3.4.3 - The Men of the Unseen (Seville, 590/1194)

The Greatest Shaykh says that there no one single person, or any group whether small or large, except that they accompanied by one of “the men of the unseen” (rijal al-ghayb), so when they talk, then that one transmits their news in the world, and sometimes people may realize that in themselves when they meet in congregation, or when someone talk with himself something that (they think that) no one knows except Allah, yet later they may find or hear people talking about it!

In this regard, on his return to Seville, after three-month caravan journey from Tunis, a complete stranger came to him and recited, word for word, the poem he had composed in the oratory of Ibn al-Muthanna, as we quoted in section

ef(maqsura above, although he had not written it out for anyone, as we mentioned. When he asked him: who had composed these lines, the stranger replied that they were by Muhammad Ibn al-Arabi, and he mentioned the very day on which he had composed them, despite the great distance! He then asked him: who had recited them to him? He said, “One night I was sitting at a session of the brothers in the eastern part of Seville, when a stranger, who looked like a mendicant, came and sat with us. After conversing with us, he recited the lines. We liked them so much, and we wrote them down and asked him who had composed them. He said: they were being composed by Ibn al-Arabi in the oratory of Ibn al-Muthanna. We told him we had never heard of such a place in our country. He replied that it was in Tunis and that the lines had just been composed there. After we memorized them, we missed him and did not know where or how did he go away from us, and we did not see him afterwards” [Futuhat: III.339].