Çeviri
Ibn Arabi Heir to the Prophets
William C. Chittick
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Ibn‘Arabi
Heir to the Prophets
WILLIAM C. CHITTICK
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IBN ‘ARABI
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INTRODUCTION 1
Ibn ‘Arabi’s Life 4
Abbreviations Used in the
Text 9
1 THE MUHAMMADAN INHERITANCE 11
Inheritance 12
Opening 14
The Muhammadan Seal 16
Reading the Qur’an 17
Understanding God 18
Knowing Self 20
God’sWide Earth 22
The Inheritor 23
Assuming the Traits of
the Names 29
The Divine and Human Form
31
Imperfect Love 32
Wujud 36
The Nonexistent Beloved 38
The Entities 40
The Genesis of Love 42
Love’sThrone 44
Human Love 45
Felicity 46
Poverty 47
Perfection 49
4
THE COSMOLOGY OF
REMEMBRANCE 53
Remembrance 53
Prophecy 55
The Book of the Soul 57
The Breath of the
All-Merciful 58
Knowledge of the Names 61
All-Comprehensiveness 62
Achieving the Status of
Adam 63
The Perfect Servant 64
The House of God 66
5
KNOWLEDGE AND REALIZATION
69
Knowledge 70
Benefit 72
The Form of God 74
Reliable Knowledge 75
Following Authority 77
Realization 78
The Ambiguity of Creation
80
GivingThings their Haqq
81
The Rights of God and Man
83
The Soul’s Haqq 84
6
TIME, SPACE, AND THE
OBJECTIVITY OF
ETHICAL NORMS 87
The Methodology of
Realization 87
Time and Space 91
Location 92
Time 93
Eternity 94
ConstantTransformation 96
Ethics 97
Lost in the Cosmos 99
Relativity 102
The Worldview of
In-Betweenness 103
Cosmic Imagination 105
The Soul 108
The Soul’s Root 109
Controversies 111
The Gods of Belief 112
8
THE DISCLOSURE OF THE
INTERVENING IMAGE 115
Self-Awareness 117
Death 118
Love 119
9
THE HERMENEUTICS OF MERCY
123
Interpreting the Qur’an 124
Good Opinions of God 126
The Return to the
All-Merciful 128
The Mercy of Wujud
130
Mercy’s Precedence 131
Essential Servanthood 134
Primordial Nature 135
SweetTorment 136
Constitutional Diversity 139
Surrender 141
Resources 145
Index 147
B
orn in Spain in 1165, Ibn
‘Arabi is at once the most influential and the most controversial Muslim
thinker to appear over the past nine hundred years.The Sufi tradition looks
back upon him as “the greatest master” (ash-shaykh al-akbar), by which
is meant that he was the foremost expositor of its teachings. Modern
scholarship is rightly skeptical about grandiose titles, but there is plenty of
evidence to suggest that this specific title is not out of line. On the
quantitative side, Ibn ‘Arabi’s massive al-Futuhat al-makkiyya (“The
Meccan Openings”) provides more text than most prolific authors wrote in a
lifetime. Manuscripts of several hundred other works are scattered in
libraries,and scores of books and treatises have been published.
But “greatness” is not to
be judged by bigness, so we clearly need to look at the contents of all those
pages. Probably no one has ever read everything Ibn ‘Arabi wrote, and few
specialists would even claim to have read the whole Futuhat. Even so,
“reading” is one thing, “understanding” something else. Ibn ‘Arabi has always
been considered one of the most difficult of authors.This is due to many
factors,not least extraordinary erudition, consistently high level of
discourse, constantly shifting perspectives, and diversity of styles. Thorough
analysis and explication of a single page of the Futuhat demands many
pages of Arabic text, and the task becomes much more challenging when it is a
question of translation into a Western language.
One might suspect that
Ibn ‘Arabi’s works are difficult because he wrote unnecessarily complicated
rehashes of earlier works. In fact, we are dealing with an approach to Islamic
learning that is remarkably original, so much so that he has no real
predecessor. Certainly, there were important authors during the previous
century who also expressed Sufi teachings with theoretical sophistication, but
compared even to the greatest of these, such as Ghazali, Ibn ‘Arabi represents
a radical break.
Ghazali speaks for much
of the early Sufi tradition when he tells us that “unveiling” — that is, the
unmediated knowledge that God bestows on his special friends — should not be
set down in books (though he does not always follow his own advice). Ibn ‘Arabi
sweeps this prohibition aside and spreads out the fruit of unveiling for all to
see. It should not be imagined, however, that in setting down his “unveilings,
witnessings, and tastings” Ibn ‘Arabi is simply providing tantalizing glimpses
of the spiritual realm in the manner of a mystic visionary.
One might get the
impression that Ibn ‘Arabi was primarily a “mystic” by reading Stephen
Hirtenstein’s excellent introduction to his exterior and interior life, The
UnlimitedMercifier:The Spiritual Life and Thought of Ibn ‘Arabi.
Hirtenstein translates a good percentage of the autobiographical passages from
Ibn ‘Arabi’s studied works, and many of these speak of visions and unveilings.
In fact, however, the vast majority of his writings are argued out with a
rational precision that puts him into the mainstream of Islamic scholarship.
After his death in 1240,
Ibn ‘Arabi’s teachings quickly spread throughout the Islamic world, and they
kept on spreading wherever Islam went, from Black Africa and the Balkans to
Indonesia and China. The reason for this spread was certainly not that the
masters of the various forms of rational discourse that shaped the Muslim elite
were overawed by his mystical credentials. Quite the contrary, they were
convinced by the soundness of his arguments and the breadth of his learning.
They paid attention to him because he offered powerful proofs, drawn from the
whole repertoire of Islamic knowledge, to demonstrate the correctness of his
views. Many of these scholars adopted his basic perspectives and a good deal of
his terminology, and many also criticized some of his teachings or made
sweeping condemnations. But no reputable scholar could simply ignore him.
Ibn ‘Arabi’s doctrines
and perspectives did not have the limited, elite audience that one might
expect.They also seeped down into the nooks and crannies of Islamic
culture.This happened in many ways, not least through the widespread reach of
the Sufi orders, which played important roles in shaping society all over the
Islamic world. Several of the orders claimed him as one of their intellectual
and spiritual forebears.
Ibn ‘Arabi’s popularity
among the Sufis should not be understood to mean that he was widely read by
them. In fact, the vast majority were not scholars and did not have the
requisite training to study his writings. Generally, however, those with an
intellectual calling, who often ended up as guides and teachers, spoke a
language that was largely fashioned by him and his immediate followers.
Ibn ‘Arabi’s influence
also spread through the enormously popular poetry of languages like Persian,
Turkish, and Urdu. Many of the great poets were trained in Sufi learning and
employed concepts and perspectives drawn from his school of thought.
Partly because of his
pervasive influence and widespread name recognition, Ibn ‘Arabi came to be
targeted by reformers and modernists from the second half of the nineteenth
century. He specifically and Sufism generally were chosen as convenient emblems
for every shortcoming of traditional Islamic society. More recently, interest
in his writings has made a remarkable comeback throughout the Islamic world,
especially among young people disillusioned with the various forms of modern
ideology, “fundamentalism” being the latest of these.
Many of the early
Orientalists dismissed Ibn ‘Arabi as incoherent. Later work, especially the
groundbreaking studies of Henry Corbin and Toshihiko Izutsu, gave him academic
respectability. Whatever scholars may think of the contents of his writings, no
one can deny that he represents a watershed in Islamic history and a major
determining force in the course of later Islamic civilization.
Those who still believe
in the civilizing mission of the West and the supremacy of scientific
rationality over all other forms of knowledge may think that Ibn ‘Arabi’s
pervasive influence on premodern Islamic culture is sufficient proof against
him. Others may find him a refreshing voice, offering perspectives that throw
light on the human situation in any time and any place.
For those unfamiliar with
Ibn ‘Arabi’s biography, let me provide a thumbnail sketch: Arabic texts
commonly call him Ibn al-‘Arabi (with the definite article). He often signs his
works Abu Abd Allah Muhammad ibn al-‘Arabi at-Ta’i al-Hatimi. He came to be
called Muhyi ad-Din, “The Revivifier of the Religion.”He was born in 1165 in
Murcia in Andalusia (Spain). His father ‘Ali was apparently employed by
Muhammad ibn Sa‘id ibn Mardanish, the ruler of the city. In 1172 Murcia was
conquered by the Almohad dynasty, and ‘Ali took his family to Seville, where
again he was taken into government service. Ibn ‘Arabi was raised in the
environs of the court, and recent research shows that he underwent military
training. He was employed as a secretary by the governor of Seville and married
a girl named Maryam from an influential family.
Ibn ‘Arabi received no
unusual religious education as a child, and he tells us that he spent much of
his time with his friends in pastimes and gaiety. In his early teens, however,
he was overcome by a spiritual call that quickly led to a vision of God. He
tells us that everything he subsequently said and wrote was “the
differentiation of the universal reality comprised by that look” (F II 548.14).
In this early period he had a number of visions of Jesus, whom he calls his
first guide on the path to God.
Ibn ‘Arabi’s father told
his friend, the philosopher and judge Averroes, about the change in his son.According
to Ibn ‘Arabi’s account,Averroes requested a meeting.The exchange that took
place, which has been recounted in several studies of Ibn ‘Arabi, particularly
that of Corbin, highlights the wide gulf that Ibn ‘Arabi perceived between the
formal knowledge of rational thinkers and the unveiling of those whom he calls
the “gnostics” (‘arifun), those who have true insight into the nature of
things.
Once Ibn ‘Arabi underwent
his initial conversion to Sufism, he dedicated his life to the spiritual path.
An ambiguous passage in the Futuhat has been interpreted to mean that he
did not enter formal Sufi training until he was nineteen, but the life-altering
vision and the meeting with Averroes had certainly taken place several years’
earlier, “before his beard had sprouted.” Eventually he studied with many Sufi
shaykhs (two of his accounts of these have been translated by Ralph Austin in Sufis
of Andalusia). He also studied with numerous masters of other Islamic
sciences. In one document, he mentions the names of seventy teachers in fields
like Hadith (sayings of the Prophet), Qur’an recitation, Qur’an commentary, and
jurisprudence.
He left Spain for the
first time when he was thirty, traveling to Tunis. In 1200, a vision instructed
him to go to the East. In 1202 he performed the hajj and met, among others,
Majd ad-Din Ishaq, a scholar from Malatya. He accompanied Majd ad-Din back to
Anatolia. On the way, he stayed for a time in Mosul, where he was invested with
an initiatory cloak by Ibn al-Jami’, who himself had received it from Khadir
(Khizr), the undying spiritual guide who makes his first appearance in Islamic
sources in the Quranic account of his mysterious meeting with Moses (Q. 18:
65—82). Ibn ‘Arabi recounts a number of his own meetings with Khadir, and Henry
Corbin has highlighted these in his foundational study. There is no basis,
however, for Corbin’s suggestion that Khadir was Ibn ‘Arabi’s primary guide on
the spiritual path.
For some years Ibn ‘Arabi
traveled from city to city in the regions of Turkey, Syria, and Egypt, and he
again visited Mecca and Medina. In 1211—12 he was in Baghdad, perhaps accompanied
by Majd ad-Din Ishaq, who had been sent there by Sultan Kay Ka’us I (1210—19)
of Konya on a mission to the caliphal court. Ibn ‘Arabi was on good terms with
this sultan and wrote him a letter of practical advice. He was also a companion
of the ruler of Aleppo, al-Malik az-Zahir (1186—1218), a son of Saladin. Later
on he was a teacher of the Ayyubid ruler of Damascus, Muzaffar ad-Din (d.
1238). His hobnobbing with royalty demonstrates two things: first, his own
upbringing, since he would have been trained in all the right ways of speaking
and acting demanded by high society; and second, the important role that
scholars played as advisers,consultants,and even teachers to kings. His
relations with royalty should also be sufficient evidence that his “mysticism”
was no barrier to involvement in the social and political institutions of the
time.
According to some
accounts, after Majd ad-Din’s death, Ibn ‘Arabi married his widow and raised
his son, Sadr ad-Din Qunawi (d. 1274). Qunawi became Ibn ‘Arabi’s leading disciple,
training many well-known scholars and leaving behind a number of important
books. In 1223 Ibn ‘Arabi settled down permanently in Damascus, where he taught
and wrote.A circle of disciples, including Qunawi, served him until his death
in 1240. His major project during these years was the Futuhat, of which
we have two recensions. But he was a prolific author, and
OsmanYahia, in his
comprehensive study of 850 works attributed to him, estimates that 700 are
authentic and over 400
extant. Many of these
works are short treatises, but many more but no manuscripts are known to have
survived. The most famous of his books are these three:
Fusus al-hikam (“The
Ringstones of the Wisdoms”). Over the centuries Ibn ‘Arabi’s students held this
book in highest esteem and wrote well over one hundred commentaries on it.
Basing himself largely on Quranic verses and hadiths, he shows how each of
twenty-seven prophets from Adam down to Muhammad disclosed in his own person
and prophetic career the wisdom implied by one of the divine attributes.
Al-Futuhat
al-makkiyya.This is a vast compendium of metaphysics, theology, cosmology,
spiritual anthropology, psychology, and jurisprudence.Topics include the inner
meanings of the Islamic rituals, the stations of travelers on the journey to
God and in God, the nature of cosmic hierarchy, the spiritual and ontological
meaning of the letters of the Arabic alphabet, the sciences embraced by each of
the ninety-nine names of God, and the significance of the differing messages of
various prophets.
Tarjuman al-ashwaq (“The
Interpreter of Yearnings”). This short collection of love poetry, the first of
Ibn ‘Arabi’s works to be translated into English, was inspired by his meeting
during his first pilgrimage to Mecca with Nizam, the beautiful and gifted
daughter of a great scholar from Isfahan. He also wrote a long commentary on
the poems to prove to one of his critics that they deal with spiritual truths
and not profane love.
Novin Doostdar of
Oneworld invited me to write a book on Ibn ‘Arabi’s life and works in the
summer of 2000. Faced with the fine studies of Claude Addas — her long Quest
for the Red Sulphur and the shorter Voyage of No Return — and
Stephen Hirtenstein’s Unlimited Mercifier, I could not think of a fresh
approach to his life, so I decided to stick to his teachings. I can console
myself with the thought that this approach is more in keeping with the
traditional way of dealing with him.
Biography as we know it
is a modern invention, and the fact that we think it important to know the
details of people’s personal lives tells us more about ourselves than about
them. Nothing like a thorough account of Ibn ‘Arabi’s life was available before
the twentieth century. In the premodern Islamic world, it was enough to know
that he was a great scholar, or a great saint, or a great heretic.Those who
wanted to learn about him were not attracted by his life but by his ideas.
I first thought of
writing a comprehensive introduction to Ibn ‘Arabi’s worldview in the early
eighties.When I finally gave up the attempt to keep the project down to
reasonable size, I published The Sufi Path of Knowledge (1989), with the
promise of a second, completing volume. When I finished the second volume, The
Self-Disclosure of God (1998), I was forced to promise a third, which is
currently in progress. If I ever finish the third, I will no doubt need to
promise a fourth. I mention this to forestall the idea that I am trying here to
offer an adequate introduction to Ibn ‘Arabi’s teachings. The chapters are
rather a series of forays into his way of looking at things.[1] [2] My goal is
simply to introduce his thought to readers who have not been exposed to it, or
to provide a refresher course for those who have.
The first two chapters
deal with the relation between Ibn ‘Arabi’s teachings and his self-perception
as Seal of the Muhammadan Saints and lover of God. Chapters three and four
address the relationship between God and human beings in terms of love and
remembrance. Five and six discuss the nature of knowledge, its role in human
becoming, and the importance of correctly apprehending the phenomenal world.
Seven and eight offer a few glimpses into the world of imagination, specifically
its relation to the soul and death. The ninth and final chapter looks at the
central role of divine mercy in the afterlife.
ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE TEXT:
Q. The Qur’an
F Ibn ‘Arabi, al-Futuhat al-makkiyya.
4 volumes, Cairo,
1911.
FH. Ibn ‘Arabi, Fusus
al-hikam. Edited by A. Afifi. Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-‘Arabi, 1946.
D. Ibn‘Arabi, Diwan. Bombay: Mirza
Mohamed Shirazi, n.d.
Dh. Ibn‘Arabi, Dhakha’ir
al-a‘laq. Edited by M. ‘Abd ar-Rahman al-Kurdi. Cairo, 1968.
R. Ibn ‘Arabi, Risalat
ash-Shaykh ila’l-imam ar-Razi, in Rasa’il Ibn ‘Arabi.
Hyderabad-Deccan: The Dairatu’l-Ma‘arifi’l- Osmania,1948.
I
bn ‘Arabi’s followers often called him “the
Seal of Muhammadan Sanctity” or, a bit more literally, “the Seal of Muhammadan
Friendship.” It seems rather clear that he laid claim to such a rank, at least
in some of his poetry. But what exactly would the expression have meant to him
and to the tradition that he represents?
The expression is derived
from a title that the Qur’an gives to Muhammad, “the Seal of the Prophets.”
This is typically understood to mean two things: first, that Muhammad was the
last of the 124,000 prophets sent by God to the human race; and second, that
the Qur’an, the revelation received by Muhammad, brings together and
synthesizes all the knowledge given by God to all previous prophets.
“Friendship” derives from
the Quranic term “friend” (wali). This Arabic word has a range of
meanings, any or all of which may be meant when it is used: friend, someone
close, someone given authority, benefactor, protector. The Qur’an makes it one
of God’s names, and it also speaks of God’s friends and the friends of Satan.
The friends of God are those whom he has brought near to himself, those whom he
protects, and those to whom, on the basis of their special closeness,he has
given a certain authority and rulership, if only over their own egocentric
tendencies.
By the time of Ibn
‘Arabi, “friend” was a standard epithet for those Muslims of the past who had
come close to embodying the model of human perfection established by Muhammad.
Western scholars have commonly translated wali as “saint,” but this word
should be used with caution, since it has specifically Christian connotations
that do not necessarily apply in the Islamic context.
The idea of friendship
with God is a major theme in Ibn ‘Arabi’s writings. In brief, he follows the
mainstream of the Islamic tradition by asserting that God chooses as his
friends those who embody the best qualities of the human race. God’s friends
are first and foremost the prophets. His revelations to the prophets then make
it possible for others to become his friends as well. Each prophet is a source
of guidance and a model of human goodness and perfection.
Those who achieve the
status of friendship with God by following a prophet may then be given an
“inheritance” from that prophet.The inheritance has three basic dimensions:
works, or proper and appropriate activities; states, or inner experiences that
manifest noble character traits; and stations of knowledge, or firm rootedness
in the true understanding of reality in its diverse modalities.
Ibn ‘Arabi considered the
goal of religion to be the achievement of human perfection in the three
modalities of works, states, and knowledge. He commonly calls those who achieve
the goal “Perfect Man” (al-insan al-kamil), one of his best known
technical terms.The word insan has no gender connotation, so in this context
the English word “man” must be understood in the same way. The main scriptural
source for the notion of human perfection mentions both men (rijal) and
women (nisa’): Muhammad said, “Among men, many have reached perfection,
and among women, Mary and Asiyah [the wife of Pharaoh].”
The primary examples of
those who achieved perfection are the prophets, beginning with Adam. They can
be defined as those perfect human beings whom God created as paradigms for the
human race.
In many ways the most
important and fundamental dimension of perfection is knowledge, which entails
discernment and putting things in their proper places. Ibn ‘Arabi writes, “As a
man moves closer to perfection, God gives him discernment among affairs and
brings him to realization through the realities” (F. II 525.2).
“Realization” is the full
actualization of human status, and “the realities” are things as they truly
are, that is, as they are known by God. To be given realization through the
realities means to understand the realities for what they are and to respond to
them in the appropriate manner. Realization, in other words, demands both
knowledge and works.A good deal will be said about this dual sense of the word
in coming chapters.
Approaching perfection by
following a prophetic paradigm brings along with it knowledge of a certain
configuration of realities.The realities are infinite, so God alone can know
them in their simultaneity. Nonetheless, human beings may come to know the
principles of all realities. In many passages, Ibn ‘Arabi connects the modes of
knowing the realities with the names of God that are so frequently mentioned in
the Qur’an. The prophets have special insight into the manner in which specific
divine names manifest their traces and display their properties in the
universe.
Each prophet has left an
inheritance. A purported hadith often cited by Ibn ‘Arabi says, “The ulama” —
that is, the scholars, those who have knowledge of God and the prophetic teachings
— “are the heirs to the prophets.” In his view, every age must have at least
124,000 friends of God, one heir for each prophet (F III 208.14). The prophetic
inheritances delineate the possible modes of authentic experience and correct
knowledge of God, the universe, and the human soul. In other words, to attain
true knowledge, one must know and act in accordance with a paradigm of human
perfection embodied in a prophet. No one comes to know things as they are
without these divinely appointed intermediaries.
The question of how
people can gain a prophetic inheritance is central to Ibn ‘Arabi’s writings.The
simplest answer is that, to the extent human initiative plays a role, people
must follow a prophet’s guidance. However, the guidance of most prophets has
not come down to us. The only way to receive an inheritance from those
prophets is to take it through the intermediary of Muhammad, whose message
comprises everything given to all previous prophets. In the last analysis,
however, it is God himself who chooses to bestow an inheritance on any given
individual.
Ibn ‘Arabi tells us that
effort can take seekers only as far as the door. Having reached the door, they
can knock as often as they like. It is God who will decide when and if he will
open the door. Only at the opening of the door can complete inheritance
occur.This explains the sense of the word “opening” in the title of Ibn
‘Arabi’s al-Futuhat al-makkiyya, “The Meccan Openings.”
The title announces that
the knowledge and understanding contained in the book were not gained by study
or discursive reasoning. They were simply given to the author when God opened
the door to him. The whole Futuhat, in other words, represents a massive
series of unveilings and witnessings, or “mystical visions” if you prefer.
It is important to keep
in mind that Ibn ‘Arabi does not confuse unveiling, witnessing, and opening
with “revelation,” which applies properly to prophetic knowledge. It is
precisely the special nature of revelation that makes it necessary for God’s
friends to follow the prophets. As Ibn ‘Arabi often tells us, the basic
distinction between a prophet and a friend is that the friend is a “follower” (tabi‘
) and the prophet is the one “followed” (matbu‘ ).
If one wants to achieve
opening, the way to do so is to engage in the practices set down by one’s
prophet and to follow the instructions of a shaykh or spiritual master, who,in
the ideal case, will be a full heir to that prophet. Among the practices that a
shaykh will prescribe are retreat (khalwa), which is seclusion from
others in order to devote oneself fully to meditation and prayer, and
remembrance (dhikr), which is the constant invocation of a Qur’anic
divine name or formula.
When the aspiring
traveler clings to retreat and the remembrance of God’s name, when he empties
his heart of reflective thoughts, and when he sits in poverty at the door of
his Lord with nothing, then God will bestow upon him and give him something of
knowledge of Him, the divine mysteries, and the lordly sciences. (F. I 31.4)
Notice that it is the
“heart” (qalb) that needs to be emptied of thought. In the usage of the
Qur’an and Islamic sources in general, the heart designates not the emotive
and affective side of human nature, but the center of consciousness, awareness,
and intelligence. The heart is the human faculty that can embrace God in the
fullness of his manifestation. In Ibn ‘Arabi’s terms, the heart alone can know
God and the realities in a synthetic manner embracing both rational
understanding and supra- rational unveiling.
When God opened the door
for him, Ibn ‘Arabi found that he had inherited all the sciences of
Muhammad.Among these sciences was the knowledge that no one after him — except
Jesus at the end of time — would be Muhammad’s plenary inheritor. It was this
unveiling that allowed him to see himself as the Seal of Muhammadan
Friendship,that is,the last person to actualize the specific mode of friendship
that results from embodying the fullness of the paradigm established by Muhammad.
By no means does Ibn
‘Arabi’s claim to be the Muhammadan Seal imply that he was the last friend of
God. Rather, it means that no one after him, with the exception of Jesus, would
inherit the totality of prophetic works, states, and knowledge — a totality
that had been realized only by Muhammad among all the prophets.
One should not be
surprised that Ibn ‘Arabi privileges Muhammad here. This is the Islamic
tradition, after all, and every tradition privileges its own founder. For those
who prefer a more universal language, we can say that for Muslims, Muhammad is
the full embodiment of the Logos, which is the Divine Word that gives rise to
all creation and all revelation. Ibn ‘Arabi calls this Logos by several names,
including “the Muhammadan Reality.”
Ibn ‘Arabi maintains that
there are friends of God in every age and that they will continue to inherit
from Muhammad, but they will no longer have access to the entirety of
Muhammad’s works, states, and sciences. The modalities of the inheritance will
be defined by their connection to specific prophets embraced by Muhammad’s
all-comprehensive prophethood. After the Muhammadan Seal, “No friend will be
found ‘upon the heart of Muhammad’ ” (F. II 49.26).
Ibn ‘Arabi’s claim to be
the Seal of the Muhammadan Friends has appeared pretentious and even outrageous
to many people over the centuries. Hostile and critical scholars have dismissed
it out of hand.The fact remains, however, that no author writing after him has
come close to matching the profundity, freshness, and detail of his
interpretation of the sources of the Islamic tradition. Whether or not one
would like to call him the Seal of the Muhammadan Friends, it is difficult to
deny him the title “Greatest Master.”
If the Muhammadan friends
of God inherit all the sciences of Muhammad, this means that they have been
opened up to all the knowledge and understanding given to all the prophets.
This is the knowledge that was given scriptural form in the Qur’an.Thus the
Seal of the Muhammadan Friends will somehow embody the whole Quranic message.
This is why Ibn ‘ Arabi can write concerning the Seal, “There is no one who has
more knowledge of God ... He and the Qur’an are siblings” (F. III 329.27).
Ibn ‘Arabi presents all
of his writings as explications of the Qur’an, which the tradition considers to
be God’s Speech or Word, his linguistic self-expression. In Ibn ‘Arabi’s view,
the Qur’an presents all prophetic knowledge in a synthetic manner while
addressing the two primary modes of human understanding, “reason” (‘aql)
and “imagination” (khayal). If people want to understand the Qur’an in
its totality, they need to employ both of these faculties.
Each Quranic verse yields
up an appropriate meaning according to the mode in which the interpreter
understands it. Ibn ‘Arabi often brings this home by discussing certain verses
as expressions of a rational truth, and then offering other interpretations of
the same verse on the basis of an imaginal understanding (or what we might
call a “symbolic truth”).
Such dual interpretations
do not mean that Ibn ‘Arabi thinks each Quranic verse has only two meanings —
one rational and the other imaginai. In his view, each word of the Qur’an — not
to mention its verses and chapters — has an indefinite number of meanings, all
of which are intended by God. Proper recitation of the Qur’an opens up the
reader to new meanings at every reading. “When meaning repeats itself for
someone who is reciting the Qur’an, he has not recited it as it should be
recited.This is proof of his ignorance” (F. IV 367.3).
One of the major themes
of Ibn ‘Arabi’s writings is the time- honored principle of the Judeo-Christian
tradition that God created man in his own image. Muhammad’s version of this saying
reads, “God created Adam in His own form.”
I translate the Arabic
word sura as “form” rather than “image” to retain its technical meaning.
It is used in Islamic philosophy in the Aristotelian sense, in
contradistinction to matter (the doctrine of hylomorphism,“matter-form-ism”).
In Sufism, the same word is used to designate the appearance of things, in contrast
to their “meaning” (mana), which is their invisible reality, the
spiritual substance that gives rise to their appearance in the outer world. Ibn
‘Arabi uses the word in both senses, though usually in the latter.
As for the word “image,”
it can serve well as a second translation for the word khayal, which we
have already met as “imagination.” Khayal denotes not only our
subjective power of imagining things, but also the objective reality of images
in the world, such as reflections in a mirror.
In one respect, God is
infinitely beyond understanding, and the only proper response to him is
silence. In another respect, he discloses himself to his human forms, and he does
so in two basic ways: first, he discloses his undisclosability, and thereby we
come to know that we cannot know him.This is the route of negative theology,
and Ibn ‘Arabi frequently takes it. Second, God discloses himself to human
beings through scripture, the universe, and their own souls. To the degree that
he does so, people can and do come to know him.
Ibn ‘Arabi calls the
modality of awareness that discerns God’s undisclosability “reason,” and he
calls the modality of understanding that grasps his self-disclosure
“imagination.” “Unveiling” is then fully actualized and realized imagination,
which recognizes the divine reality in its images. Rational thought pushes God
far away, but imaginal thought brings him close. Reason discerns God as absent,
but unveiling sees him present.
