Ibn al-‘Arabi, Muhyi‘l-Din al-Ta‘i
Ibn al-‘Arabi, Muhyi‘l-Din al-Ta‘i (Muhyi‘l-Din al-Ta‘i ibn al-‘Arabi) (Muhyi‘d-din ibn ‘Arabi) (al-Shaykh al-Akbar) (July 28, 1165 - November 10, 1240). Andalusian Arab Sufi mystic and philosopher. His full name was Abū 'Abdullāh Muḥammad ibn 'Alī ibn Muḥammad ibn al-`Arabī al-Hāṭimī al-Ṭā'ī. He is considered to be one of the greatest, and certainly the most prolific, Sufis of Islam. Born in Murcia, Andalusia (Spain), he impressed his father’s friend Ibn Rushd (Averroes), who was then a judge in Seville.He travelled far and wide in the Muslim countries. He traveled throughout the centers of learning of his time: Seville, Cordoba, Marrakech, Tunis, Cairo, Konya, Mecca, Baghdad, and Damascus, where he died and where his tomb has become a popular shrine.
In 1230, Ibn ‘Arabi settled in Damascus where he died and was buried. There seems little doubt that he is the author of some 400 works, among which are a full exposition of the author’s Sufi doctrine, and a summary of the teaching of 28 prophets from Adam to the Prophet. His ideas had their most profound influence in Anatolia. It has been suggested that his description of his “ascension to heaven” (in Arabic, mi‘raj) from the world of being to the station in God’s presence influenced Dante.
Although Ibn ‘Arabi founded no order -- no tariqa --, he nevertheless influenced speculative Sufi thought more profoundly than any other thinker. Ibn ‘Arabi left a list of his own literary output. This list totaled 270 works, 176 of which dealt with Sufism. Two of the 176 works have received special attention. The first, The Meccan Revelations, garnered attention because it is partially autobiographical and otherwise sets forth much of interest about famous Sufis as well as the central teachings of Sufism. The second, The Wisdom of the Prophets (Fusus al-Hikam), in which each of the 27 major prophets is allotted an individual chapter that describes not the prophet but rather the approach to unity -- tawhid -- characteristic of the prophet. Revealed to Ibn ‘Arabi in a single night at age sixty-five, The Wisdom of the Prophets is a brilliant, often insightful book which is without parallel in the history of Sufism.
Ibn ‘Arabi‘s thought, at once radical and comprehensive, scriptural and mystical, inspired defenders and detractors, sparking a debate over “Unity of Being” and “Unity of Witness” that relates to the fundamental question: How does one feel, think, act, and pray as a Muslim?
Ibn ‘Arabi’s ideas represent and culminate the third major phase of Sufi thought. In the first phase, thinkers such as Rabi‘a, Junayd, and Bistami articulated the Sufi concept of mystical experience as the passing away of the human ego-self (nafs) and a Sufi way of life centered in that experience, and a Sufi affirmation of divine union as the immersion of human consciousness in one divine beloved to the point of obviousness to all other things. In the second phase, represented by Sulami, Sarraj, Makki, Qushayri, and al-Ghazali, the Sufi experience of mystical union and the Sufi way of life were more explicitly integrated with ritual Islam and Islamic theology.
With Ibn ‘Arabi, mystical union becomes not only the central moment in the affirmation of divine union and in the life of the Sufi, but it also becomes the central event within mystical language as well, an event that fundamentally transforms all language concerned with ultimate reality, reconfiguring and sometimes shattering the normal dualisms of subject and object, human and divine, before and after, self and other.
Ibn ‘Arabi’s writings mirror his philosophy of “perpetual transformation.” His works continually move through the discourses of law, comparative philosophy, Islamic theology, esoteric sciences (alchemy, astrology, number symbolism, and talismans), meditative practice, Qur‘anic interpretation, hadith sciences, theory of prophecy, and sainthood. Rather than forming a system, and certainly not forming a static philosophy of “oneness of reality” as the “sum” of all things (a conception that was due to later systematizers and followers of Ibn ‘Arabi), his work resists closure and analysis by linear development. Like a moving picture made up of separate frames, it is the moving image that is meaningful, not the series of static frames. This method of writing is a perfect reflection of the dynamism of Ibn ‘Arabi’s philosophy.
