Insight Editions · No. 125
Ibn al-'Arabi's Barzakh
The Concept of the Limit and the Relationship between God and the World
Salman H. Bashier
Salman H. Bashier examines Ibn al-'Arabi's concept of the barzakh as a mediating limit connecting God and world, tracing its philosophical roots and implications for being and knowledge.
A study guide to Ibn al-'Arabi's Barzakh by Salman H. Bashier. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
Overview
Bashier into a study guide. The book argues that Ibn al-'Arabi's idea of the barzakh, a Limit that separates two things and by that same act unites them, resolves the long Islamic debate over how an eternal God relates to a created world, and offers a way past modern doubts about rational knowledge.
Argument Map
Figure 1. Argument map of the book: a problem, three rounds of debate, a definition, its two aspects and their meeting point [p 8 to 9].
What the Book Is
Bashier's study is part history of ideas and part philosophy. Its first half retells the debate between Muslim theologians and philosophers over the origin of the world, from atomism and Ibn Sina to the exchange between Ghazali and Ibn Rushd, and shows that each side produced an "in-between" idea it could not fully defend. Its second half presents Ibn al-'Arabi's barzakh as the Limit that those ideas were reaching for, compares it with Plato's Forms and Receptacle, and follows it into being (the Third Thing), knowing (the Perfect Man) and their meeting (the Limit Situation) [p 8 to 9]. Running through the whole is a dialogue with Rorty, Putnam and other modern critics of representation [p 9, 18 to 27].
At a Glance
Chapter Map
| Unit in the book | Printed pages | Main question |
|---|---|---|
| Introduction | 1 to 9 | What is a liminal definition, and why does it matter? |
| 1. Liminal theory of representation | 11 to 27 | Can the barzakh answer Rorty's attack on representation? |
| 2. Ibn Sina versus the theologians | 29 to 42 | Did the world begin in time, and how does God relate to it? |
| 3. Ibn Rushd versus al-Ghazali | 43 to 57 | Can one limit be both finite and infinite? |
| 4. Mysticism versus philosophy | 59 to 74 | Why is reason a veil, and what is the liminal path? |
| 5. The Barzakh | 75 to 96 | What exactly is the Limit, and how does it relate things? |
| 6. The Third Entity | 97 to 111 | How does the Supreme Barzakh solve creation? |
| 7. The Perfect Man | 113 to 128 | What does liminal knowledge look like in a person? |
| 8. The Limit Situation | 129 to 141 | How are the Real and creation intertied? |
| Conclusions | 143 to 147 | Why recover medieval roots for modern philosophy? |
Table 1. Chapter map of the book and the question each unit answers.
Introduction. The Musician, the Seal and the Silent Letter
Bashier opens with a story rather than a thesis. A sixteenth-century Ottoman official learns music, dreams of gypsy players, and is told that the gypsies play the art without knowing what any of its terms mean. The point of the story sets up the whole book: real knowledge lives in the interval between things, and that interval never fully shows itself [p 1 to 2].
The Gypsy Art and the Liminal Definition
In 1562 a Turkish agha came to Istanbul and, six years later, became watchman of the sultan's garden. Taken with a musician's playing, he practised day and night until sleep overtook him and he dreamed of gypsy musicians. His teacher explained the dream: music is a gypsy art, but the gypsies cannot say what a note, time, harmony or interval is. A note is the deliberate producing of the sound "ten", and time is the sound of the interval between voicing the letter ta and the letter nun [p 1 to 2].
Bashier reads these as liminal definitions: each term is defined as the thing that sits between two others. A player can sound the one word "ten" in many ways depending on the interval he strikes. Knowing the literal definition of time does not give real knowledge of it, because the moment the relationship is pinned down it is no longer the relationship the musician cares about. That knowledge stays nonmanifest, as does the musician who fixes it and is fixed by it. This, Bashier says, is Ibn al-'Arabi's mystical knowledge [p 2].
