Ibn 'Arabi

Muhyiddin Muhammad ibn ‘Ali ibn Muhammad ibn ‘Arabi was born in 1165 in Murcia, in Muslim Spain, into an Andalusi Arab family. He spent his youth in Seville, traveled to Tunis as a young man for his early Sufi training, performed hajj to Mecca in 1202–04 (where the visions and experiences that produced the Futuhat began), and lived the second half of his life in the eastern Mediterranean — Mecca, Cairo, Konya (where he met the young Sadr ad-Din al-Qunawi, who would become his most influential systematizer and later associate with Rumi), and finally Damascus, where he died and is buried in 1240.

The two great works

• al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya (The Meccan Revelations) — a sprawling encyclopedia in 560 chapters, begun after his Mecca visions and worked on for the rest of his life. Treats virtually every topic in Islamic spiritual life — cosmology, metaphysics, prophetology, ritual practice, the stations of the Sufi path — at a level of detail that has made it inexhaustible to readers.
• Fusus al-Hikam (The Bezels of Wisdom) — a much shorter work in 27 chapters, each treating the wisdom embodied by a particular prophet. More concentrated, more philosophically dense; the work that has most been commented upon in the subsequent tradition.

Wahdat al-Wujud

Ibn ‘Arabi’s central metaphysical claim — articulated across his work but never reduced to a single doctrinal formula — is what later systematizers (especially Qunawi) called wahdat al-wujud, the unity of being. The teaching is this: wujud — being, existence — is one. The only true being is the divine. Everything that appears to exist is a self-disclosure (tajalli) of the one divine being, in finite form, refracted through the names and attributes by which God is known.

Two important guards against misreading. First, wahdat al-wujud is not pantheism in the standard sense; Ibn ‘Arabi insists, with characteristic precision, that the divine remains utterly beyond every form in which it discloses itself (tanzih) even as it discloses itself in every form (tashbih). The held tension between these two — God beyond, God in — is the heart of his theology. Second, the doctrine has not been universally accepted within the Sufi tradition; Ibn Taymiyya and other Sunni scholars criticized it sharply, and an alternative formulation — wahdat al-shuhud (unity of witnessing, not of being) — was developed by the Naqshbandi master Ahmad Sirhindi as a corrective.

What he gives the platform

Three durable contributions:

1. The most developed metaphysical synthesis in any Islamic mystical tradition — and one of the most developed in any contemplative tradition. A reader who wants to think rigorously about the metaphysics of contemplative experience finds in Ibn ‘Arabi an inexhaustible interlocutor.
2. The apophatic-cataphatic synthesis held in delicate tension. The mature traditions across the world hold these two; Ibn ‘Arabi articulates the holding with unusual precision.
3. A continuing thread of comparative work. Henry Corbin’s 20th-century studies, Izutsu’s comparison of Ibn ‘Arabi with Daoist metaphysics, the contemporary Christian-Sufi dialogue — Ibn ‘Arabi has been a fertile ground for comparative contemplative philosophy.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Subset of: [[sufism]]
• Parallels: [[apophatic-theology]] · [[meister-eckhart]]
• Member of: [[person]]

Sources

1. Ibn ‘Arabi. The Bezels of Wisdom (Fusus al-Hikam). Trans. R.W.J. Austin. Paulist Press (Classics of Western Spirituality), 1980. Source class: primary text.
2. William C. Chittick. The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-‘Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination. SUNY, 1989. Source class: book / definitive scholarly study.
3. William C. Chittick. The Self-Disclosure of God: Principles of Ibn al-‘Arabi’s Cosmology. SUNY, 1998. Source class: book / scholarly study.
4. Henry Corbin. Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi. Princeton, 1969. Source class: book / philosophical study.
5. Toshihiko Izutsu. Sufism and Taoism: A Comparative Study of Key Philosophical Concepts. University of [[berkeley|California]] Press, 1983. Source class: book / comparative study.

Lenses still to grow

• The Futuhat in detail — its 560 chapters cover so much that any honest entry should eventually develop sections on the major topics.
• Wahdat al-shuhud as the corrective tradition (Sirhindi and the Naqshbandi response).
• The Akbarian school — Qunawi, Jami, the long line of commentators on the Fusus.
• Ibn ‘Arabi and [[christian-mysticism|Christian mysticism]] — the comparative thread with [[meister-eckhart|Eckhart]], Cusa, and the apophatic tradition deserves its own treatment.
• The Henry Corbin reception in 20th-century French and continental philosophy.