Ibn ‘Arabi’s thinking has been labeled as “theosophy,” but its originality and most lasting contribution are in the domain of apophatic thought, sometimes called “negative theology” (having to do with matters that are inexpressible). As with the other practitioners of apophatic thinking, Ibn ‘Arabi begins from a critique of any attempt to refer to or name the transcendent, and ends with a dialectically simultaneous affirmation of absolute transcendence and absolute immanence. Ibn ‘Arabi’s positions are grounded in previous controversies of scholastic theology (kalam). After several centuries of growth, Islamic theology had divided into hundreds of schools of thought, all seeking to harmonize the absolute oneness of the Deity with the various attributes (ninety-nine attributes in the Qur‘an) ascribed to it. Are these attributes (“the hearer,” “the seer,” “the compassionate,” and so forth) the same as the essence of the Deity? If so, then the Deity has a plurality of eternal powers. If the attributes are not co-eternal, then the deity is subject to accident and change, in a state of not-hearing in one instant, for example, and hearing in the next.
The quandary was vividly dramatized in the debate over a hadith (a saying of the Prophet Muhammad), parallel to a passage in Genesis, in which the Deity is said to have created Adam “in his image.” If the “his” refers to the Deity, then how is one to conceive of a transcendent, infinite Deity confined to an “image”? Some theologians responded that the “his” must refer to Adam, to Adam’s being made as a full human, rather than going through a period of gestation, for example. The Deity transcends all images. Ibn ‘Arabi’s solution to this dilemma was to combine the Sufi concept of mystical union with his concept of the “complete human being.” Adam, as the symbol of the complete human, that is, of archetypal human consciousness, is the mirror through which the Deity reveals its own attributes to itself, and the prism through which its undifferentiated unity is refracted into the various attributes.
The attributes of the Deity do not exist in themselves, nor are they purely categories of human imagination. They are actualized only at the point that the mirror of human consciousness is polished and the reflections in it become visible. By combining cosmic and the individual, macrocosm and microcosm, Ibn ‘Arabi treats this polishing of the mirror as any human’s “passing away” in union with the divine beloved. When the Sufi, following the Sufi path outlined by Qushayri and Rabi‘a, achieves a point where his or her ego-self is annihilated, then the Deity reveals itself in the polished mirror of that Sufi’s heart. At this point, to paraphrase the crucial hadith of mystical union, the Deity becomes the hearing with which he hears, the seeing with which he sees, the hands with which he touches, the feet with which he walks, the tongue with which he speaks.
In dialectical terms, this “polishing of the mirror” is a co-creation in which both the Deity and human (as manifested entities endowed with form and categories) are created in the polished mirror of the complete human being. A lord cannot exist without a servant, a creator Deity cannot exist without a creation in which it manifests itself and reflects itself. Ultimate reality, what Ibn ‘Arabi calls the identity of self of the Real (dhat al-haqq), lies beyond all such dualisms. The antecedent of “his” in “in his image” is neither the Deity by itself nor Adam by himself, but the Deity-human at the moment of the mystical union. The image occurs within the polishing of the mirror when the Deity’s image is revealed and prismatically refracted in its attributes within the polished mirror of the human heart.
From the perspective of eternity, this self-revelation always has occurred. However, from the perspective of time, it is ephemeral. It cannot be possessed. Ibn ‘Arabi takes the dynamic notion of “the moment” as developed by earlier Sufis such as Qushayri and makes it the centerpiece of his mystical dialectic. Quoting a Qur‘anic passage that refers to the Deity as being in every moment in a different condition, Ibn ‘Arabi states that the image of the eternal and infinite when it occurs in time is in a state of perpetual transformation. In every moment the image changes. Each image is formed by the linguistic, conceptual, philosophical, and psychological categories of the persons in which it appears. Each is a valid manifestation of the Deity.
The central intellectual error, the cause of religious and philosophical disputes and violence, is the attempt to “bind” the Deity into a particular fixed image. The human analytical intellect functions according to the principle of binding. It constructs both grammar and logic according to bound or delimited categories: self and other, subject and predicate, before and after, here and there. When the binding categories of language and logic are applied to the Deity, an image of the Deity is formed. This image is valid -- but only “for the moment.”