When reason grasps God’s
inaccessibility, it “asserts his incomparability” (tanzih). When
imagination finds him present, it “asserts his similarity” (tashbih).
Long before Ibn ‘Arabi, asserting God’s incomparability (or transcendence) had
been normative for most versions of Islamic theology, and asserting his
similarity (or immanence) was often found in Sufi expressions of Islamic
teachings, especially poetry. Ibn ‘Arabi’s contribution was to stress the need
to maintain a proper balance between the two ways of understanding God.
People are able to
maintain the balance between incomparability and similarity by seeing with
“both eyes,” that is, both reason and imagination. If we do not see God, the
world, and ourselves with the full vision of both eyes, we will not be able to
see things as they are.The locus of such a vision is the heart, whose beating
symbolizes the constant shift from one eye to the other, made necessary by the
divine unity, which precludes a simultaneously dual vision.
To be human, then, is to
be a divine form.To be a divine form is to be a divine self-expression within
which every name of God — every real quality found in the cosmos, every
attribute of the absolutely Real (al-haqq) — can become manifest and known.The
human form is both different from God (incomparable) and identical with him
(similar). Correct understanding of the situation demands seeing with both
eyes.
The Muhammadan inheritors
and the great friends of God differ from ordinary human beings in the clarity
of their vision and the appropriateness of their activity.They have realized
the form in which they were created, so they grasp the realities in proper
proportion and respond to every situation as God himself would respond, were
he to take upon human form.
All expressions of
knowledge go back to our own understanding and experience. Seeing with both
eyes, or what might be called “gnosis” (ma‘rifa), is no exception.The
human self or soul (nafs) is “an ocean without shore,” to use the
expression that Michel Chodkiewicz has chosen as the title of his outstanding
study of Ibn ‘Arabi’s hermeneutics.To the extent that we do come to know
ourselves correctly as the divine form, we also come to know the infinite God
in both his incomparability and his similarity.
It is axiomatic for Ibn
‘Arabi (and for most of Islamic theology as well), that God never repeats
himself in his creative activity, because he is absolutely One. At each moment
the One discloses itself to each individual in the universe, and each
disclosure of the One is one and unique. Every creature undergoes constant
change and flux as the moments of self-disclosure follow one upon another.We
are no different from any other creature in this respect, so we are endlessly
changing and forever new. Each moment of self-knowledge represents a new
perception of God’s manifestation in the soul and the world.
For Ibn ‘Arabi, the
achievement of self-understanding means to live in a constantly overflowing
fountain of divine self-expression, a neverending outpouring of knowledge and
awareness. At each instant God’s knower experiences a renewed divine
self-disclosure and comes to a fresh understanding of what it means to be
created in God’s form.
God is infinite, but his
form is limited, because it appears in the realm of disclosure and
manifestation. Each moment of self-disclosure specifies the form and makes it
uniquely itself. The Real itself cannot fit into form, so the divine forms can
only appear as successive self-disclosures, extending ad infin- itum.This
explains among other things why people in paradise will never be sated or
bored: they experience constant renewal and refreshment. So also, the gnostic,
who sees with both eyes, witnesses each moment as a totally new creation, fresh
and exhilarating.
In discussing the nature
of self-knowledge, Ibn ‘Arabi frequently cites the famous maxim attributed to
the Prophet,“He who knows himself (or, “his soul”) knows his Lord.” The saying
can perhaps more accurately be translated,“He who recognizes himself recognizes
his Lord.” The saying does not employ the usual word for knowledge, ‘i7m,which
often carries the connotation of learning or erudition without true
understanding. Rather, it uses the verbal form of the noun ma‘rifa,
which is often translated as “gnosis.” This word implies direct experience of
the thing and recognition of its true nature and actual situation. The
“gnostics” are those who achieve this sort of knowledge — direct, unmediated
knowledge of self and God. Thus “gnosis,” if this is the right translation,
means simultaneous self-recognition and God-recognition.
In his frequent
explanations of the meaning of this maxim, Ibn ‘Arabi sometimes takes one or
the other of the two basic routes of understanding God — asserting his incomparability
or declaring his similarity.The more we use our rational insight to analyze the
knowing self, the better we come to recognize that we are not God and we cannot
hope to know him. But the more we are given the gift of imaginai vision, the
better we recognize ourselves and the world as forms of the divine selfdisclosure.
Ibn ‘Arabi refers to the
perception of self and world achieved by the gnostics — those who recognize
things for what they are — as the direct vision of “He/not He,” or “God/not God.”
With one eye they see that God is incomparable, transcendent, and infinitely
beyond their perception and understanding.With the other eye they see that all
things display God’s similarity, immanence, and sameness. Each thing in the
universe, not least the human self, is simultaneously God and not God. Each
breath, each beat of the heart, offers a new instance of God’s absence and
presence.
Although knowledge of
God’s Essence is inaccessible to any but God himself, knowledge of God as he
discloses himself to the soul is the ready cash of everyone.There is in fact no
other knowledge. All of us know God in ourselves and the world, but most of us
do not recognize what we know. “There are none but knowers of God, but some of
the knowers know that they know God, and some do not know that they know God.
The latter know what they witness and examine, but they do not know that it is
the Real” (F. III 510.32).
At the highest stage of
self-knowledge, the gnostics recognize their own nature as the infinite and
neverending selfdisclosures of God. In their constant vision of the forms of
selfdisclosure, they live along with Ibn ‘Arabi in “God’s wide earth.” In the
Qur’an, God says, “O My servants, ... truly My earth is wide, so worship Me”
(29: 56).To be God’s “servant” ( ‘abd) is to recognize one’s created
status vis-à-vis the Creator, and to “worship” him is to act appropriately to
one’s status. Appropriate “worship” or “service,” ‘ibada, is precisely
proper “servanthood,” ‘ubudiyya, a word derived from the same root.
According to Ibn ‘Arabi,
when one achieves true servanthood of God, as he did in the year 1195, one
worships God in God’s own “wide earth,... which has permanent subsistence — it
is not the earth that accepts change ... The servant remains a servant forever,
so he remains in this earth forever. It is a supraformal, intelligible earth,
not a sensory earth” (F. III 224.10).
From the vantage point of
God’s wide earth, the faith of those who know God is the reverse of the faith
of the common people. The faithful, in the Quranic formula, are those who have
“faith in the Unseen.” The Unseen is typically identified as God, the angels,
and the Last Day. The gnostics also have faith in the Unseen, but for them the
Unseen is the universe. “They witness nothing but God in the realm of being.
They do not know what the world is, because they do not witness it as a world
... They have faith in it, but they do not see it, just as the people have
faith in God,but they do not see Him” (F.IV 74.16).
One might say that Ibn
‘Arabi’s project in the Futuhat is to map out the works, states, and
knowledge that he received as a denizen of the Wide Earth of God and as an heir
to Muhammad and the other prophets.The stress that he places on the necessity
of following in Muhammad’s footsteps to gain this knowledge and to achieve
perfection cannot be overestimated. He tells us, for example, that the highest
vision of God that anyone can hope to attain is found in the vision of the form
of Muhammad, the perfect human embodiment of the total divine self-disclosure.
The most excellent,
balanced, and correct of mirrors is Muhammad’s mirror, so God’s self-disclosure
within it is more perfect than any other self-disclosure that there may be.
You should struggle to
gaze on the Self-disclosing Real in the mirror of Muhammad so that he may be
imprinted in your mirror.Then you will see the Real in a Muhammadan form with a
Muhammadan vision.You will not see Him in your own form. (F. IV 433.10)
The Quranic prototype for
traversing the path to God is the Prophet’s mi‘raj or “ladder,” also
called his “night journey” (isra’). According to the traditional accounts,
Gabriel came to Muhammad one night and took him to Jerusalem. From there they
ascended together to the Lote Tree of the Far Boundary, the outermost limit of
paradise. Then Muhammad ascended alone to the presence of God.
According to a well-known
saying of the Prophet,“The daily prayer is the ‘ladder’ of the believer.” In
keeping with this saying, many Sufis have taken the accounts of the Night
Journey as symbolic depictions of the fruit of spiritual practice. Followers of
the Prophet can reap this fruit here and now through prayer and the remembrance
of God. Quite a few Sufis, however, recounted how they themselves had traveled
in the Prophet’s footsteps all the way up the ladder to God. Ibn ‘Arabi was one
of these, and he provides several accounts of his journey.
In one of his accounts,
Ibn ‘Arabi describes his meetings with the prophets and angels who inhabit each
of the heavens.When he finally attained to the divine presence, God sent down
upon him a single verse of the Qur’an, one that highlights his role of speaking
for all prophetic wisdom:“Say: ‘We have faith in God, and in what has been sent
down upon us, and sent down on Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, and Jacob, and the
Tribes, and in what was given to Moses and Jesus, and the prophets, of their
Lord. We do not distinguish among them, and to Him we submit” (3:84).
Ibn ‘Arabi tells us that
when he was given this verse, God made it the key to every knowledge. He came
to understand that he was a “Muhammadan,” that is “one of the inheritors of
Muhammad’s all-comprehensiveness.” In other words, he recognized that in his
own being he embraced all the knowledge revealed to all the prophets. He saw
that he had been given the knowledge and understanding of all the names that
had been taught to Adam (Q. 2:31). Or rather, he recognized that, as a form of
God, he contained all knowledge in himself.
In this night journey I
gained the meanings of all the divine names. I saw that they all go back to a
single Named Object and a Single Entity.That Named Object was what I was
witnessing, and that Entity was my own existence. So, my journey had been only
in myself. I provided no indications of any but myself. It was from here that I
came to know that I am a sheer servant and that there is nothing whatsoever of
lordship within me. (F. III 350.30)
At the highest levels of
self-realization, knowledge of self yields the recognition that there is
nothing in existence but the self, because nothing can be found in the entire
universe but God’s self-disclosure. At its most comprehensive and unified, that
divine self-disclosure is simply the form in which human beings were created.
One who realizes this station recognizes his absolute subservience to the Real
and acts as God’s servant in all that he does. Achieving this station can only
come through “gnosis,”that is,through self-recognition. Ibn ‘Arabi advises the
seeker, “Do not hope to recognize yourself through other than yourself, for
there is no other” (F. III 319.23).
I
bn ‘Arabi’s general approach to the Islamic
tradition implies that seekers ascend the ladder to God primarily by means of
knowledge and self-recognition, but he does not neglect the motivating power of
love (hubb). So much does he stress it in fact that Henry Corbin would
like to place him in the same category as Persian Sufis like Rumi. It is
closer to Ibn ‘Arabi’s perspective, however, to say that he considered
knowledge a more basic quality of the seeker. As he says explicitly, “Knowledge
is more eminent than love” (F II 661.10). God’s lovers possess exalted ranks in
the hierarchy of saints, but the knowers or “gnostics” rank even higher.
Although Ibn ‘Arabi
discusses the qualities of knowers much more than he talks about lovers, the Futuhat
is such a large work that he is able to provide a book-length explanation of
what it means to be a lover in Chapter 178. In one long section of this chapter
he lists forty-five of the lover’s major attributes and then comments on them
in a treatise called “God’s Loci of Manifestation to the Gnostic Lovers within
the Bridal Thrones: Explaining the Attributes of the Lovers in their Love.”
It is perhaps needless to
say that Ibn ‘Arabi did not write about love as a compiler of mystic lore, but rather
as a resident in the Wide Earth of God.What he has to say about love bubbles up
from his own realization of the realities, his first-hand
recognition of self, his
“tasting” (dhawq) of the way things are. He is describing his own
unveilings and openings, but in the rational and didactic language of the
scholarly tradition.
One incident drawn from
autobiographical remarks in the Futuhat can serve as an illustration of
Ibn ‘Arabi’s personal acquaintance with love. He is in the midst of explaining
that love can carry the lover to a station on the path to God where he is deaf
to every sound but his Beloved’s words, blind to every vision but his Beloved’s
face, and dumb to every utterance but his Beloved’s name. Nothing enters his
heart but love. Love’s power to transform is such that the lover “can no longer
imagine anything but the form of his Beloved” (F.II 325.17).
Next Ibn ‘Arabi alludes
to a famous hadith that he cites more often than any other in his works. The
Prophet quotes the words of God concerning the fruit of the mutual love between
God and man:
My servant keeps on
seeking nearness to Me through voluntary works until I love him.Then, when I
love him, I am his hearing through which he hears, his eyesight through which
he sees, his hand through which he grasps, and his foot through which he walks.
This shows, says Ibn
‘Arabi, that “The lover hears Him through Him, the lover sees Him through Him,
and the lover speaks to Him through Him.” By way of illustration, he describes
his own situation at the hands of love:
The power of my
imagination took me to the point where my love embodied my Beloved before my
eyes in the outside world, just as Gabriel used to embody himself to the
Messenger of God. I could not bear to gaze upon Him, yet He addressed me and I
listened to Him and understood what He said. For several days He left me in a
state where I could not eat.
Whenever the dining cloth
was spread for me, He would stand at its edge, look at me, and say in a tongue
I heard with my ears, “Will you eat while gazing upon Me?” I was prevented from
eating, but I was not hungry, and He kept my stomach full. I even put on weight
and became plump from gazing upon Him. He took the place of food.
My companions and family
were amazed at my becoming plump without food, for I remained many days without
tasting anything, though I became neither hungry nor thirsty. During all this
time, He never left from before my eyes, whether I was standing or sitting,
moving or still. (F. II 325.20)
ASSUMING THE TRAITS OF THE NAMES
No points of reference
are more recurrent in Ibn ‘Arabi’s writings than the names and attributes of
God, which are mentioned profusely in the Qur’an and provide the basic givens
of Islamic theology. A saying of the Prophet tells us that God has ninety-nine
of what the Qur’an calls “the most beautiful names,” but different lists have
been proposed and no general agreement as to their exact identity has been
reached. Ibn ‘Arabi quotes approvingly the opinion of one authority that only
eighty-three of the most beautiful names are known with certainty. But he also
points out that the divine names are infinite in number, corresponding to the
endless divine selfdisclosures that fill the universe, the infinite faces of
God that gaze upon the creatures.“Wherever you turn,” says the Qur’an, “there
is the face of God”(Q. 2: 115).
All creatures become
manifest by displaying God’s names and attributes. All are “signs” (ayat)
of God. To use the theological terms that Ibn ‘Arabi prefers, things make
manifest the “properties” (ahkam) and “traces” (athar) of the
divine names. Or, they “assume as their own the traits of the names,” an
expression derived from a saying often ascribed to the Prophet.
The cosmos has become
manifest as living, hearing, seeing, knowing, desiring, powerful, and speaking
...The cosmos is His work, so it becomes manifest in keeping with His
attributes ... It is He/not He, and it is the unknown/ the known. “To God
belong the most beautiful names” [Q. 7: 180], and to the cosmos belongs
becoming manifest through the names by assuming their traits. (F. II 438.20)
The word translated here
as “traits” is akhlaq. Its singular, khuluq, can be translated as
“character.” The most important scriptural use of the word is a verse addressed
to Muhammad: “Surely you have a magnificent character” (Q. 68: 4), or, as
Arberry translates it, “a mighty morality.” In English translations of Islamic
philosophical texts, akhlaq is typically rendered as “ethics.” The
Muslim philosophers use the term to designate the science that investigates
virtue and vice, specifically how to acquire the former and avoid the latter.
From the Sufi perspective, the virtues that people must acquire are precisely
the divine names and attributes, for it is these that are latent in the human
substance, created in the form of God.
Life in this world is a
process through which the traces and properties of the divine names come to be
actualized. Revelation is necessary if people are to become qualified by the
names in proper harmony and equilibrium. To use the moral language, people need
divine guidance if they are to actualize the traits of the names as virtues and
avoid their deformation as vices.
If people display the
traces of divine attributes such as severity and wrath and fail to keep them
properly confined through justice, compassion, and generosity, they will be
dominated by cruelty and arrogance. Only a perfect harmony of divine attributes
can lead to the full blossoming of human nature, the realization of the
deiformity latent in the soul. Ibn ‘Arabi refers to the assumption of the
traits of the divine names as the very definition of the spiritual life:
“Assuming the character traits of God — that is Sufism” (F. II 267.11).
One of the most important
and fundamental of the divine attributes that need to be actualized is love.
God is called “the Lover” in both the Qur’an and the Hadith. For Ibn ‘Arabi,
the objects of God’s love help delineate the qualities and character traits
that human beings must acquire in order to gain perfec- tion.Thus God
loves,among others,the repentant and the pure (Q. 2: 222), those who trust in
him (Q. 3: 159), the patient (Q. 3: 146), the virtuous (Q. 2:195), and those
who fight in his path in ranks (Q. 61: 4).
Ibn ‘Arabi often quotes a
famous hadith to show that God’s love plays an essential role in the origin and
structure of the world. Significantly, the saying also highlights the
importance of knowledge and recognition: the Prophet reported that God says (in
the version cited by Ibn ‘Arabi), “I was a Hidden Treasure but unrecognized. I
loved to be recognized, so I created the creatures and I made Myself
recognized to them, so they recognized Me”(F. II 322.29).
In other words, God’s
love brings the universe into existence, thereby opening up a gap between his
uncreated Self and the created world. But the love that brings about separation
also leads to union. God’s love for creation gives rise to creation’s love for
him, and that love does not remain unfulfilled.
Ibn ‘Arabi points out
that God created both human beings and the universe in his own form. Both man
and cosmos display the traces of the divine attributes and assume as their own
the
divine character
traits.The cosmos, however, discloses the full along with perfect human
beings.Without the prophets and the friends of God, the world would be dead,
like a body without a spirit, and it would disintegrate and disappear. “If
[Perfect] Man were to leave the cosmos, the cosmos would die” (F II 468.12).
In contrast to other
beings in the universe, humans are complete self-disclosures of the Divine
Reality, for they manifest all God’s names and attributes and encompass the
three basic levels of created existence — corporeal, imaginal (or psychic), and
spiritual. Made in God’s form, they cannot fully satisfy their quest for
fulfillment and completion except in God himself. Only God or another human
being is adequate to their love.
Man’s love for God and
for his own kind absorbs him totally, but no love for anything else in the
cosmos can do that.When he loves one of the forms found in the cosmos, he turns
to it with the corresponding part of himself, but the rest of him stays sober
in its occupation.
As for his total
absorption in love for God, this is because he is made in His form, as reported
by the Prophet. He coincides with the Divine Presence through his whole
essence, and that is why all the divine names become manifest within him. He
who does not have the attribute of love will not assume the names as his own
character traits. (F II 325.29)
When Ibn ‘Arabi talks
about love for God, he means specifically God in respect of his
all-comprehensive name, i.e., Allah, to which all other names refer and in the
form of which human beings were created. It was God in respect of this name who
created man in his own form, not God as Creator or Allmerciful. If people love
God because he is the Benefactor or the Provider or the All-powerful and not
because he is God per se, they run the risk of failing to actualize the full
range of divine attributes that determine human nature.
Imperfect love for God
can be seen wherever we look. Whatever love’s object appears to be, in fact it
is love for God, because all phenomena go back to the divine self-disclosures.
Typically people love God under the guise of one or more of the divine
attributes that he has lent to the creatures.This is a major theme of the great
Persian lovers like Rumi, and Ibn ‘Arabi expresses it just as clearly: “None
but God is loved in the existent things. It is He who is manifest within every
beloved to the eye of every lover — and there is nothing in the existent realm
that is not a lover”(F. II 326.19).
All things come from God
and return to him.The force that brings them into existence is the Hidden
Treasure’s love to be known. Among all creatures, only human beings, made in
God’s form, are given the gift of full and integral love in order to realize
full and integral knowledge and recognition of the Hidden Treasure. In loving
their Lord and thereby actualizing the form in which they were created, they
burn away the veils of ignorance and illusion that keep them back from their
eternal home.“The sincere lover is he who passes into the attributes of the
Beloved, not he who pulls the Beloved down to his own level ... He assumes as
his own the traits of His names” (F.II 596.6).
We should not conclude
that all lovers are equal in love. Although God is one, his forms are
infinitely diverse. Perfect love for God is found only in Perfect Man, and each
of the prophets and friends loves God in a unique mode of perfection. In
Chapter 208 of the Futuhat, Ibn ‘Arabi explains something of the
typology of lovers in keeping with their varied knowledge of God, for every
lover knows God, because it is impossible to love what you do not know.
Ibn ‘Arabi tells us that
some people are simply believers, and their knowledge of God comes by way of
hearsay and prophetic reports. But reports invariably conflict, so the
believers remain bewildered about God and are not able to have a clear
conception of their Beloved. Among them, some prefer what they understand
through their imagination, which recognizes God’s similarity and immanence.They
conceive of God in a limited form and become attached to it. In their search
for God they desire ecstasy, intimacy, and vision.
Some believers know God
through their rational faculties. In contrast to those who depend on
imagination, they impose no limits on him,but they miss great good. Despite the
fact that “He is closer to them than the jugular vein” (Q. 50:16),they fail to
recognize that he is he. Their Beloved is always manifest to them, but they do
not have the eyes to see him.
Those who gaze upon God
by means of the eye of reason are divided into two sorts. One sort craves to
see their Beloved. Here Ibn ‘Arabi probably has in mind the Ash’arite
theologians, who affirmed that the vision of God in the afterlife was the
supreme goal of man. The other sort declare, like the Mu’tazilite theologians,
that it is impossible to see the Beloved, though it is possible to know
Him.They despair of seeing and, as Ibn ‘Arabi puts it, “They remain in the
bliss of despair, while the other group remains in the bliss of craving” (F II
494.6). After all, as the Qur’an tells us, “Each party takes joy in what they
have”(23: 53).
All these groups are
ranked in degrees according to the level of their understanding.The greatest of
the lovers, however, are those who constantly seek to augment their knowledge,
in keeping with the Quranic command: “Say: ‘My Lord, increase me in
knowledge’”(20:114).They increase their knowledge by never denying God’s
presence in any phenomenon and by never affirming his presence in anything
whatsoever. Seeing with both eyes, they constantly recognize that all is
“He/not He.” They never let themselves fall into stasis and fixity, but flow
with the constant unfolding of the universe. They recognize themselves and all
things for what they are.
I
bn ‘Arabi begins his long chapter on love in
the Futuhat as he begins most of the book’s chapters,by citing relevant
Quranic verses and prophetic sayings. He points out first that love is a divine
attribute, and he lists several of the Quranic verses in which God is the
subject of the verb “to love.” Fourteen of these mention those whom God loves,
and the remaining twenty- three mention those whom God does not love.
In every Quranic verse
where God’s love or lack of it is mentioned, the objects are human beings. In
other words, the Qur’an associates love only with man among all creatures. Most
other divine attributes mentioned in the Qur’an — such as life, knowledge,
desire, power, speech, generosity,justice, mercy, and wrath — have no special
connection with the human race. It follows that love is a key term if we are to
understand what differentiates man from those creatures who are not made in the
divine form.
The first prophetic
saying that Ibn ‘Arabi mentions at the beginning of the chapter is the hadith
of the Hidden Treasure, and the second is the hadith according to which, when
God loves his servant, he becomes the hearing with which he hears and the
eyesight with which he sees.
By citing Qur’an and
Hadith at the beginning of the chapter, Ibn ‘Arabi wants to establish what he calls
“the divine roots” or “the divine principles” of the discussion. On one level,
this
means simply that he
wants to show that he is basing himself on the revealed texts. On a deeper
level, he is saying that the Qur’an expresses the nature of love as it is found
in the deepest roots of Ultimate Reality.
Ibn ‘Arabi’s first topic
is always the truly Real, which is God. His second topic is the cosmos, which
is defined as “everything other than God.” When employing the technical
language of philosophy and theology, he typically calls God wujud, a
word that is usually translated as “being” or “existence.”
In Arabic the word wujud
is applied to God and to everything else as well. God has wujud, or
rather, God is wujud, and everything else has wujud in one mode
or another. Using a typical way of distinguishing between being and existence
in English, we might say that wujud means Being when referring to God
and existence when referring to anything other than God. But in Ibn ‘Arabi’s
usage of the word, it is often unclear if he means God’s wujud, the
world’s wujud, or simply wujud without specification.
If we translate wujud
as “existence” or “being,” we meet another problem as soon as we look at its
literal meaning, which is “finding” or “to be found.” True, from early times
the word was used in philosophy and theology (and from somewhat later on in
Sufism) to mean existence/being. But, the implications of the literal meaning
were never forgotten, neither by the more insightful philosophers nor by the
Sufis. Wujud is not simply the fact of being or existing — the fact that
something is there to be found. Rather, wujud is also the reality of
finding, which is to say that it is awareness, consciousness, understanding,
and knowledge.
Throughout the early Sufi
tradition, the word wujud was used primarily in the more literal sense
of awareness and
understanding. As a
technical term, it was used to designate “finding God,” that is, coming to
direct awareness and consciousness of the Divine Reality. It was practically a
synonym of words like “witnessing” and “unveiling,” which also play prominent
roles in Ibn ‘Arabi’s writings.
For Ibn ‘Arabi, the word wujud
carries both the Sufi and the philosophical meanings. No matter how
“ontological” his discussions may appear to modern readers, he never loses
sight of the fact that wujud designates not only the incomparable and
ineffable Reality of the Real, but also the immanent presence of God in the
knower’s awareness. The gnostics look with both eyes, and they perceive wujud
as both absent, because it is none other than the Divine Essence, and present,
because it is none other than God’s self-disclosure as the selfhood of the
knower.
In Ibn ‘Arabi’s
terminology, then, wujudmeans not only being and existence (the
“objective” side of reality), but also finding and awareness (the “subjective”side
ofreality). He highlights the latter sense in expressions like ahl al-kashf
wa’l-wujud, “the folk of unveiling and finding,” or ahl ash-shuhud
wa’l-wujud, “the folk of witnessing and finding.” These are precisely the
gnostics, those who see with both eyes.
It hardly needs to be
pointed out that in English neither “being” nor “existence” has the connotation
of awareness and consciousness. Even when we talk about God as “Being,” we know
that God has knowledge and awareness because we say so, not because the word
itself demands it.
The results of
disassociating being and consciousness
become obvious when we
glance at the history of Western
theologians look upon
life and consciousness as epiphenomena of existence, latecomers on the cosmic
scene. We moderns are happy to think that “existence” came before
consciousness, or that living things gradually evolved from dead and inanimate
matter. For Ibn ‘Arabi and much of Islamic thinking (not to mention kindred
visions in other traditions), no universe is thinkable without the primacy of
life and awareness, the presence of consciousness in the underlying stuff of
reality.
In itself, wujud
is the non-manifest, the Hidden Treasure.
However, wujud
loved to be known, so it created the universe in order to be known.Those who
recognize and realize wujud are true human beings, Perfect Man. But
people cannot know and recognize wujud unless wujud makes itself
known to them, and it does so by revealing itself in three basic modes: the
universe, the human self, and scripture.
Scripture is the key that
opens the door to the universe and the self. Self-expressive wujud
employs scripture to stir up human understanding.Without recourse to it, people
will not be able to fathom themselves and the cosmos. If they do not come to
know and recognize themselves, they will not know God.
When Ibn ‘Arabi says that
Quranic verses are the divine roots of things,he means to say that these verses
manifest the very principles of wujud, the very sources of the
existence that we find in our experience, the foundations of our consciousness
and aware- ness.The Qur’an gives expression to the realities of wujud in
the clearest possible manner. Among these realities, one of the most
significant for understanding the divinely human form is love.
Love has many
similarities with wujud, which is simply to say that God is the root of
all love, and by experiencing love we experience something of him.Among the
most salient similarities is that like wujud, love cannot be defined.
Ibn ‘Arabi calls the understanding of love “a knowledge of tasting” (F. IV
7.2), which is to say that people will know love only when they experience it
in themselves, but they will not be able to convey their understanding to
others.
Wujud cannot be
known in itself, but it can be known inasmuch as it discloses itself. Once wujud
shows itself, we can summarize what we have learned about it by mentioning its
attributes.Thus God, the Real Wujud, reveals his own nature in the
Qur’an by mentioning his most beautiful names.
In a similar way, love
cannot be known in itself, but its attributes and names can be known and
described. For Ibn ‘Arabi, one of the most important of love’s attributes has
to do with the nature of its object.Whatever object it is that we love, he
says, it is always nonexistent.This seems to fly in the face of common sense,
since we like to think that we love a real person or a real object, not a
nothingness. “Love’s object remains forever nonexistent, but most lovers are
unaware of this, unless they should be recognizers of the realities” (F. II
337.17).
