately housed antiquities, such as the Elgin Marbles in London,
whereupon he had ‘a kind of spiritual awakening that takes him

16. Engseng Ho, Graves of Tarim (Berkeley, University of California

Press, 2006), p. 231.
17.  Louis Ruprecht, ‘Caught between Enlightenment and Romanticism:
On the Complex Relation of Religious, Ethnic, and Civic Identity in a Mod-
ern “Museum Culture”’, in Rethinking Islamic Studies: From Orientalism to
Cosmopolitanism, eds. Carl Ernst and Richard Martin (Columbia, University
of South Carolina Press, 2010), p. 214.
76 Ali Hussain

very nearly to a place beyond words’.18 In such places, Ruprecht

contends, ‘pilgrims … inevitably fall into a state of worship-
ful, ecstatic inspiration and Romantic epiphany’.19 With this
eloquent description, Ruprecht delivers us to Campbell’s door-
step, who describes ‘the myth’ as ‘[that which] brings us into
a level of consciousness that is spiritual’,20 ‘clues to the spir-
itual potentialities of the human life’21 and – most pertinent
for our discussion – ‘teaches you what’s behind literature and
the arts’.22 Campbell may as well be reiterating Ruprecht’s poeti-
zation of Keats’ visit to antiquities with his description of the
mythology of Native Indian hunting rituals, as ‘mystical jour-

Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabi Society, Vol. 63, 2018

neys … in another world … [where] there are special shrines
that represent stages of mental transformation on the way’.23
Campbell makes the intimate relationship between mythol-
ogy and art clear throughout The Power of Myth. He tells us that
mythology is ‘the homeland of the muses, the inspirers of art,
the inspirers of poetry’.24 However, he also emphasizes the social
agency of this spiritual consciousness of mythology by stating
that ‘to see life as a poem and yourself participating in a poem
is what the myth does for you’,25 a fitting homage for a poet like
Keats and his embodied poetic journey to housed antiquities.
Campbell elaborates further on the interconnectedness of art
and mythology within an individual’s search for meaning by
referencing Shakespeare, who ‘said that “art is a mirror held up
to nature” … The nature is your nature, and all of these won-
derful poetic images of mythology are referring to something in
you’.26 Ultimately, this is because ‘the myth … gives you a line
to connect with that mystery which you are’.27

18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Campbell, Power of Myth, p. 19.
21.  Ibid. p. 5.
22.  Ibid. p. 14.
23.  Ibid. p. 17.
24.  Ibid. p. 65.
25. Ibid.
26.  Ibid. p. 68.
27. Ibid.
 Ibn al-ʿArabī and Joseph Campbell 77

We already perceive in such statements an Akbarian spirit

and reference to one of the most frequently recurring threads
in Ibn al-ʿArabī’s writings, pertaining to the identity of the
human being’s inner microcosm with the universe’s larger
macrocosm. This is clear in one, among countless, excerpts
from al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, where the Shaykh tells us that
‘the human being is al-kalima al-jāmiʿa [encompassing word]
and nuskhat al-ʿālam [copy of the world]. For everything that
is in the world is already a part of him/her, while the inverse
is not true’.28 He also explains in Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam the intimate
purpose of this mirroring in light of the human being’s rank as

Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabi Society, Vol. 63, 2018

the objective behind divine creativity: ‘He founded the world
in its entirety as an undifferentiated bodily form, without spirit
like an unclear mirror. Then, Adam became the essence of that
mirror’s clarity and spirit of that form.’29
Although we are able to perceive here threads of communi-
cation between Ibn al-ʿArabī and Campbell in their reliance
upon similar motifs and images, such as the ‘mirror’ and the
human being’s inner mystery, we still need to decipher the
extent to which the latter’s notions of ‘myth’ and ‘art’ exist and
have currency in the Shaykh’s vision. A possible entry point
for this investigation is through the vast gate of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s
understanding of shiʿr (poetry), which Campbell provides as
an instance of art, and the Shaykh’s use of the myth, as spir-
itual consciousness, to help the reader appreciate the ḥaqīqa of
poetry:

Indeed, poetry is from speech. Thus, it belongs to the category

of al-anfās [breaths] … For this reason, let us return to al-nafas
al-raḥmānī [the merciful breath] from which emerged the letters
of living entities and words of this world, according to the vari-
ous ranks of the pronunciation of letters from the breath of the
human being who breathes; the most perfect of all created things
in this world.30

