Ibn al-FāriḍArab poet in full Sharaf al-Dīn Abū Ḥafṣ ʿUmar ibn al-Fāriḍ

born March 22, 1181 or March 11, 1182, Cairo died Jan. 23, 1235, Cairo

Arab poet whose expression of Sufi mysticism is regarded as the finest in the Arabic language.

Son of a Syrian-born inheritance-law functionary, Ibn al-Fāriḍ studied for a legal career but abandoned law for a solitary religious life in the Muqaṭṭam hills near Cairo. He spent some years in or near Mecca, where he met the renowned Sufi al-Suhrawardī of Baghdad. Venerated as a saint during his lifetime, Ibn al-Fāriḍ was buried in the Muqaṭṭam hills, where his tomb is still visited.

Many of Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s poems are qaṣīdah (“odes”) on the lover’s longing for reunion with his beloved. He expresses through this convention his yearning for a return to Mecca and, at a deeper level, a desire to be assimilated into the spirit of Muhammad, first projection of the Godhead. He developed this theme at length in Naẓm as-sulūk (Eng. trans. by A.J. Arberry, The Poem of the Way, 1952). Almost equally famous is his “Khamrīyah” (“Wine Ode”; Eng. trans., with other poems, in Reynold Alleyne Nicholson’s Studies in Islamic Mysticism [1921] and in The Mystical Poems of Ibn al-Fāriḍ, translated by A.J. Arberry [1956]). This long qaṣīdah describes the effects of the wine of divine love. Although Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s poetry is mannered in style, with rhetorical embellishments and conventional imagery, his poems contain passages of striking beauty and deep religious feeling.