Abstract
This article introduces an approach to analyzing the way in which figurative language interfaces with cognitive, cultural, and spiritual experience in the symbols employed by the Sufis to express their love of God. It relies on the Cognitive Linguistic Approach to reveal the relationship between the Sufis' thoughts about God, secular language of love, and the idea of divine love. Through a case study analysis of the symbols of love in Ibn 'Arabi's poetry, the two chief undertakings here are: first, to argue that thoughts and feelings of human love inspired the Sufis to express their ideas about their experience of divine love through secular symbols that create gaps of indeterminacy in their poems, and second, to explain, using Conceptual Metaphor Theory, how these gaps can be closed through mappings of the Sufi symbols, as parts of the target domain of divine love, onto the source domain of secular love.