Ibn Arabi

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In a hagiographer’s telling, a boy of about fifteen is brought to the qadi of Cordoba, the philosopher Ibn Rushd — Averroes to the Latins — who has heard from the boy’s father that something has opened in his son. The philosopher asks whether what unveiling and divine inspiration give is the same as what reflection yields. The boy answers yes — and then, watching the scholar brighten, no — and then, between the two, that here spirits take flight from their matter and necks break from their bodies. Ibn Rushd is said to have gone pale. The anecdote is Ibn Arabi’s own, recorded decades later in his al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya, and whatever happened in that room, it sets the lifelong key: a knowing that does not arrive by inference, set courteously beside the demonstrative reason of the falsafa, and not reducible to it.

Muhyi al-Din Muhammad ibn Ali ibn al-Arabi was born in 1165 (560 AH) at Murcia, in the southeast of al-Andalus, into a family of standing. While he was a child the family moved to Seville, then the cultivated heart of Almohad Spain, where he received the schooling of a young man of his class — Qur’an, hadith, Arabic letters, the law — and where, in his teens, a grave illness and a visionary turning bent his life decisively toward the path of Sufism. He studied with the masters of the Andalusian and Maghrebi tariqa, among them women of great spiritual attainment whom he names with reverence — Fatima of Cordoba, Shams Umm al-Fuqara — and he traveled the peninsula and crossed to North Africa, to Fez and Tunis and Bijaya, gathering teachers and unveilings. The honorific the tradition would fix on him, al-Shaykh al-Akbar, the Greatest Master, belongs to this trajectory: not a poet among poets nor a jurist among jurists, but the one in whom the whole science of realization is held to have found its fullest articulation.

The Giralda, the surviving Almohad minaret of the great mosque of Seville (built 1184-1198), the city where Ibn Arabi was raised and turned to the Sufi path. — Diliff, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

In 1198 (some accounts place the vision slightly earlier) a command came to him in the form of an inner directive to leave the West for the East. He went, and never returned. The journey is the spine of the second half of his life: through Egypt and Palestine to the Hijaz, and to Mecca, where he arrived in 1202 and where, circling the Ka’ba, he met the figure who would govern the Tarjuman al-Ashwaq and received the first openings of his vast summa. By Claude Addas’s reconstruction, the Futuhat was begun at Mecca around 1203. From the Hijaz he moved north and east — to Mosul, to the Anatolian cities of the Seljuks, above all to Konya, where he formed the bond with his foremost interpreter, the young Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi, whose stepfather Ibn Arabi is said to have married. The long itinerary came to rest at Damascus in 1223. There, honored across the Islamic world as the supreme living master, he taught, wrote, completed and recompleted his books, and there he died on the night of 22 Rabi al-Thani 638 AH — 16 November 1240 — at seventy-five. He was buried on the slope of Mount Qasiyun, in the Salihiyya quarter; the tomb stands there still, raised into a mosque-and-shrine complex by the Ottoman sultan Selim I after the conquest of 1516.

Sultan Selim I at the tomb of Ibn Arabi in Damascus, in a sixteenth-century Ottoman illustrated chronicle; after the conquest of 1516 Selim raised the mosque-and-shrine complex over the grave. — Bibliothèque nationale de France, Supplément turc 524, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Ibn Arabi’s authorship is enormous — the medieval catalogs credit him with hundreds of titles, and the genuine corpus runs to well over a hundred surviving works — but two books carry the weight of the tradition.

Al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya, the “Meccan Openings” or “Meccan Revelations,” is one of the largest single works in the literature of any mystical tradition: 560 chapters in the author’s final redaction, an encyclopedic prose summa that moves across cosmology, the divine names, the spiritual stations and states, the inner sense of ritual and law, prophecy and sainthood, the letters of the alphabet, and the structure of the worlds. It is not a treatise with a thesis but a cosmos rendered in language, organized — loosely — around the architecture of Islamic religious science and shot through everywhere with the report of fath, the “opening” or unveiling by which its contents were given rather than reasoned. Ibn Arabi composed a first recension and then, near the end of his life, a second; the autograph of that final version survives in Istanbul, and its critical edition, begun by Osman Yahia, remained unfinished at the editor’s death — a measure of the work’s sheer scale.

