The Tarjuman al-Ashwaq

In 1215, while on pilgrimage in Mecca, Ibn al-'Arabi met Nizam: the learned and devout daughter of a Persian shaykh. He wrote her sixty-one love poems. When devout readers accused him of writing mere erotic verse, he spent the rest of his life insisting the poems were nothing of the kind, and wrote a commentary on his own work explaining what each image was meant to carry. Both are in this volume: the odes, and the defence.

"My heart has become capable of every form," he writes. "I follow the religion of Love: whatever way Love's camels take, that is my religion and my faith."

This edition is Reynold A. Nicholson's 1911 translation, made for the Royal Asiatic Society, reproduced in full with his preface, introduction, commentary, footnotes and index. The text was collated line by line against the original 1911 printing; thirteen substantive errors in the digitised source were found and corrected, and every correction, emendation and editorially supplied word is recorded in a Note on the Text. Nicholson's index has been re-keyed so that each entry is a working link.

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