The Seal of Sainthood and Khadir's Knowledge
In Cordoba in 586 Ibn al-'Arabi saw all the messengers and prophets from Adam to Muhammad gathered together; only Hud spoke to him [p 2]. The reason for the gathering was kept among his disciples until Jandi (d. 1330) revealed it: the prophets had come to congratulate him on being named the Seal of Sainthood [p 3]. The idea that sainthood contains prophecy, and that within each prophet the saint is superior, drew attacks in medieval and modern times [p 3].
Figure 2. 'Abd al-Qadir's saying to the prophets [p 2].
Ibn al-'Arabi supports it with a saying of 'Abd al-Qadir to the prophets: "You have been given the title, but we have been given what you were not given." He ties this to Khadir's words to Moses: "O Moses, I have a knowledge that God has taught me, and that you do not know" [p 3]. Bashier calls this the knowledge of nonmanifestation.
Kun: Two Letters Seen, One Hidden
The divine command kun ("Be!") is written with two letters that show, kaf and nun, and one that does not, the waw that is voiced between them. The word therefore stands for everything manifest and nonmanifest. It signifies God, the Limit that holds both aspects together, and it signifies the perfect human being, God's deputy, who differentiates the prior word from the word that follows [p 3 to 4].
Figure 3. The command kun as a model of the Limit: two manifest letters and one nonmanifest letter between them [p 3 to 4].
Ibn al-'Arabi cites the hadith "Do not curse the Aeon, for God is the Aeon." God uses dahr, not zaman, for Himself to mark His time off from time pictured as a straight line. God's time is the Limit, like any point on a circle's circumference that can count as beginning and end. The circle has no beginning or end, yet holds endless points; so the words of God are infinitely many and all come from the single word kun [p 4].
Figure 4. Why God calls Himself the Aeon.
Oneness of Being Without Erasing Difference
Chittick reads al-kawn ("engendered existence") as everything other than God; Bashier thinks the term carries both meanings, "all that is" and "all but God", and that this double reading defines the Oneness of Being (wahdat al-wujud): unification that does not exclude differentiation [p 4 to 5]. Chittick holds that tawhid begins from recognised multiplicity; Murata treats undifferentiation as the prior dimension. Bashier accepts both: difference must be seen before unity is recognised, yet some identity is needed before any limit can be set [p 5].
Afifi's error. Abu al-'Ila 'Afifi read the doctrine as pantheism, a static unity without variety, and blamed the paradoxes on Ibn al-'Arabi's lack of philosophical training. Bashier answers that he missed the central idea of actuality, the ceaseless unfolding of reality into higher unities [p 5].
Between rationalism and relativism. Rosemann argues that Neoscholasticism, while fighting modernity, adopted its rationalism, and that the postmodern swing toward difference now overreaches; relativism is "logically untenable and self-destructive" [p 5 to 6]. Some Ibn al-'Arabi scholars, such as Peter Young, see in him the cure for a fragmented mind, almost with devotion [p 6]. Chittick writes that "the Western intellectual tradition took a wrong turn" and that the search for what was lost has rediscovered imagination [p 7].
Aristotle's Limit and Ibn al-'Arabi's Limit
For Aristotle the limit is the last part of a thing, and things are known by their limits. Ibn al-'Arabi also makes the Limit the essence of each thing, but rejects the "part" picture. If the limit is a part, it becomes a duality, one side belonging to each thing, and a further limit is needed to unite them, without end. The regress stops only with a Limit that meets both sides "with two faces that are one" [p 7].
Figure 5. Two concepts of the limit.
| Position | World in space | World in time | In-between device |
|---|---|---|---|
| Theologians (kalam) | Limited | Limited (originated) | Ash'arite "state" (hal); Mu'tazilite "nonexistent thing" |
| Philosophers | Limited | Unlimited (eternal) | Ibn Sina: possible in itself, necessary through another |
| Ibn Rushd | Two accounts both true though their conjunction contradicts | Complementarity thesis | |
| Ibn al-'Arabi | God and world each eternal and originated, in different respects | The barzakh, the Third Thing | |
Table 2. The antinomy of the world's finitude and the in-between solutions the book traces [p 8].
