Sufism

Ibn al-Farid wrote of wine that was pressed before the vine and grape existed — the wine of pre-eternal love

Ibn al-Farid opens his most famous poem with a paradox - a wine that predates the very fruit it should be made from - to signal that the intoxication he means is not physical at all.

The opening lines of Khamriyya, The Wine Ode, describe a wine that intoxicated the drinker before the creation of the vine, a deliberately impossible image that immediately signals the poem is operating symbolically rather than describing literal drinking. Ibn al-Farid (1181-1235), an Egyptian poet regarded as one of the great masters of Arabic mystical verse, uses this pre-eternal wine to represent love of God existing prior to and independent of creation itself - a love the soul is said to have tasted before it ever entered a body. Because the wine precedes even the material that would normally produce it, its intoxication cannot be explained by anything within the created order, and the poem insists the reader look past chronology to a spiritual reality logically prior to everything else. The Khamriyya became one of the most commented-upon poems in the Sufi tradition precisely because of this densely layered symbolic opening.

Khamriyya (The Wine Ode)

Written about in

• What Sufism says about longing and separation

  Ibn al-Farid opens his best-known poem with a wine drunk before the vine existed. The impossible date is the signal: the intoxication he means is older than anything that could be poured.