The Reality and Image of the Prophet according to the Theologian and Poet ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī

ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī (d. 1143/1731) was a prominent Damascene scholar and spiritual master and, at the same time, one of the most productive poets of his time. Both his Sufi teaching and his poetic oeuvre have the luminous “Muḥammadan Reality” (ḥaqīqa muḥammadiyya) as their main axis, which can be experienced in dreams or visions in a waking state, linked to the intermediary sphere between the spiritual and material worlds (barzakh), where divine and higher realities take on visible forms. In such visions the Prophet can be perceived in an authentic way, either in his physical appearance as described in ḥadīth (the so-called ḥilya), or in purely symbolic and imaginary forms. This is where poetry with its rhetorical figures (badīʿ) and images comes in to exalt the “Muḥammadan Reality” in the language of love and passion. For Nābulusī, the interior immersion in the presence of the Prophet justifies all forms of devotion and can manifest itself even in Christian imagery, as attested in his own poems. The chapter draws parallels between his theory of a spiritual and symbolic Muḥammadan imagery and the Christian theology of iconic images, as developed in Arabic already by Abū Qurra (d. 830), bishop of Harran, in an Islamic context. It also refers for this to ʿAbd al-Ghanī’s substantial intellectual exchange with one of the leading Christian Orthodox bishops and theologians of his time in the Levant.