28.  Fut.I:136.
29.  Ibn al-ʿArabī, Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam (Beirut, Dar al-Kitab al-ʿArabi, 2002),
p. 49.
30.  Fut.II:394.
78 Ali Hussain

If the myth, as Campbell tells us, is a ‘mystical journey in

another world’, then Ibn al-ʿArabī has taken us in this excerpt
on a majestic iteration of such a saga. Likewise, the Shaykh’s
analogy between the human and divine breaths goes to the
heart of Campbell’s definition of the myth as that ‘which gives
you a line to connect with that mystery which you are’.
More than that, this vast mythologized vision of Ibn al-ʿArabī,
to which this excerpt is a mere allusion, actually provides more
details than Campbell does of the specific role that poetry, as an
instance of art, plays in the mythologized world of the spiritual
consciousness. For the Andalusian mystic, shiʿr (poetry) is an

Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabi Society, Vol. 63, 2018

emblem of kalām (speech) and, in turn, nafas (breath). It is the
constant movement of shahīq (inhalation) and zafīr (exhala-
tion) that characterizes the tones of human breaths, and from
which emanates the symphony of poetry, that the Shaykh is
able to draw the intimate analogy of al-nafas al-raḥmānī (merci-
ful breath), or nafas al-raḥmān (breath of the most merciful), as
the incessant series of divine exhalations and inhalations that
animate the universe.
Ibn al-ʿArabī further enriches this portrayal of poetry while
discussing an ancient mythological journey, the miʿrāj (ascen-
sion), in a third-person narrative. There, the Shaykh associates
some aspects of shiʿr with the figure of Jesus and second heaven:

[This heaven] is the presence of khiṭāba [eloquent address], awzān

[poetic meters], ḥusn mawāqiʿ al-kalām [the beautiful stations of
speech], imtizāj al-umūr [the mixture of affairs] and ẓuhūr al-maʿnā
al-wāḥid fī-l – ṣuwar al-kathīra [the appearance of one meaning in
many forms]. He [traveler] also obtains the furqān [clarification]
in regard to the level of kharq al-ʿawāʾid [breaking of the habits].31

Campbell would most probably agree with Ibn al-ʿArabī’s

association of poetic meters with ‘the appearance of one
meaning in many forms’, for that is how the former also
explains the magic behind films: ‘Through the multiple forms,
the form of forms out of which all of this comes is right there.’

31.  Fut.II:274.
 Ibn al-ʿArabī and Joseph Campbell 79

And yet, the Shaykh’s ability to draw the mythological

dimensions of poetry and its harmony with the human com-
position does not end here. Elsewhere in the Futūḥāt, he reveals
the secret of this affinity, which for him revolves around the
figure of Jesus, who is the custodian of the second heaven:

Know that the existent things are kalimāt Allāh [words of God]
that do not cease. God, may He be exalted, said regarding the
being of Jesus, peace be upon him, that he is: ‘His Word which
He sent to Mary’ which is Jesus, peace be upon him. It is for this
reason that we said that the existent things are the words of God.
This is from the aspect of al-dalāla al-samʿiyya [auditory proof],

Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabi Society, Vol. 63, 2018

lest people do not believe us in what we claim to have been
revealed to us or through divine instruction.
Moreover, the words known in human custom form via naẓm
al-ḥurūf [the assemblage of letters], which takes place through the
breath that exits disconnected from the one who speaks, accord-
ing to al-makhārij [pronunciation places]. It is in this way, accord-
ing to these disconnected breaths, that the essences of letters
appear in special measures and words come into being.32

In this way, Ibn al-ʿArabī embodies the sacred role of speech,

and implicitly poetry, in a creative and layered approach. First,
he tells us that the existent things are the words of God, a fact
that, when combined with his portrayal of speech as emanating
forth from breaths, means that the entire universe is a result of
divine exhalations and inhalations. Second, not only is Jesus
son of Mary one instance of these anfās of God, dressed in a
body, but he himself also embodies and performs this divine
movement by blowing breaths upon birds of clay and dead
bodies in order to bring them back to life.
Putting together these two aspects of speech, breaths and
their relationship to Jesus, in the Futūḥāt leads us to the follow-
ing reflective query: if all of creation consists of nothing but
God’s words that ‘do not cease’, and it emerges from the inces-
sant divine breaths and moves between the eternal inhalations
and exhalations according to the specific aqdār (measures), or to

