"Far more interested in humanity

than in nature as a whole, Ibn 'Abbad is nonetheless highly sensitive to God's creation, the world of time and space, as a theater of His "signs." From effects one can learn of the Cause. Ibn 'Abbad's view of this world has been formed by the Qur'an's frequent summons to discover God's traces everywhere:

Behold, in the heavens and the earth are signs for those who believe. And in your creation, and all the wild creatures He has scattered over the earth, are signs for a people of firm faith. And the alternation of night and day, and the sustenance that God sends down from the sky, quickening thereby the earth after her death, and the ordering of the winds - these are signs for a people who understand [45:3-5]

He believes that if it is on this earth one must journey, it is here also that God will show the way; and that "those who reject Our signs are deaf and dumb and in profound darkness. God allows to go astray whom He will, and He places on the Straight Path whom He will" [Qur'an 6:39].

Ibn 'Abbad surely did not look forward to staying on this earth forever, nor would he have liked to do so. The words "this world and the next" appear frequently and formulaically in his letters, and "the next" has a decided edge. But the Sufi would, I suspect, not have been entirely at a loss to understand Robert Frost's "Earth's the right place for love. I can't imagine where it's likely to go better" ["Birches"]. One has to begin with what one is given, and in that sense, this is the best of all possible worlds. This world was made for God's purposes and that is ultimately the way things will work out. In the meantime, it is precisely in and through this time and this space that God speaks to this individual person.

-From the introduction to Ibn 'Abbad of Ronda: Letters on the Sufi Path by John Renard, pg 8.