Observations placeholder
Ibn El-Arabi - Henry Corbin - Sura Yasin
Identifier
001078
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Henry Corbin – Alone with the Alone
It was at this time that Ibn 'Arabi's visionary aptitudes became apparent. He fell gravely ill; his fever brought on a state of profound lethargy. While those about him thought him dead, he in his inward universe was besieged by a troop of menacing, diabolical figures.
But then there arose a marvellously beautiful being, exhaling a sweet perfume, who with invincible force repulsed the demonic figures.
"Who are you?" Ibn' Arabi asked him.
"I am the Sura Yasin."
His anguished father at his bedside was indeed reciting that sura (the thirty-sixth of the Koran), which is intoned specifically for the dying. Such was the energy released by the spoken Word that the person corresponding to it took form in the subtile intermediate world - a phenomenon not at all rare in religious experience. This was one of Ibn 'Arabi's first entrances into the 'alam al-mithal, the world of real and subsistent Images ……