32.  Fut.II:390.
80 Ali Hussain

use the Shaykh’s term: istiʿdādāt (dispositions), allotted to each

Word, then can we not also say that Ibn al-ʿArabī would con-
sider all of creation expressions of divine poetry? If the entire
universe emerges from nafas al-raḥmān (the breath of the merci-
ful), the tanfīs al-karb (release/alleviation of a calamity) which
was bestowed upon creation as a performance of unveiling
al-kanz al-makhfī (the hidden treasure), wouldn’t the Shaykh
also concur that human creativity is nothing but an intimate
mimesis, that highest form of flattery, of the divine creative
process?
Ultimately, we can describe the creative process exactly as Ibn

Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabi Society, Vol. 63, 2018

al-ʿArabī describes the emergence of speech – and poetry – as a
formed expression of the meanings that reside in the soul of
the artist. In this regard, both the Shaykh and Campbell would
agree that this cosmic art, both inside and outside the human
being, is a matrix of metaphors that alludes to the ‘spiritual
consciousness’. The latter makes this conviction vivid in state-
ments such as: ‘the myths are metaphorical of spiritual poten-
tiality in the human being, and the same powers that animate
our life.’33 However, it is also at this point that Campbell and
Ibn al-ʿArabī part ways, for their perceptions of the reality of
the metaphors and what resides beyond them is clearly dispa-
rate. This is clear when Campbell is asked: ‘So, there is no such
thing as the Garden of Eden?’ to which he responds: ‘Of course
not. The Garden of Eden is a metaphor for that innocence that
is innocent of time, innocent of opposites.’34
In contrast, Ibn al-ʿArabī would probably agree with David
Brown who sets out in his masterful work God and Mystery in
Words: Experience through Metaphor and Drama to prove the
tagline in the heading: metaphors in religious – and for our pur-
poses cosmic – literature are not merely allusions to the divine
experience, but actual paths to it. This is eloquently stated by
the author in the following excerpt concerning the Christian
sacraments:

33. Campbell, Power of Myth, p. 28.

34.  Ibid. p. 59.
 Ibn al-ʿArabī and Joseph Campbell 81

Symbols are but enacted metaphors, and so body and blood could
be viewed under either heading. But that does not mean that they
are just metaphors or just symbols. They are the means whereby
Christ’s human presence is mediated to the believer once more,
and for that to be experienced it is important that the richness of
such imagery be allowed its full force.35

Thus, unlike Campbell’s metaphor, which serves a tempo-

rary and illusive purpose in the seeker’s journey towards the
meaning or mystery that resides beyond it, Brown views it as
a crucial window through which the meaning or mystery is

Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabi Society, Vol. 63, 2018

mediated and channelled, from the ineffable to the expressible.
Meanwhile, the Andalusian mystic further extends the
importance of the metaphor beyond facilitating the divine
experience, and regards it as an indispensable component of its
spirit. Concerning the role of the metaphor, or as the Shaykh
would term it: ʿibra (expression), in mediating the journey to
God, Ibn al-ʿArabī states in the Futūḥāt:

And so, I have opened up for you the iʿtibār [taking heed] accord-
ing to the sharīʿa, and it is the passage from the form which man-
ifests its property in the sensory domain to what is interrelated in
your essence, or at the Side of the Real, from among that which
signifies God. This is the figurative meaning of iʿtibār. It is like
‘You have ʿabarta [crossed over] the valley when you have forded
it and traversed it.’36

This is why He made this life a ʿibra [example], or bridge yuʿbar

[crossed]. This means [in reality] tuʿabbar [to be interpreted], just
as dreams that human beings see while sleeping are interpreted.37

As is expected, the Shaykh poetically converges the etymo-

logical intimacy between ʿubūr (crossing over) and taʿbīr (inter-
pretation) to render the kaleidoscopic forms of creation as paths

35. David Brown, God and Mystery in Words: Experience through

Metaphor and Drama (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 9.
36.  Fut.I:347.
37.  Fut.I:207.
82 Ali Hussain

which can and should be traversed, via interpretation, to their

ultimate meanings, fī janāb al-Ḥaqq (at the side of the Real).
Although Ibn al-ʿArabī remarks, following the above state-
ment, that this world ‘is not intended for its own sake, but
for its root in the divine presence’,38 Ralph Austin emphasizes
the importance of the cosmic ṣuwar (images and forms) in the
Shaykh’s vision of the drama of divine manifestations, in the
specific context of nature’s ceremonious dress in the season of
Spring:

