Sh. Muhyiddin Ibn al-ʿArabī

07 Achieving ‘The Heart’s Life With God: maʿrifa

In Samʿānī’s terms, achieving ‘the heart’s life with God’ – an achievement that I take as the goal of the intellectual tradition – demands maʿrifa, ‘recognition.’

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Scholars like myself typically waffle^[6] when translating this word. In verbal form we use ‘know’ or ‘recognize,’ and as a noun we translate it as knowledge, science, and, particularly in the context of Sufism, gnosis.

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The active participle of the word, ʿārif, is typically translated as ‘gnostic.’ Another noun from the same root, ʿirfān, which in classical texts means exactly the same thing as maʿrifa, has come to be used in recent centuries to designate Sufism in its more theoretical forms.

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But English has no verb for gnosis, so the specific characteristics of maʿrifa get lost in translation.