8vo. 91 pp., 1 plate at rear, slightly faded, small vignette at end, Arabic text within borders, double column to the page, new cloth spine with contemporary rubbed boards, new end papers, first three leaves detached, book plate of St Bede’s College on verso lower cover, foxing to last couple of leaves, otherwise copy in good condition, al-Matba’a al-Umumiyya, Beirut, 1866.

Synopsis

Ibn al-Farid (1181-1235) was an Arab poet. He was born in Cairo, lived for some time in Mecca and died in Cairo. His poetry is entirely Sufic, and he was esteemed as the greatest mystic poet of the Arabs. Some of his poems are thought to have been written during ecstasy.
The poetry of Ibn al-Farid is considered by many to be the pinnacle of Arabic mystical verse, though surprisingly, he is not widely known in the West. (Rumi, who is probably the best known of the great Sufi poets in the West, wrote primarily in Persian, not Arabic.) Ibn al-Farid’s two masterpieces are The Wine Ode, a beautiful meditation on the “wine” of divine bliss, and The Poem of the Sufi Way, a profound exploration of spiritual experience along the Sufi Path and perhaps the longest mystical poem composed in Arabic. Both poems have inspired in-depth spiritual commentaries throughout the centuries, and Sufis and other devout Muslims still reverently memorise them today.