The point Ibn ‘Arabi
wants to make is not difficult to understand. When people fall in love, they
experience a desire to achieve nearness or union with the person they love.As
long as they have not achieved the object of their desire, the object does not
in fact exist for them. People love what they do not already have. They want to
achieve something that they have not already achieved, or to be near to someone
from whom they are far. “The love of the lover becomes attached only to that of
the person which is nonexistent at the moment. He imagines that his love is
attached to the person, but this is not so. Love incites him to meet and see
his beloved” (F. II 327.7).
Ibn ‘Arabi continues this
passage by answering an objection. You may say that you loved companionship, or
kissing, or intimacy. Then, when you achieved your desire, you found that you
still loved it. Therefore, you conclude, love exists along with its object. Ibn
‘Arabi replies that in fact the object still does not exist, because now love’s
object is the permanence of what was achieved, not the achievement itself. Permanence
is not an existing thing. “Love attaches itself only to a nonexistent thing
...When love sees the thing, it is transferred to the permanence of that state
whose existence it loves in that existent entity” (F.II 337.18).
THE
ENTITIES
All things are rooted in
Real Wujud, and love is no exception. If it is universally true that the
object of love is nonexistent, this must hold true for God’s love as well. In
fact, the idea that God loves nonexistent objects is a corollary of tawhid,
the assertion of God’s unity that is the first principle of Islamic thought and
the governing theme of Ibn ‘Arabi’s works.
Tawhid is expressed
most succinctly in the formula, “There is no god but God.” God is wujud,
so “There is no wujudbut God.” Everything other than God is not wujud
and can properly be called “nonexistence” (‘adam). Wujud is the Hidden
Treasure, and all things derive their existence from it, for they possess none
of their own.
One of Ibn ‘Arabi’s best
known technical terms is ‘ayn thabita, “fixed entity.” The fixed
entities are the things of the universe as known by God for all eternity. Given
that “God knows everything” (Q. 2: 231) and given that his knowledge, like
himself, is eternal and unchanging, he has always known everything and will
always know it. The “things” that God knows are precisely the “entities.” They
are “located” in the Hidden Treasure: “God’s words, ‘I was a Treasure,’ affirm
the fixed entities” (F. II 232.12).
The entities
are “fixed” because, despite their nonexistence in themselves, they are
eternally known to God. They are “things” even before God brings them into
existence. On the basis of his knowledge of them, he creates them and they
become manifest as “existent entities” (ayan mawjuda). However, their
existence is not their own, because wujud belongs to God.There is only
one wujud, and that is the wujud of God, or rather, the wujud
that is identical with God. “The fixed entities,” as Ibn ‘Arabi remarks in an
often quoted sentence, “have never smelt a whiff of wujud" (FH 76),
and they will never smell it, because they are nonexistent by definition.
The things that we
perceive and experience in the world are called “existent entities.” This name
is deceptive, however, because the “existence” that sustains them does not
belong to them. In themselves, they are no different from the nonexistent,
fixed entities. Whether we call them “fixed” or “existent,” it is not they that
smell the whiff of wujud. Rather, Real Wujud itself is the
hearing through which they hear and the eyesight through which they see.
Wujud and the
nonexistent entities — the Real and the not Real — are the two pillars upon
which the universe stands. On one side, God alone is wujud. On the other
side, the entities have no wujud. On its own Wujud simply is, and
on their own, the entities simply are not. But love is an inherent attribute of
Wujud, and love inherently strives for what is not. It expresses what is
unexpressed, makes manifest what is hidden, and creates what has not been
created. Love might be described as the innate tendency of Wujud to
become manifest, or of light to shine.“God is the light of the heavens and
earth” (Q. 24:35).
Through love, Wujud
asserts its own reality by showing itself to everything that may possibly come
to exist.The possibilities of existing are specified by entities that do not in
themselves exist. If they did exist, there would be two wujuds, and that
would contradict tawhid, “There is no wujud but God.” The
entities are known to God as concomitants of his own Infinite Reality.
Each entity is a specific
mode of not existing, or a specific possibility (mumkin), because each
represents a mode in which the radiance of Wujud can be limited,
defined, specified, and determined. When Wujud delimits its radiance
through the entities,it discloses itself as less than its infinite self. In
order for the blinding light of Real Wujud to become manifest, it must
be diminished by darkness, which is simply the lack of light, the lack of
reality, the lack of existence.
In short, the “existent
entities” of the universe are the infinite differentiations and delimitations
to which the radiance of Real Wujud is susceptible. Each creature is a
self-showing or a self-disclosure of Wujud, but it does not truly exist,
because Wujud alone is Wujud. It follows that each creature is Wujud/not
Wujud, He/not He, God/not God.
Why is love an inherent
attribute of Wujud? In one passage, Ibn ‘Arabi answers this question in
terms of two divine names, Beautiful ( jamil) and Light (nur).
Light is that which is manifest (zahir) in itself and makes other things
manifest by bestowing light upon them. Wujud is precisely light, for it
is manifest in itself and makes other things manifest. In contrast, the fixed
entities are nonexistent and non-manifest, which is to say that they have no
existence of their own and are known to none but God.When we say that God
creates the universe, we mean that he brings the entities into existence, or he
makes the nonmanifest manifest, or he showers light upon darkness.
In and of themselves the
entities remain fixed and immutable in nonexistence. God loves to be known, so
he loves the creatures through whom he comes to be known.The objects of his
love are by definition nonexistent, and they will always remain nonexistent,
because his love for them is eternal. “The created thing ... is nonexistent, so
it is the object of God’s love constantly and forever.As long as there is
love, one cannot conceive of the existence of the created thing along with it,
so the created thing never comes into existence” (F. II 113.29).
If the created thing
never gains true existence, then the existence that we perceive can belong
only to God, who is Manifest Wujud and who discloses his names and
attributes as the existent entities. Ibn ‘Arabi calls the existent entity a
“locus of manifestation” (mazhar), for it displays Wujud in
specific and delimited confines. For our part, we see the confines, the
delimited thing, the specific self-disclosure that is this thing and not some
other thing. But in fact, Wujud alone is truly manifest, because
manifestation belongs to light, not darkness; to existence, not nonexistence;
to God, not creation.
In explaining why the
divine love derives from God’s names, Beautiful and Light, Ibn ‘Arabi says that
Light shines upon the nonexistent entities and illuminates their gaze. It gives
the uncreated things an eyesight that is none other than the eyesight of God,
and then God sees through them and they see through God. Light alone allows
things to see and to be seen. “Then God discloses Himself to the entities
through the name Beautiful, and they fall in love with Him” (F. II 112.34).
Ibn ‘Arabi is saying that
the Hidden Treasure is both beautiful and luminous. The nonexistent things have
nothing of their own with which to perceive the divine beauty. In order to give
them existence in the world, God must speak to them: “Our only word to a thing
when We desire it, is to say to it ‘Be,’ and it comes to be”(Q. 16:40).
If God speaks to the
nonexistent entities, they must be able to hear his words. All perception
presupposes manifestation, and light makes itself and others manifest by its
very nature. God’s light, shining upon the nonexistent entities, gives them the
ability to hear and to see, and they see what is there, which is God.The
entities cannot see God without his light, for they have no light of their own.
He must become the eyesight with which they see, which is simply to say that
things can only come into existence through God’s wujud, the only wujud
there is.
Once the Light of God
becomes manifest and the entities come into existence — in a manner of speaking
— then the entities see the Beautiful. “God is beautiful,” the Prophet said,
“and He loves beauty.” This sets down a principle that is omnipresent in Muslim
discussions of love: every beautiful thing is inherently lovable. Beauty is
that which attracts love, just as love is that which is attracted by the
beautiful. As Ibn ‘Arabi puts it, “The cause of love is beauty, for beauty is
loved by its very essence” (F II 326.24).
When the entities see the
Beautiful, they become his lovers. Utterly engrossed in their beloved, they
forget self and see nothing but him.What is really happening is that God is
loving himself by means of the locus of manifestation that is the existent
entity. Having become the entity’s eyesight and hearing, God loves what he sees
and hears. Just as “There is no god but God,” so also “There is no lover but
God” and “There is no beloved but God.” In the last analysis,“The servant is
not qualified by this love, since love has no property within him. After all,
nothing of the servant loves God but God, who is manifest within him. God alone
is the Manifest” (F II 112.34).
God loves the objects of
his knowledge when they are nonexistent. As soon as they come into existence,
he stops loving them, because love is directed only at nonexistence. Hence he
loves the next moment of the thing’s existence, which is to say that he loves
the permanence of the thing’s existence. He never ceases loving the fixed
entities for all eternity, because they remain forever nonexistent. At each
moment, his love for the existence of the nonexistent things brings about a new
creation.
In his chapter on the
divine names in the Futuhat, Ibn ‘Arabi writes that the meaning of the
name Loving (al-wadud) is that God constantly brings the universe into
existence for the sake of his creatures. Although we are fixed entities and
remain forever nonexistent, the tongue of our own situation begs God to
bestow existence upon us,
and he responds by doing so.
Looking closely, we see
that he is responding to himself, for he
One of the two Quranic
passages that mention the name “Loving” associates it with the divine Throne:
“He is the Forgiving, the Loving, the Lord of the Throne” (85: 14—15).
Elsewhere, the Qur’an tells us that it is God as the All-merciful who is
sitting on the Throne. The tradition typically understands the Throne to
designate the outermost sphere of the heavens, which encompasses the whole
cosmos. It follows that God’s mercy embraces everything, as the Qur’an says
explicitly (7: 156).
God is generous and
bountiful by nature, because Wujud is infinitely full and infinitely
effusive. He gives to the creatures the best that he has, and that is Wujud,
his own reality.The creature is by definition a lover, for the entity loves
the Beautiful who discloses himself to it through the effusion of light. God’s
mercy, then, is directed at his lovers, who are all the creatures of the
universe.
He has mercy only on the
ardor of the lover, which is a delicate yearning for the encounter with the
Beloved. No one encounters the Beloved save with His attribute, and His
attribute is wujud. Hence He bestows wujudupon the lover. Had
there been anything more perfect than that with Him, He would not have been
stingy with it ..., for God reported that He is “the Forgiving, the Loving,”
which is to say that in His unseen reality He is fixed in love, for He sees us,
so He sees His beloved. Hence He delights in His beloved. (F. IV 260.6)
God loves the
nonexistent, fixed entities. They remain nonexistent, but his love brings them
into existence forever. From one standpoint, he has a single object of love,
which is the cosmos and everything it contains. From another standpoint, the
universe itself is nothing but the manifestation of Wujud, so God loves
himself, and in loving himself he brings the entities in the Hidden Treasure
from nonexistence into existence.
As all-comprehensive
forms of Wujud, human beings possess the attribute of love, and what
they love remains forever non- existent.When God and the universe are
considered as two different realities, the object of human love may be God, or
someone or something in the universe. But when we understand that the universe
is nothing but God’s self-disclosure, then we see that the object of love can
be nothing but God.The object of love, however, is always nonexistent, so God
stays forever nonexistent in relation to his lovers. In other words, in his
Essence he remains forever non-manifest, unknowable, and unattainable.
Lovers and seekers strive
to find God, but the God who can be loved and sought is the God who can be
conceptualized and understood.That is not God in himself, but rather the God of
belief (ilah al-mu‘taqad), the God that we understand, who is none other
than God as he shows himself to us. In himself God will never be found. And
only the God who will never be found is truly the infinite God who is no
different from Real Wujud.
If God in himself cannot
be sought, what are the seekers seeking? What have the Sufis been singing
about in their poetry if not love for God? Ibn ‘Arabi replies that they are not
seeking God in himself, but God inasmuch as they understand and embrace him,
that is, God as he shows himself to them. This God who discloses himself to
them, however, is not Wujud. It is the radiance and manifestation of Wujud,
not Wujud itself.
In respect of His Essence
and His Wujud, nothing stands up to the Real. He cannot be desired or
sought in His Essence. What the seekers seek and the desirers desire is only
recognition of Him, witnessing of Him, or vision of Him.All of these arefrom
Him.
They are not He Himself.
(F. II 663.9)
Given that God himself
cannot be sought, the gnostics make no attempt to seek him.What they do seek is
their own “felicity”(sa‘ada), which is the Quranic term for the
permanent happiness achieved in paradise. “God cannot be attained by seeking.
The gnostics seek their own felicity, not God” (F. IV 443.1).They seek the joy
of participating with full consciousness and awareness in the ongoing renewal
of the universe, the endless process whereby God loves the nonexistent entities
and brings them into existence.They love God not for his sake, but for their
own sake.
Although there are many
lovers — or rather, everyone in existence is a lover — no one recognizes the
object to which his love is attached. People are veiled by the existent thing
within which their beloved is found.They imagine that the existent thing is
their beloved, but, in reality, it is their beloved only indirectly. In
reality, no one loves a beloved for the sake of the beloved’s self. Rather, he
loves the beloved only for the sake of his own self. (F. II 333.21)
POVERTY
Like Rumi and many other
Sufi teachers, Ibn ‘Arabi frequently explains love in terms of “need” (iftiqar),
a word derived from the same root as “poverty” ( faqr). Poverty in turn
is used much more often in Islamic texts than “Sufism” to designate the inner
dimension of Islamic teaching and practice.
Poverty or
need is an inherent attribute of creatures in face of God, who is the Wealthy,
the Independent, the Unneeding (al-ghani). “Poor” and “wealthy”
are derived from several Quranic verses, especially 35: 15:“O people, you are
the poor toward God, and God, He is the Wealthy, the Praiseworthy.” God
possesses all good and all wujud.Whatever people possess comes from him,
so he deserves the praise for it.
In Ibn ‘Arabi’s
vocabulary, poverty is equivalent to the philosophical term “possibility” or
“contingency” (imkan), which refers to the fact that things have no
claim on existence and stand in need of Real Wujud if they are to come
into existence.Wealth or independence refers to God’s “necessity” ( wujub),
the fact that he is and cannot not be.
Sufis sometimes debated
as to whether the goal of the Sufi path was to be poor and needy toward
God or to be wealthy and independent through God. For Ibn ‘Arabi,
poverty and wealth are two sides of the same coin, but poverty deserves to be
stressed, because it is the fundamental situation of every created thing. The
entities are inherently poor, so their realities demand that they love and seek
what they do not have. The object of their love and seeking is always
nonexistent in relation to themselves. “He who is wealthy through God is poor
toward Him. But relationship to God through the word ‘poverty’ is more
appropriate than relationship to Him through wealth.’” (F. II 263.34)
Although people are in
fact poor toward the Real Wujud, their poverty and need become specified
and focused on specific forms. When people recognize the true nature of their
poverty, they strive to have no object of need other than God. Nonetheless, the
object of seeking can only be nonexistent. Hence to love God means to love that
which cannot be delimited, defined, constricted, or understood. It is to desire
that which is nonexistent in relation to the limited and defined form that is
oneself. The human soul may be an ocean without shore, but it can never be more
than a shadow of Infinite Wujud.
In their states and
beliefs, the Folk of the Path see being [kawn] and bliss [na‘im]
as coming only from God, so they are poor toward Him in that and toward no one
else. It would not be correct for them to be poor toward Him while they have wujud,
for then they would already be existent. Rather, they have this poverty
toward wujud in the state of their nonexistence, and that is why He
gives them existence. (F. II 600.35)
The true lover loves God
alone, not any specific gift of God. Those who love specific objects are
unaware that true love can focus only on what is absolutely nonexistent in
relation to the lover. Only Wujud is absolutely other than the
nonexistent thing, so only it can be the true object of love.This is why Ibn
‘Arabi advises his readers, “Attach your poverty to God in an absolute sense,
without any specification” (F. II 264.20).
The hadith of the Hidden
Treasure tells us that God loved to be known and recognized. The Qur’an and the
tradition make clear that the knowledge God desired to actualize through
creation can only be achieved by human beings, who alone are God’s forms and vicegerents.
Only they were created in God’s form, so only they can recognize God by
recognizing themselves.
The Qur’an tells us that
God taught Adam all the names, and one of the interpretations of this verse is
that these were the names of God, that is, the names that designate Real Wujud.
This special knowledge taught to Adam explains his superiority over all
other creatures. The goal of human life is then to actualize the knowledge
taught to Adam, and it is this actualization that Ibn ‘Arabi calls “perfection.”
The underlying theme of
Ibn ‘Arabi’s writings is not, as many would have it, wahdat al-wujud,
“the Oneness of Being,” but rather the achievement of human perfection. He
never mentions the term wahdat al-wujud, but he does refer repeatedly
to Perfect Man. His focus on human perfection can be seen clearly in the very
structure of his two most famous works, the Fusus al-hikam and al-Futuhat
al-makkiyya.The first begins with a discussion of Adam, the original
Perfect Man, and then describes the various modalities of human perfection in
terms of its specific individuations in the prophets. As for the Futuhat,
it is a vast compendium of depictions of the various stations of human
perfection, viewed from diverse standpoints, though always in the context of the
divine names and attributes.
The notion of perfection
is closely bound up with the infinity and inaccessibility of Wujud. God
in himself is “no thing,” which is to say that he is no existing thing, because
he is Wujud itself, the Divine Reality that stands beyond all existent
and nonexistent things. If human beings are to attain to the perfection of the
divine form, they cannot be tied down by specific things. At one and the same
time they must be all things and no thing, just as God is all things and no
thing.
When we love specific
people or things, we focus our aspirations and desires on defined and limited
objects. By doing so, we turn away from an infinite number of other possible
objects. For his part God loves all things. His love embraces everything that
can possibly exist and brings the universe into existence moment by moment.
Perfect Man is similar to God in that he loves all things and no specific
thing, in contrast to ordinary people, who love this thing and that thing, this
person and that person.
Ibn ‘Arabi sometimes
calls human perfection “the station of no station” (maqam la maqam).
Everyone other than Perfect Man stands in a specific station delimited and
defined by the objects of his or her love and aspiration. Perfect Man alone
stands in no station, because he alone has fully actualized a love that has no
specific object. Rather, the object of his love is the infinite Essence of God,
which remains forever inaccessible.
Perfect Man is defined by
his lack of definition. He loves the “nothing” that is the source of
everything. He has perfected the divine form, for he is indefinable and
unrestricted, just like the object of his love. By living in no thing and no
station, he is free of all things and all stations. By being poor and needy toward
all things, he is poor and needy toward nothing, which is to say that he is
poor and needy only toward God and wealthy and independent only through him.
The mark of Perfect Man’s
love is his universal poverty, that is, the utter annihilation of his egocentric
self and his total focus on God in the infinite wealth of the divine
self-disclosure. God’s self-disclosure is the universe in its entirety, in all
its spiritual, imaginal, and corporeal dimensions. Through a love for God that
is absolute and non-delimited, Perfect Man loves all. Others at best will
experience only glimmers of non-specific love.
Ibn ‘Arabi calls the
non-specific and non-delimited love that is realized by the gnostics and
Perfect Man “divine love,” since, like God’s love for the universe, it does not
distinguish among the entities.The mark of this divine love is that the gnostic
loves every created thing in every level of being and every world, whether the
level be supraformal and spiritual, imaginal and psychic, or corporeal and
sensory. For, every level of being “has an eye from His name Light through
which it looks upon His name Beautiful, since it is this light that dresses it
in the robe of wujud” (F. II 113.6).
T
he Prophet said, “This
world is accursed, and accursed is everything within it, save the remembrance
of God.” “This world,” which is where we are now, is contrasted with “the
afterworld,” which is where we will be after death.The saying seems to express
an other-worldly sentiment that is not especially characteristic of the
Islamic tradition. Generally, like
Judaism and contrary to
much of early Christianity, Islam evaluates this world positively and asks
people to bring God into it,
not to turn away from it.
Is this saying in fact uncharacteristic of Islam? Perhaps more to the point, is
it in fact as negative as it first appears? Ibn ‘Arabi’s teachings on
remembrance (dhikr)
We saw in Chapter 1 that
Ibn ‘Arabi speaks of remembrance as knocking at God’s door in the hope that God
will open it. In another passage he defines it as “presence [Audur] and
watchfulness [muraqaóu] over God’s traces in your heart and in the
cosmos” (F III 502.12). It is to be with God and not absent from him, to
recognize him through his signs and marks in the cosmos and the self.
Remembrance is often
encouraged in the Qur’an, where it means keeping God in mind and mentioning or
invoking his name. It was central to theory and practice from the beginning of
the tradition, and Western scholars have paid a good deal of attention to the
prominent role that it has played in Sufism. Its similarity to the Jesus prayer
in Christianity, japa yoga in Hinduism, and nembutsu in the Shin
Buddhist tradition has often been remarked upon. Some scholars have gone as far
as to claim that Sufis borrowed the technique from Christian monks. Given its
role in the Qur’an and the Sunnah, however, this seems a gratuitous hypothesis.
In any case, Ibn ‘Arabi throws a good deal of light on why it should be central
not only to Sufism, but also to Islam in general.
The Islamic tradition is
founded on knowledge.This is most evident in the first half of the testimony of
faith, “There is no god but God,” which epitomizes tawhid or the
assertion of God’s unity. Even those familiar with Islamic teachings, however,
sometimes forget that tawhid has nothing to do with history, because it
is simply a statement of the way things are. More sophisticated Muslim thinkers
have always maintained that tawhid is a universal and atemporal truth.To
be human is to have an intuition of this truth, and all the 124,000 prophets
came with tawhid at the core of their message.
Tawhid expresses the
nature of reality, irrespective of the existence of the universe, man, or any
other created things. Given that we do have a world and human beings, however,
the tradition takes into account a second fact, the human situation. It
encapsulates this situation with the words “forgetfulness” (nisyan) and
“heedlessness” ( ghafla). Although people have an innate intuition of tawhid,
they do not necessarily find it ready to mind. It may not be easy for them to
bring it from latency to actuality or to voice it in language and put it into
practice.They need the help of the prophets.
With “prophecy,” the
second principle of Islamic faith, the perspective shifts from atemporal to
temporal, eternal to contingent, and God to history.The first function of the
prophets is to “remind” people of their own divinely given reality.This word
“remind” translates dhikr and several of its derivatives (dhikra,
tadhkir, tadhkira).The Qur’an calls the human response to this reminder by
the same word dhikr. The “reminder” that comes from God calls forth
“remembrance” from man.
The use of one word to
designate a bidirectional movement
— from the divine to the
human and from the human to the divine — is consistent with the Qur’an’s
unitary perspective and recalls the parallel use of the word love: “He loves
them and they love Him” (Q. 5: 54). “So remember Me, I will remember you” (Q.
2: 152).
Whether we speak of
remembrance or love, there is in fact
only one force, and that
is the divine activity that makes manibeings and sends the prophets to remind
them that he is the one
source of love and the
only real goal of love. The doctrine of
But the human response to
the reminder does not simply entail acknowledging its truth.To remember God is
to awaken to the innate understanding of God’s unity and to express this understanding
in language and praxis.
If the first function of
the prophets is to remind people of the One Reality and its love for them,their
second function is to provide instructions that will allow people to live
their lives in ways that are pleasing to that Reality and worthy of its love.
The Qur’an calls these instructions “guidance” (huda).To follow the
guidance of the prophets is to remember God in word, deed, and thought; or in
works, states, and knowledge. It is this guidance that is fully actualized in
the inheritance given to God’s friends.
As the human response to
the divine reminder, remembrance can be defined as keeping God in mind at all
times and in all activities. Ibn ‘Arabi defines it in this sense as “presence
with the One Remembered” (F. IV 36.8). If we remain absent from God in word,
deed, or thought, in works, states, or knowledge, we have not remembered him as
he should be remembered.
The Qur’an and the
tradition sum up the practical implications of remembrance with the word ‘ibada,
which means worship, service, and being a servant (‘abd). As mentioned
in Chapter 1, at the final stage of his ascent to God, Ibn ‘Arabi came to
understand that he had been witnessing nothing but the One Entity, i.e., God
himself, and that the One Entity was nothing but his own wujud, the only
wujud there is. His journey to God had been in himself. At that point he
saw that he had become “a sheer servant,” with no trace of “lordliness”
whatsoever.
The fact that
“servanthood” is the highest human perfection is one of Ibn ‘Arabi’s constant
themes. As Muslims well know, “servant” is Muhammad’s first title, mentioned in
the rites before “messenger” (‘ abduhu wa rasuluhu). It should come as
no surprise that Ibn ‘Arabi uses the expression “Perfect Servant”
interchangeably with “Perfect Man.”
Worship and servanthood
are the most important of human tasks. When God says in the Qur’an, “I created
jinn and mankind only to worship/serve Me” (Q. 51:56), the tradition
understands this to mean that people must conform to the Divine Reality.They do
so by remembrance, which entails their works, states, and knowledge and
involves right speech, right activity, and right understanding. The criterion
for “rightness” is the degree to which people understand, act, and exist in the
presence of God.
Islamic faith has three
principles, not just two. After divine unity and prophecy comes ma‘ad,
the “return” to God, commonly discussed in terms of death and resurrection.
Since everyone dies and is brought forth into the presence of God, the
afterlife is often called the “compulsory return.” But many theologians,
philosophers, and spiritual teachers place far greater stress on the “voluntary
return,” that is, choosing freely to undertake the return to God here and now.
To sum up, the general
Islamic understanding of the human situation is that correct knowledge of the
world and the human soul demands that people freely and actively undertake the
journey back to their Creator.They do so by remembering him on every level of
their being. To remember him is to make the fact of his unity, his absolute and
infinite reality, the axis of thought, speech, and activity. This is precisely
“worship” and “servanthood,” which are the appropriate response to tawhid and
prophecy.Thus the Qur’an speaks of tawhid and worship as the two basic
dimensions of every authentic tradition: “We never sent a messenger before you
without revealing to him, ‘There is no god but I, so worship/serve Me’ ”(Q. 21:
25).
In the process of
detailing God’s names and activities, the Qur’an goes to extraordinary lengths
to emphasize that it is God’s book, speech, and words. It maintains that all
revelation to the prophets is nothing but God’s speech, and that God speaks to
the prophets to clarify the nature of things and to explain the appropriate
human response. Moreover, it tells us repeatedly that God creates the world by
speaking. Just as the Qur’an and other scriptures are collections of God’s
“signs” or “verses” (ayat), so also the whole universe is a vast
collection of God’s signs and verses. In effect, God creates the universe by
revealing three books — the universe, the human self, and scripture. In each
book he displays his signs and writes out his words.
Once we understand that
reality is configured by speech, we see that the human task is to read and
understand what has been written and to follow the instructions. The
interpretation of the Qur’an is the foundation and fruit of all Islamic sciences,
and it has always entailed the simultaneous interpretation of the universe and
the soul. Every Muslim, by accepting the Qur’an as God’s Speech, has accepted
the responsibility of understanding what God is saying.The fruit of this
understanding redounds on the soul.
Every soul will answer
for its own reading, not only of scripture, but also of the other two books.
And, given that the soul’s understanding is written out in itself, the soul’s
own book is the all-important determinant of its destiny. This helps explain
why, in recounting the events that will take place on the day of resurrection,
the Qur’an says that every human being will be addressed by the words, “Read
your book!Your soul suffices you today as a reckoner against you!”(Q. 17: 14).
The crux of knowledge,
then, is to understand one’s own soul. The voluntary return teaches people how
to interpret themselves by discerning the wisdom present in both revelation
and the cosmos.The return reaches its fruition on the day of resurrection. What
we should want to learn is who we are now and who we will be when we arrive
back at the meeting with God. All other knowledge should be subordinate to this
knowledge.
THE BREATH OF THE ALL-MERCIFUL
When Ibn ‘Arabi discusses
God’s creation of the universe by speech, he frequently elaborates on the
expression “the Breath of the All-merciful,” which he borrows from a prophetic
saying. According to the Qur’an, it is God as the All-merciful who sits on the
Throne, which embraces the whole universe. God is the
King (al-malik),
as the Qur’an tells us, and every king has a throne and a kingdom. God’s
kingdom is the cosmos in its entirety. He sits on his Throne as All-merciful
because the divine mercy — which is the bestowal of the good,the beautiful, and
the true — determines the nature of the universe.
According to the Prophet,
the inscription on the Throne reads, “My mercy takes precedence over My wrath.”
Another saying tells us
that God’s Throne is the human heart. It follows that, just as nothing lies
beyond the macro- cosmic Throne but God, so also nothing is found at the center
of the microcosmic Throne but God. Hence the famous divine saying said to have
been related by the Prophet: “My heavens and My earth embrace Me not, but the
heart of My believing servant does embrace Me.”
When the All-merciful
speaks, he articulates words in his Breath, so his Breath is the underlying
stuff of the universe. It is the page upon which God writes out the cosmic
book. The nature of the words that appear in the Breath is suggested by the
etymology of the words kalam, “speech,” and kalima, “word.” Both
derive from kalm, which the Arabic dictionaries define as
jarh, which means
to cut or wound. Jarh in turn is explained
Basing himself on these
standard definitions, Ibn ‘Arabi says that the divine speech leaves traces in
the All-merciful Breath.