A rendering of Ibn Arabi’s diagram of the “Plain of Assembly” (Ard al-Hashr) on the Day of Judgment, one of the cosmological figures set out in the Futuhat al-Makkiyya. — Shafi (user SPQR10), via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Fusus al-Hikam, the “Bezels of Wisdom,” is the polar opposite in form and the equal in consequence: a short, compressed, aphoristic book of twenty-seven chapters, each devoted to a prophet from Adam to Muhammad and to the particular “wisdom” — the hikma — set in that prophet as a gem is set in the bezel of a ring. Ibn Arabi reports that the Prophet handed him the book in a vision at Damascus in 1229 and bade him bring it to people. Where the Futuhat expands, the Fusus condenses to the point of opacity; it became legible only through the long commentary tradition that grew up to unfold it, generation upon generation — al-Qunawi, then al-Jandi, al-Kashani, al-Qaysari, down to Jami in Persian and the Ottoman commentators. To read the Fusus in the tradition is never to read it alone.

The architecture of being

The metaphysics these books carry is the one later named wahdat al-wujud, the Oneness or Unity of Being — and the name is the first thing to get right, because it is not his. Ibn Arabi does not use the phrase as a slogan or a doctrine. As William Chittick sets out in the standard reference account, the master never employs the expression; his students used it only rarely and without a technical sense, and it was the Hanbali jurist Ibn Taymiyya who first fixed it on him as the name of an error. The whole subsequent career of the term — at least seven distinct meanings ascribed to it in later polemic, the Orientalist verdict of “pantheism” — is reception, not text. His own governing word was tawhid, the bearing-witness that there is no god but God, and the term he gave unusual prominence was the plainest and most exact in the vocabulary: wujud, being, existence, finding.

The architecture runs thus. Only al-Haqq, the Real, possesses wujud in the full sense — being that is of itself, owing nothing to another. Everything other than the Real does not stand alongside it as a second existent; it is tajalli, self-disclosure or theophany, the showing-forth through which the one Being manifests in endless determinate forms. The word is Qur’anic: it is the verb of the instant on Sinai when the Real disclosed itself to the mountain and Moses fell senseless, and the entire system can be read as that single moment generalized across the cosmos. The world is therefore not illusion — its reality is genuine — but it is borrowed, the Real seen under the aspect of multiplicity, as light is the sun’s even where it falls on the earth and never becomes the earth’s own. This is why the charge of pantheism misreads the grammar. To say the cosmos is God is precisely what Akbarian thought refuses. The Real is at once immanent in every form — tashbih, the likeness by which it can be found in every face — and utterly beyond every form — tanzih, the incomparability by which no face contains it. To take only the first is the pantheism the critics named; to take only the second is a frozen transcendence that cannot account for a world at all. The Real discloses itself as the cosmos without being divided, exhausted, or contained by it — present in the thing as meaning is present in a word.

Because the disclosures are configured by the asma al-husna, the most beautiful names of God — the Merciful, the Living, the Knowing, the Bringer-of-Death — the cosmos is the outward face of the divine names, each name a fixed relation through which the one wujud shows a determinate aspect of itself. The names are infinite in their combinations, and so no two self-disclosures ever repeat: the Real, in a phrase the tradition loves, never shows the same face twice. Within this, the human being holds a singular rank. The one creature capable of receiving the totality of the names at once is al-insan al-kamil, the Perfect or Complete Human — the polished mirror in which the Real contemplates itself entire, the barzakh or isthmus joining the divine and the cosmic, the reason (in the developed teaching) that there is a cosmos at all. The faculty of this reception is the qalb, the heart, named from a root meaning to turn or overturn: it is the organ that turns with the ceaseless turning of the disclosures and so can hold what the fixed categories of reason cannot. The famous line of the Tarjuman is the heart’s own confession — a heart become capable of every form, pasture and cloister and temple and Ka’ba at once.

