Seeking the Mother-God: Divine Maternity in Islamic and Christian Contemplative Texts
Nottingham Medieval Studies January 1, 2025 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.1484/j.nms.5.151488 via Semantic Scholar
Summary
Divine maternity appears in both Christian and Sufi texts from the 1170s to 1250 as a central way of imagining God and the relationship between worshiper and the Divine. This article examines these traditions side-by-side, analyzing the anonymous Christian works Ancrene Wisse and the Wooing Group alongside writings by the Sufis Ibn ʿArabī, ʿAṭṭār, and Ibn al-Fāriḍ. Maternity is shown to be a crucial concept for conceiving the Divine in both bodies of literature.
Study at a glance
| Design | theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Key finding | Maternity is a crucial way of conceiving the Divine and configuring the devotee-Divine relationship in both Christian and Sufi texts from the 1170s to 1250. |
Abstract
This article adopts a multi-directional gaze to consider Christian and Sufi texts side-by-side, in a study of Divine maternity across both bodies of literature. In both the Christian and the Sufi texts, maternity is a crucial way of conceiving the Divine, and is a crucial configuration of the relationship between devotee and Divine. The texts are all chronologically close, spanning the 1170s to 1250: the anonymous texts Ancrene Wisse and the Wooing Group ( c. 1230), and the works by the Sufis Muḥyddin Ibn ʿArabī (1165–1240), Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār ( c. 1145–1220), and ʿUmar Ibn al-Fāriḍ (1181–1235).