Each word is a “cut” or
an “articulation,” even though the Breath itself remains forever untouched and
uncut.
In the eternal now, God
speaks one word, and that is the command “Be!” This word gives rise to the
beginningless and endless succession of words and worlds that unfold in the
spiritual, imaginal, and corporeal realms.The one word “Be” (kun)
bestows being (kawn), so all things are implicitly contained within it.
God directs this word toward everything that he wants to bring into
existence:“Our only word to a thing, when We desire it, is to say to it ‘Be!,’
so it comes to be”(Q. 16:40).
The “things” to which God
speaks abide in “nonexistence,” which, as we have seen, is the realm of divine
omniscience. God knows all things, all entities, for all eternity, but they
have no existence of their own. When he says “Be!” to them, they come to be
articulated in his Breath. Their being belongs not to them, but to the divine
Breath within which they are voiced.
Given that creatures are
nothing but words uttered by God, human knowledge of things can be nothing but
knowledge of the divine words. As Ibn ‘Arabi puts it, “The existence of the realm
of being has no root other than the divine attribute of speech, for the realm
of being knows nothing of God but His speech, and that is what it hears” (F II
352.14).
If creatures know nothing
but speech, this is because there is nothing else to be known.The speech they
know says “Be!” to them, and it never ceases belonging exclusively to God.
Speech is God’s true attribute, so the true attribute of creation is silence.
When speech is attributed to creation, it is done so only inasmuch as God has
bestowed it, just as, when being is attributed to creation, it is done so only
inasmuch as God has said “Be!” to it. “When you hear the servant speaking, that
is the Real’s bringing to be within him.” (F. III 218.34).
All things are words of
God, silent in and of themselves. All are modes of being, nonexistent in
themselves. It is wujud who speaks through them, hears through them,
sees through them, and remembers through them. And it is wujud that is
spoken, heard, seen, and remembered.
The cosmos has received
nothing from the Real but wujud, and wujud is nothing other than
the Real ... So nothing remembers Him but something that has been given wujud,
for there is nothing else ...The cosmos stays in nonexistence according to its
root, though its properties become manifest in the wujud of the Real.
(F. IV 92.12)
Islamic theology calls
creatures “acts” of God. Ibn ‘Arabi explains that these acts are nothing but
the traces of God’s names, the vestigia Dei. But what about the divine
names themselves? What exactly are they? When we speak of names (ism) —
whether we are talking about God or creatures — we are speaking about
“Something that occurs from a trace, or something from which a trace comes to
be” (F. II 120.13). So again, a name, like other words, is a trace, a scratch,
a cut, or an articulation in the plain fabric of universal, uncut wujud.
The ultimate source of
all names and all realities is the very Selfhood of God, the Essence. In
himself, God knows all things, because things are simply the traces of his
knowledge of his Essence, which is Infinite and Absolute Wujud. God
knows not only his own names,but also the names of all things and all creatures.
If he calls himself by many names both in the Qur’an and in other scriptures,
it is because the traces of the names are infinitely diverse. As Ibn ‘Arabi
puts it, “God made the divine names many only because of the diversity of the
traces manifest in the realm of being” (F. IV 36.19).
From one standpoint, the
divine names are the traces of the divine attributes and qualities that become
manifest in creation. God names himself in terms of the creatures, which are
the words that he pronounces. Within the creatures, certain qualities can be
discerned, and these can only be the qualities of their Speaker.The Speaker
reveals himself through the attributes of creation as Merciful, Alive,
Knowing, Powerful, Speaking, and so on down the list of the most beautiful
names that he pronounces in the Qur’an.
All names, whether of God
or creation, are in the last analysis traces of the Essence, which in itself
is traceless and unknown. Nonetheless, man has been given the capacity to know
all the names — all the traces displayed by the Essence, traces that are
nothing but the words voiced in the All-merciful Breath. It is this potential
omniscience that sets man apart from other creatures.When the Prophet said,“God
created Adam in his own form,” he certainly had in mind the fact that God had
given Adam knowledge of all things: “He taught Adam the names, all of them” (Q.
2:31).
Ibn ‘Arabi points out
that names make remembrance possible. This holds true not only for man, but
also for God, who knows things through their names, which are nothing but their
traces in his own omniscience, traces known as “entities”: “Were it not for the
names, God would remember nothing, and nothing would remember God. So, God
remembers only through the names, and He is remembered and praised only through
the names” (F II 489.26).
In sum, the
distinguishing feature of man is the potential to know all the names, which are
the traces of the divine attributes,or the traces of the divine Essence itself.
In the creative act of the eternal now, God voices the names, and they appear
as creatures in the All-merciful Breath.The endless array of creatures are specific
words of God. Every creature has an understanding of God, but only in respect
of the name or names that differentiate it from other named things. Only man
was taught all the names, making him somehow equivalent to all of creation.
In the universe as a
whole, the names are infinitely differentiated, but in the divine form that is
man, the names are brought together as an all-comprehensive epitome. Adam
received the all-inclusive knowledge of the names when God taught it to him,
and he was able to know all the names precisely because he was made in the form
of God, who knows and utters all things.
In effect, among all
creatures Adam alone was taught the meaning of the name “God” itself. He came
to know and understand this name and all subsidiary names by knowing himself,
made in God’s form.This sort of knowledge does not come by means of discursive
thought, but directly from the nature of things. Ibn ‘Arabi refers to it as
“tasting,” a standard expression for unmediated knowledge:
God taught Adam all the
names from his own essence through tasting, for He disclosed Himself to him
through a universal self-disclosure. Hence, no name remained in the Divine
Presence that did not become manifest to Adam from himself.
From his own essence he
came to know all the names of his
Creator. (F.II 120.24)
Quranic theology, rooted
in words, names, and remembrance, allows Muslim sages to understand the human
role in the cosmos largely in terms of the achievement of true knowledge of
God.Those who do so are precisely “Perfect Man.”Historical examples are found
in the prophets and some of the saints. Most people, however, remain at the
level of what Ibn ‘Arabi sometimes calls “animal man.”
Perfect Man realizes the
knowledge of the Hidden Treasure, a knowledge that is God’s goal in creating
the universe. Only human beings can recognize God in the fullness of his
divinity, because only they were created in the form of his allcomprehensiveness.
The importance of this knowledge is already implicit in the Quranic statement,
“I created jinn and mankind only to worship/serve Me” (Q. 51:56). As the
Prophet’s companion Ibn Abbas explained, “to worship/serve Me” (ya‘buduni)
means “to know Me” or “to recognize Me” (ya‘rifuni). Once one recognizes
one’s own human status as a servant and creature of God, one can give
servanthood its full due by following prophetic guidance.
Creation has many levels,
and the most perfect level is occupied by man. Each kind in the cosmos is a
part with regard to man’s perfection. Even animal man is a part of Perfect Man
... He created Perfect Man in His form, and through the form He gave him the
ability to have all of His names ascribed to him, one by one, or in groups,
though all the names together are not ascribed to him in a single word —
thereby the Lord is distinguished from the Perfect Servant. Hence there is none
of the most beautiful names — and all of God’s names are most beautiful — by
which the Perfect Servant is not called, just as he calls his Master by them.
(F. III 409.16)
In the diverse creatures
of the cosmos other than man — on whatever level they may dwell, from spiritual
and angelic to corporeal and sensory — the traces of God’s names and attributes
are externalized as the specific and unique characteristics of each creature.
Everything in the universe knows God in a specific, differentiated, and
determined way, defined by the attributes that the thing displays, or by the
divine word that it embodies. Each thing gives news of God and displays his
signs by occupying its own specific niche in the never-repeated speech of the
All-merciful.
In the multileveled
reality that is the human self, the traces of God’s names and attributes are
relatively internalized.They extend from the corporeal to the spiritual realm,
and they circle around the heart, the luminous center of the being, the spirit
that God blew into Adam at his creation.
Man alone is given the
potential to know God in a global, synthetic manner, because he alone was
created in the form not of one or several specific names, but in the form of
the all- comprehensive name that designates God as such, in both his
absoluteness and his infinity, his Essence and his attributes, his
incomparability and his similarity, his transcendence and his immanence. Only
the human form denotes the meaning of God’s all-comprehensive reality. Man is
in effect God’s greatest name.“You are the clearest and most magnificent
denotation of God, for you have it in you to glorify Him through yourself ...
You are His greatest name” (F. II 641.21).
If the fullness of
worship and servanthood is to remember God in a manner appropriate to God’s
total reality, only those made in his form can be servants of God per se.
Nonetheless, in a narrower sense, worship simply means serving God’s purposes,
and in this respect everything worships God, because created and contingent
things can do nothing but serve the Necessary Wujud from which they
arise: “There is nothing in the heavens and the earth that does not come to the
Allmerciful as a servant” (Q. 19:93). Each servant — each creature — worships
and serves God through its own mode of being. Each has a status determined by
the manner in which the All-merciful articulates his Breath.
If human beings alone can
achieve the station of being a perfect servant of God, this is because they
are the exception to the rule of having a cosmic niche. In their perfected
state, they have no specific mode of being, because their awareness and recognition
have no boundaries. They alone are global images and forms of the All-knowing
and the All-aware. In effect, they have the potential to be the form of the
All-merciful Breath itself, the manifestation of all of Wujud and all
the divine names and attributes.This, in Ibn ‘Arabi’s view, is the true meaning
of the divine vicegerency bestowed upon Adam.
Whoever witnesses without
cease what he was created for, in both this world and the next world, is the
Perfect Servant, the intended goal of the cosmos, the deputy of the whole
cosmos. Were all the cosmos — the high of it and the low of it — to be heedless
of God’s remembrance for a single moment, and were this servant to remember
Him, he would stand in for the whole cosmos through that remembrance, and
through him the existence of the cosmos would be preserved. (F. III 248.12)
In sum, the Qur’an
depicts God, the universe, and man in terms of words and speech.The three
principles of Islamic faith — tawhid, prophecy, and the Return — are
understood on the basis of his names and naming.The human task is to respond to
our existential situation by remembering the names of things — the real and
actual names of things inasmuch as they designate the Divine Reality, or
inasmuch as they articulate the Allmerciful Breath.
This task can only be
accomplished through the heart, man’s spiritual and cognitive center. The heart
alone can expand to become an unlimited realm of awareness and consciousness.
Among all created things, only the heart has the capacity to encompass God.To
remember God fully and actually is to find him sitting on his Throne in the
microcosm.
Knowing God demands
recognizing all things as selfdisclosures of the Real, as signs and traces
displaying God’s names and attributes. This is not a theoretical sort of knowledge,
but a knowledge of gnosis and tasting. It is a true vision of the divine
omnipresence, the fact that “Wherever you turn, there is the face of God” (Q.
2: 115). Such knowledge comes by way of remembrance, which is “presence with
the One Remembered.”
Once we achieve presence,
then we see that everything in this world is accursed inasmuch as it does not
disclose the Real, and that we ourselves are accursed inasmuch as we fail to
recognize things as his self-disclosures.At the same time, however, we see
that the world is nothing but God’s reminder to us, God’s mention of himself.
Our response can only be to follow the world’s lead — to mention and remember
God.
“This world is accursed,”
says the hadith, “and accursed is everything within it, save the remembrance of
God.” But, everything is the remembrance of God, so nothing is
accursed.The alchemy of remembrance transmutes the accursed into the
blessed.The place of remembrance, where God becomes truly present and man
becomes truly blessed, is the heart. Only knowledge and recognition can bring
the heart to life and make possible the achievement ofhuman status.This is why
Ibn ‘Arabi writes,
The greatest sin is what
brings about the heart’s death. It dies only by not knowing God.This is what is
named “ignorance.” For the heart is the house that God has chosen for Himself
in this human configuration. Someone like that, however, has misappropriated
the house, coming between it and its Owner.
He is the one who most
wrongs himself, for he has deprived himself of the good that would have come to
him from the Owner of the house — had he left the house to Him.This is the
deprivation of ignorance. (F. III 179.6)
I
bn ‘Arabi’s basic goal in his writings is to
show the way to the life of the heart. He wants to awaken in his readers the
intuition of tawhid that lies at the root of their being and remind
them of the way to achieve the worship and servanthood demanded by their very
nature. Knowledge is fundamental to the task, so he constantly discusses it.
His purpose, however, is not to provide an exhaustive theory or explanation.
Rather, he wants to urge his readers to go beyond rote learning, to achieve
understanding on their own, and to realize and verify for themselves the truth
that is written out in the signs and verses of scripture, the universe, and the
soul.
Ibn ‘Arabi often cites
the divine command, “Say: ‘My Lord, increase me in knowledge’” (Q. 20: 114).
Although this command is grammatically singular and typically taken as
addressed to the Prophet, it also pertains to every human soul. If the Prophet
himself, the embodied Logos, the Perfect Man par excellence, was commanded to
ask God for greater knowledge and understanding, then all human beings must do
the same.
The command to seek
knowledge does not mean simply to acquire information and learning from people
and books. Certainly, one must follow the guidance of scripture, but the quest
to know is intensely personal.The opinions of experts,
scholars,and scientists
have no relevance to true awareness. No one can know for you.The life of the
heart pertains only to selfawareness, and the locus of self-awareness can only
be one’s own self.
Ibn ‘Arabi agrees with
the standard view that knowledge ( ‘ilm) cannot be defined, because it
is presupposed by every definition. He insists, nonetheless, that true
knowledge attaches to the thing in itself, its “essence” (dhat), which
in the final analysis is its fixed entity, or its reality as known to God.
Like anything else,
knowledge has a divine root.The Qur’an says repeatedly that God knows
everything. Real Wujud is not only that which truly is,but also that
which truly finds and truly knows.To say that God has knowledge means that Real
Wujud has permanent consciousness of its own reality; it is aware of
itself and everything demanded by its absoluteness and infinity. God knows his
Essence, his attributes, and his acts; he knows himself and all the entities.
Ibn ‘Arabi sometimes
speaks of the “four pillars” of Divinity, by which he means the four primary
names upon which the cosmos is predicated. He typically lists them as Living,
Knowing, Desiring, and Powerful. He points out that each of these names
designates the exact same Wujud, but they have a logical
interrelationship that helps us understand the underlying order of the
universe.
God creates the cosmos
through power, but he never exercises power without desiring to do so, which is
to say that nothing arbitrary or meaningless ever happens in the universe. He
cannot desire something without first knowing it, so desire is preceded by
omniscience. And knowledge depends upon life.
Another way to understand
the divine roots of knowledge is to notice that God is “the One/Many” (al-wahid
al-kathir). In other words, Real Wujud is a single reality that is
properly named by many names, though these do not compromise its unity in any
way. God is Wujud — both Being and Finding — and within his own
Singularity he finds the possible entities in all their infinity.
The first person to use
the expression wahdat al-wujud, “the Oneness of Being,” as a technical
term was Sa‘id ad-Din Farghani (d. c. 1300), a student of Ibn ‘Arabi’s primary
disciple, Sadr ad-Din Qunawi. He did not claim, however, that the expression
refers to Ibn ‘Arabi’s perspective. Rather, he employed it in the course of
discussing two principles in God that give rise to the universe.These are the
oneness of God’s wujud and the manyness of the objects of his
knowledge.The oneness of wujud gives rise to the existence that is
shared by the entire cosmos, and the manyness of knowledge gives rise to the
multiplicity of things and their constantly changing states. Both the oneness
of being and the manyness of knowledge are subordinate to God’s unity.
As a divine attribute,
then, knowledge designates Real Wujud as the one who is aware of self
and others. As a human attribute, it designates human beings in the same way —
inasmuch as we are aware and conscious of self and others.Truly to know is to
remember the names taught to Adam, and there is nothing higher to which we can
aspire. “There is no level more eminent than the level of knowledge” (F. III
448.7).
Given the primary
importance that Ibn ‘Arabi accords to human knowing, his constant discussion of
it, and the extraordinary extent of his literary corpus, it is beyond the
scope of this chapter even to begin a survey of his views. Instead I will try
to evoke his explanation of the benefit (naf) of knowledge. I have in
mind the well-known saying of the Prophet, “I seek refuge in God from a
knowledge that has no benefit.” Seeking knowledge is, in the Prophet’s words,
“incumbent on every Muslim.” What sort of knowledge must be sought, what sort
should be avoided, and what exactly is the benefit to be gained?
BENEFIT
It would be fair to say
that Ibn ‘Arabi’s writings attempt to expose the full range of things knowable
to human beings — not exhaustively, of course, but inasmuch as these may be
beneficial. “The various sorts of knowledge are not sought for themselves;
they are sought only for the sake of that to which they attach” (Dh. 191), that
is, for the sake of their objects. Which object or objects, once known, are
beneficial for human beings?
In a letter addressed to
the famous theologian and Qur’an commentator, Fakhr ad-Din Razi, Ibn ‘Arabi
suggests something of the benefit of knowledge and differentiates between
knowledge that is truly important and imperative, and the various types of
knowledge with which people divert themselves from their divine calling. He
asserts that genuinely worthwhile knowledge is only the knowledge of God that
comes by way of “bestowal” (wahb) and “witnessing” (mushahada),
which is to say that it cannot be acquired from books or teachers.
Ibn ‘Arabi explains to
Razi that a wise and intelligent human being seeks only those sorts of
knowledge that will aid him in perfecting his soul and will then accompany him
in the stages of becoming after death, what Ibn ‘Arabi calls “the homesteads of
the afterworld.” Other sorts of knowledge — such as medicine or mathematics —
are useful only in this world, so they will be left behind at death.
Hence, the intelligent
person should not partake of any knowledge save that which is touched by
imperative need. He should struggle to acquire what is transferred along with
him when he is transferred.This is none other than two knowledges specifically
— knowledge of God, and knowledge of the homesteads of the afterworld and what
is required by its stations, so that he may walk there as he walks in his own
home and not deny anything whatsoever. (R. 6—7)
What about knowledge of
the Shariah? Is such knowledge imperative? The answer is, “To a degree.” Like
most other forms of knowledge, knowledge of the revealed law has no benefit
once a person reaches the next world. Taklif — God’s “burdening” the
soul by prescribing worship for it — is cut off at death. In the afterworld,
everyone will worship God with an essential worship, not with the secondary and
accidental worship that is characteristic of believers in this world and
depends on their knowledge of religious teachings. Hence knowledge of the Shariah
is important to the extent that it is useful to guide the individual in his
worship and service of God, but it has no use in the next world. One should
learn it here only in the degree necessary.
Ibn ‘Arabi tells us that
we need knowledge of the revealed law just as we need food, so we should
exercise moderation and partake of it only in the measure in which we engage in
activity, which is precisely the realm to which such knowledge applies. Paying
too much attention to it will produce illness of the soul, just as eating too
much food produces illness of the body. In contrast, knowledge of God and of
the homesteads of the afterworld has no limit at which one can come to a halt.
Only this sort of knowledge “will lead its knower to a preparedness for what is
proper to each homestead” (F I 581.29) and will allow people to answer for
themselves on the day of judgment.
Ibn ‘Arabi supports his
views on beneficial knowledge with arguments based on ontology, theology,
cosmology, anthropology, and spiritual psychology. The most basic argument can
perhaps be called “anthropological,” in that it is grounded in an understanding
of what makes human beings human. The axioms here are “God created Adam in His
form” and “He taught him the names, all of them” (Q. 2:31).
It was noted that the
Sufis use the word “form” (sura) as the opposite of “meaning” (mana).
The form is the external appearance of a thing, its outwardness (zahir),
or its corporeal- ity.The meaning is the invisible reality of a thing, its
inwardness (batin), its spiritual essence, or its fixed entity.To say
that God created man in his own form implies that man’s meaning is designated
by God’s all-comprehensive name, which denotes both the Essence and all the
divine attributes.
When the Qur’an says God
taught Adam “all the names,” this means that he taught him all the names of God
and creation. These names designate God as the One/Many, the single Essence
that comprehends all reality, what Ibn ‘Arabi commonly calls “the Divine
Presence”: “There is nothing in wujud save the Divine Presence, which is
His Essence, His attributes, and His acts” (F II 114.14).
The “meaning” that Adam
came to know is God, and Adam’s knowledge is the “form” of that meaning. But
Adam’s knowledge is not disassociated from Adam’s being, just as God’s
knowledge is nothing other than his wujud.The very knowledge infused
into Adam by God is the very being that sustains him, the word that articulates
him in the divine breath.
The human soul, then, has
a beginning, because God gave it existence, but no end, for there can be no end
to the knowledge that unfolds from its fixed entity.The beginningless and
endless divine Meaning imbues the human soul with a boundless form, and this
same Meaning articulates a limitless cosmos in the Breath of the All-merciful.
Correct knowledge of the
cosmos is in fact knowledge of God’s outward and inward signs. Ibn ‘Arabi sees
this already implicit in the Arabic language, where the words “cosmos” ( ‘alam),
“knowledge” ( ‘ilm), and “mark” ( ‘alama) all derive from the
same root: “We mention the ‘cosmos’ with this word to give ‘knowledge’ that by
it we mean that He has made it a ‘mark’” (F.II 473.33).
Although knowledge of the
cosmos must be acquired in the process of knowing oneself and one’s Lord, it
can also be the greatest of veils.The more we focus on signs without recognizing
what they signify, the deeper and denser becomes the darkness that prevents us
from seeing things as they are.
The universe is the realm
of possibility, in contrast with the Necessary Wujud of God and the
impossibility of sheer non- existence.The Qur’an tells us repeatedly that God
is powerful over everything. There can be no end to things when they have an
infinite source. It follows that “Knowledge of the possible realm is an
all-embracing ocean of knowledge that has magnificent waves within which ships
founder. It is an ocean that has no shore save its two sides” (F III 275.15),
which are Necessity and impossibility, or the Essence of God and absolute
nothingness.
Trying to know things in
terms of other things is like trying to pinpoint a wave in the ocean. In
itself, the shore of Necessity cannot be known, because none knows God but God.
Nor can anyone know the shore of absolute nothingness, because there is nothing
there to be known. This helps explain Ibn ‘Arabi’s radical agnosticism
concerning knowledge of things without reference to divine instruction. “It is
impossible for anything other than God to gain knowledge of the cosmos, of the
human being himself, or of the self of anything by itself” (F III 557.4). True
knowledge, in other words, belongs to God alone, and human knowledge can be
reliable only inasmuch as it partakes of divine knowledge. As the Qur’an puts
it, “They encompass nothing of His knowledge save as He wills”(2: 254).
The knowledge that people
are able to acquire by their own efforts situates things in relation to other
things or, at best, in relation to God. Only God has direct, unmediated
knowledge of himself and things as they are. God can bestow direct knowledge
of himself, but even then, none knows God but God. What in fact happens is that
God becomes the hearing through which the servant hears, and the intelligence
through which he knows.
Given the impossibility
of any real knowledge without reference to God, it should come as no surprise
that Ibn ‘Arabi frequently discusses the inadequacy of reason for achieving
true understanding. Every knowledge gained by rational thought or by any other
purely human mode of knowing is obscured by created limitations. People can
understand only inasmuch as their native ability, circumstances, upbringing,
and training allow them to.They know in the measure of their own selves, which
is to say that, in the last analysis, they know only themselves. “The thing
knows nothing but itself, and nothing knows anything except from itself” (F III
282.34).
Ibn ‘Arabi demonstrates
the futility of independent human effort to achieve real knowledge in many ways.
He points out, for example, that all knowledge comes from outside the knowing
self. In acquiring knowledge, we are forced to depend on others and trust in
them.We “follow authority” (taqlid) in our knowledge. Following
authority is much discussed in jurisprudence, where it is contrasted with ijtihad,
the competence to make independent legal judgments. If a believer has not
totally mastered the sources of jurisprudence, then he must take his knowledge
of proper activity from someone who has.
In the intellectual
sciences such as philosophy, following authority is contrasted not with ijtihad
but with tahqiq or “realization,” which entails knowing things by
finding their realities in the transcendent reality of the Universal Intellect
(i.e., the divine spirit). Like the philosophers, Ibn ‘Arabi takes the position
that the purpose of seeking knowledge is to achieve realization and to know
the realities for oneself.This is precisely the sort of knowledge that people
do not have, because they follow the authority of teachers, books, public
opinion, scientists, experts, their own sense faculties, imagination, and
reason, all of which are unreliable. Anyone who has not achieved realization
does not know the realities of things. “Since it has been affirmed,” says Ibn
‘Arabi, “that other than God cannot have knowledge of anything without
following authority, let us follow God’s authority, especially in knowledge of
Him” (F.II 298.3).
The way to follow God’s
authority is to tread in the footsteps of the prophets, Muhammad specifically.
But it is not enough simply to accept prophetic instruction and put it into
practice. The full and integral prophetic inheritance demands receiving
knowledge directly from God by way of “bestowal and witnessing.” The messengers
themselves, the paradigms of human perfection, received their knowledge
precisely by this route.
“The day God will gather
the messengers and say, ‘What response did you receive?’ They will say, ‘We
have no knowledge;Thou art the Ever-knowing of the absent things’” [Q. 5: 109].
No one has any knowledge save those whom God has taught. Other than this divine
path in teaching, there is nothing but the predominance of conjecture, knowing
by chance, or being convinced by fantasy. (F. IV 80.33)
REALIZATION
Ibn ‘Arabi maintains that
real knowledge alone is truly beneficial, and that such knowledge is true
knowledge of Real Wujud, received by following God’s authority. Every
other sort of knowledge must be subservient to it. It is this knowledge that
provides the means to know the Hidden Treasure and to achieve God’s purpose in
creating the universe. Through it people actualize their own selfhoods as
forms of God and reach everlasting felicity.They become, in short, Perfect Man.
In order to achieve
realization, one must transcend the limitations of all modes of knowing save
the one mode that recognizes the relative validity of each mode while not being
bound or restricted by any. This is precisely “the station of no station” or
“the standpoint of no standpoint.” It is achieved by “the Muhammadans,” those
who receive the inheritance of all prophetic wisdom from Muhammad.
Realization,
then, is the full actualization of beneficial know- ledge.The Arabic word, tahqiq,
is the second form of the verb from the root h-q-q, from which we
have two words of great importance for the Islamic sciences — haqq and haqiqa.The
second, haqiqa, means “reality,” and a great deal could be said about
what it means in Ibn ‘Arabi’s terms and in the Islamic sciences in general.The
English translation suggests some of the directions in which a discussion would
take us. All we have to do is pose questions like “What is reality?” or “What
is the reality of a thing?” to fall into the most difficult of philosophical
issues.
The word haqq is
perhaps more significant than haqiqa for grasping the sense of tahqiq.
Haqq means not only “real,” as I usually translate it, but also true,
proper, appropriate, right, and just. As a Quranic divine name, it means the
Real, the Truth, the Right. From early times, it was used as a virtual synonym
for the name God (Allah). It is typically juxtaposed with khalq,
“creation.”
It can be said that there
are two basic realities, haqq and khalq, or the Real and
creation. The status of the Real is perfectly clear, because “There is no god
but God,” which is to say that there is nothing real, true, right, proper,
appropriate, and just in the full senses of the words but God. It is the status
of created things that raises questions.
In investigating the
status of creation, we can gain help by remembering that a second term, batil,
is also juxtaposed with haqq. Batil means unreal, false, null, void,
absurd.The Qur’an contrasts the two terms in a dozen verses, such as, “The haqq
has come and the batil has vanished” (Q. 17:41).
Although both khalq
and batil, creation and unreal, are opposites of haqq, the two
words are hardly synonymous.The unreal is totally other than the Real, the
negation of the Real. But creation, though not the same as the Real, is also
not completely different, because it is certainly not unreal, false, vain, and
null. Its actual status is the first question of Islamic philosophy: “What is
it?” This is the question of quiddity or essence, and it can be posed for
everything in the cosmos.
Creation has a status
that is ambiguous, because it hangs between Real and unreal, God and
nothingness, right and wrong, proper and improper, appropriate and
inappropriate. We are creatures, so we need to understand the status of created
things in order to live appropriately in the realm of being. We cannot avoid
asking ourselves what we are and whether or not there is anything we can do to
improve our status. If we can talk of improvement, we need standards by which
to judge better and worse. To have standards, we need to know our purpose in
existence, our real goal in life.
These then are the two
foundational questions that arise from the human situation: “What [ma]?”
and “For what [lima]?” What exactly are we, and why are we here? What is
our actual situation, and what should we be doing to take advantage of it and
reap its benefit? The process of asking these questions, answering them, and
putting the answers into practice is what “realization” is all about.
