Ibn Arabi Society Bay Area Meeting: A Workshop with Oludamini Ogunnaike

'Those who believe are more intense in love': Ibn al-'Arabi and the Paradoxes of Love

Love is mysterious and many splendored—the source of our greatest joys and deepest sorrows; easy to talk and sing about, but impossible to define. “One who defines love has not known it, and one who has not tasted it by drinking it down, has not known it,” writes Ibn al-‘Arabi.

While Rumi is more associated with love in the contemporary imagination, love is equally central to the writings and tradition of the great Andalusian writer, thinker, and spiritual teacher, Ibn Al-‘Arabi (d. 1240), known as al-Shaykh al-Akbar (The Greatest Master). Through an examination of his commentaries on two verses of the Qur’an (2:165 and 45:23), and exploration of the paradoxes and seeming contradictions therein, this workshop will explore how love is key to understanding Ibn Al-‘Arabi’s vast and kaleidoscopic oeuvre, and how these writings and perspectives can, in turn, help us better understand the undefinable nature of love and longing. For Ibn Al-‘Arabi,  love is more than a feeling, it is the fundamental nature of consciousness, God, and reality itself.

This day-long seminar is hosted by the Ibn Arabi Society USA and is open to anyone with interest in these themes from whatever background, with or without prior knowledge of Ibn ‘Arabi, but registration is required.

Oludamini Ogunnaike is an Associate Professor of African Religious Thought at the University of Virginia specializing in the intellectual and aesthetic dimensions of West and North African Sufism and Yoruba oriṣa traditions. He is the author of Deep Knowledge: Ways of Knowing in Sufism and Ifa, Two West African Intellectual Traditions (Penn State University Press, 2020) winner of the ASWAD's (Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora) Outstanding First Book Prize and Poetry in Praise of Prophetic Perfection: West African Madīḥ Poetry and its Precedents (Islamic Texts Society, 2020). He is currently working on two book projects, The Logic of the Birds: An Introduction to Sufi Poetry and Poetics and a book on Yoruba Mythology.

He received his PhD in African and African American studies and Religion at Harvard University and his A.B. in African Studies and Cognitive Neuroscience from Harvard College. 

Oludamini Ogunnaike is a Board Member of the Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society USA.  

To learn more about the Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society, visit https://ibnarabisociety.org/