3.4.6 - The Deterioration of the Situation in Andalusia

In the first chapter, we mentioned how the conflict with the Spanish Christians began to worsen in Andalusia when Sultan Yaqoub Ibn Yusuf Ibn Abdul-Momin was preoccupied with suppressing the revolutions against him in north Africa. When Alfonso VI (the Adventist) felt the weakness of the Muslims, he broke the truce and his armies wreaked havoc in Andalusia. He also sent a letter to Sultan Yaqoub in Marrakesh, mocking Muslims and inviting him to fight. Sultan Yaqoub answered him on the back of his letter, beginning with the words of prophet Solomon, peace be upon him, as Allah the Almighty said in Surat An-Naml (the Ants): ((Return to them, for we will surely come to them with soldiers that they will be powerless to encounter, and we will surely expel them therefrom in humiliation, and they will be debased.)) [Quran, 27:37], then he said to him: “The answer is what you see, not what you hear”, and he began to prepare and collect armies for the famous battle of the Ark on the ninth of Shaaban in 591 AH, which ended with a landslide victory for Muslims who stormed the fortress of Ark, and the castle of Rabah and other castles nearby.

With the beginning of the outbreak of these wars and skirmishes between Christians and Muslims in Andalusia, the Greatest Shaykh began his second journey to the Maghreb again, where he left for the city of Fez, where he stayed for a period, and then returned to Seville for another period and then returned back to Fez again, where he stayed for several years. Some Western writers tried to challenge Ibn al-Arabi and accuse him of having fled the war and returned after it ended, and that when he found the situation unstable in Andalusia, he fled again to Maghreb [D. Urvoy, Le Monde des Ulémas andalous, Genève: Droz, 1978, p. 191.]. However, Claudia Addas clearly refuted this claim, because Ibn al-Arabi left Andalusia in 593/1197 after Alfonso’s disastrous defeat at the Ark and after the Spanish threat was eradicated at the time [Search for Red Sulfur: p. 134].

It seems clear that Ibn al-Arabi’s many journeys between Andalusia and Maghreb had nothing to do with the wars that had been going on from time to time in those areas, because Ibn al-Arabi was seeking the shaykhs and educators as we saw in his first trip to Tunisia. At that time, the city of Fez was the stronghold of Sufism in Maghreb, a city chosen by Shaykh Abu Madyan to receive his Sufi upbringing, and in which he met his Shaykh Abu al-Hasan Ali Ibn Herzahum (d. 559/1165) and Abu Abdullah al-Daqaq and other famous Shaykhs who spread Sufism in Maghreb and Andalusia, especially in Fez. One of the companions of Shaykh Muhyiddin, Shaykh Muhammad Ibn Abdul-Karim al-Tamimi al-Fassi, wrote a precious book of the biographies of these shaykhs, that he called “al-Mustafid”, which we will mention further below.