One verse in particular
plays a crucial role in Ibn ‘Arabi’s understanding of realization: “Our Lord is
He who gave each thing its creation, then guided” (Q. 20: 50). Here we have the
beginnings of an answer to the two questions.
What are we? Are we haqq
or batil, real or unreal, appropriate or inappropriate? The basic
answer is given by the first clause of the verse, “He gave each thing its
creation.” The Real has determined and bestowed creation, and when the Real
comes, the unreal vanishes. The Absolute Wujud gives existence to creatures
and defines and determines their nature.
When we look at God’s
engendering command (al-amr at-takwini) — the fact that He says “Be!” (kun)
to a thing and gives it being (kawn) — then we must conclude that
creatures are haqq, which is to say that they are real, right, true, and
appropriate.
Inasmuch as we can see
the Real’s activity in creation, we find the haqq manifest in khalq.
This brings us to the
second question:Why are we here? It is answered implicitly by the second clause
of the verse, “Then guided.” First God creates the things, then he guides them.
Our purpose in creation is to follow God’s guidance. “I created jinn and
mankind only to worship/serve Me” (Q. 51: 56). The prophetic messages lay down
the paths of achieving appropriate and worthy worship and servanthood.These
paths in turn lead to the station of vicegerency, for which Adam was created.
One cannot achieve the
human purpose simply by following the engendering command. In any case,
everything follows the engendering command by definition, so there is nothing
else we can do. What complicates the human situation is the mysterious gift of
freedom, the possibility of saying “Yes” and “No.” The human purpose can only
be achieved by responding positively to the “prescriptive command” (al-amr
at-taklifi). With this command, relayed by the prophets, God provides
instructions on right, true, and real knowledge and activity.
GIVING THINGS THEIR HAQQ
One of Ibn ‘Arabi’s
several scriptural sources for his discussion of the haqq of created
things is a well-known hadith that has come in many versions and in most of the
standard sources. A typical version reads like this: “Your soul has a haqq
against you, your Lord has a haqq against you, your guest has a haqq
against you, and your spouse has a haqq against you. So, give to each
that has a haqq its haqq.”
“Giving to each that has
a haqq its haqq" provides a thumbnail definition of tahqiq.
Realization is to recognize the reality, truth, rightness, and properness of
things, and, on the basis of this recognition, to give them their haqq,
that is, what is appropriate for them and rightfully due to them.
From the point of view of
the first question,“What are we?,” the hadith of the haqqs explains that
we and everything with which we interrelate have haqqs pertaining to us,
which is to say that everything without exception has a proper situation, a correct
mode of being, an appropriate manner of displaying the Real to us. It does so
because “He gave each thing its creation,” thereby establishing not only its khalq,
but also its haqq. As the Qur’an puts it,“We created the heavens and the
earth and what is between them only through the haqq”(15: 85).Inthis
respect the creation of each thing is identical with its haqq, because
the Absolute Haqq has bestowed its creation upon it.
In answer to the second
question, “Why are we here?,” the hadith of the haqqs tells us that we
are here to achieve realization, which is to give “to each that has a haqq
its haqq.” The human purpose is to live such that everything we do, say,
and think is right, true, appropriate, worthy, and real. All things have haqqs
against us, so, in the homesteads of the resurrection (or, if you prefer, in
the posthumous realms of karmic repercussion), we will answer for the manner
in which we dealt with those haqqs. Each haqq “against us”
represents our responsibility toward God, the person, or the thing.The object
has a right and, by that very fact, the subject that engages with it has a
responsibility.
Only human beings were taught
all the names, so they alone are able to recognize and realize the haqq
of everything in existence. The haqq of God’s vicegerents demands that
they recognize the haqq of all things and act accordingly. When they
deal with people, objects, and situations, they need to address their haqqs,
which are identical with the created nature that God has given to each of them.
That created nature is not only what is there, but also what is right and
worthy. It lays moral and ethical responsibilities on human beings by its very
reality.
Given that all things
manifest the Absolute Haqq and that each thing possesses a relative haqq,
and given that people will be held responsible for the haqqs that
pertain to them, they need a scale by which to judge the extent of their
responsibility and to learn how to deal with the haqqs. They cannot
possibly know the haqq of things by their own lights or their own rational
investigation of the world and the soul, for the relative haqq of
creation is determined and defined by the Absolute Haqq, and the
Absolute Haqq is unknowable except in the measure in which it chooses to
disclose itself. The scale of measurement comes through the prophets, and it is
the Qur’an that clarifies the haqq for Muslims:“With the haqq We
have sent it down, and with the haqq it has come down”(Q. 17: 105).
One can conclude that for
Ibn ‘Arabi, God’s primary prescriptive command — the command that addresses
most directly the question “Why are we here?” — is expressed in the hadith of
the haqqs by the sentence,“Give to each that has a haqq its haqq.”
This is realization, the goal of human existence.
The first haqq
that people must recognize is that of God himself, who is the Absolute Haqq,
the basis for all huquq (plural of haqq). Indeed, many jurists
and theologians have discussed the necessity of fulfilling what is commonly
translated as “the rights of God” (huquq Allah). Nowadays in the Islamic
languages, the whole discussion of “human rights” goes on employing this same
word huquq, though it is often forgotten that human rights cannot be
disassociated from divine rights and human responsibilities toward God.
The way to realize God as
Haqq is to begin by perceiving him as the Truth and Reality that has a
rightful claim upon all creatures, a claim that supersedes all other claims and
that establishes every claim and every right. The Qur’an is totally explicit
about God’s rightful claim on people. It criticizes them for paying attention
only to what they perceive as their own haqqs and neglecting God’s haqq.
It calls this attitude by names such as kufr (unbelief, ingratitude,
truth-concealing), zulm (wrongdoing), and fisq (unrighteousness).
In one verse, it lists many of the things that we see as having rightful claims
upon us, and then tells us that nothing is due to them if it interferes with
what is rightfully due to God:
Say: “If your fathers,
your sons, your brothers, your wives, your clan, your possessions that you have
gained, commerce you fear may slacken, and dwellings you love — if these are
more beloved to you than God and His Messenger and struggle in His path, then
wait till God brings His command. God does not guide unrighteous people.” (Q.
9: 24)
In short, the haqq
that needs to be verified and realized before all other haqqs is that of
God.This means, among other things, that one must carry out all human
obligations toward God,which are precisely his “rights.” The first of these is tawhid.
As a well-known hadith puts it,“God’s haqq against the servants ...
is that they should worship Him and not associate anything with Him,... and the
servants’ haqq against God”is that “if they do that, He will bring them
into paradise.”
THE SOUL’S HAQQ
After tawhid,
human obligations toward God are defined by everything that tawhid
demands. In the domain of creation, the first thing whose haqq is
clarified by prophetic guidance is the human self or soul. Notice that the
hadith of the haqqs begins, “Your soul has a haqq against you,
your Lord has a haqq against you.” Then it mentions guest, wife, etc.
The order is not accidental. Although observing “the rights of God” is the
first priority, we need to know who we are. “He who recognizes himself will
recognize his Lord.” When instructing people how they should supplicate God, the
Prophet said, “Begin with yourself!” Only when we recognize our status
vis-à-vis our Creator can we observe God’s rights.
On the Shariah level,
discerning haqqs is relatively straightforward. It demands recognizing
that we are addressed by the revealed law, and then observing the law to the
best of our abilities. But the Shariah pertains to only a small portion of
reality. What about the rest? God says, “I am placing in the earth a
vicegerent”(Q. 2: 30).The duties of God’s representatives can not be limited to
observing commands and prohibitions, which, for example, do not address the
roots of morality and virtue.The Qur’an says, “God burdens a soul only to its
capacity” (Q. 2: 286). Made in the form of God and taught all the names, the
soul certainly has the capacity to know itself, the cosmos, and its Lord.
The issue of who we are
pertains to ontology, cosmology, spiritual psychology, and the anthropology of
human perfec- tion.To give our own soul the haqq that is due to it, we
must know the Meaning of which we are the form. Realization is the station of
those who have achieved, by divine grace and solicitude, the full
possibilities of human knowledge and existence. The realizers recognize the haqq
in exactly the manner in which God has established it. By giving everything in
the soul and the cosmos its haqq, they also give God his haqq,
and they actualize the fullness of God-given knowledge and God-given reality.
Ibn ‘Arabi sums up his
view of realization in a short chapter of the Futuhat. He explains that
realization “is true knowledge of the haqq that is demanded by the
essence of each thing.”Then he goes on to say that realization can be achieved
only by becoming the object of God’s love, for things can be given their due
only when God is one’s hearing, eyesight, and understanding.
One condition for the
owner of this station is that the Real should be his hearing, his eyesight, his
hand, his leg, and all the faculties that he puts to use. He acts in things
only through a haqq, in a haqq, and for a haqq.This
description belongs only to a beloved. He is not beloved until he is given
nearness ...
God shows the realizer
all affairs as established by the divine wisdom. He who has been given this
knowledge has been given what is necessary for each of God’s creatures ...
What is desired from
realization is knowledge of what is rightly demanded by each affair, whether it
be nonexistent or existent.The realizer even gives the unreal [batil]
its haqq and does not take it outside its proper place. (F. II 267.17)
TIME, SPACE,
AND
THE OBJECTIVITY OF
ETHICAL NORMS
I
n his voluminous writings
on the cosmos, Ibn ‘Arabi employs a great deal of the terminology used by
Muslim philosopherscientists like Avicenna and Averroes. Indeed,it is hardly
possible to speak of the world without discussing basic modalities of its
appearance, such as time and space,two important philosophical issues. Nowadays
these two terms, however, have come to have much greater prominence than they
did in premodern times. This is hardly surprising, given the focus of
scientific cosmology on physical appearances instead of essences and realities.
When Ibn ‘Arabi discusses
time and space, he keeps in view their divine roots.There is nothing in the
universe that is not a sign of God and his workings.As signs, time and space
provide reminders for the human soul in its becoming. In other words,
understanding them and perceiving their haqq has direct relevance to
the task of achieving realization, or assuming as one’s own the character
traits of God.
THE METHODOLOGY OF REALIZATION
Ibn ‘Arabi cannot
properly be described by any of the conventional labels given to Muslim
scholars, such as Sufi,
philosopher, theologian,
jurist, Hadith expert, or Qur’an commentator, even though he was a master of
all these fields. If we insist on putting a label on him, it would probably be
most accurate simply to call him a “realizer,” given that both he and his
followers use the term “realization” to specify their own intellectual
position.To grasp the role of time and space in his way of looking at things,
we can do no better than to reflect once again on tahqiq as an approach
to knowledge.
As already pointed out,
God as haqq is the Real or the Reality, the True or the Truth, the
Right, the Proper, the Just. When the word haqq is applied to creatures,
it designates not only their “truth” and “reality,” but also their rightful
place in creation and the just and proper demands that they make upon human
beings.When someone perceives the haqq of a thing, he has perceived not
only its true and real nature, but also its “rights,” or what is properly and
rightfully due to it. In other words, such a person understands not only the
thing itself, but also his own correct response to it. Haqq designates
at once the objective reality of a thing and the responsibilities of the
subject who encounters it.
Everything has a haqq,
because each is created by the Absolute Haqq, thereby receiving a
relative haqq. In the verse, “Our Lord is He who gave each thing its
creation, then guided” (Q. 20: 50), a thing’s “creation” can be understood as
its actual reality at any given moment, and its “guidance” as the path it will
follow in achieving the fullness of what it is to become. In other words,
“creation” refers to the fact that each thing has come forth from Real Wujud,
and “guidance” to the fact that the Real has provided each with a path back to
its Source. Everything except human beings follows its own proper guidance
simply by virtue of being a created thing. All obey the engendering command.
Human beings have a
peculiar situation, because they alone were created in the form of God. Their
creation — their primordial nature — bestows upon them the potential to
actualize the divine character traits as their own and to realize
all-comprehensiveness. They are guided not only by their own nature, created in
the form of God, but also by prophetic instruction. The latter is needed
because, by virtue of their divine form, they possess a certain freedom of
activity deriving from God’s trait of “doing what He desires” (Q. 2: 253). At
the same time, their distance from their Source — their exposure to the realm
of the unreal, the false, and the vain — makes them susceptible to
forgetfulness and heedlessness. They cannot be counted upon to make the right
choices in every situation.
The intelligence and
discernment latent in human allcomprehensiveness can provide the ability to
differentiate between haqq and batil, truth and untruth, right
and wrong, appropriate and inappropriate. People’s primordial nature forces
them to play a role in becoming what they will become, and the guidance of the
prophets directs them toward the fullness of the divine form. They cannot
actualize their deiformity, however, unless they freely and actively choose the
Real and avoid the unreal.
In short, each thing’s
creation and guidance situate it in the grand scheme of tawhid. Nothing
is unrelated to the Absolute Haqq.To give things their haqqs is
first and foremost to understand them in relation to God. Many of the things
whose haqqs need to be understood are made explicit by the tradition,
such as self, God, visitor, and spouse. But this hardly exhausts the list. It
is not too difficult to see that discerning the haqqs of things is the
primary issue in all Islamic sciences qua Islamic sciences. It is
intimately bound up with the interpretation of revealed scripture.
Scholars who specialized
in transmitted learning (al-‘ulum an-naqliyya) were primarily interested
in interpreting the Qur’an and Hadith with a view toward right activity.
Scholars who specialized in intellectual learning (al-‘ulum al-‘aqliyya) wanted
to interpret and understand all things, not just scripture. They did not
limit themselves to investigating the haqqs clarified in the Qur’an.They
also tried to understand and act upon the haqqs laid bare in the other
two books — the universe and the soul.
The jurists and
theologians kept mostly to transmitted learning and focused on the explicit
teachings of the Qur’an and the Prophet. The Muslim philosophers set out to
understand the nature of the objective world and the reality of the knowing
subject. Realizers like Ibn ‘Arabi brought together the study of all three
books.Whichever of the three scriptures they interpreted, they dealt with it in
terms of the same principles, the same realities, and the same ultimate Haqq.They
saw that in each case, God makes demands upon us, and our duty as creatures is
to act in keeping with those demands.
To verify and realize
something, to discern its haqq and to act accordingly, is first of all
to see how it displays the signs of God. This is not an abstract, theoretical
enterprise, but a spiritual discipline. It is a way of training the soul to
find God’s names and attributes in all things and to realize them in oneself.
The goal is to see “the face of God” that is found “wherever you turn” (Q. 2:
115), in every creature and in oneself, and to act accordingly.
If we understand things
without taking into account the fact that they disclose the divine face and act
as loci for the divine Self-disclosure, then we will have lost sight of their haqqs.
By doing so, we will have lost sight of our own responsibility toward the
things and their Creator. In other words, we will have lost sight of tawhid
and fallen into shirk or “associating others with God,” which, in
Islamic terms, is the root of all negativity and misfortune.
The standard Arabic
expression that corresponds to English “time and space” is zaman wa makan,
which I would translate as “time and place,” or “time and location.”The word makan
does not conjure up the vast empty reaches that are understood from the word
“space.” Rather, it implies the fixed and exact locations in which things
exist.
When Ibn ‘Arabi discusses
zaman and makan, he typically speaks of them as “relations” (nisab).
By doing so, he means to contrast them with entities, which are real things
(though not necessarily existent things). He is saying that time and place
designate interrelationships among things, but they themselves are not things.
There is nothing out there that can properly be called “time” or “place.”
Relations per se do not
exist, so it is always difficult to say exactly what they are. In other words,
time and space are two abstract concepts that do not designate anything in the
objective universe.They refer rather to the manner in which human observers
see relationships among things. Using the terms tells us as much about our own
subjectivity as it does about the world.
From Ibn ‘Arabi’s
standpoint, if we want to verify the real, objective world and come up with a
valid theory of how things hold together, we need to go beyond appearances and
surface relationships. We need to penetrate into verities, principles,
essences, and haqqs.Time and space are abstract concepts and
insubstantial relationships, which helps explain why he — like most other
Muslim thinkers — discussed them only with passing interest. It is far more
important to discern what exactly is out there, not simply how things appear to
us.
To discern what is
actually there, we need to address the whole question of what being there
means. In other words, the intellectual tradition focused not on the realm of
external being, but on the ultimate nature of being itself, and that demanded
an understanding of wujud and its essential attributes and
concomitants.
Wujud is the most
real and concrete of all entities, because it underlies every object, every
subject, every concept, and every relationship. Wujud, in other words,
is God.True and unsullied wujud belongs to God alone, and everything
else “exists” only in a manner of speaking, inasmuch as “He has given it its
creation.” As for time and place, they tell us more about nonexistence than
existence.
Of the two concepts,
place or location is easier to understand. For Ibn ‘Arabi, the first question
in realization is how a thing or concept is related to the Absolute Haqq.
How is location related to God? One way to answer this question is to reflect
on the Arabic word makan itself.The grammatical pattern of the word,
called “maf‘al,”designates a “name of place” (ism makan). Maktab, for
example, has the same pattern and means “place of writing,” though it has come
to mean grammar school.
Makan itself is the
most general word in the maf‘al pattern, so much so that it gives its
name to the pattern. It is the most general because its root is kawn,
“being,” a word that applies to all created things, though not to the
uncreated.The word makan means literally “place of being.” In other
words, it designates the specific location within the matrix of the
All-merciful Breath in which a thing comes to exist after God has uttered the
engendering command “Be!” When this command gives kawn to a thing, it
has its own specific place different from that of other things. Typically, makan
is used for things found in the corporeal world, because spiritual beings are
not localized, much less God.
The word kawn is
almost never used for the “being” of God. Rather, wujud is used to
designate God’s Necessary Being and his finding of self and others. Kawn
is then the being that is acquired by things when God brings them into
existence.The very use of the word makan or “place” tells us that
something that did not have being has now entered into the realm of being. The
cosmos as a whole is called al-kawn,“the (realm of) being,” the net
result of God’s having said “Be!”
Makan designates
the place and locatedness of something in the visible world, so the concept
involves a certain fixity. But things are not in fact fixed, because both their
being and their location change. As soon as we mention “change,” time enters
the pic- ture.The word zaman designates change and movement in the realm
of being. It refers to changing relationships in the appearance of the
cosmos.The being of the cosmos can never be fixed and stable, because
permanence and stability are attributes of the Real, not creation.They belong
to wujud, not kawn. “Time” is a name that we give to the pattern
of ongoing changes that occur in the face of the cosmos.
Ibn ‘Arabi points out
that both time and place are demanded by the realm of kawn wafasad,
“being and corruption,” a philosophical expression that is applied to
everything that has a location. Its standard English equivalent is “generation
and corruption.” Generation here means coming to be as a result of God’s
creative act, and corruption means disappearance. To speak of being is to speak
of place, because a thing’s being is localized. To speak of corruption is to
speak of change, and changes are described in terms of time.
God is untouched by time,
just as he is untouched by place. This is what is meant by words like qadim
and sarmadi, both of which mean eternal or outside time or beyond time.
In contrast to eternal, temporal (zamani) refers to the changing
relationships of created things.
How then are eternity and
time related? Is the relationship between God and the world a fixed
relationship of eternity or a changing relationship of time? These questions
are versions of the central issue in tawhid: “How are the many related
to the One?” Answering such questions has always posed major difficulties for
theologians and philosophers. One of the several ways in which Ibn ‘Arabi
addresses it is in terms of the word dahr, which I would translate as
“Aeon.” (In medieval Western philosophy, Aeon can designate an intermediate
realm of unchangeable created things, perhaps what Ibn ‘Arabi means by the
fixed entities.)
Arabic texts often treat
Aeon as a name of God, and Ibn ‘Arabi considers it as such. In some passages he
says that Aeon and time are the same thing, but more commonly he differentiates
between the two. He tells us that Aeon is God’s name inasmuch as he gives rise
to the changing conditions of the universe, the flow of events that we call
time.Thus it designates the relationship between eternity and time.
The Qur’an mentions “the
Days of God” (Q. 14: 5), and Ibn ‘Arabi takes this as a reference to the
prefiguration of temporal differentiation in the Divine Knowledge. It is the
Days of God that give birth to the unfolding temporal cycles of our world. He
tells us that these Days all belong to the name Aeon, which designates God as
the principle of time. Just as God’s attribute of knowledge is the root of all
awareness and understanding in the universe, and just as his mercy is the root
of all mercy, compassion, and kindness, so also God as Aeon underlies time and
becoming.
God has days of differing
length that are related to various names.The Qur’an says that the angels and
the Spirit rise up to God in a day whose length is fifty thousand of our years,
and it relates this fifty-thousand-year day to the divine name dhu’l- ma‘arij,
“the Possessor of the Ladders” (Q. 70: 3—4). The Qur’an also speaks of a
one-thousand-year day (Q. 32: 5), and Ibn ‘Arabi explains that it is connected
to the name c/M>,“I.ord.” He also mentions several other divine days
of varying length, each related to a specific divine name.
The most all-embracing of
the Days of God is the “Day of the Essence,” to which Ibn ‘Arabi finds a
reference in the verse, “Each day He is upon some task” (Q. 55: 29). God’s
Essence, denoted here by the pronoun He, is Absolute, Real, Unchanging Wujud.
One might think that the Day of the Essence is the longest of the Divine
Days.This is true, but Ibn ‘Arabi points out that from our standpoint, it is
the shortest. Its length is one instant, which is the present moment. There is
no time shorter than the present moment, which is defined precisely as the
instant that cannot be divided into parts. But, this shortest of Divine Days
lasts forever.We never leave the present moment, because we never leave the
Divine Presence.
To come back to the name
Aeon, Ibn ‘Arabi says that it designates God inasmuch as he is the possessor
of Days. Each Day is divided into day and night. “The Aeon,” he writes, “is
nothing but daytime and night” (F. IV 87.18), because the properties and traces
of the Days of God constantly change. During daytime, a divine name’s traces
become manifest, and at night they stay hidden. Each of God’s Days has cycles
of manifestation and non-manifestation, or display and concealment. These
cycles underlie the changes that occur throughout the universe for all time.
As for the daytime and
night of the Day of the Essence, these are the fact that God is forever present
and absent, or the fact that what prevents us from seeing God’s face is
precisely the face of God before our eyes. As Ibn ‘Arabi says in a short invocation
that expresses this paradox, “Glory be to Him who veils Himself through His
manifestation and manifests Himself through His veil!” (F. III 547.12).
In several passages, Ibn
‘Arabi tells us that the specific characteristic of the divine name Aeon is tahawwul,
that is, constant change and transformation. Inasmuch as God is Aeon,he brings
about the ceaseless transformation and alteration of the universe. Change is
so basic to creation that, as Ibn ‘Arabi frequently remarks, God’s signs never
repeat themselves, whether in time or in place.This is the meaning of his
maxim, “There is no repetition in Self-disclosure.”
At each moment, every
sign of God — every creature in its momentary reality — is unique, because it
manifests God’s own uniqueness. Nothing is ever the same as anything else, and
no moment of anything can ever be repeated. Every creature at every moment has
a unique haqq, and the goal of realization is to perceive and act upon
all these instantaneous, never- repeating haqqs in every time and in
every place, just as God perceives and acts upon these haqqs in the Day
of the Essence.
If every creature is
constantly changing, do creatures have nothing permanent? Do we and other
things have no real and fixed identity? Ibn ‘Arabi answers this question by
having recourse, once again, to the divine names. God is both omniscient and
eternal. It follows that God knows all things for all eternity. “Not a leaf
falls but He knows it” (Q. 6: 59). All things are permanent in his knowledge.
They do in fact have fixed identities, and we can be sure that our persons are
eternal in God. However, everything in the realm of being and corruption
undergoes change and disappearance, which is to say that all things experience
time.
We can sum up this brief
discussion of the haqq of time and place in terms of two divine names:
Speaker and Aeon. As Speaker, God says “Be!” in the Day of the Essence, so at
every instant he recreates the realm of being and location. As Aeon, he
manifests his names and attributes through the diversity of his Days, whose
days and nights display and conceal his neverending signs.
It goes without saying
that the perspective of tahqiq demands a radically different standpoint
from the perspectives that infuse modern thinking — whether we are talking
about science, philosophy, sociology, ideology, theology, or whatever.The
difference in standpoint is so stark that it might be imagined that there is
no relationship between tahqiq and modern thought. Nonetheless, the
attempt to draw parallels may provide insight into the significance of
realization for Ibn ‘Arabi and the Islamic tradition.
The first point to
remember here is that, according to the standpoint of realization, it is impossible
to know things properly and truly if we do not combine the knowledge of their
objective reality with the rightful demands that they make upon us as knowing
subjects. If we break things out of the context of the divine signs — the
divine faces or the divine haqqs — then we dissociate them from Real Wujud.
By doing so, we negate tawhid, which is to say that we destroy the
interrelationships established by the divine Unity, because we put Reality on
one side and things on the other. Things are then simply “objects” without any
real connection to their Source.They are khalq deprived of haqq,
creatures wrenched from their context in the whole of Reality, relativities
deprived of their absolute point of reference.
One of the many
implications of the perspective of tahqiq is found in the domain of
ethics. Modern thought in its various forms investigates objects,
relationships, and concepts. At the same time, it strips these of their haqqs,
that is, their characteristic of having real relationships with the Real and
of making demands on the subjects who deal with them. Hence the question of
right activity is relegated to the beliefs and opinions of the human observer.
It is ascribed to the side of the subject and negated from the side of the
object.
Typically in the modern
view of things, the object out there is thought to be indifferent to the
observing subject, with the exception of other human beings (who have, for
example, “human rights”). Nowadays, of course, ecologists and others are
striving mightily to recognize the rights of non-human creatures, but “hard
science” cannot take these efforts seriously. Despite the critiques of
numerous philosophers and thinkers, the predominant view among practicing
scientists and popular scientism has been and continues to be that “objective
knowledge” is value-free.
From the standpoint of tahqiq,
talk in these terms abuses the words “subject”and “object.”If the word
“objective”is to have any real significance, then it must designate knowledge
that is rooted in the actual reality of things. The “actual reality of things”
is incomprehensible without knowledge of the Ultimate Reality, the Unique Haqq,
the Origin and Return of all things.
In Real Wujud,
subject and object converge. Ibn ‘Arabi would say that the divine root of all
subjectivity is the fact that God is Knower, and the divine root of all objectivity
is that he is his own object of knowledge. In other words, God is wujud,
and he finds all things as fixed entities in the midst of his own finding of
himself, his own knowledge and consciousness. He is the One/Many, the
Knower/Known.
To discern the haqq
of things is to find their objective realities and to act in accordance with
the demands that these realities make upon us. We cannot dissociate object
from subject and then claim that the object has no divine rights, that it lays
no obligations on the subject who knows it. Anyone who wants to investigate
“objective” truth must at the same time investigate “subjective” truth. Not to
do so is to ignore the haqq of both the object and the subject.
Modern thought has no
access to the haqqs of things, so talk of ethics and morality typically
goes on in terms of self-interest and social stability. But what is this “self”
whose interest we are trying to discern, and what is the haqq of
society? If we do not know the haqq of the human self, we are left with
a discussion of self-interest based on a misunderstanding of the self and its
becoming. Without knowledge of the haqqs of the selves who make up any
collectivity, the haqq of society cannot be known. Yet, contemporary
disciplines, with their everincreasing specialization, are based upon
separating things out from their cosmic and human contexts — not to mention
their divine context.
Clearly, modern
discussions of human nature and ethics give no thought to the fact that human
beings are made in the form of Real Wujud, or the fact that their
innate, primordial nature embraces a knowledge of all things. Nor do these
discussions take into account the sure criterion of the ultimate significance
of all human reality and all human becoming, the return to God after death. Tahqiq
demands that we understand that God gave each thing not only its creation, but
also its guidance. Without understanding the final goal of becoming, there is
no possible way to understand the significance of the world.
If it is true that ethics
cannot be integrated into modern science , this would be sufficient proof for
Ibn ‘Arabi that science is fundamentally flawed and ultimately batil —
unreal, vain, null, void.This is not only because it ignores the haqqs
of things, but also because it cannot possibly not ignore the haqqs of
things. If it did not ignore them, it would betray its own methodology worthy
of the name “science.”
By definition, scientific
research is cut off from anything beyond the realm of “being and corruption,”
the realm of time and space, and by definition it leaves out the “subject.” It
may be that some of the latest theories in quantum mechanics are stretching the
limits of “scientific”reality, but, compared to any traditional cosmology, the
quantum universe remains enormously impoverished.
In short, modern science
specifically and modern learning in general cannot allow for the objectivity of
ethical and moral standards. Today’s critical methodologies can never acknowledge
that people — much less animals, plants, and inanimate objects — have haqqs
that belong to the very stuff of reality.
