Hermeneutics and Sufi Texts: A Literary Analysis of the Sufi Poetry in The Dīwān of ‛Umar Ibn al-Fāriḍ (576-632 AH/ 1181-1235 AD)

The present paper offers a new approach to the poetry of the Egyptian Sufi poet 'Umar Ibn al-Fāriḍ (576-632AH/ 1181-1235AD). This approach is based on the text of Ibn al- Fāriḍ's Great Sufi Poem, al-Tā'iyyat al-kubrā, in which the poet has expressed in full his spiritual experience. First, the basic hermeneutical question is discussed, e.g., what is the way of approaching a literary text in order to understand the experience of the poet? In the present paper, we deal with a Sufi text and its context. We deal, first of all, with the basic relationship between text and experience. To what extent does the author express his inner world in verbal expressions? In the end, we find that there is always a distance between the interior experience of a Sufi and his verbal expression. Then we find the three steps one has to cross in order to reach the final understanding of the text through the 'fusion of horizons' proposed by Gadamer, in which an understanding of the poet's experience is achieved, these are: • The contextual or the synchronic level. • The historical or the diachronic level.• The meta-historical or the transcendental level.