When the human being clings to the image and reifies it, however, “binding” leads to idolatry. The most disastrous idolatry of all occurs when people bind the Deity into their own affirmations of its transcendence. In his critique of the Qur‘anic Noah, who called upon God to annihilate the idolaters, Ibn ‘Arabi suggests that Noah himself “bound” the Deity into the idol of the “beyond the world,” an
image just as limiting (by marking of the Deity from the world) as the polytheists' images of the Deity “within” their images of stones and wood. The unlimited must simultaneously be beyond all things, within all things, other than all things, and identical with all things. This critique applies to Sufis as well as to those who are tempted to bind the Deity into a particular station, vision or experience.
The intellectual activity of binding, therefore, must be complemented by perpetual transformation (taqallub). The polished mirror of the human heart -- as locus not of emotion, but of this higher knowledge -- is capable of every form. This phrase “capable of every form” becomes the central concept in Ibn ‘Arabi’s famous collection of love poetry, Interpreter of Desires, a volume that together with a later commentary plays upon that creative tension -- so important in Sufi thought -- between love poetry and philosophical analysis. Ibn ‘Arabi evokes the classical motif of the lover’s meditation on the lost beloved and his dwelling upon the beloved’s departure with the women of her tribe and the “stations” along their journey away from the poet.
For Ibn ‘Arabi the beloved and the women of her tribe are aligned with the ephemeral images or manifestations of the Real. The movement toward the beloved (symbolized by the movement of the pilgrim through the stations of the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca) are identical to the movements of the divine manifestations away from the human knower. The human being who accepts the condition of fundamental humanity is thus in a state of continual joy and continual sorrow. In every moment he passes away in union with the divine beloved, the beloved appears in the reflection of the polished mirror of his heart, and -- most importantly -- the human accepts the immediate disappearance of that image so that it can be replaced by a new image. The angels who objected to the creation of Adam, a creature who could “spill blood and cause corruption” (Qur‘an, Sura 2:30-33), failed to understand this notion of the role of humanity as the locus of a continuing kaleidoscope of divine manifestation.
When the mystic achieves this state of perpetual transformation, he or she is able to participate fully in the perpetual co-creation. In a Sufi appropriation and transformation of the metaphysics of scholastic theology, the world is annihilated and re-created in every moment. However, instead of the re-creation of the objective world by an independent creator Deity -- as we find in scholastic theology -- the Sufi re-creation is the mutual construction of the divine attributes and human categories within the polished mirror of the human heart, a construction that is renewed in each moment (waqt).
Different people have moments of different lengths. Some never achieve an image of reality. Some achieve one in a lifetime and hold on to it with dogmatic fervor. Some achieve one in a year, some in a month. In a remarkable parallel to the dynamist notion of transcendence and immanence, Ibn ‘Arabi, emphasizes the continual creation of the divine image in every new moment, a creation that simultaneously always has occurred and always is occurring. Ibn ‘Arabi identifies the eternal “breath of the compassionate” by which Allah breathed spirit into his creation, through Adam, with the breaths of the individual Sufi. The goal of Sufi meditation and annihilation in mystical union is to make “his/His moment his/His breath.” The alternate pronouns show that the referent at any moment is both the divine and the human as they mutually construct one another within the polished mirror and prism. Ibn ‘Arabi also speaks of the divine as revealing it(self) to it(self) through it(self), again fusing the two possible pronouns of the pronoun (reflexive and non-reflexive) into one. When Ibn ‘Arabi asks who reveals whom in whom and through whom, he stresses the transformation of categories of reflexive and non-reflexive, self and other, at the moment of mystical union.
Ibn ‘Arabi proclaimed that the heart capable of every form can receive and affirm all valid manifestations: the Torah, the Qur‘an, the Christian monk’s cell, the abode of idol, and the meadow of gazelles. Wherever the “caravan of love” leads, Ibn ‘Arabi writes in his most famous poem from the Interpreter of Desires, that is his religion, his faith. This famous statement is not a call for tolerance, a weak virtue in which one agrees to ignore other beliefs or to allow them to exist. Rather, it is a call for a complete immersion in and acceptance of all manifestations of reality.
Such acceptance is perpetually both critical and self-critical of the ways in which delimited images of ultimate realtiy can be reified and idolized. The heart capable of every form is a conception of a knowing faculty that is dialectical in the sense of seeing each manifestation as the abode of divine immanence which simultaneously points to the Real’s transcendence of all images. It is also dynamic in that the joy of receiving one manifestation is accompanied by the sorrow at losing the previous manifestation, a joy and a sorrow that are ultimately part of the one experience of mystical union, perpetually re-enacted in each moment.