From Ibn ‘Arabi’s
standpoint, modern thought is the study of the ocean’s waves and the
simultaneous rejection of the reality of the ocean. By self-imposed
methodological constraints, scientists and scholars deal only with the surface
of reality.They think — or at least they practice their professional disciplines
as if they think — that there are waves but no ocean. Studying waves will never
provide access to the ocean without shore.
T
ranslators of Greek texts
into Arabic rendered psyche as nafs, the usual English equivalent
of which is “self” or “soul.” InArabic nafs functions as the reflexive
pronoun, like self in English but unlike psyche in Greek. As
such, it can be applied to anything — the rock itself, God himself. Already in
the Qur’an, however, it is used dozens of times with the definite article but
without reference to a noun. In these instances, it is understood to designate
the human self as a generic term, and translators typically render it as “the
soul.”
As a designation for the
human self or soul, nafs is used in all schools of Islamic learning.The
word was given a variety of definitions, but generally it was taken to refer
to the totality of constituents that make up a human being, including body and
spirit; or, to all the components of any living being that are more than simply
the body. Sometimes nafs was distinguished from spirit (ruh), and
sometimes it was not.
In keeping with one
common usage, Ibn ‘Arabi often speaks of the nafs as the net result of the
divine act through which human beings were created. Mythically, this act is
depicted as God’s molding the clay of Adam with his two hands and then blowing
his spirit into the clay. Once the clay came to life through the divine spirit,
Adam “himself” came to be distinguished from the components that gave rise to
him. Thus the nafs — the self or soul — is what comes into being when
God
combines body and spirit.
It is neither the spirit, nor the body, nor something completely new. Already
in the myth, the domain of the human soul is “in between”—that is, between the
divine breath and the earthly clay, or between spirit and body.
Ibn ‘Arabi considers
knowledge of the self the primary means to realization. But knowing oneself is
hardly straightforward. We can only recognize who we are in terms of a radical
in-betweenness (bayniyya), so we are left with uncertainty in every
domain.The knowing subject is in between — between spirit and body, light and
clay, knowledge and ignorance, awareness and unconsciousness. So also, the
soul’s knowledge is in between, because it is inseparable from both the known
object and the knowing subject. When we think we know something, in fact our
knowledge partakes of the indeterminate nature of the soul, so it lies between
truth and error, reality and unreality, accuracy and inaccuracy. All knowledge
is true in one respect and false in another. All knowledge, one might say, is
relative.
If the relativity of
knowledge does not lead to relativism in any of its modern forms, this is
simply because the Absolute Haqq remains lurking beneath the surface and
continues to demand that the haqq of individual things be recognized.
Ibn ‘Arabi insists on a certain sort of relativism because he recognizes the
actual human situation and acknowledges the limits of human possibility. In his
view, nothing of value can be accomplished on the basis of ignorance and
self-deception, and these are sure to result when false absolutes are set up.
Once we recognize where in fact we stand — a recognition that depends upon
knowing who we are — then the path of deliverance from limitations may become
clear.
In one passage, Ibn
‘Arabi alludes to the manner in which the recognition of universal cosmic
relativity leads to deliverance: “Morning is not hidden from the Possessor of
the Two Eyes, for he distinguishes the in-between from the in-between [al-bayn
min al-bayn]” (F IV 384.33). “The two eyes,” as noted earlier, designate
the two primary modes of human understanding: reason and imagination, or ratiocination
and intuitive apprehension, or intellect and unveiling. Seeing with one eye
leads to distortion.True understanding can only come when reason and
imagination are kept in the delicate balance demanded by the haqq of
things.
Either eye acting on its
own perceives one of the two sides that define the middle. Only those who see
with both eyes will recognize that all things are in-between, placed in their
specific niches with wisdom and order. True understanding will then dawn from
the horizon of darkness, delusion, and deception.
In the domain of
theology, seeing with two eyes means that God must be looked upon both as
incomparable, transcendent, and absent, and as similar, immanent, and present.
In actual fact, God is both absent and present, or neither absent nor present.
If we look at him with one eye, or with one eye predominating over the other,
we are bound to fall into theological error. The issue is not just theological
error, but all the errors that arise from not seeing the self, the world,people,
and things for what they really are.
THE WORLDVIEW OF IN-BETWEENNESS
Anyone who wants to know
the actual situation of all things must know the Real Wujud, which is
the principle and root of all reality. Only the Real is an absolute point of
reference, which is to say that, in itself, it does not stand in between. It
establishes the reality of everything in the universe.To know this Real, one
must know oneself, but the self has no fixity and embodies relativity. It is
nothing but a flux, a flurry of relationships, an in-betweenness that can never
be tied down to what it is, because it is nothing in particular.
The soul is configured by
the web of relationships that shape and mold it. This web embraces not only the
social, political, historical, physical, biological, and psychological factors
that preoccupy modern scholarship, but also everything that escapes the methods
of rational and scientific inquiry — an infinitely vast spectrum of reality.
The self cannot be
understood by grasping what it is, because it is nothing specific.We can only
grasp where it stands, and “where it stands” is smack in the middle of
everything. The soul is the ultimate in-betweenness. It stands between all
things, and all things have apparitions and signs within it. By knowing these
signs, one can know the things and the self, and by knowing the self, one can
know the configuration of reality.
Of course, the soul is
not unique in its in-betweenness, because everything else is also situated
between the absolute, undifferentiated reality of the Real and utter
nothingness. Everything is a word articulated in the All-merciful Breath. What
singles out the human soul from other things is the allcomprehensiveness of
the qualities and characteristics latent within it.
Potentially, the soul can
assume as its own any attribute and quality in existence. Made in the form of
God, it has no essence or definition other than to be the point of conjunction
for all things, for every realm of the in-between. Other things tend toward one
side or the other, but the soul in its full realization can only be understood
as the central point of cosmic wujud.
Once the soul completes
its trajectory in this life, it moves on to the next place of in-betweenness.
Islamic texts commonly call the first posthumous realm the barzakh or
“isthmus,” because it is situated between the ocean of this world and the ocean
of the next world. For Ibn ‘Arabi, however, every place, time, and world, and
indeed everything in existence other than the Real, is an isthmus, because
nothing can be discretely itself by itself. Discreteness is definition and
limitation, and these depend upon the configuration of surrounding realities.
No word can stand on its own in the All-merciful Breath, because each is
configured both by the letters that spell it out and by the sentence, chapter,
and book in which it appears.
Cosmic “location” is not
the only factor here, of course, for time plays an equally important role.
“There is no repetition in Self-disclosure,” and creation is renewed at each
instant.
Everything other than God
is destroyed and re-created at every moment, because nothing other than God has
any wujud in and of itself. Nothing other than the Real is permanent, so
each thing must be constantly replenished, just as a ray of light gains its
continuity from the unbroken emission of its source.
God is the “light of the
heavens and the earth” (Q.24:35), and all realms of existence are rays of God’s
light. Any discrete point or location on a ray vanishes at once, only to be
replaced by a new point at the next instant. Nothing in the realm of manifest wujud
is ever the same for two successive moments. Everything is an
in-betweenness configured on a radius emerging from a dimensionless center, a
center that is unknown and imperceptible. Nothing is discrete, nothing is
fixed, and everything is constantly changing. The fact that we often fail to
notice the change says nothing about the evanescence of all things. Unless we
grasp this evanescence, we cannot begin to know our own souls.
Few notions are more
central to Ibn ‘Arabi’s conceptual apparatus than khayal, imagination
or image. The Arabic word denotes not only the power that allows us to picture
things in the mind, but also mental pictures, mirror reflections, and images on
a screen. It refers both to the internal faculty and the external reality.
Imagination had long been
discussed by Muslim philosophers to highlight the intermediacy of the
subjective realm, which is an image of both the knowing self and the known object.
This subjective realm came into being when God blew his spirit into Adam’s
clay. It is none other than the soul, which arises at the meeting point of
light and darkness, awareness and unawareness.
Philosophers considered
imagination one of several internal faculties or senses. Ibn ‘Arabi
universalized the concept, showing that it properly designates everything
other than God. All things are images of Real Wujud, which is Being,
Consciousness, and Mercy, and all things are also images of utter nothingness.
All things shimmer between being and nonbeing. Each is an isthmus between
other things, spatially and temporally.
The realm of being is
nothing but image
but in truth it is haqq.
Whoever understands this
fact
has grasped the secrets
of the Path. (FH 159)
To be an image is to be
an isthmus between an object that casts the image and the locus in which the
image appears. It is to be located in a never-never land between being and nonexistence,
light and darkness, consciousness and unawareness. Creatures are like images in
a mirror, different from both the mirror itself and the object casting the
images.
From one point of view,
the object that casts the images is Real Wujud, and the mirror is
nonexistence. But, as Ibn ‘Arabi often reminds us, “Nonexistence is not there”
(F.IV 410.30),so the analogy of the mirror should not be pushed too far. Once
we have dispensed with it, we are left with a picture of reality akin to the
non-dualisms of India and East Asia. An infinity of images fills the universe, and
all are nothing but the effulgence of Conscious Light — dispersed,
differentiated, and refracted in a cosmos without beginning and end. An
infinity of words has become articulated in the All-merciful Breath, and each
is nothing but the divine exhalation itself.
As the very stuff of the
soul, imagination marks the point where the active vitality of intelligence
encounters the signs and sediments perceived by the senses. Invisible realities
come down into imagination embodied as notions and dreams, and the objects of
sense perception rise up to imagination and become the landscape of the
soul.Awareness and unawareness, depth and surface, meaning and words, spirit
and clay, inward and outward, non-manifest and manifest — all coalesce and
become one.
As two all-comprehensive
images of the Real, cosmos and soul reflect each other.The universe is outward,
deployed, dispersed, and objectified; the soul inward, concentrated, focused,
and subjectified. The soul is aware and conscious, the world unaware and
unknowing — relatively speaking, of course, because there can be no absolutes
when the stuff of reality is intermediacy and flux. Through its inwardness the
soul finds itself and others, and through its outwardness the world deploys
what is potentially knowable to the soul.
Given that God taught
Adam all the names, everything deployed and dispersed in the universe is
already known to primordial human nature. Regaining Adamic perfection means to
remember who we are and to recognize what we know. “All the names” means every
possibility of being and becoming present in the Real, every word articulated
in the All-merciful Breath. The qualities and characteristics of created things
are in fact the names of their Creator. Following the path of realization, the
soul comes to experience the designations of the names in its own imaginal
realm, where being and awareness are one.
From a certain point of
view, the soul is Ibn ‘Arabi’s only topic.
He frequently tells us
that we can only know what we are. All ness and consciousness. Everything we
know is our self, because awareness and knowledge are situated inside the self,
not outside it.What we know is the image of what lies outside, not the thing
itself. All outside things are themselves images cast into the mirror of
nothingness. Things have no permanence or substantiality, despite the power of
the divine imagination to display them as integral parts of an entrancing
dream.
Human knowledge, then, is
an internal image of an external image.To the extent that knowledge does in
fact coincide with the reality of the known thing — that is, with the entity
fixed in God’s knowledge — the internal image is more real than the external
image. The external image, after all, pertains to the physical, inanimate realm
of being and corruption, but the internal image pertains to a higher level of
existence and reality, a realm that is identical with life, awareness, and
consciousness.
Inasmuch as true
knowledge of external objects becomes entrenched in the soul, the objects are
transmuted into the life of the knowing soul, which finds the objects in its
own primordial omniscience, taught to it by God at its creation.The soul of
Perfect Man takes the totality of the world as its object. Together, the
perfect soul and the cosmos are a single, unitary reality, supported by the
Object that casts the images.
Ibn ‘Arabi’s voluminous
writings are all concerned with depicting the diverse modalities of human
knowing and awareness, which he looks upon as signs of God in the soul and the
world. To depict and clarify the signs, however, he needs to make sense of the
infinite diversity of human souls, the subjects that become aware of the signs.
No human subject is exactly the same as any other, for each is an ongoing,
never-ending articulation of the infinite in-betweenness called the
All-merciful Breath.
Awareness of the
shoreless ocean of the soul can have no end. But the only way to be aware of it
in a cogent and coherent fashion is to turn away from the multiplicity of the
waves and focus on the unarticulated water itself, the ocean of awareness. To
grasp the soul’s fullness and integration, one must dwell in the root of all
souls, the divine spirit that was blown into Adam’s clay, the All-merciful
Breath that utters every word,the Divine Meaning that gives rise to the Divine
Form and is refracted endlessly in human diversity.
Knowing the soul is to
situate it within the grand flux that is the cosmos. To do this, one must know
what the cosmos is, which in turn depends upon knowing the principles and roots
of real- ity.These principles Ibn ‘Arabi typically explains in terms of the
divine names. Equally important for his perspective, however, are the prophets
in all their multiplicity.
The divine names
represent the roots of things in God himself, which is to say that they
signify the basic modalities of Real Wujud. By understanding the names,
one understands in conceptual and abstract mode how God relates to the world and
human understanding. Inasmuch as God is properly and appropriately named by
many names, he is the first principle of in-betweenness. As the One/Many he is
the root of divine selfexpressiveness or the Logos — known in Ibn ‘Arabi’s
terms as the Supreme Isthmus, Non-delimited Imagination, the Reality of Perfect
Man, and the Breath of the All-merciful.
The traditional idea that
God sent 124,000 prophets from Adam down to Muhammad provides Ibn ‘Arabi’s
second framework for explicating roots and principles. It functions as a bridge
between the unity of the Logos and the diverse possibilities of human
becoming.The prophets designate the divine roots of multiplicity as they become
humanly embodied. They signify the basic modalities of humanness. By meditating
on the prophets and their disparate human qualities and characteristics, we
can come to understand in relatively concrete terms how Wujud is present
to the human soul and how its attributes determine human character traits.
What distinguishes Ibn
‘Arabi is not that he makes the divine names and the prophets the basic terms
of theological and psychological discourse, for that was done by many other
theologians and thinkers. What distinguishes him is rather that he highlights
the middle ground and emphasizes its in-betweenness. He is perfectly aware that
discourse always pertains to the middle, that language is always ambiguous, and
that nothing can be known or expressed without uncertainty and wavering.
Everything other than God
is an image, so nothing whatsoever can be known in and of itself. The selfness
of each thing is precisely the fact that it is an image of something else.
Moreover, God cannot be known in himself, because none knows God but God, and
no image of God can ever coincide with God in every respect. This means that,
in the last analysis, nothing can truly be known. Only the image can be
known — not in itself, but as image, as in-between, as a sign in the soul
pointing to the divine names. Ibn ‘Arabi makes the point in an often-quoted
verse:
I have not perceived the
reality of anything —
How can I perceive a
thing in whichYou are? (D. 96)
Ibn ‘Arabi’s approach
ends up in an admission of utter ignorance in face of the Real. This is why he
often tells us that the ultimate, final knowledge is the knowledge of
unknowingness, or what he likes to call hayra, “bewilderment” or
“perplexity.”
In no way, however, does
his approach lead to a suggestion that God is not there or to attempts at
defining human life and responsibility in human terms. Rather, God is there,
but he cannot be known as he knows himself.
Ibn ‘Arabi has been
perceived with hostility by many Muslim theologians and jurists.What has been
said about in-betweenness should suggest why. He threatens all the easy
certainties. Theologians love to establish their catechisms and creeds, which
offer in seemingly unambiguous language a firm ground on which believers can
stand. Ibn ‘Arabi, in contrast, launches a massive assault on straightforward
assertions.
Ibn ‘Arabi does not deny the
relative validity and usefulness of dogma, and he often reaffirms the standard
formulations. He frequently tells us that the only safe road in the ocean of
in-betweenness is faith in God as set down in the Qur’an and the Sunnah. But,
the moment he begins to meditate on the meanings explicit and implicit in the
sources of the tradition, he destabilizes unreflective minds. All the stark
black and white distinctions that are the stock-in-trade of dogma — not to mention
ideology — are shown to be illusory shadows.
It should be obvious that
Ibn ‘Arabi’s writings were not accessible to the vast majority of Muslims. His
books demanded far too much background in the Islamic sciences. In any case, he
was not attacking the faith of the common people, for which he had great
respect. Rather, his targets were the opinions and teachings of the learned,
especially the jurists, theologians, and philosophers. Only they had enough
training to understand what he was getting at. He subjects their finely tuned
explanations of God and the world to withering criticism. He refuses to let
anyone claiming knowledge of things stand on firm ground. He frequently shows
the essential contradictoriness of rational discourse, and in doing so he
attacks a sacred cow of all Muslim intellectuals.
From the standpoint of
the in-betweenness that he highlights, Ibn ‘Arabi’s grand contribution to
Islamic learning was to loosen and unhinge all the fixed points of reference to
which people attach themselves in their beliefs and opinions. This alone is
enough to explain the hostility that he has stirred up, especially in modern
times, when ideological absolutes have played central roles in political
discourse throughout the Muslim world. Nonetheless, the fact that he has been
venerated by numerous great scholars and by the common people should be enough
to tell us that his approach must be rooted in some basic Islamic insight.That
insight is simply tawhid: “There is no god but God.”
The formula of tawhid
radically undermines everything other than God, including all beliefs and
certainties concerning God and the world, not least those established by
rational, scientific, and ideological thought.Whatever fixed point of reference
one seizes upon must be other than God himself, who is beyond all points of
reference. Everything that appears as fixed and stable must be thrown into the
fire along with all things ephemeral and passing.
One of Ibn ‘Arabi’s
bolder explanations of the in-betweenness of all things is found in his
analysis of the gods of belief. Given that everything other than Real Wujud
is an isthmus, an image, an in-between, whatever people worship and serve can
only be an image, because they do so on the basis of their own understanding.
In actual fact, everyone is an idol-worshiper, because everyone worships a god
that he fabricates in his own mind, whether or not he names it “God.”
In effect, everyone
worships himself, because what we worship is what we conceptualize, grasp,
believe, and understand. Whatever object of worship it may be and wherever it
draws us, it cannot be outside of our own selves. What is outside the self is
unknown and inaccessible, unperceived and unfathomable.
This is not to say that
all beliefs are equal, or that faith in the God described by the prophets is
useless. It is simply to state the obvious — “There is no god but God.” The god
that we know is not the God who alone is, but rather the god that needs to be
negated: “None knows God but God.” All knowledge claimed by anything other than
God is simply a phantom, floating between darkness and light, hovering in the
foggy realms of the in-between.
Once it becomes clear
that all understanding, including theological and scientific understanding, is
simply an understanding of oneself, it becomes even more imperative to know
the self that knows. So again, this is Ibn ‘Arabi’s basic project — to describe
the parameters of the soul on the basis of the Object of which the soul is the
image, or the Meaning of which it is the form.
If everything the soul knows
is nothing but itself, this can only be because the self has the potential to
know everything other than the Divine Essence, of which each thing and every
concept in the universe is simply the image or the self- disclosure.The Real in
itself cannot be known, but the Real as it discloses itself in images can be
known, and these images include everything that can be known or experienced,
and everything that knows or perceives.
The Meaning of which Adam
is the form is the Logos, or the totality of God’s self-disclosing Self, or the
primal Unity of all the images that make up the universe, or the Supreme
Isthmus, or the eternal reality of Perfect Man. Human beings can know all
things because all fixed entities — all objects of God’s knowledge — are already
latent in the soul. Coming to know oneself is coming to know the things, which
are the individual facets of the all-inclusive divine form.
When one knows the form
of God, one recognizes oneself as the form of God’s self-disclosure. The
knowing subject perceives that it is none other than the known object. Just as
the soul can perceive nothing but the divine self-disclosures, so also the very
act of perceiving and knowing is God’s disclosure of himself to himself. “I am
the hearing with which he hears, the eyesight with which he sees.”The human
process of knowing oneself, however, is never-ending, because the soul has no
shores in this world or the next.
THE DISCLOSURE
OF THE
INTERVENING IMAGE
nderlying Ibn ‘Arabi’s
enormous literary output is the concern to explicate reality in all its
dimensions. Although
as a universalist and not
a particularist. Far from developing a “system,” as some modern observers have
claimed, he offers a vast panorama of legitimate points of view, symbolized by
the divine names and the 124,000 prophets.Among the many basic topics that he
explains with unprecedented detail and extraordinary insight is the return to
God, the third of the three principles of Islamic faith after tawhid
and prophecy.
The goal of realization
is to gain knowledge of the haqqs of things and to act appropriately.The
soul must undergo a transformation such that it becomes indistinguishable from
the infinity that it knows.The quest for omniscience has of course been present
in Western thought at least since Aristotle, and it has obvious parallels in
Hinduism and Buddhism. What is unusual in Ibn ‘Arabi’s case is that his
writings are the clear fruit of having achieved the goal — or so it has seemed
to much of the later tradition.
Ibn ‘Arabi calls the
fruit of realization “the Muhammadan station” and “the station of no station.”
As long as human individuals know themselves as confined and limited, they
deserve to be called this or that.True freedom is achieved only by those
who pass beyond every
specificity and return to the original purity of the human self, known asfitra
or primordial nature. As the Taoists would say, the primordial self is an
uncarved block, but social and environmental circumstances carve it into
specific shapes and destroy its simplicity.
The Prophet said, “Every
child is born in keeping with the primordial nature, but then its parents make
it into a
Christian, a Jew, or a
Zoroastrian.” Achieving the fullness of human possibility demands recovering
the state of nondetermination and returning to the freedom of the All-merciful
Breath, which underlies every articulation in the universe. Human beings have
the potential to understand, emulate, and actualize every name that properly
applies to Wujud. But to do so, they must reject the fixity and
limitation of every station and standpoint.
divine self-disclosure, a
constant bubbling up and boiling over of existence and awareness, a ceaseless
flow from unity into multiplicity and consciousness into nescience. What comes
to be disclosed is the concealed reality of the absolutely Real, which embraces
every possibility of being and know- ledge.The disclosure is driven by the
Hidden Treasure’s love to be known.
Man enters the cosmos at
the point where the dispersive and externalizing movement of God’s love to be
known turns back upon itself. People begin as germinal images of the Real.
Their individual configurations replicate microcosmically everything deployed
in the indefinite spatial and temporal expanse of the universe.They have the
possibility of developing into full-blown manifestations of the Real’s
simplicity and all- comprehensive unity by loving God fully and achieving
identity with every quality latent in the Hidden Treasure.
Human subjectivity
pertains to the inwardness of the cosmos, and the physical appearance of the
world pertains to its out- wardness.This is not to deny the inwardness of
animals, plants, and other creatures, to which Ibn ‘Arabi devotes a good deal
of attention. It is simply to say that what characterizes the human state is
the potential to be aware of everything, in contrast to the limited horizons of
other things. The limited potential for awareness in non-human beings makes
them pertain more to the object than to the subject.
The inner limitations and
psychic boundaries of animals appear as the diversity of their species. In
contrast, human beings are outwardly similar but inwardly diverse.The primordial
purity of human nature, created in the form of the Infinite and the Unlimited,
allows for vast differences in inner being and awareness.The diversity of
life-forms in the outside world provides only the barest hints of the unbounded
realm of the soul. Indeed, Ibn ‘Arabi tells us that the world of imagination is
by far the vastest realm in existence, “because it exercises its ruling
property over every thing and non-thing. It gives form to absolute nonexistence,
to the impossible, to the Necessary, and to possibility. It makes existence
nonexistent and nonexistence existent” (F. I 306.6).
Human beings become what
they are by actualizing their ontological, spiritual, and psychological
potentialities in never-repeating combinations. Their true world is that of
awareness and imagination, but its panorama remains hidden from those who make
no attempt to reverse the outward flow and focus awareness back on the Source.
Loving this and that, they lose sight of the real Beloved and remain transfixed
by the mirroring surface.
The cosmos as a whole is
simply an image of the Beautiful. The soul’s self-awareness derives from the
living image of the cosmos that is its own perception and understanding.
Perception of self and others is never anything but consciousness, which is to
say that it pertains to the realm of the soul. People cannot recognize the
world and themselves for what they are without awareness of their own immersion
in the ocean of imagination.
Just as imagination is
the realm of disclosure and recognition, so also it is the domain of
concealment and deception. It embraces both illumination and obscurity and is
peopled by both angels and demons. Its ambiguity and intermediacy explain the
imperative for prophetic revelation, which provides the keys to differentiate
angel from demon and beauty from glimmer.
In sum, each human self
is a unique subject, complemented by the object that is the universe. Both soul
and world are images of the absolute Subject/Object, which is Real Wujud, true
Finding and Being. In itself, human primordial nature is unhampered by any
quality or characteristic, but most people freely choose to carve their blocks
into specific shapes. Falling in love with transient beauty, they fail to
realize that they have the potential to aim for the Beautiful and transcend
every limitation of existence and awareness.
The Qur’an and the
Prophet offer numerous accounts of the world after death. Ibn ‘Arabi finds the
key to interpreting these accounts in the very stuff of the human self, which
has the potential to assume every form. People have no specific form in their
primordial nature, but they gradually assume qualities and character traits
according to the paths that they follow in the unfolding of their lives.
The paths that people
follow may lead in the direction of the fullness and wholeness of the divine
form, or they may obscure its radiance. Some people become attuned to the
universality, harmony, and balance of the Real, and others perceive the cosmos
and themselves as dissonance, disequilibrium, and dissol- ution.The soul’s
situation in the total pattern of things comes to be determined by the objects
upon which it fixes its attention. It becomes what it loves.
Death turns the soul inside
out. “God created man in an inverted configuration, so he finds the afterworld
in his inwardness and this world in his outwardness” (F. IV 420.1).At death,
man’s inner life becomes the outward configuration of his reality.The self is
left to stand on its own without the stabilizing fixity of the outside world.
So-called objects disappear as independent things, and the divine
self-disclosure comes to the surface. People experience themselves in forms
appropriate to their own loves and aspirations.As God says to the soul that has
just died, “We have lifted from you your covering, so your sight today is
piercing” (Q. 50: 22).
The afterworld is the
inversion of this world’s configuration, and this world is the inversion of the
afterworld’s configuration, but man is simply man. Hence you should strive here
to make your thoughts praiseworthy according to the Shariah so that your form
in the afterworld may be beautiful.
(F.IV 420.3)
Given the essential
unlimitedness of the human self and the fact that nothing is impossible in the
realm of imagination, the modalities of posthumous becoming are beyond
reckoning. The only way to ensure a congenial afterlife is to love the
Beautiful and recover the primordial purity of God’s form.This is precisely the
practical goal of realization: assuming God’s character traits as one’s own.
The homesteads of the
afterlife are the stages of an endless succession of awakenings to the
self-disclosures of the Real. In this life, the stages of the return to God map
out in broad strokes the infinite imaginal realm where divine self-disclosures
will be seen for what they are. Every stage on the path to God prefigures one
of the homesteads of the next world. Human nature finds the imperative to
follow the path in the hunger to know the divine names and to find their
substance within the self, a hunger that is commonly known as love.
The Real, Ibn ‘Arabi
reminds us, is precisely the Real and nothing else. All else is derivative and
unreal. Nothing in the universe can subsist except in function of the Sheer
Good. “Nothing comes forth from the Sheer Good in which there is no evil —
which is the Real’s Wujud that bestows wujud on the cosmos —
except what corresponds with it, and that is good specifically.” This is why
Ibn ‘Arabi claims that God, the Allmerciful, the Sheer Good, “created the
universe only for happiness” (F. III 389.21).When misery occurs, it occurs as
a passing accident. Even hell is not exempt from this rule, as will become
clear in the next chapter.
In this life, people taste
something of the good and mercy of reality in love, which allows them to
recognize God’s presence in the world and drives them to realize the divine
form within themselves.Those who fail to recognize that all love is directed
toward God will come to their senses at death: “When the covering is lifted,
they will come to understand that they had loved only God, but they had been
veiled by the name of the created thing” (F. IV 260.27).
In his chapter on love in
the Futuhat, Ibn ‘Arabi explains that this world is in fact nothing but
a testing ground for love, and death the meeting with the true Beloved. He is
commenting on the hadith,“When someone loves to encounter God, God loves to
encounter him. And when someone dislikes to encounter God, God dislikes to
encounter him.”
The encounter that lovers
crave is a specific encounter designated by the Real, since He is already
witnessed in every state. He designates whatsoever homestead He will, making it
the place of a special encounter, because of His craving for us. We reach it
only by emerging from the abode that contradicts this encounter, and that is
the abode of this world ...
