The Nightfolk: Ibn ‘Arabi Behind the Veil of Night

The night plays an important role in many Muslim cultures and religious beliefs. During Ramadan Muslims will often do nightly prayers called Tarawih, where they can ask for forgiveness and receive rewards. On one night, in the last 10 days of Ramadan, Muslims try to discern when the Night of Power or Laylat Al-Qadr is. According to Islamic beliefs, this is the night when the Holy Quran was first revealed and where Muslims can receive extra blessings for prayers and good deeds done during this time. While this demonstrates some nights have special significance in normative Muslims beliefs, some Muslim scholars think the night has even more importance than this. Twelfth century sufi poet, scholar, and philosopher Muhyi Al-Din Ibn Arabi believed that a select group of spiritual practitioners had greater insight into the divine, the Nightfolk or Ahl Al-Layl. Dunja Rasic’s new book The Nightfolk: Ibn Arabi Behind the Veil of Night explores Ibn Arabi’s writings on this mysterious group. 

Ibn Arabi’s road to wisdom began with a strange encounter in Makkah, where a young man was circling the Kaaba. The poet described the young man as an ‘elusive, silent speaker, neither living nor dead.’ The man took Ibn Arabi on a spiritual journey that would change his life forever, it is not clear who the young man described was with some scholars arguing he was Ibn Arabi himself, while others think the young man was the First Intellect or Al-Aql Al-Awwal, a being believed to be the first created spirit that represented the highest spiritual reality. The encounter allowed Ibn Arabi to ascend spiritually and to experience the divine unveiled. Ibn Arabi concluded that while all people were created in God’s form, only a small group of people not only understood the Divine Names of God, but also knew the realities of them and were able to take this knowledge and apply them. They were able to put things in their proper divine order and God uses them to enact reward, punishment, rules, measures and to establish and dismantle cosmic order. These were perfect human beings and they carried out key spiritual practices at night. 

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The actual spiritual practice of the Nightfolk is a mystery, but as Rasic notes, ‘Ibn Arabi was, however, instructed to disclose their pre-eminence to the world and, more importantly, to the Nightfolk themselves!’ The book draws a lot of Ibn Arabi’s descriptions of the Nightfolk from his work Al-Futuhat Al-Makkiyya, one of his most important publications. For Ibn Arabi, according to Rasic, the night was significant partly because it acted as a veil, it conceals things and it makes the visible world dissolve. This confuses the human mind and for many the darkness of the night can be compared to nonexistence. Humans do most of their activities from work to learning during the day, the nighttime represents the end of human knowledge. However, ‘behind the veil of the night, God converses with the Nightfolk. Most people have no knowledge of either the veil or the veiled.’ In other words, the night offers the Nightfolk the possibility of conversations with God and from these discussions perceive reality more fully. The notion of the night offering such divine possibilities was unknown to the Arabs until the Prophet Muhammad [PBUH] according to Ibn Arabi. ‘God reveals the totality of knowledge to the Nightfolk when teaching them the content of the Qur’an and He also fulfils all their needs and wishes under the cover of the night.’ 

The book goes on to explore who might the Nightfolk be, based on the criteria Ibn Arabi sets out. The Nightfolk tries to explore the historical contexts of Ibn Arabi’s ideas, the notion the night has knowledge to offer and has a hidden metaphysical quality is not unique to Ibn Arabi. Rasic traces the idea from the seventh century until the twelfth century, when Ibn Arabi wrote his book, demonstrating a lively discourse across the Islamic world. Rasic compares this to sacred notions of the night in other cultures and religious traditions, which offers the book a unique perspective that allows scholars to think through both universals and particulars of metaphysical beliefs about the dark night sky. The Nightfolk would also appeal to people interested in philosophy and how different times and societies dealt with the limits of knowledge. Ibn Arabi offers a case study of the creative ways philosophers, poets and sufi scholars try to navigate these limits and find ways to expand human knowledge.   

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