Ibn ‘Arabi’s thought was systematized by later followers, and throughout the period of classical Islam, the influence of Ibn ‘Arabi was central. In the modern period that influence came under attack from some modernists who were influenced by postivist Western ways of thinking and by dogmatists such as the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia (where Ibn ‘Arabi’s works are banned). In recent years there has been a strong worldwide resurgence of interest in Ibn ‘Arabi, -- “The Grand Master” (al-shaykh al-akbar) of Islamic mystical philosophy.
In addition to his mystical treatises, Ibn ‘Arabi is also known for his mystical odes. In these odes, Ibn ‘Arabi, like all Sufis, expresses his longing for Union with God in terms of passionate human love. Many critics have been uncertain whether his poetry is in fact religious or erotic, a difficulty also encountered in the poetry of Hafiz. The philosophy of Ibn ‘Arabi’s poetry appears to combine, as does that of most Sufi poets, elements of Muslim Orthodoxy, Manichaeanism, Gnosticism, neo-Platonism and Christianity. Later Sufi poets, particularly Persians, can scarcely be called Muslims at all. Their beliefs appear to coalesce into an indefinite pantheism.
Some critics have credited Ibn ‘Arabi with making the Muwashshah into a respectable literary form. This is a type of poem, apparently native to Moorish Spain, which ends with a couplet in the colloquial language, and sometimes even in Spanish. The Muwashshah was long despised by Arab literary circles, but after Ibn ‘Arabi established it, many of the finest love poems in Arabic literature came to be written in the Muwashshah form.
Ibn al-'Arabi see Ibn al-‘Arabi, Muhyi‘l-Din al-Ta‘i
Muhyi'l-Din al-Ta'i ibn al-'Arabi see Ibn al-‘Arabi, Muhyi‘l-Din al-Ta‘i
Muhyi'd-din ibn 'Arabi see Ibn al-‘Arabi, Muhyi‘l-Din al-Ta‘i
Shaykh al-Akbar, al- see Ibn al-‘Arabi, Muhyi‘l-Din al-Ta‘i
Ibn 'Arabi see Ibn al-‘Arabi, Muhyi‘l-Din al-Ta‘i
"The Grand Master" see Ibn al-‘Arabi, Muhyi‘l-Din al-Ta‘i
The intellectual activity of binding, therefore, must be complemented by perpetual transformation (taqallub). The polished mirror of the human heart -- as locus not of emotion, but of this higher knowledge -- is capable of every form. This phrase “capable of every form” becomes the central concept in Ibn ‘Arabi’s famous collection of love poetry, Interpreter of Desires, a volume that together with a later commentary plays upon that creative tension -- so important in Sufi thought -- between love poetry and philosophical analysis. Ibn ‘Arabi evokes the classical motif of the lover’s meditation on the lost beloved and his dwelling upon the beloved’s departure with the women of her tribe and the “stations” along their journey away from the poet.
For Ibn ‘Arabi the beloved and the women of her tribe are aligned with the ephemeral images or manifestations of the Real. The movement toward the beloved (symbolized by the movement of the pilgrim through the stations of the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca) are identical to the movements of the divine manifestations away from the human knower. The human being who accepts the condition of fundamental humanity is thus in a state of continual joy and continual sorrow. In every moment he passes away in union with the divine beloved, the beloved appears in the reflection of the polished mirror of his heart, and -- most importantly -- the human accepts the immediate disappearance of that image so that it can be replaced by a new image. The angels who objected to the creation of Adam, a creature who could “spill blood and cause corruption” (Qur‘an, Sura 2:30-33), failed to understand this notion of the role of humanity as the locus of a continuing kaleidoscope of divine manifestation.
When the mystic achieves this state of perpetual transformation, he or she is able to participate fully in the perpetual co-creation. In a Sufi appropriation and transformation of the metaphysics of scholastic theology, the world is annihilated and re-created in every moment. However, instead of the re-creation of the objective world by an independent creator Deity -- as we find in scholastic theology -- the Sufi re-creation is the mutual construction of the divine attributes and human categories within the polished mirror of the human heart, a construction that is renewed in each moment (waqt).
