zahir-batin-relation

Active relation: aspect. The famous catalogue of sanctuaries (gazelle-meadow, monks’ cloister, idol-house, Kaʿba, Torah-tablets, Qurʾan-codex) is the zahir; the batin is that the heart, as qābil kulli ṣūra, is the locus in which each of these is disclosed as a form (ṣūra) of the Real. The list is not religious indifferentism but a metaphysical claim: every confessional form is an aspect of a single self-disclosure (tajallī), and the heart of the ʿārif is the mirror in which they coincide. The closing distich names the inner orientation — maḥabba — that grounds the outer plurality. Nicholson, R. A. 1911, p. 67-70; Chittick, William C. 1989, p. 106-112

qabilan

qābil here is technical: in the Akbarian lexicon the qābil is the recipient-correlate of fayḍ (effusion) and tajallī (self-disclosure). The heart’s becoming qābil kulli ṣūra is not mere metaphorical openness; it is the realization that the heart (qalb, etymologically ‘that which turns/inverts’) is the only created locus capacious enough to mirror every form of the Real’s self-disclosure. Cf. Futūḥāt I.219 and the ḥadīth qudsī ‘My heavens and My earth contain Me not, but the heart of My believing servant contains Me.’ Ibn ʿArabī, Muḥyī al-Dīn, p. I.219

kaʿba-tāʾif

kaʿbatu ṭāʾifin: literally ‘a Kaʿba of a circumambulator.’ The grammatical inversion (the Kaʿba belongs to the ṭāʾif rather than the reverse) is doctrinally pointed — every ṭāʾif’s qibla is constituted in the act of turning toward it. This anticipates ‘wherever its mounts turn’ in the closing distich: the qibla is wherever love directs, not a fixed point.

rakāʾibuhu

rakāʾib (mounts, riding-camels) is the conventional Arabic poetic figure for the caravan of the beloved; ‘wherever its mounts turn’ positions love as a moving qibla. The line is among the most cited in the Tarjumān and was the focus of orthodox suspicion that prompted Ibn ʿArabī’s own Dhakhāʾir al-aʿlāq commentary defending the poem as wholly metaphysical. Ibn ʿArabī, Muḥyī al-Dīn

Editorial decisions

• religion-of-love. Rendered ‘the religion of love’ rather than ‘the creed of love’ or ‘the law of love’ to preserve the surface confession; the obligation-sense of dīn is surfaced in the ambiguities array rather than chosen on the surface. (editor-machine, 2025-01-15)
• kaʿba-tāʾif-construction. Preserved the iḍāfa ‘the Kaʿba of the circumambulator’ rather than smoothing to ‘the pilgrim’s Kaʿba’ so that the doctrinal point (the qibla is constituted by the turning) survives. (editor-machine, 2025-01-15)

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Reynold A. Nicholson, 1911

Rendering: My heart has become capable of every form: it is a pasture for gazelles and a convent for Christian monks, / And a temple for idols and the pilgrim’s Kaʿba and the tables of the Tora and the book of the Koran. / I follow the religion of Love: whatever way Love’s camels take, that is my religion and my faith.

Agreement: substantial — Nicholson renders qābilan as ‘capable of,’ which is grammatically defensible but loses the technical Akbarian sense of qābil as ontological correlate of tajallī. He also flattens ‘kaʿbatu ṭāʾifin’ to ‘the pilgrim’s Kaʿba,’ obscuring the constitutive role of the turning. His ‘temple for idols’ is acceptable; ‘tables’ for alwāḥ is archaic but accurate.

Chunk id

ibn-arabi.tarjuman.11.13-15

Frame controllers

zahir-batin

Model

claude-opus-4-7

Glossary revision

akbarian-sufism-v1.0

Frame controllers version

1.0

Drafted at

2026-05-08T05:21:52Z

Passes run

crib, faithful

Drift audit

skipped

Prompt hash

sha256:126adb9fe35ef03a

Glossary updates proposed

• qābil (قابل): Add as controlled term. Selected sense: ‘recipient-correlate’ or ‘receptive-locus.’ Active senses: receptive, accepting, ontological correlate of tajallī/fayḍ. Forbidden renderings: ‘capable of,’ ‘able to receive’ (when used in technical contexts). Note: in Akbarian usage qābil names the structural counterpart of the disclosing Real; flattening it to ‘capable’ loses the metaphysical content. (Appears in this chunk in technical sense (‘qābilan kulla ṣūra’) and recurs throughout the Futūḥāt and Fuṣūṣ. Currently rendered ad hoc; controlled rendering would stabilize the wujud/tajallī/qābil triad in English.)
• qalb (قلب): Add as controlled term. Selected sense: ‘heart’ (with etymological gloss). Active senses: heart, that-which-turns/inverts, the locus capacious of the Real. Note: when the q-l-b root is in play (as it arguably is in this poem with its imagery of turning mounts and shifting qiblas), surface the etymology in the apparatus. (qalb in Akbarian metaphysics is technical and the q-l-b/turning wordplay is recurrent. Controlled handling would let translators decide consistently when to surface the etymology.)
• dīn (دين): Add as controlled term. Selected sense: ‘religion’ (default surface), with active senses: religion, judgment/obligation, requital. Forbidden renderings when context activates the obligation-sense: ‘creed’ alone, ‘faith’ alone. Note: the verb adīnu/dāna and the noun dīn share the polysemy; preserve in apparatus when both senses are live. (Central term in this passage and across the corpus; the polysemy (religion/judgment) is doctrinally exploited by Ibn ʿArabī and others.)