The Route Through the Book
Chapters 2 and 3 present the theologians and philosophers; Chapter 4 makes Ibn Rushd's complementarity the background for the Limit through two encounters, Moses with Khadir and Ibn Rushd with the young Ibn al-'Arabi. Chapter 5 traces the barzakh to the Qur'an, tradition and Plato's Forms; Chapter 6 gives its ontological side, the Third Thing, beside Plato's Receptacle; Chapter 7 its epistemological side, the Perfect Man; Chapter 8 the Limit Situation, where the Real and creation permeate each other [p 8 to 9].
Chapter 1. A Liminal Theory of Representation
The first chapter is a critical introduction from the present. It asks what happens to a mystic after the flash of insight, and answers: he tries to represent what was presented to him, and never finishes. That unending representation, Bashier argues, is a better model of knowledge than either classical correspondence or Rorty's rejection of it [p 11 to 27].
The Barzakh in Three Verses
Figure 6. The word barzakh.
The book follows Corbin's emphasis on difference but also tracks continuity: rational thought culminates in Ibn Rushd's complementarity thesis, which prepared the ground for the Limit. Bashier adopts Whitehead's line that "the purpose of philosophy is to rationalize mysticism" and Plato's picture of the mind that, after long comparison of names and definitions, is "flooded with light" [p 12].
Presentation and Representation
Huntington Cairns contrasts Plato's severe logic with mystics whose beliefs are "a series of apprehensions, flashes, based on feeling, denying the rational order" [p 13]. William Alston models mystical awareness on sense perception: God is presented to consciousness as objects are presented to the eye [p 13 to 14]. Bashier finds both incomplete. Sara Sviri stresses that for Sufis it is not the experiences that matter most, but transcending them [p 14].
The missing element is representation. After presentation comes mediation: the mystic's constant attempt to represent the moment, which brings suffering rather than joy, since no representation can close the process. The mystic shifts between closure (attempted representation) and disclosure (renewed presentation); each limits the other, and the whole becomes an experience of Disclosure [p 14]. Chittick puts it: "To get to the point is to bring about closure, but there is no closure, only disclosure" [p 14].
Figure 7. After the flash, the attempt to represent it [p 14].
Figure 8. The two complementary moments of a genuine mystical experience in Bashier's account [p 14].
Carter: Infinity, Truth and Lies
Michael Carter argues that medieval Islam restricted infinity as a threat to doctrine. Ibn Rushd, on this view, treated the eternity of the world as a problem of terminological ambiguity, leaving him "closer to the style of the mutakallim" than to a pure philosopher [p 15]. Only poetry escaped, as "an elegant compromise" between a finite religion and the urge for infinite imagination, because nothing in poetry was taken as necessarily true; mystical speech was a similar protected zone [p 15 to 16]. Bashier connects this to the Liar paradox: groups such as poets and mystics declare that their language game issues only relative truth, and so are shielded [p 16 to 17].
Bashier grants the appeal but rejects the conclusion. Ibn Rushd said philosophical answers could be given in a philosophy book; his talk of language's limits reflects the limits of rational thought itself, the attitude of an original thinker [p 17]. And Ibn al-'Arabi uses the Liar not as a shield but as a tool for showing the liminal nature of things:
Bashier reads the passage against Carter: the paradox does not wall God off from the world. Our failure to define liminal cases indicates that we cannot set limits to the Truth of appearances either, and the paradoxical representation of such cases restores the unity of knowledge instead of splitting it [p 18].