Different people have moments of different lengths. Some never achieve an image of reality. Some achieve one in a lifetime and hold on to it with dogmatic fervor. Some achieve one in a year, some in a month. In a remarkable parallel to the dynamist notion of transcendence and immanence, Ibn ‘Arabi, emphasizes the continual creation of the divine image in every new moment, a creation that simultaneously always has occurred and always is occurring. Ibn ‘Arabi identifies the eternal “breath of the compassionate” by which Allah breathed spirit into his creation, through Adam, with the breaths of the individual Sufi. The goal of Sufi meditation and annihilation in mystical union is to make “his/His moment his/His breath.” The alternate pronouns show that the referent at any moment is both the divine and the human as they mutually construct one another within the polished mirror and prism. Ibn ‘Arabi also speaks of the divine as revealing it(self) to it(self) through it(self), again fusing the two possible pronouns of the pronoun (reflexive and non-reflexive) into one. When Ibn ‘Arabi asks who reveals whom in whom and through whom, he stresses the transformation of categories of reflexive and non-reflexive, self and other, at the moment of mystical union.
Ibn ‘Arabi proclaimed that the heart capable of every form can receive and affirm all valid manifestations: the Torah, the Qur‘an, the Christian monk’s cell, the abode of idol, and the meadow of gazelles. Wherever the “caravan of love” leads, Ibn ‘Arabi writes in his most famous poem from the Interpreter of Desires, that is his religion, his faith. This famous statement is not a call for tolerance, a weak virtue in which one agrees to ignore other beliefs or to allow them to exist. Rather, it is a call for a complete immersion in and acceptance of all manifestations of reality.
Such acceptance is perpetually both critical and self-critical of the ways in which delimited images of ultimate realtiy can be reified and idolized. The heart capable of every form is a conception of a knowing faculty that is dialectical in the sense of seeing each manifestation as the abode of divine immanence which simultaneously points to the Real’s transcendence of all images. It is also dynamic in that the joy of receiving one manifestation is accompanied by the sorrow at losing the previous manifestation, a joy and a sorrow that are ultimately part of the one experience of mystical union, perpetually re-enacted in each moment.
Ibn ‘Arabi’s thought was systematized by later followers, and throughout the period of classical Islam, the influence of Ibn ‘Arabi was central. In the modern period that influence came under attack from some modernists who were influenced by postivist Western ways of thinking and by dogmatists such as the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia (where Ibn ‘Arabi’s works are banned). In recent years there has been a strong worldwide resurgence of interest in Ibn ‘Arabi, -- “The Grand Master” (al-shaykh al-akbar) of Islamic mystical philosophy.
In addition to his mystical treatises, Ibn ‘Arabi is also known for his mystical odes. In these odes, Ibn ‘Arabi, like all Sufis, expresses his longing for Union with God in terms of passionate human love. Many critics have been uncertain whether his poetry is in fact religious or erotic, a difficulty also encountered in the poetry of Hafiz. The philosophy of Ibn ‘Arabi’s poetry appears to combine, as does that of most Sufi poets, elements of Muslim Orthodoxy, Manichaeanism, Gnosticism, neo-Platonism and Christianity. Later Sufi poets, particularly Persians, can scarcely be called Muslims at all. Their beliefs appear to coalesce into an indefinite pantheism.
Some critics have credited Ibn ‘Arabi with making the Muwashshah into a respectable literary form. This is a type of poem, apparently native to Moorish Spain, which ends with a couplet in the colloquial language, and sometimes even in Spanish. The Muwashshah was long despised by Arab literary circles, but after Ibn ‘Arabi established it, many of the finest love poems in Arabic literature came to be written in the Muwashshah form.
Ibn al-'Arabi see Ibn al-‘Arabi, Muhyi‘l-Din al-Ta‘i
Muhyi'l-Din al-Ta'i ibn al-'Arabi see Ibn al-‘Arabi, Muhyi‘l-Din al-Ta‘i
Muhyi'd-din ibn 'Arabi see Ibn al-‘Arabi, Muhyi‘l-Din al-Ta‘i
Shaykh al-Akbar, al- see Ibn al-‘Arabi, Muhyi‘l-Din al-Ta‘i
Ibn 'Arabi see Ibn al-‘Arabi, Muhyi‘l-Din al-Ta‘i
"The Grand Master" see Ibn al-‘Arabi, Muhyi‘l-Din al-Ta‘i
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