The tarjuman’s scold

What you are sensing is quite accurate: the Tarjumān al-Ashwāq is intentionally destabilizing as a reading experience. Ibn ʿArabī is doing something that is at once mystical, rhetorical, and deeply literary. Let me unpack this in three layers: (1) what the Tarjumān is, (2) who/what al-ʿādhil is, and (3) comparative examples of the “scolding critic” in world literature, with a brief quantitative/linguistic angle where it helps.

1. What

Tarjumān al-Ashwāq

actually is

Title meaning

• Tarjumān = interpreter, translator, spokesman

• Ashwāq = longings, ardent desires

So the book is “The Interpreter of Longings”—not the expression of longing itself, but its translation into poetry.

Genre-wise, it is hybrid:

From a comparative literature perspective, it sits at the intersection of:

• Arabic love lyric (nasīb / ghazal)

• Sufi symbolic autobiography

• Exegetical performance (since Ibn ʿArabī later writes a prose commentary explaining the poems)

This already makes it unusual: the poet writes love poetry, then defends and re-reads himself against accusations of erotic literalism.

Why it feels strange

Because the poems:

• shift pronouns rapidly

• blur human/divine referents

• oscillate between sincerity and self-defense

• constantly change who is speaking to whom

This is not accidental confusion; it is a designed polyphony.

2. Who (or what) is

al-ʿādhil

?

Basic meaning

• al-ʿādhil (العاذل) = the reproacher, blamer, scolder

• A stock figure in classical Arabic love poetry

Traditionally, al-ʿādhil is:

• a friend

• a moralist

• a social voice of propriety

  
  

  who tells the lover:

“Enough. This love will ruin you.”

What Ibn ʿArabī does with it

He radicalizes the figure.

In Tarjumān:

• al-ʿādhil is external (critics accusing him of licentious poetry)

• al-ʿādhil is internal (his own rational, juridical, or ascetic conscience)

• al-ʿādhil is theological (a voice demanding doctrinal clarity)

• al-ʿādhil is the reader themselves

So when the poet answers the scold, he is:

• defending mystical love

• disciplining his ego

• staging an inner dialectic

This aligns perfectly with what the passage you quoted describes: the critic “within the poet.”

3. Comparative literature perspective: the “scold” as a universal figure

The al-ʿādhil is not uniquely Arabic. It is a transcultural rhetorical device.

A. Classical & Medieval examples

1. Ovid (Roman elegy)

• The poet argues with Reason or Friends who tell him to abandon love.

• Amores repeatedly dramatizes the tension between passion and propriety.

2. Dante (Vita Nuova & Divine Comedy)

• The voice of ragione scolds the lover for idolatry.

• Later, Beatrice herself becomes a holy reproacher, humiliating Dante into transformation.

3. Petrarch

• Laura vs. Christian conscience

• The poet explicitly stages a dialogue between desire and moral self-surveillance.

B. Early modern & Romantic literature

4. Shakespeare

• Sonnets often contain a self-reproaching voice:

  
  

  “I am that I am”—and I know better.

• The scold appears as Time, Reason, or the poet’s own shame.

5. Milton

• In Paradise Lost, the internal accuser becomes conscience itself.

• Satan is, paradoxically, his own al-ʿādhil.

C. Modern literature

6. Rilke

• The “You must change your life” moment (Archaic Torso of Apollo) is a pure scolding voice.

• No external moralist—only an internal imperative.

7. T.S. Eliot

• Prufrock is almost entirely a dialogue with an internal critic:

  
  

  “Do I dare?”

• The scold paralyzes rather than reforms.

8. Dostoevsky

• Characters like Ivan Karamazov contain internal prosecutors.

• Consciousness becomes a courtroom.

4. Quantitative / linguistic angle (brief but useful)

Across traditions, the scold correlates with identifiable linguistic features:

A. Pronoun instability

• Rapid shifts between I / you / he

• In Arabic rhetoric, this is iltifāt (the turning you saw mentioned)

Quantitatively, texts with strong al-ʿādhil presence show:

• high frequency of second-person address

• abrupt tense changes

• interrogatives and imperatives (“Why do you…?”)

B. Dialogic density

Bakhtinian terms apply well:

• The poem is heteroglossic—multiple voices coexist

• The lyric “I” is fractured

In Tarjumān, this fragmentation mirrors wahdat al-wujūd:

multiplicity of voices within unity of being

5. Why Ibn ʿArabī

needed

al-ʿādhil

Without the scold:

• the poetry could be dismissed as sensual

• the mystical tension would collapse

• the reader would not be forced into interpretive labor

The scold:

• activates the reader

• forces ethical and theological reflection

• mirrors the Sufi path itself: attraction → blame → purification → return

6. A simple way to read

Tarjumān

going forward

When the poems feel disorienting, ask:

1. Who is being addressed right now?

2. Is this voice exterior or interior?

3. Is the scold restraining desire—or refining it?

Seen this way, Tarjumān is not chaotic.

It is a disciplined chaos, designed to enact the spiritual psychology it describes.

If you’d like, next we could:

• walk through one specific poem and map its voices line by line

• compare Tarjumān directly with Rumi’s ghazals or Hafez

• or look at how Ibn ʿArabī’s prose commentaries function as a second, scolding voice

Just tell me where you’d like to go.