What is Islamic Art

Rains burst like tears of a lover

torn asunder

from the one he loves.

The transportation of the subject emergesfirst through sorrow for the loss

of the beloved, then through wine. The wine transports the reader to its

initial fermentation:

Drink this ancient wine,

drink deeply–

Let the spell of its song take you–

Wine transforms into song–the lyric of the poem which is transporting us

on this journey, reaching all the way to the beginning of humanity in the

garden of paradise.

Wine of the age of Adam! bearing word,

assured Hadith, down

the generations,

from the garden of sanctuary:

this wine, sweet

as a rush of musk

wine tasted on the lips’

elixir kiss,

of signoras,

given me freely by signorinas.^62

The physical wine intertwines with song and lovemaking. It sensually

draws ibn Arabi back to his pre-revelatory experience with women (in

his youth in Spain). Yet the wine is also the iteration of the word of God as

set in the descent of Adam and passed, likeHadith, across generations.

Although a juridical reading of the canonicalHadithwould forbid wine, a

metaphorical understanding of bothHadithand wine allows the one to

function as the other: the wine traversing time to entice and enchant the

beloved is also the guidance of God as embodied in theHadithsince the

beginning of time.

Connections between worldly lust, intoxication, and music remained a

mainstay of Islamic poetry. The Arabic-language lyric poems of Rumi and

the widely read Persian lyric poems in theDivan(collected works) of Hafez

(^62) Sells, 2008: 5–7.
74 Seeing with the Ear