Encountering God through
death has a flavor not found in encountering Him in the life of this world. In
death we are related to Him as mentioned in His words, “We shall surely attend
to you at leisure, O jinn and men!”[Q. 55: 31]. For us, death is that our
spirits achieve leisure from governing our bodies. Lovers desire and love to
taste this directly. It will occur only at the emergence from this world
through death, not in ecstatic states. It happens when they depart from the
physical frames with which they have gained familiarity from the time they were
born, and through which they have become manifest ... He created death and made
it a trial for them so as to put their claims to love Him to the test. (F. II
351.16)
N
o doubt the predominant
interpretative methods of the modern-day academy belong to the category of “the
hermeneutics of suspicion.” In contrast, traditional Islamic scholarship is
characterized by a hermeneutics of trust, though trust in God alone. One can,
however, observe a tension between the interpretative approach of the experts
in dogmatic theology and that of the Sufis.The theologians were more likely to
trust in God’s wrath and vengeance, and the Sufis preferred to trust in his
mercy and forgiveness.
The stance of the
theologians, and along with them that of the jurists, has much to do with their
chosen role as guardians of religious and social order.They appealed to a God
who will punish all those who stray from the straight and narrow. The Sufis
called upon a God who loves his creatures and inclines to forgive all sins.
One major reason for the
differing standpoints lies in individual religious experience. The theologians
made no claim to know God other than by way of rational interpretation of the
Qur’an and the tradition. Many of the Sufis claimed to know God’s mercy and
compassion first-hand.
Ibn ‘Arabi explains that
the rational analysis characteristic of theology detaches God from the soul and
abstracts him from creation. Rational minds find it easy to prove God’s
transcendence and
incomparability, but they fail to grasp his immanence and similarity. “Those
who know God through their rational faculties look upon Him as far removed from
themselves through a distance that demands the declaration of
incomparability.They put themselves on one side and the Real on the other side,
so He calls to them ‘from a far place’ [Q. 41: 44]” (F III 410.18). In
contrast, God called to Ibn ‘Arabi and other Sufis from a near place, and they found
that God was “closer than the jugular vein” (Q. 50: 16).
Part of the reason that
Ibn ‘Arabi came to be called “the Greatest Master” was that his massive corpus
contains consistently erudite and profound expositions of the meanings of the
Qur’an that had few precedents, and no serious later challengers. Recent
studies, especially the work of Michel Chodkiewicz and Claude Addas, have
brought out the intimate connection between his spiritual life and his
understanding of the holy book.
For Ibn ‘Arabi, the
Qur’an was the vivifying word of God, an infinite ocean that constantly
replenished his soul, a living presence that would embody itself to him and
appear in visions.The dependence of his writings on the Qur’an is obvious to
careful readers, and he frequently reminds us of the fact. As he says in one
passage, everything that he writes “derives from the presence and the
storehouses of the Qur’an,” because God gave him “the key to understanding it
and taking aid from it” (F. III 334.32).
When Ibn ‘Arabi tells us
that his writings provide explicit or implicit commentary on the Qur’an and
that they represent the fruit of bestowal and witnessing, he is claiming that
his interpretations are divinely inspired. He does not in any way, however,
mean to preclude other interpretations. Quite the contrary, from his
standpoint, a true understanding of any Quranic passage can never be exclusive.
As was noted in Chapter 1, he goes so far as to say that anyone who understands
a Quranic verse in the same way twice has not truly understood it.
The Qur’an, after all, is
God’s Speech, and God’s Speech is the self-disclosure of his infinite Essence.
God’s infinity demands that he never disclose himself twice in the same form.
To the degree that we understand the Qur’an, we come to understand God’s
self-disclosure within ourselves. Given that no self-disclosure is ever
repeated, no two understandings, even by the same individual, can be exactly
the same.
Diverse interpretations
of the Qur’an answer to the diverse modes in which God discloses himself to the
book’s readers. One could claim, of course, that this is not specific to the
Qur’an, since no two readers will understand any book in exactly the same way.
Ibn ‘Arabi would not argue, but he does point out one grand difference between
divine and human books. When the omniscient God reveals a book, he intends
every meaning that will be understood from it, but no human author can possibly
anticipate, much less intend, all the meanings that his readers will find.
“The Qur’an is an ocean without shore, since He to whom it is ascribed intends
all the meanings demanded by the speech — in contrast to the speech of created
things” (F. II 581.11).
Ibn ‘Arabi does not mean
to imply that every interpretation is equally valid. He adds a number of
conditions to this blanket approval, most notably that the interpretation must
be sustainable by the language of the revelation. If the language does indeed
support it, “No scholar can declare wrong an interpretation that is supported
by the words ... However, it is not necessary to uphold the interpretation or
to put it into practice, except in the case of the interpreter himself and
those who follow his authority” (F. II 119.24). Responsibility for
interpretation rests with the interpreter.
If interpreters of the
Qur’an will be held responsible for their own interpretations, they should
naturally take care to interpret the book in a way that is appropriate to its
author. Ibn ‘Arabi likes to quote the divine saying related by the Prophet,“I
am with My servant’s opinion of Me, so let his opinion of Me be good.” Those
who have a good opinion of God will be given good by him, just as those who
have an evil opinion will find misfortune: “Those who opine evil opinions of
God — against them shall be fortune’s evil turn” (Q. 48: 6).
Perhaps the best opinion
that one can have of God is represented by the hadith of God’s precedent
mercy, one of the basic themes of Ibn ‘Arabi’s writings.When he saw God in all
things, he saw mercy, and God’s mercy is nothing but his goodness, bounty,
kindness, love, and solicitude toward all creation.
God says, “I am with My
servant’s opinion of Me,” but He does not stop there, because “His mercy takes
precedence over His wrath.” Hence He said, in order to instruct us, “So let his
opinion of Me be good” — by way of commandment.Those who fail to have a good
opinion of God have disobeyed God’s commandment and displayed ignorance of what
is demanded by the divine generosity ...When people have a bad opinion of the
actual situation, what overcomes them is their own bad opinion, nothing else.
(F. II 474.26)
It was noted earlier that
Ibn ‘Arabi’s claim to be the Seal of the Muhammadan Friends implies that he
would be the last person before Jesus at the end of time to inherit all the
works, states, and stations of Muhammad. The Qur’an says that God sent Muhammad
only as a mercy to the creatures, and the fact that practically every chapter
of the Qur’an begins by citing God’s two primary names of mercy — ar-rahman
and ar-rahim, “theAll- merciful” and “the Ever-merciful” — was lost on
no one. If Ibn ‘Arabi considered himself Muhammad’s last plenary inheritor, it
is not surprising that he saw his own role as that of spreading mercy:“God
created me as a mercy, and He made me an inheritor of the mercy of him to whom
He said, ‘We sent thee only as a mercy to the worlds’ [Q. 21: 107]”(F. IV
163.9).
What is especially
telling in this passage is Ibn ‘Arabi’s next sentence, which clarifies his
understanding of what the mercy of the Prophet implies:“God did not specify
those who have faith to the exclusion of others.”In other words, God sent
Muhammad as a mercy to everyone, not just Muslims or religious believers.
This all-inclusiveness of
mercy has implications that many theologians — not just Muslim theologians —
would find difficult to accept. As Ibn ‘Arabi puts it, such people would like
to exclude some of God’s creatures from his mercy, but their evil opinion of
God can only redound upon themselves. “Those who curtail God’s mercy curtail it
only from themselves.Were it not that the actual situation is otherwise, those
who curtail and limit God’s mercy would never reach it” (F. III 532.22).
I saw a group of those
who dispute concerning the all- embracingness of God’s mercy, maintaining that
it is confined to a specific faction.They curtailed and constricted what God
has made all-embracing. If God were not to have mercy on any of His creatures,
He would forbid His mercy to those who say this. But God refuses anything but
His mercy’s all-inclusiveness. (F.IV 163.5)
Although Ibn ‘Arabi’s
stress on the precedence and predominance of God’s mercy has many Quranic
roots, his own intimate experience of God was perhaps the deepest motivation.
One of his visions is especially telling. He saw the divine Throne, upon which
the All-merciful is sitting, and it was supported by four columns. He found
himself standing in the ranks of the angels who held up the most excellent of
these columns, which is “the storehouse of mercy,” because God had created him
“ever-merciful in an unqualified sense”(F. III 431.32). One of the other three
columns was pure wrath and severity, and the other two were mercy mixed with
wrath.
THE RETURN TO THE ALL-MERCIFUL
Ibn ‘Arabi’s metaphysics,
theology, cosmology, and spiritual psychology are all rooted in a good opinion
of Sheer Good, the All-merciful God whose mercy takes precedence over his
wrath.This comes out with special clarity in the issue of hell. The Qur’an
declares that hell is a place of divine wrath and punishment. The general
Muslim understanding is that hell’s chastisement will last forever, though some
theologians offer dissenting views. Ibn ‘Arabi’s own good opinion is
categorical, however: although certain types of unbelievers will remain forever
in hell, even they will cease to suffer after a period of time, however long
this period may take in earthly terms.
A basic argument that Ibn
‘Arabi offers to prove that hell’s pain comes to an end is simply that God is
“the Most Merciful of the merciful” (Q. 12: 64).There are people who could
never agree that anyone, even the most evil of men, should suffer forever. God
is certainly more merciful than they.
I have found in myself —
who am among those whom God has innately disposed toward mercy — that I have
mercy toward all God’s servants, even if God has decreed in His creating them
that the attribute of chastisement will remain forever with them in the
cosmos.This is because the ruling property of mercy has taken possession of my heart.
The possessors of this
attribute are I and my peers, and we are creatures, possessors of fancy and
personal desire. God has said about Himself that He is “the Most Merciful of
the merciful,” and we have no doubt that He is more merciful than we are toward
His creatures.Yet we have known from ourselves this extravagant mercy. How
could chastisement be everlasting for them, when He has this attribute of
all-pervading mercy?
God is more noble than
that! (F. III 25.19)
God’s “nobility” or
“generosity” (karam) is a recurrent theme in Ibn ‘Arabi’s discussions of
hell. God has commanded his servants to acquire noble character traits (makarim
al-akhlaq). Would he ask his servants to acquire attributes that he himself
lacks? The Qur’an ascribes many of these noble traits to God by calling him
Forgiving, Patient, Just, Pardoner, and so on. Such traits demand that he have
the best interests of his creatures in view. Hence the “final issue” (ma’al)
of the creatures will be at mercy.
According to an already
cited hadith, God has a haqq — a right, a truthful and worthy claim —
against his servants, and his servants have a haqq against him. God’s
right is tawhid — that the servants acknowledge his Unity and worship
him alone. The servants’ right is that, if they fulfill God’s right, he will
take them to paradise.
The Qur’an says that
people will not be blamed for claiming their rights, but it also states that it
would be better to forgive. “God has set down in the Shariah concerning some of
our rights that if we abandon them, that would be best for us, and He placed
this among the noble character traits.” In proof, Ibn ‘Arabi cites the verse,
“And the recompense of an ugly act is an ugly act the like of it,but whoso
pardons and makes things well, his wage falls upon God” (Q. 42:40).
The next verse gives
people permission to claim their rights: “Whosoever helps himself after he has
been wronged, against him there is no way” (Q. 42: 41). If it is better for the
servants to pardon people who have sinned against them, then God himself will
certainly pardon the sin of not worshipping him: “He will pardon, show
forebearance, and make things well. Hence the final issue will be at God’s
mercy in the two abodes. Mercy will embrace them wherever they may be” (F. III
478.20).
THE MERCY OF WUJUD
To say that God has noble
character traits is to say that reality itself is rooted in these traits and
demands that they become manifest. The key term here, as usual, is wujud.
God is the Necessary Wujud, which is to say that he is and cannot not
be. Everything else is a possible thing, which is to say that it has no
inherent claim on wujud. The cosmos — everything other than God — owes
its existence to God’s bestowal, which is his mercy. The whole realm of possible
existence is nothing other than the Breath of the All-merciful.
Ibn ‘Arabi’s most
frequently cited proof text for all- pervasive mercy is the verse, “My mercy
embraces everything” (Q.7:156).It follows that “The cosmos is identical with
mercy, nothing else” (F. II 437.24). This verse does not suggest that mercy
pertains only to specific realms, or that it is found in paradise but not in
hell.“Hence the abode of mercy is the abode of wujud" (F. IV 4.32).
“The name All-merciful protects us ... Wujud accompanies us, so our
final issue will be at mercy and its property” (F. II 157.23).
The final issue will be
at mercy, for the actual situation inscribes a circle.The end of the circle
curves back to its beginning and joins it.The end has the property of the beginning,
and that is nothing but wujud. “Mercy takes precedence over wrath,”
because the beginning was through mercy.Wrath is an accident, and accidents
disappear. (F. IV 405.7)
Inasmuch as the cosmos is
everything other than God, it is everything other than the All-merciful, the
Permanent, the Living, the Powerful, the Knowing, the Generous. It is, in
short, everything other than Real Wujud. Hence the cosmos has nothing of
its own to support its existence. At the same time, we all recognize that
helping the underdog is a noble character trait. How could God, who is merciful
and bountiful by essence, do anything but help the weak? “And all creatures are
weak at root, so mercy includes them” (F. III 255.33).
The Qur’an says, “There
is no fault in the blind, there is no fault in the lame, and there is no fault
in the sick” (Q.48:17). This is normally taken to mean that the Shariah makes
allowances for human weakness and handicaps. But the Shariah is God’s law, and,
as God’s law, it expresses the nature of wujud itself. It follows that
a deeper meaning of this verse is that God is gentle and kind to all those who
are weak and disabled. But weakness and disability are the attribute of the
whole universe, which is other than the Real, the Strong, and the Powerful.
He who is stricken by
some blight has no fault, and all the cosmos is stricken by some blight, so it
has no fault in the view of him whose insight has been opened by God.This is
why we say that the final issue of the cosmos will be at mercy, even if they take
up an abode in the Fire and are among its folk. “There is no fault in the
blind, there is no fault in the lame, and there is no fault in the sick.”And
there is nothing but these ... For all the cosmos is blind, lame, and sick. (F
IV 434.34)
Ibn ‘Arabi finds
allusions to mercy’s final triumph throughout the Qur’an. For example, the book
tells us that the “felicitous” will remain in paradise forever, as “a gift
unbroken” (Q. 11: 108). In the same place it tells us that the “wretched” will
remain forever in the Fire. As Ibn ‘Arabi points out, however, God “does not
say that the state within which they dwell will not be cut off, as He says
concerning the felicitous.” He continues,
What prevents Him from
saying that is His words, “My mercy embraces everything” [Q. 7: 156], and His
words, “My mercy takes precedence over My wrath” in this configuration. For wujud
is mercy for all existent things, even if some of them suffer chastisement
through others. (F. II 281.26)
To say that mercy takes
precedence over wrath is to say that God takes precedence over his creatures,
light over darkness, reality over unreality, good over evil. Or, it is to say
that, by embracing all things, mercy also embraces wrath, employing it for its
own ends.
God says,“My mercy
embraces everything” [7: 156], and His wrath is a thing. Hence His mercy
embraces His wrath, confines it, and rules over it.Therefore wrath disposes
itself only through mercy’s ruling property. Mercy sends out wrath as it will.
(F. III 9.23)
The Qur’an tells us that
the wrongdoers, even if they were to possess the whole universe, would not be
able to ransom themselves from the ugliness of their actions. “There will
appear to them from God what they had never reckoned with ... and they will be encompassed
by what they mocked at” (Q. 39:47).Theologians of evil opinion read this as a
guarantee that God will implement his threats, but Ibn ‘Arabi rejects this out
of hand. God, after all, is “Sheer Good, in whom there is no evil” (F. II
478.9).The wrongdoers, having been immersed in evil, reckon to receive the same
from God. But, what appears to them is the Real itself.
“There will appear to
them from God what they had never reckoned with,” and that is the witnessing of
the affair as it is in itself. God will relieve them through what appears to
them from Him, for nothing appears from the Good save good.
(F.II 478.12)
As already suggested, one
of the most obvious Quranic assertions of God’s good intentions is found in the
basmalah, the formula of consecration that begins practically every
Quranic surah: “In the name of God, the All-merciful, the Ever- merciful.”As
the all-comprehensive name, “God” embraces all the divine attributes, and these
can be divided into two categories — the severe and the gentle, or the majestic
and the beautiful, or the merciful and the wrathful. The fact that this name is
followed by the two primary names of mercy tells us that the merciful side of
God rules over creation and revelation. As Ibn ‘Arabi remarks, the basmalah
does not make manifest any of the names of severity and wrath.
Even if the name God
includes severity, it also includes mercy.
So the names of severity,
dominance, and harshness that the name God comprises are countered measure for
measure by the names of mercy, forgiveness, pardon, and forebearance that it
contains in itself.There remains for us the surplus ... and that is His
words,“the All-merciful, the Ever-merciful.” ...Thus His mercy is
all-pervasive, and hope is great for everyone ...
for He has made mercy
three — the non-manifest mercy in the name God, the All-merciful, and the
Ever-merciful.
(F. III 9.24)
Ibn ‘Arabi compares the basmalah
to the intention that undergirds every human activity. According to the
Shariah, if one is deficient in one’s religious practice “through heedlessness
or inattention, this has no effect on the correctness of the activity, for the
intention makes up for it.” In the same way, God’s intention, asserted in the basmalah
at the beginning of each chapter, makes up for “every threat and every
attribute that demands the wretchedness mentioned in the chapter ... So the
final issue will be at mercy, because of the basmalah. It is a statement
of good news” (F. III 147.31).
People win paradise by
observing the instructions that God has sent through the prophets, just as they
earn hell by ignoring them. The prophets guide people to become proper
servants, but the Qur’an also tells us that everything is a servant by nature:
“There is nothing in the heavens and the earth that does not come to the
All-merciful as a servant” (Q. 19: 93). Nothing can disobey the engendering
command that brings it into being, so the first act of every creature is
obedience. In other words, the primary created characteristic of everything is
to obey the divine command and to serve the All- merciful.This characteristic
must exercise its ruling property, sooner or later. Having explained this, Ibn
‘Arabi remarks,“The precedence belongs to mercy, so there is no escape from the
final issue at mercy for every possible thing for which wretchedness occurs,
for the thing is obedient at root” (F.IV 296.10).
There are two basic sorts
of worship and servanthood:The “essential” sort follows upon created nature,
and the “accidental” sort derives from God’s commandments delivered by the
prophets.The existence of accidental servanthood depends on a number of
factors, not least of which is free choice. In the next world, whether people
go to paradise or hell, they will lose their freedom of choice and return to
worship through their essences. “This is why the final issue for the wretched
will be at mercy, for the essential worship is strong in authority, but the
commandment [to worship God in this world] is accidental, and wretchedness is
accidental. Every accidental thing disappears” (F. III 402.11).
Although human beings are
free when gauged against other creatures, they have no freedom when compared to
God.They are his absolute servants like everything else.They are, as Ibn ‘Arabi
often remarks, compelled in their free choice. They never leave their essential
worship, even if they choose to reject accidental worship. God will forgive
them for their accidental disobedience. “Since the excuse of the world is
accepted in actual fact — because they are compelled in their free choice — God
placed the final issue of everything at mercy” (F. III 433.4).
Muslims have typically
understood the notion of “primordial nature” (fitra) to mean that all
people are born with an innate disposition toward tawhid. If they fail
to acknowledge God’s unity, they will be flying in the face of their own
reality. Primordial nature is associated with the Covenant of Alast, when all
human beings, before their entrance into this world, stood before God and
acknowledged his lordship over them (Q. 7: 172). Ibn ‘Arabi often identifies it
with people’s essential worship of God: “ ‘Every child is born according to
primordial nature,’ and this primordial nature is acknowledging God through
servanthood. It is an obedience upon an obedience” (F.IV 296.14).
Even those who end up in
hell will reap the fruit of this primordial obedience. They will cease
suffering when they come to understand that they, like all things, were created
as servants of the All-merciful. At this point they will stop claiming
lordship, control, and mastery, and they will acknowledge that they are
nothing but creatures and servants. They will recognize that everything real
belongs to the Real and will give everything its haqq, thus being
delivered from ignorance, illusion, and pain.
They will pluck the fruit
of their words [at the Covenant of Alast], “Yes, [we bear witness]” [Q. 7:
172].They will be like those who submit to God after apostasy.The authority of
“Yes” will rule over everything and finally give rise to their felicity, after
the wretchedness that had touched them in the measure in which they had made
claims.The property of “Yes” will never leave them from its own moment ad infinitum
— in this world, in the isthmus, and in the afterworld. (F. II 213.8)
Ibn ‘Arabi offers one of
his bolder assertions of the ruling authority of primordial nature in the
context of the constant Quranic criticism of the “associators,” those who
worship others along with God. In some verses, the Qur’an quotes excuses that
they offer. For example,“We only worship them so that they may bring us nigh in
nearness to God” (Q. 39: 3). In answer to this sort of excuse, God tells
Muhammad to ask them to name their associates (Q. 13: 33). In Ibn ‘Arabi’s
reading, “Once they named their associates, it became clear that they
worshipped none but God, for no worshipper worships any but God in the place to
which he ascribes divinity to Him.” Hence, despite associating others with God,
such people are standing firm in the tawhid that is God’s right,
“because they acknowledged Him at the Covenant,” and so they remain in their
primordial nature. “Through the strength of remaining in their primordial nature
they did not in reality worship Him in the forms. Rather, they worshipped the
forms because they imagined that within them was the level of bringing about
nearness, as if they were intercessors.” This will open them up to God’s
forgiveness and pardon (F. III 24.34).
The Qur’an asserts that
hell will last forever, and this may appear as strong evidence against
universal mercy. Ibn ‘Arabi does not deny its everlastingness, but he does deny
the permanence of suffering. His basic argument is simply the precedence of
mercy.
How could there be
everlasting wretchedness? Far be it from
God that His wrath should
take precedence over His mercy — for He is the truthful — or that He should
make the embrace of His mercy specific after He had called it general! (F. III
466.20)
The Quranic verse that
supports Ibn ‘Arabi’s position most explicitly is probably 39: 53, “O My
servants who have been immoderate against yourselves, do not despair ofGod’s
mercy! Surely God forgives all sins.” The Qur’an often says that the sins of
those who repent and do good deeds will be forgiven, but here it says that the
sins of everyone will be forgiven.
He brought forgiveness
and mercy for the repentant and those who do good deeds, and He also brought it
for those who are “immoderate,” those who do not repent.The latter He forbids
to despair, and He confirms the point with His word “all.”Nothing could be
greater in divine eloquence concerning the final issue of the servants at
mercy. (F. III 353.1)
Many people would counter
by citing various Quranic verses that make sinners the objects of wrath and
punishment. Ibn ‘Arabi answers that God becomes wrathful only in this world. In
the next world, all creatures will follow his command exactly, for they will
worship him by their very essences. He will be pleased with them, whether they
dwell in paradise or hell, because they can do nothing but obey him through
their own primordial natures. Everyone will act in keeping with God’s good
pleasure,“for this is required by the homestead,in contrast to the homestead of
this world” (F. III 495.23).
In this world, people are
addressed by the prophets and told to do certain things and to avoid others.
They are able to act “both in what pleases God and what angers Him.” God
created the situation this way “because He made the Fire the abode of those
with whom He is angry. Hence,in this world, its folk have no escape from acting
in what angers Him.” Once they enter hell, however, it becomes impossible for
them to act except according to God’s good pleasure.“That is why the final
issue of its folk will be at the ruling property of the mercy that ‘embraces
everything’ [Q. 7: 156], even if the Fire is an abode of wretchedness” (F. III
495.24).
The Qur’an says, “God is
well-pleased with them, and they are well-pleased with Him”(5: 119,58: 22,98:
8). One should not be misled by the fact that the context of this statement
makes explicit reference to paradise.
The Real does not make
good-pleasure manifest until the folk of the Fire have taken up their domiciles
and the folk of the Garden have taken up their domiciles.Then everyone will be
pleased with what they have because the Real will make them pleased.
No one will desire to
leave his domicile, and each will be happy with it. (F. II 244.1)
Ibn ‘Arabi continues this
passage by referring to the unpopularity of this sort of good opinion of God.
No one, so far as he knows, has explained that God’s good pleasure rules over
both paradise and hell. He supposes that some people have been aware of this
fact, but they have concealed it, to ward off criticism and to protect others
from the harm of rejecting the truth. “I have called attention to it here only
because mercy has overcome me at this moment. Those who understand will be
felicitous, and those who do not understand will not be wretched because of
their lack of understanding, even if they are deprived” (F. II 244.4).
One of God’s Quranic
names is “Patient” (sabur). God is patient with the disobedience of his
servants, and the Qur’an says that he will delay taking them to task for their
wrongdoing until the afterworld. He is patient despite the fact that his curse
is upon those who annoy him: “Those who annoy God and His Messenger — God has
cursed them in this world and the next” (Q. 33: 57). In explaining the meaning
of this verse, Ibn ‘Arabi says that when this world comes to an end, so also
will God’s annoyance, and along with it the property of the divine names that
answer to this annoyance, such as Avenger and Severe in Punishment. “One of the
causes of punishment is annoyance, but annoyance has disappeared, so there is
no escape from mercy and the removal of wrath. Inescapably, mercy will include
everything, through God’s bounty, God willing” (F. II 206.33).
Ibn ‘Arabi finds a divine
allusion to the final issue at mercy in the Quranic word for chastisement, ‘adhab.The
basic sense of this word’s root is to be sweet and agreeable, which clearly has
nothing to do with pain and suffering. An apparently unrelated meaning is found
in a noun form that means pieces, strips, the extremity of a thing, the end of
a whip.
“Chastisement” seems
originally to have meant the pain of being whipped. In the Qur’an, it is the
generic term for the punishment inflicted upon people in hell. The Qur’an could
have used other words to make the same point.Why did God choose this specific
word? For Ibn ‘Arabi, the reason can only be that in the end, the chastisement
will become “sweet” ( ‘adhib) for those who suffer it. “That which
causes pain is named ‘chastisement’ as a good news from God: Inescapably, you
will find that everything through which you suffer is sweet when mercy envelops
you in the Fire” (F. II 207.1).
God is Just, and the
basic definition of justice is to put things where they belong.The divine
justice becomes manifest when God puts people where they belong by their very
nature. Once they arrive at their final abodes, they will find that they are
happy because they have come home. It is not the location that determines bliss
or chastisement, but the nature of the person who enters the location.The
angels of chastisement enjoy hell, and sinners will too. “Bliss is nothing but
what is accepted by the constitution and desired by the soul — locations have
no effect in that.Wherever agreeableness of nature and attainment of desire are
found, that is the person’s bliss” (F. III 387.22).
The same line of
reasoning helps Ibn ‘Arabi explain why the Qur’an refers not only to the “fire”
of hell, but also to its “bitter cold” (zamfiarir).Those who go to hell
do so because their individual divine forms — their “constitutions” — are out
of kilter and therefore inappropriate for the equilibrium of paradise. The
person of cold constitution will find the fire’s heat pleasant, and the person
of hot constitution will find the bitter cold pleasant.What causes pain in one
constitution will cause bliss in another constitution.
So, wisdom is not
inoperative, for God keeps the bitter cold of Gehenna for those with hot
constitutions and the fire for those with cold constitutions.They enjoy
themselves in Gehenna. If they were to enter the Garden with the constitutions
that they have, they would suffer chastisement, because of the Garden’s
equilibrium. (F. II 207.3)
Ibn ‘Arabi finds another
allusion to the pleasures of the Fire in the verse, “Whosoever comes unto his
Lord a sinner, for him awaits Gehenna, wherein he shall neither die nor live”
(Q. 20: 74).The folk of the Fire will not die therein, “because they find
relief through the removal of pain.” When it is removed, the chastisement turns
sweet. “Nor will they live therein, which is to say that they will not have a
bliss like the bliss of the folk of the Gardens, a bliss that would be
something in addition to the fact that He has relieved them in the abode of
wretchedness”(F. III 245.26).
In several places Ibn
‘Arabi insists that the pleasure of hell is precisely the removal of suffering
and pain. But this is not something small, given hell’s severity.
The enjoyment of the
Companions of the Blaze is tremendous, for they witness the abode, while
security is one of its properties.There is no surprise if roses are found in
rose gardens.The surprise comes when roses grow up in the pit of the Fire. (F.
IV 307.34)
Ibn ‘Arabi says that a
soul’s wretchedness derives from its refusal to submit to God’s wisdom and to
accept its own nature. People suffer the fire of hell because they do not trust
God and insist that the world needs to be changed to accord with their own
personal desires.
The wretched have
chastisement only from themselves, for they are made to stand in the station of
protest.They seek the reasons for God’s acts among His servants. “Why did such
and such happen?” “If such and such had been, it would have been better and
more appropriate.” (F. II 447.8)
By protesting against the
way things are, people dispute with the Real, who has given everything its
creation. They join up with those who “broke off from God and His messenger”
(Q. 8: 13). Ibn ‘Arabi explains one meaning of this verse by playing on the similar
spelling of shaqq, which means “breaking off,” and shiqa , which
is the “wretchedness” of hell. “Their wretchedness is their ‘breaking off.’