Between the sensory world and the world of pure intellect Ibn Arabi sets a third, and it is among his most consequential contributions: khayal, imagination, and the alam al-mithal, the imaginal world — an order of reality, neither bare matter nor disembodied meaning, where spirits take on form and forms become spirit, where the visionary’s unveilings, the events of dreams, and the bodies of the resurrection have their proper ontological home. It is the realm of the barzakh, the in-between that joins what it separates and separates what it joins; the heart’s perceptions live there. Henry Corbin, reading Ibn Arabi in the twentieth century, would name this the mundus imaginalis and make it central to his account of Islamic spirituality — a reception treated below. Crowning the system is Ibn Arabi’s doctrine of walaya, sainthood or nearness to God: he held that the line of prophecy is sealed in Muhammad, but that walaya continues, and he advanced — carefully, and not without provoking his readers — the figure of the Seal of the Muhammadan Sainthood, the one in whom that nearness reaches its fullness, a station he intimated for himself.

The Interpreter of Desires

If the Fusus and the Futuhat are the prose, the Tarjuman al-Ashwaq — the “Interpreter” or “Translator of Ardent Desires” — is the lyric: sixty-one love odes in the high Arabic manner, composed after the master, circling the Ka’ba in 1202, met Nizam, the learned and beautiful daughter of an Isfahani shaykh, in whom he saw the locus of divine wisdom and beauty. The poems are dense with the conventions of the nasib, the amatory prelude of classical Arabic verse — the abandoned campsite, the caravan, the gazelle, the beloved’s quarter — and when readers at Aleppo took them for ordinary erotic verse and impugned the shaykh, he answered by writing a commentary on his own poems, the Dhakha’ir al-A’laq, the “Treasured Stores of the Lover,” that reads each image as a sign of a divine reality. The most quoted lines of the whole Akbarian corpus stand here — the heart that has become receptive to every form, “a pasture for gazelles and a convent for Christian monks,” a temple for idols and the pilgrim’s Ka’ba and the tablets of the Torah and the book of the Qur’an, and the declaration that he follows the religion of Love, wherever its mounts may turn. Nicholson, who brought the lines into English, glossed the verse as the Sufi teaching that all ways lead to the one God — not a leveling of the revealed religions but the claim that the Real, infinite in its self-disclosures, exceeds the form of any single creed even as it discloses itself through each.

The contested orthodoxy

No figure in Sufism has been more fiercely argued over. From al-Ghazali’s generation onward the question of how far mystical metaphysics could be pressed without unsettling the law was live; Ibn Arabi pressed it further than anyone, and the reaction was correspondingly sharp. The jurist Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328) led the assault: to say that being is one, he argued, is to make the necessary being of God and the contingent being of a creature a single existence, to equate the Creator with what he creates, to dissolve the wall between worshipper and Worshipped and with it the wall between the lawful and the forbidden — a notion, he said, worse than plain unbelief. The Akbarian school answered that they had never said the world is God, that immanence and incomparability are held together and not traded against each other, and that the gnosis the path pursues is precisely knowledge of the difference, not its erasure. The quarrel hardened over the centuries into the polemic between wahdat al-wujud, the unity of being, and the wahdat al-shuhud, the unity of witnessing, urged by the Naqshbandi reformer Ahmad Sirhindi in Mughal India — the latter reading the experience of oneness as a state of the seer’s perception rather than a standing fact about the structure of being, and so keeping a firmer wall between Creator and creature. The dispute remains genuinely unresolved within the tradition: a real fault line in how Sufi metaphysics reads its own deepest experience — the wahdat al-wujud of the Akbarians set against the wahdat al-shuhud of their critics — argued for seven centuries and never closed.