…when the divine munificence in nature is once more so glori-

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ously manifest after the rigour and cold of icy winter, since both
concepts have to do with the affirmation of the world, the cosmos
and its relationship with its Creator, rather than with those more
world-negating strictures of higher, spiritual aspiration which
seek to blot out its seductions.39

In other words, for Ibn al-ʿArabī, it is not only the ‘mystery’ or

‘spiritual consciousness’ – to use Campbell’s terms – of the pres-
ence of divine names and attributes that have a root ‘at the side
of the Real’, but the forms and images themselves, as vessels for
containing drops from the oceans of names, also perform and
affirm the Essence’s infinitude and iṭlāq (absoluteness), as they
depart from al-ʿadam al-muqayyad (delimited non-existence) of
immutability, to their temporary abode of contingent existence
and then to their final residence in al-ʿadam al-muṭlaq (absolute
non-existence), to make room for the next flood of forms ema-
nating from the presence of theophanies.
The root of art, at the side of the Real, is nothing but this
unfolding of the divine treasure in an endless play of forms on
the cosmic stage. Any natural or human-made imitation of this
primordial narrative, manifest in the plethora of art forms we
experience, is close or far from its divine root according to the
purity of its content and awareness of that origin. However, as
Addas highlights above, the absence of the content’s purity or

38. Ibid.
39.  Ralph Austin, ‘Image and Presence in the Thought of Ibn al-ʿArabī’,
in JMIAS 12 (1992).
 Ibn al-ʿArabī and Joseph Campbell 83

cognizance of the divine root from the intention of the human

artist does not negate its divine origin, as Campbell insists.
Rather, it becomes the task of those with the aesthetic lubb
(spiritual center) to undertake the project of tadhkira (remind-
ing) human beings of the inevitable source and ultimate des-
tination of their aesthetic dhikr (remembrance/memory), from
which emanate all artistic productions.
When Campbell is asked: ‘where are the sacred places today?’
he responds bluntly that ‘they don’t exist’, save for a few his-
torical sites that serve as a memory of a time when such sancti-
fied places predominated on the planet.40 Ibn al-ʿArabī, on the

Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabi Society, Vol. 63, 2018

other hand, reminds us that every place and person in creation,
at all times, is inherently sacred and that sacrality fully blooms
once they successfully remind us of the divine root. Art, in this
regard, is a stage for a dramatic play where the actors are special
signposts that serve as great reminders of al-janāb al-ilāhī, if it
is approached and appreciated by the insight of the aesthetic
spirit. Where art seems to function in Ibn al-ʿArabī’s vision is as
the window into the ḥayra (perplexity) of creation, in a contin-
uous movement between existence and non-existence, huwa/lā
huwa.
‘Reality is perplexity, perplexity is anxiety and movement
and movement is life … no stillness, no death. Only being and
no nihility!’41 That is the abode of art, between the suffering
of distance, ‘the rigor and cold of icy winter’, and redemption
of nearness, ‘the affirmation of Spring’; both the constrictive
beginning and expansive culmination ‘affirm the cosmos and
its relationship with its Creator’. If Campbell’s preliminary
outline of our ‘spiritual consciousness’ and its emergence in the
myth of our outward existence so inspired George Lucas that he
embodied it in what John Caputo aptly termed ‘a reproduction
of classic myth’, Star Wars,42 then how much more insightful

40. Ibid.
41.  Fuṣūṣ, p. 199.
42.  Bill Moyers often discusses Campbell’s influence on Lucas, as a men-
tor, inspiration and motivation behind Star Wars: ‘Lucas and Campbell had
become good friends after the filmmaker, acknowledging a debt to Camp-
bell’s work, invited the scholar to view the Star Wars trilogy. Campbell
84 Ali Hussain

is Ibn al-ʿArabī’s ḥayra of tajalliyāt and wujūd as a lens through

which to appreciate Lucas’ ‘force’, which Yoda describes as that
which ‘Life [al-Ḥayy] creates … makes it grow. Its energy sur-
rounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude
matter. You must feel the Force around you. Here, between you,
me, the tree, the rock, everywhere!’43
In the Mysticism of Sound and Music, Hazrat Inayat Khan
begins by asking: ‘Why is music called the divine art? …
[Because] sound alone is free from form.’44 This initial eloquent
attempt to glean the various art forms from their divine roots
blooms in the mystic’s later statement that ‘what the art of

Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabi Society, Vol. 63, 2018

painting cannot clearly suggest, poetry explains in words, but
that which even a poet finds difficult to express in poetry, is
expressed in music’.45 This particular sentiment finds harmony
in Ibn al-ʿArabī’s Weltanschauung, as the latter also describes
poetry as ‘the abode of comprehensiveness, symbols, allusions
and insinuations’.46 In this light, Hazrat Inayat Khan’s prelimi-
nary outline paves the way for us to undertake a later, more
extensive, project of situating the divine root of these various
art forms (painting, poetry and music) within Ibn al-ʿArabī’s
vision.
Our contemporary world has experienced – and continues
to experience – drastic and fast-changing developments in art
forms and styles. In the realm of film alone, we have witnessed
a flourishing of the ‘superhero’ genre, the success of which

reveled in the ancient themes and motifs of mythology unfolding on the

wide screen in powerful contemporary images. On this particular visit,
having again exulted over the perils and heroics of Luke Skywalker, Joe
grew animated as he talked about how Lucas “has put the newest and
most powerful spin” to the classic story of the hero’ (Campbell, Power of
Myth, p. xiii).
43.  George Lucas, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Washington, DC,
Lucasfilm, 1980).
44. Hazrat Inayat Khan, The Mysticism of Sound and Music: The Sufi
Teaching of Hazrat Inayat Khan (Boston, Shambhala Publications, 1991),
p. 2.
45.  Ibid. p. 4.
46.  Fut.I:56.
 Ibn al-ʿArabī and Joseph Campbell 85

should be partially attributed to Star Wars, a saga that continues

to live in its eighth iteration. Why are the masses so fascinated
and willing to pay millions to watch endless reincarnations of
Ironman, Thor, Spiderman, Black Panther, Superman and Batman?
Perhaps these figures are great visual signposts of the sacred
human potential, as a perplexing nexus between the finitude
of bodies and infinitude of the divine spirit, and our struggle
against the suffering and ‘rigor of the cold icy winter’ of evil
villainy, while striving for the redemption, ‘affirmation’ and
triumph of goodness.
Perhaps there is also a similar reason why the motif of ‘zombie

Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabi Society, Vol. 63, 2018

apocalypse’ has flourished in productions like The Walking
Dead,47 Z-Nation48 and World War Z,49 for this latter genre
reminds us subconsciously, and unequivocally gruesomely, of
a certain chaos in forms, the fear of their inevitable transition
to absolute non-existence. This theme has likewise found other,
more colourful expressions, in recent video games like The Last
of Us50 and Horizon: Zero Dawn,51 where the unrelenting misery
of annihilation is eventually overwhelmed by the redemption
of the mythic hero who redeems their forsaken world somehow,
through an act of kindness. Indeed, the medium of video games
has long shed the reputation of ‘empty entertainment’; this
much is clear in Thatgamecompany’s masterful virtualization of
taḥqīq in their game Journey.52
And so, the contemporary cultural soil is fertile for a mean-
ingful engagement with Ibn al-ʿArabī’s divine illumination.
What the Shaykh can grant us in this journey is a spiritual
prism through which our most revered artistic cultural forms
can be unveiled and witnessed as mimesis of that primordial
divine theater. This is also a call to liberate modern art from the
censures of unrooted religious law, in order to deliver it to the

47.  David Alpert and Gale Hurd, The Walking Dead (2010).
48.  Craig Engler and Karl Schaefer, Z Nation (2014).
49. Matthew Carnahan, Drew Goddard et al., World War Z (London,
2013).
50.  Neil Druckmann, The Last of Us (2014).
51.  John Gonzales, Ben Schroder et al., Horizon: Zero Dawn (2017).
52.  Robin Hunicke and Kellee Santiago, Journey (2012).
86 Ali Hussain

shore of Dīn al-Ḥaqq, where even an artistic expression as foul

as the fish Ibn al-ʿArabī carried can be appreciated as a vessel
of divine care and the merciful gaze. Campbell also instructs
us that ‘artists communicate the myth today … they have to
understand mythology and humanity’;53 between him and Ibn
al-ʿArabī we come to understand that the complete artist is a
perfect saint, and both are portraits of the Perfect Man.

Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabi Society, Vol. 63, 2018

53. Campbell, Power of Myth, p. 122.