Hell is the abode of ‘the wretched’ because they enter it in this state.”
Eventually, however, their state changes and they come to realize that there
is no profit in questioning God and refusing to submit to their own nature.
“When the period is drawn out for the wretched and they come to know that
dispute has no profit, they say, ‘Agreement is better.’ ” At this point, their
situation changes, and their breaking off from God and his Messenger
disappears.
Then the chastisement is
removed from their inwardness and they achieve ease in their abode.They find an
enjoyment known by none but God, for they have chosen what God has chosen for
them, and at that point they come to know that their chastisement had been only
from themselves. (F. II 447.12)
When the denizens of hell
accept their own natures, they realize that they will never leave the Fire.
This makes them secure in their places, for they no longer wonder if they will
be among those who, according to a hadith, had done no good whatsoever in the
world but would be taken out of hell by the Most Merciful.
When they give up the
thought of leaving, they become happy, so they enjoy bliss in this measure.
This is the first bliss they find ...Thereby they find that the chastisement is
sweet, for the pains disappear, even though the chastisement remains.
(F. III 463.6)
Among the Quranic verses
that criticize those who associate others with God is the following: “Be not
among those who associate, those who divide up their religion and become sects,
each party rejoicing in what is theirs” (Q. 30: 31—32). Ibn ‘Arabi finds good
news lurking here, even for sectarians. He is in the process of explaining how
the Qur’an encourages its readers to search out the deepest meanings of its
verses, which are the “signs that God appointed ‘for a people who use intelligence’
[Q. 2: 164] and ‘for a people who reflect’ [Q. 10: 24].” It calls those who
understand the signs ulu’l-albab, which is usually translated by
expressions like “possessors of minds” or “people of understanding.” Literally,
it means “owners of the kernels,” and Ibn ‘Arabi contrasts it with “owners of
the shell.”
Those who penetrate to
the kernels of things enjoy their knowledge, and those who remain with the
shells stay happy with their ignorance. Each group has its own idea of
happiness, and neither is wrong, because each idea corresponds to the group’s
own nature.This is a mercy from God which, however, filters haphazardly into
this world, because here not all are happy with what they have .Things will be
sorted out in the next world.
The realization of His
words “each party rejoicing in what is theirs” [Q. 30: 32] occurs only in the
next world, in contrast to this world. It is not known in this world, or
rather, it occurs for many people but not for everyone ...The final issue of
everyone in the next world, after the expiration of the term of taking to task,
will be that they will rejoice in what they have and what they are busy with.
(F. III 471.9)
A final passage can serve
to summarize Ibn ‘Arabi’s good opinion of God. He points out that the Qur’an
never provides straightforward verses concerning hell’s suffering.What it does
say along these lines should be understood as threats. But God is the source of
all beautiful character traits, and no person of true nobility and generosity
would carry out his threats. In one of the more threatening passages, the
Qur’an says, “The Clatterer! What is the Clatterer! And what shall teach you
what is the Clatterer? The day that men shall be like scattered moths, and the
mountains shall be like plucked wool-tufts!” (Q. 101: 1—5).This indeed sounds
like a terrible situation, and the rest of the short surah encourages readers
to take it as a dire warning of calamities to come. But Ibn ‘Arabi’s good
opinion of God allows him to read it as a sign of precedent and all-embracing
mercy:
The ultimate end of the
affair will be that “with God is the most beautiful place of return” [Q. 3:
14]. God does not explicitly link any ugliness whatsoever to the place of
returning to Him.Things of that sort that have come to us play the role of
threats in the first understanding... For His mercy is all-embracing, and His
blessing is abundant and all-comprehensive...
This explains why all the
world will be mustered on the day of resurrection “like scattered moths” [Q.
101:4]. Mercy will be scattered in all the homesteads, so the world will
scatter in search of it, for the world has diverse states and various forms.
Through the scattering they will seek from God the mercy that will remove from
them the forms that lead to wretchedness. This is the cause of their being
scattered on that day.
(F. III 390.35)
http://www.ibnarabisociety.org
Journal of the Muhyiddin
Ibn ‘Arabi Society, published biannually.
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READING
Addas, Claude. Ibn
Arabi: The Voyage of No Return. Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 2001.
----- . Questfor the Red Sulphur: The
Life of Ibn ‘Arabi. Cambridge: IslamicTexts Society, 1993.
Austin, R.WJ. Ibn al
Arabi: The Bezels of Wisdom. Ramsey, NJ: Paulist Press, 1981.
----- . Sufis ofAndalusia. London:
George Allen & Unwin, 1971.
Burckhardt,Titus. Ibn
Arabi: The Wisdom of the Prophets.
Gloucestershire: Beshara
Publications, 1975.
----- . Mystical Astrology According
to Ibn Arabi. Gloucestershire: Beshara Publications, 1977.
Chittick,William C. Imaginal
Worlds:Ibn al- Arabi and the Problem of Religious Diversity. Albany: State
University of NewYork Press, 1994.
----- . The Self-Disclosure of God:
Principles of Ibn al- Arabi’s Cosmology. Albany: State University of
NewYork Press, 1998.
----- . The Sufi Path of Knowledge:Ibn
al- Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination.Albany: State University of NewYork
Press, 1989.
Chodkiewicz, Michel, An
Ocean Without Shore:Ibn ‘Arabi, the Book, and the Law. Albany: State
University of NewYork Press, 1993.
----- . The Seal of the Saints:
Prophethood and Sainthood in the Doctrine of Ibn Arabi. Cambridge:
IslamicTexts Society, 1993.
Chodkiewicz,
Michel,William C. Chittick, and James Winston Morris. Ibn al ‘Arabi: The
Meccan Revelations. NewYork: Pir Press, 2002.
Corbin, Henry. Creative
Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi (re-issued as Alone with the
Alone). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969.
Elmore, GeraldT. Islamic
Sainthood in the Fullness ofTime:Ibn al- ‘Arabi’s “Book of the Fabulous
Gryphon”. Leiden: Brill, 2000.
Hirtenstein, Stephen. The
UnlimitedMercifier:The Spiritual Life and Thought of Ibn Arabi. Oxford:Anqa
Publishing, 1999.
----- and Pablo Beneito. Ibn Arabi:
The Seven Days of the Heart.
Oxford:Anqa Publishing,
2001.
----- and Michael Tiernan (eds.). Muhyiddin
Ibn ‘Arabi:
A CommemorativeVolume. Shaftesbury:
Element, 1993.
Izutsu,Toshihiko. Sufism
and Taoism. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983.
Morris, James Winston.
“Listening for God: Prayer and the Heart in the Futihat."Journal of the
Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society 13 (1991), pp. 19-53.
----- .“‘Seeking God’s Face’: Ibn ‘Arabi
on Right Action and TheophanicVision.”Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi
Society 16 (1994),pp. 1-38; 17 (1995),pp. 1-39.
Murata, Sachiko. The
Tao of Islam: A Sourcebook on Gender Relationships in Islamic Thought.Albany:
State University of NewYork Press, 1992.
Nicholson, R.A. TheTarjumán
al-Ashwáq: A Collection of Mystical Odes by Muhyi’ddin ibn al- Arabi.
London: Theosophical Publishing House, 1978.
Sells, Michael A. Stations
of Desire:Love Elegiesfrom Ibn ‘Arabi. Jerusalem: Ibis, 2000.
----- . Mystical Languages of
Unsaying. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
‘abd 22, 56
Adam 7, 13, 18, 50, 74-5,81, 101, 106, 109, 113
achieving status of 63-4, 71,107
his knowledge of names 25,49, 62-63, 71, 74-5,
107
Addas, Claude 8, 124
‘adhab 139
Aeon 94-7
afterworld (akhira) 52, 73, 74, 119,
128-44
akhlaq 30, 129
‘alam 75
Alast 135-36
all-comprehensiveness ( jam ‘iyya)
of God 32,63, 65, 74, 116, 133
of human beings 46, 62-63, 89, 104, 107
of Muhammad 25
ambiguity of creation 80-3
‘aql 17
Ash’arites 34
associators (mushrik) 90, 142^3
and God’s right 84, 136
attributes see divine names
Austin, Ralph 5
authority, following 77-8, 126
Averroes 5, 87
Avicenna 87
ayat 29, 57
‘ayn thabita see entities
barzakh 104
Basmalah 133-4
batil (unreal) and haqq
(real) 79-81, 86, 89, 100, 120
batin 74
“Be” (kun),God’s creation and
59-60, 80, 92, 93, 97
beauty 42-5, 51, 117-18, 119
being, realm of (kawn) 23, 60, 61, 80, 93,
106
and corruption 93, 96-7, 100, 108
being and consciousness, disassociation of 37-8,
75, 98-99
belief, gods of 46, 112-14
in God by means of reason 33-4, 76-7, 123-4
and knowledge of self 112-14
breaking off (shaqq) and wretchedness
(shiqa’) 141-2
Breath of the All-merciful 58-60, 62, 64-66, 75,
92, 104, 105, 107, 109, 116, 130
change 20, 93, 96-7, 105, 109
chastisement (‘adhab) 128-29, 132, 139-42
Chodkiewicz, Michel 20, 124
command (amr), engendering 59, 80, 88, 92
and prescriptive 81, 83, 134
Corbin, Henry 4, 5, 6, 27
cosmos (‘alam) 23, 30-32, 46, 53, 59, 60,
66, 70, 87, 93, 109, 116, 130-31
the term 36, 75
Covenant of Alast 135-6
creation (khalq)
ambiguity of 80-83
and haqq 79-84, 88-89, 92, 93
and love 31, 44
realization of purpose of 80-3
renewal of 21, 44, 47, 105
as Speech of God 57-60
dahr 94
Days of God 94-7
death (return to God) 56-7, 73, 115, 118-19,
120-21
see also hell/eternal torment;
paradise
Dhakha’ir al-a ‘laq
on knowledge (191) 72
see also Ibn ‘Arabi
dhat 70
dhawq 28
dhikr 15, 53, 55
divine names 61-2, 70, 97
assuming the traits of 29-32, 33, 87,
89,118-19
explicating roots of reality 95-96, 109-10
human form and 31-32, 62-3
knowledge of 13, 25, 61-2, 120
manifestation of 29-32, 43, 61-66, 133 divine names
(cont.)
Perfect Man and 49, 50, 63—6 remembrance and
62,66—7
divine roots 35-36, 38,70-2,87, 109-10 Diwan
110
entity ( ‘ayn)
existent and nonexistent 40-2, 60, 62,
71, 91
fixed 40-42, 70, 74-75, 94, 98, 108, 113
God as 25, 56, 92
love and 42-8
essence (dhat)
and attributes 62,65,70, 74
of God 22, 37, 46, 47, 51,61,76, 95,
113, 125
of things 27, 32, 63, 70, 79, 85 eternity 94-5
ethics (akhlaq) 30, 97-100
existence (wujud) 36-8, 71 see wujud
levels of 32, 108
possible 75, 130
of self alone 25
through God’s love 31,42^ eyes, seeing with two
19-20, 34, 37, 103 faith (iman) 23, 111, 113, 127
principles of 54-6, 66, 72, 115 faqr 47
Farghani, Sa‘id ad-Din 71 felicity (sa‘ada)
136
and unknowable God 46-7
fisq 84
fitra 116, 135
fixed entities see entities
form of God 18-20, 21,24, 25, 31-3,
49-51, 74-5, 88-89, 104, 114, 119 all
comprehensive, and divine names 62-5 and divine justice 139-41 and imperfect
human love 32-4 and meaning 18, 65, 74-5, 85, 109, 113 four pillars of Divinity
70 free will 81
accidental servanthood and 134-5
God’s mercy upon entering hell and
137-8
friends of God 2, 11-12
inheritance and opening 14-17 Fusus al-hikam
(“The Ringstones of the
Wisdoms”) 7
on fixed entities (76) 41
on human perfection 50
on role of imagination (159) 106
see also Ibn ‘Arabi
al-Futuhat al-makkiyya (“The Meccan
Openings”) 1,7, 14
on afterworld (IV 420.1 & .3) 119 on assuming
traits of divine names
(II 438.20 & 267.11) 30;
(II 325.29) 32
on chastisement (II 207.1) 139;
(II 447.8 & 12) 141, 142
on constitutional diversity (II 207.3, III
245.26) 140; (III 471.9) 143; (III 387.22) 140
on creation by Speech (II 352.14;
on divine love 35-6; (II 113.6) 51;
(II 351.16) 121; (III 389.21 &
on divine names (II 120.13; IV 36.19)
61; (II 489.26) 62
on divine mercy (II 206.33) 139;
(II 244.1 & 4) 138; (II 281.26) 132; (II
474.26) 126; (II 478.9) 132; (II 478.12) 133;
(III 9.23-24) 132, 133;
(III 25.19) 128-9; (III 255.33)
131; (III 353.1) 137; (III 389.21) 120; (III
390.35) 144; (III 402.11) 134; (III 431.32) 128; (III 433.4) 135; (III 495.24)
138; (III 532.22) 127; (IV 163.5 & .9) 127;
(IV 405.7) 130; (IV 434.34) 131 on Divine
Presence (II 114.14) 74 on divine unknowability (II 663.9 &
IV 443.1) 47
on enjoyment of hell (IV 306.34) 141 on fixed
entities (II 232.12) 40 on genesis of love (II 112.34) 43;
(II 113.2) 44; (II 113.29) 42;
(II 326.24) 44
on ignorance (III 179.6) 67
on imagination (I 306.6) 117
on knowledge (I 581.29) 74;
(II 661.10) 27; (III 275.15) 76;
(III 282.34) 77; (III 448.7) 71; (III 510.32) 22;
(III 557.4) 76; (IV 129.6) 72; (IV 80.33) 78 on lovers of God (II 325.17) 28;
(II 325.20) 28-9; (II 327.7) 39;
(II 337.17) 39; (II 337.18) 39-40; (IV 7.2) 38
on man as God’s greatest name (II 641.21) 65
on Muhammadan Seal (III 329.27) 17
on Night Journey (III 350.30) 25
on perfection 50; (II 120.24) 63;
(II 468.12) 32; (III 248.12)
65-6; (III 409.16) 64
on poverty (II 263.34) 48; (II 600.35) 49 on
primordial nature (II 213.8,
III 24.34 IV 296.14) 135-6
on realization (II 267.17) 86
on recitation of Qur’an (IV 367.3) 18
on remembrance (131.4) 15;
(III 502.12) 53; (IV 36.8) 56
on the veil (III 547.12) 96
on vision of God (II 325.20) 28-9
on vision of Muhammad (IV 433.10) 24 see also
Ibn ‘Arabi
Gabriel 24, 28
Ghazali 2
gnosis, gnostics 5, 21-3, 27, 37, 47
God’s good intentions (in the Basmalah) 133-4
God’s mercy see mercy of God
God’s Throne and the human heart 59
God’s Wide Earth 22-3
good opinion of God see mercy of God
guidance (huda) of the prophets 12, 14, 55, 64, 81, 84, 88-9
haqiqa 79
haqq 79-81,88-90, 96-100, 106
as given to each thing 81-3, 102 problem of
ethics 99-100
recognition of God’s 83-4, 129 recognition of the
soul’s, 84-6
hayra 110
He/not He (huwa la huwa) 22, 30, 34, 42
heart (qalb) 15, 16, 19, 53, 64
death of 67
as God’s Throne 59
as House of God 66
hell/eternal torment and precedence of
God’s mercy 128-34, 136-9 as constitutionally
acceptable 139-41 surrender 141-2
tawhid in primordial nature and
135-6 see also death; paradise
Hidden Treasure 31, 33, 35, 38, 40, 43, 46, 49,
63, 78, 116
Hirtenstein, Stephen 2, 8
hubb see lovers of God
hudur 5 3
human beings see Adam; form of God
‘ibada 23, 56
idol-worship 112
Ibn ‘Abbas 63
Ibn ‘Arabi
acquaintance with love for God 28-9 biographical
details 4-7
claim to be Muhammadan Seal 16-17, 126-7
his night journey 24-5,56, 127-8 influence of 2-4
Qur’an, his understanding of 124-6 radical
agnosticism 76
cause of controversy 111-12
emphasis on in-betweenness 110-11
see also: Dhakha’ira al-a‘laq; Fususal-hikam;
al-Futuhat al-makkiyya; Risalat ash- Shaykh
ila’I-imam ar-Razi
ignorance (jahl) 18, 67, 126
ijtihad 77
ilah al-mu‘taqad 46
‘ilm 21,70, 75
image (khayal) 18-19, 105-7, 110, 113,
117-18
imaginal realm 32, 51, 59, 107, 117-20
imagination (khayal) 28, 105-7
and reason 17-20, 34, 103
cosmic 106-7, 108
facilitating congenial return 119-20 nondelimited
109
self-awareness and 117-18
subjective realm of cosmos and 105-8 world of
117-18, 119
see also imaginal realm imkan
48 in-betweenness (bayniyya) of manifest things 101-5
God (the Real) as first principle of 109-10 gods
of belief 112-14
theological controversies 111-12
see also knowledge of self
incomparability (tanzih) 37,
and similarity 19-22, 65, 103, 124 inheritance see
Muhammadan inheritance insan al-kamil, al- 12 ism 61 isra’
24
isthmus (barzakh) 104, 106, 112, 136
Supreme 109, 113 Izutsu, Toshihiko 4
Jesus 5, 16, 54, 126
jurisprudence (fiqh) 77 justice, divine
30, 139-40
kalam 59
kashf 37
kawn 49, 59, 80, 92-3
Kay Ka’us of Konya, Sultan 6
Khadir 6
khalq 79, 81-2, 97
khayal 17-18, 105
knowledge (‘ilm) 60, 67, 69-70, 97-100
ambiguity of 102, 108, 110, 113-14
beneficial 71-5, 78
bestowal of 15, 17, 25, 73, 78, 85
degrees of 33-4
of divine names 61-4
divine root of 70-2
God’s own 36-7, 40, 61,70-72, 75,94 and form of
God 75
infinity of 115-16
Islam’s foundation upon 54, 57
leading to sects, and God’s mercy 142-3
and love 27, 44
and realization 13-14, 25
reliable through wujud 75-7
through prophetic inheritance 12-14,
20-2, 77-8
seeking of 69-70
of self 20-2,58, 102, 107, 112-14
of unknowingness 110
see also realization
kun 59, 80
law of Islam see Shariah
light (nur) 41-4, 45, 51, 105-7
Logos 16, 69, 109-10,113
love 27-8, 32-3, 38-9
as creative force 31, 41-4, 46, 55, 116 divine
roots of 35-6
as God’s merciful test 120-1, 126-8
expressed in scripture and literature 35-6
and striving for the nonexistent 38-40, 45-6
and entities 40-4
felicity, state of 46-7
in terms of need (poverty) 47-9
perfection 49-51
throne of 44-5
lovers of God 27-9, 33-4
assuming the traits of names 29-31 human form and
the divine 31-2
imperfect love and 32-4
macrocosm and microcosm 59, 62, 64, 107-8, 116-18
Majd ad-Din Ishaq 5 makan 91-3
Malik az-Zahir, al- 6 ma'na 18, 74
manifestation (zuhur) 21, 30, 32, 33,
41-3, 46, 47, 60, 83, 95-6
locus of (mazhar) 43, 44 maqam la maqam
50 ma'rifa 20, 21 mazhar 43
mercy of God 45,59, 120-1, 126-8 hell/eternal
torment and 128-30 manifest in divine justice 139-41 precedence of mercy and
137-9 surrender and 141-4
tawhid innate in primordial
nature and 135-6
its precedence in afterlife 131-4 servanthood,
essential and accidental and 134-5
towards all creation 130-1
see also Real; wujud mi'raj
24 Muhammadan inheritance 11-12
God’s Wide Earth 22-3
knowing self and Real 20-2
Muhammad’s example 14-15, 23-5
Muhammadan Seal 16-17, 126-7 mumkin 41 muraqaba
53 Murcia 4 Mu’tazilites 34 Muzaffar ad-Din 6
nafs 20, 101 names see divine names
necessity of God 48, 65, 75-76, 93, 117, 130
negative theology 18-19
Night Journey (mi'raj) 24-5, 27, 56
nondualism 106
nonexistence (‘adam) 38 49, 60, 106, 117 nur
42
objective and subjective reality 18-20, 37, 90-2
in-betweenness and worship 112-14 problem of
ethics 82, 88, 97-100 relativity of self 101-5
role of imagination 106-8, 117-18 One/Many 71,74,
98, 109
Oneness of Being (wahdat al-wujud) 49-50,
71
opening 14—15, 28
paradise 21,73, 138, 140
see also hell/eternal torment
Perfect Man and realization of God 12—14, 23,
31-2, 38, 63, 69, 78, 107-9, 113
and love 33,49-51
as Perfect Servant 56, 64—6 philosophy (Islamic)
18, 30, 36-7, 48, 77, 79, 87, 90, 93, 106, 108, 111 possibility (imkan)
41,48,71,75, 117, 130 poverty (faqr) 15,47-9, 51 prayer 15, 24, 54
presence (hudur) 22, 34, 37, 53, 56, 66
the divine (hadra) 24, 32, 63, 74, 95
primordial nature (fitra) 89, 99, 107-8, 116-19
hell and 135-6, 137 prophets (and messengers)
11-16, 24-5, 54-7, 81, 83, 109-10
psyche 101
qalb 15
Qunawi, Sadr ad-Din 6, 71 Qur’an
and divine names 29, 35, 39, 61
as divine root 35-6, 38
interpretation of 17-18, 83, 89-90, 124-6
status of 11-12
and remembrance 54-6
as Speech 17-18,57-8, 61, 66
verse of Ibn ‘Arabi’s Night Journey 24—5 Qur’anic
verses cited (2:30) 85; (2:31) 25, 62, 74; (2:115) 29, 66, 90; (2:152) 55;
(2:164) 142;
(2:231) 40; (2:253) 89; (2:254) 76; (2:286) 85;
(3:14) 143; (3:84) 24; (5:54) 55; (5:109) 78; (5:119) 138; (7:156) 45, 130,
132, 138; (7:172) 135, 136; (7:180) 30; (8:13) 141; (9:24) 84; (10:24) 142;
(11:108) 131; (12:64) 128; (13:33) 136;
(14:5) 94; (15:85) 82; (16:40) 43, 59; (17:14)
58; (17:41) 79; (17:105) 83; (19:93) 65, 134; (20:50) 80; (20:74) 140; (20:114)
34, 69; (21:25) 57; (21:107) 127; (24:35) 41, 105; (25:53) 34; (29:56) 22;
(30:31-2) 142, 143; (32:5) 95;
(33:57) 139; (35:15) 48; (39:3) 136; (39:47) 132;
(39:53) 137;
(41:44) 124; (42:40-1) 129;
(48:6) 126; (48:17) 131; (50:16)
34, 124; (50:22) 119; (51:56)
56, 63, 81; (55:29) 95; (55:31) 121; (68:4) 30;
(70:3-4) 95;
(85:14-15) 45; (101:1-5) 143-4
Razi, Fakhr al-Din 72-3 real/Real (haqq)
79-81
as first principle of in-betweenness 109-10
and knowing self 19-22, 107, 112-14 as love,
Sheer Good 120-1 see also mercy; haqq; wujud
reality (haqiqa) 13, 18, 70, 74, 79, 98,
108, 110
Muhammadan 16
realization (tahqiq) 13, 78-9, 97-100
ambiguity of creation 80-1 and giving things their haqq 81-6 of God’s
rights 83-4 methodology/path of 87-92, 96, 102,
107, 115
problem of ethics and morality 97-9 see also
knowledge, the seeking of reason, inadequacy of 15, 33^, 76-7, 83,
104, 112, 123-4
and importance of self-knowledge 112-14 and
imagination 17-20, 33-4, 103 recognition (ma'rifa) 31,47, 64
see also gnosis
relativity 78, 101-5, 107, 111 remembrance (dhikr)
15, 24, 53-4, 60
naming and 62-3 prophetic guidance and 55-7
through human heart (God’s House) 66-7 worship and servanthood 65-6
resurrection 57, 58, 82, 144 retreat (khalwa) 15
return (ma‘ad) to God 56-8, 66, 72-3, 99,
115, 118-20, 143 revealed law see Shariah
revelation (wahy) 12, 15, 16, 30, 57, 58,
118, 125, 133 rights of God and man 83-4, 88,
98-9,
129, 136
Risalat ash-Shaykh ila’I-imam ar-Razi on knowledge
(6-7) 73 see also Ibn ‘Arabi
Rumi 27, 33,47
sa'ada 47
saints 12, 27, 63
salvation see felicity; mercy of God
science (modern) 37, 87, 98—100 scripture 19,
38,57-8, 61, 69, 89-90 Seal of Muhammadan Sanctity 11-12, 16-17, 126-7
self see soul; human form
self-disclosure (tajalli) of God 18-22,
25, 29, 33, 39, 41-43, 46, 51, 66-7, 90, 113, 116, 119-20
humans as 32, 37, 63, 114 Muhammad as 23-24
nonrepetition of 21, 96, 105, 125
Self-Disclosure of God, The 8
self-knowledge see in-betweenness;
knowledge of self self-realization see
realization
servanthood and worship 22-3, 25, 56-7, 63-4, 69,
81
Covenant of Alast 135-6
essential and accidental 134-5
God’s mercy in hell 129-30 the Perfect Servant
and 64—6
Shariah (revealed law) 119, 131, 133 benefit and
73-4
rights of God and man 83-4, 129
shirk 90
signs (ayat) 29, 53,57-8, 64, 66, 69, 75,
87, 90, 96-7, 107, 108, 142-3
soul (or self, nafs), relativity of 20,
101-5 as image of Real and cosmos 107-9, 113-14
its haqq 84-5
transformed by death 119
see also knowledge of self
speech (kalam) of God creation as 57-60
Qur’an as 17, 57-8, 125
station of no station (maqam la maqam)
50-1, 78, 115-16
subjectivity see objective and subjective
reality
Sufi Path ofKnowledge, The 8
Sufism 4, 5, 30, 36, 47, 54
and theologians 123
Sunnah 54, 111
sura 18, 74 tahawwul 96 tahqiq
77-9, 81, 88, 97-99
taklif 73, 81
tanzih 19
taqlid 77
Tarjuman al-ashwaq (“The Interpreter of
Yearnings”) 7
tashbih 19
tasting (dhawq) 2, 28, 38, 63, 66 tawhid
40, 54-5, 57, 66, 84, 69, 72, 84, 89-90, 94, 97, 112, 129
innate in primordial nature 69, 135-6 three
principles of Islam see prophecy;
return to God; tawhid throne (‘arsh)
45, 58-9, 66, 128 time and space (zaman wa makan) 87, 91-7 traits,
character (akhlaq), of God and man 12, 29-32, 33, 87, 89, 110, 118-19,
129-30, 131, 143
‘ubudiyya 23
undisclosability of God 18-20 unity see tawhid
universe see cosmos
unreal see batil
Unseen (ghayb) 23
unveiling (kashf) 2, 14, 15, 19, 28, 37,
103
vicegerency (khilafa) 49, 65, 81, 82, 85
wahdat al-wujud 49-50, 71
wali 11-12
witnessing (shuhud, mushahada) 2,
14-15,
21, 23, 25, 37, 47, 56, 65, 73, 78, 121, 124, 132
worship see servanthood and worship wujub
48
wujud 36-9, 60, 74, 92, 103,
105, 106 entities and 40-5, 47-9
felicity and 46-7
knowledge and 61, 70-2, 98, 118
love and 42-6
mercy of 120, 130-2
necessary 65, 75, 93, 130
oneness of 49-50, 71
perfection and 49-51
see also existence; mercy; Real
Yahia, Osman 7
zahir 42, 74
zaman 91, 93-4 zulm 84
[1] The
chapters were written originally as talks or articles for nonspecialists,
though in their present form they have been thoroughly revised. They appeared
in the following sources: 1. Horizons Maghrébins 30 (1995);
[2] Sufi
9 (1991); 3. Journal of theMuhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society 17 (1995);
4. Paths to the Heart:
Sufism and the Christian East, edited by James S. Cutsinger (2002); 5. Sophia
8 (2002); 6. Islamic Studies 39 (2000); 7. The Passions of the Soul
in the Metamorphosis of Becoming, edited by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (2003);
8. Discourse: Journalfor Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 24
(2002); 9. Mysticism and Sacred Scripture, edited by Stephen Katz
(2000).
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