Transmission, scholarship, and the public-domain perimeter

The systematic shape of Akbarian thought owes most to Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi (1207-1274), raised in the master’s household and his literary heir, who recast the allusive, Qur’an-soaked idiom of his teacher into the disciplined vocabulary of the philosophers, reading Ibn Arabi through the necessary-and-contingent distinction of Avicenna and giving the vision propositions that could be taught and contested. From his circle in Konya the reading passed through the great commentators on the Fusus — al-Jandi, al-Kashani, al-Qaysari, and later al-Jami and the Ottoman al-Bursawi — and through the cognate doctrine of the Perfect Human in al-Jili’s al-Insan al-Kamil into the Persian, Turkish, and Indian worlds, where it became the unspoken grammar of vast tracts of mystical verse. The work of Rumi (1207-1273), moving in the same Konya world, was read by later generations through Akbarian eyes though Rumi was no theorist of the one being; the Arabic odes of Ibn al-Farid in Cairo were drawn into the same orbit by the commentators; and in Safavid Iran the metaphysics fused with Avicennan falsafa and the Illuminationism of Suhrawardi in the transcendent theosophy of Mulla Sadra (c. 1571-1640). The structural kinship of all this with the Neoplatonic descent of all things from the One through emanation — the architecture Plotinus gave the late-antique world, transmitted into Arabic letters under the misattributed Theology of Aristotle — and with every monism that finds one reality behind the many, and with the apophatic theology that approaches the absolute by unsaying — is real and easy to overstate: Akbarian thought reframes the emanative gradient that grows dimmer as it recedes from the source into a gradient of tajalli in which the Real is wholly present in every form at once, intimacy where emanation puts distance.

The English door into Ibn Arabi was, until the twentieth century, strikingly narrow. The single book-length translation from the classical age of orientalism is Reynold A. Nicholson’s edition and rendering of the Tarjuman al-Ashwaq (Royal Asiatic Society, 1911) — hosted in the Library as Nicholson’s Tarjumán al-Ashwáq, with the Arabic text, the verse translation, and an abridged English of the auto-commentary. His The Mystics of Islam (1914) carries the famous “religion of Love” lines in its chapter on divine love, and his Studies in Islamic Mysticism (1921) holds the only sustained pre-1930 English engagement with the Fusus, by way of its exposition of al-Jili. Beyond this thin shelf the pre-modern Arabic perimeter is vast: the Bulaq edition of the Futuhat (1852-1857) and the Cairo edition of 1911 remain the canonical citation base for every specialist, and the smaller treatises survive in H. S. Nyberg’s Kleinere Schriften (Leiden, 1919). The interpretive corpus that actually constitutes the modern reading is overwhelmingly a twentieth- and twenty-first-century achievement — and the very notion of a single coherent “Akbarian school” is partly its reconstruction. The reference account is Chittick’s entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which states plainly that the master never used wahdat al-wujud and that the term was the work of others; his The Sufi Path of Knowledge (1989) and The Self-Disclosure of God (1998) opened the Futuhat to English readers. Miguel Asin Palacios first pressed the comparison with Dante; Henry Corbin’s Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi (1958) recovered the imaginal world for a Western readership; Toshihiko Izutsu set the metaphysics beside Taoist thought; Michel Chodkiewicz mapped the doctrine of sainthood and the structure of the Futuhat; Claude Addas wrote the standard life. The Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society, founded in 1977, keeps the clearinghouse — its essay revisiting the religion of Love is characteristic of the contemporary scholarship that the public-domain shelf cannot itself host.

What holds the whole edifice together is the single intuition the boy is said to have handed the philosopher of Cordoba: that being is one finding, disclosed without remainder in each face it wears and contained by none of them. The heart that turns with the turning of the disclosures does not arrive at the Real by adding the world’s forms together, nor by subtracting them; it finds, in the form before it, the Real showing a face it will never show again — and that is the science the Greatest Master spent six hundred chapters and twenty-seven bezels learning to say.

→ In the library: Ibn Arabi — The Tarjumán al-Ashwáq (Nicholson, 1911) · Nicholson — The Mystics of Islam (1914)

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