Rorty's Antirepresentational Stand
The classical theory says knowledge is a mental representation that corresponds to mind-independent reality; truth is correspondence to facts. Putnam keeps a link between truth and rationality, rejects the positivists' verification principle as self-refuting, and calls Rorty's position skeptical despair [p 19 to 20]. Rorty holds that no correspondence holds between words and things; the social context or language game decides truth. Putnam asks how Rorty can even say that kicking a rock involves a particular rock. Bashier notes that such arguments presuppose rational order and have no grip on a skeptic who does not share it [p 20].
Figure 9. The representation debate in chapter 1.
Habermas describes Rorty's "narrative of maturation": a youth enthused by Plato who concluded that no higher reality could be reached through philosophy [p 21]. Rorty edited The Linguistic Turn (1967), then decided that analytic philosophy shared metaphysics' false premise that "there are philosophical truths still to be discovered" [p 21]. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) attacked the "pathos of distance" and cast epistemology as a new "veil of ideas" that took over some functions of religion [p 21 to 22].
Ibn al-'Arabi's Stand
Ibn al-'Arabi too was enthused by Plato and called him perhaps the only philosopher who deserved the title "lover of wisdom", a rare choice in a tradition that followed Aristotle [p 22]. Like Rorty he treats words as symbols needing interpretation, but with a different sense. Rorty asks only for agreement from a competent audience. For Ibn al-'Arabi interpretation (ta'bir) means crossing over; every existent is a word in a state of crossing between affirmation and denial of existence, so difference is the root of all things [p 23]. He accepts the skeptics' picture of constant flux but not their verdict that things have no reality: their reality is imaginal and liminal. And he turns the skeptic's claim on itself: "Hence, you affirmed what you denied" [p 23 to 24].
| Question | Classical representation | Rorty | Ibn al-'Arabi |
|---|---|---|---|
| What is truth? | Correspondence to a given reality | Justification to an audience | Crossing between affirmation and denial |
| Status of things | Fixed, mind-independent | Points of reference in discourse | Real but imaginal, liminal |
| Role of paradox | A defect to remove | Sign that representation fails | Built into reality and knowledge |
| Unity of knowledge | Through method | Abandoned | Restored through the Limit |
Table 3. Three views of representation compared, as Bashier sets them out [p 19 to 25].
Rorty, then, failed to see how philosophy could mirror nature because he misunderstood mirroring: he still assumed that representation must be of a given reality, the very assumption he blamed on analytic philosophy [p 24]. In a passage on the attributes, Ibn al-'Arabi says one who claims to know God tells the truth, and one who says he has not known Him also tells the truth. To know is to find and to set limits; Reality is unlimited, so it cannot be found; yet one knows nothing except Reality. Truth transcends both the limits of language and "the limitation of its non-limitation" [p 24 to 25].
Wasserstrom and Mystocentrism
Steven Wasserstrom charges Corbin with a "religion after religion" that privileges Akbarian gnosis as the pinnacle of Islam, and asks that Ibn al-'Arabi be studied in all possible contexts and "within the limits of human knowledge" [p 25 to 26]. Bashier hears Rorty's contextualism in this. He cites Addas: for Ibn al-'Arabi his visions were more real than the Andalusian earth he walked on, and any scholar must take that into account [p 26]. Studying him only within social limits might do to mysticism what analytic philosophy did to philosophy [p 27].
Chapter 2. Creation From Nothing, in Time, or Forever: Ibn Sina Versus the Theologians
The first round of the debate is about how the world began. The theologians insist on a first moment and a God separated from His effect; Ibn Sina insists that a perfect cause cannot wait. Bashier shows that both sides lean on Aristotle, and that Ibn Sina's compromise, the world as possible in itself and necessary through another, is a paradox he would not admit [p 29 to 42].
Does the Qur'an Teach Creation From Nothing?
Netton lists creation ex nihilo among four traits the Qur'an gives the Creator, beside intervening in history, guiding, and being known through creation [p 29]. Baydawi (d. 1286) cites Q. 40:57: making the heavens and earth is greater than making man, since man came from existing material and they from nothing [p 29]. Yet Q. 41:11 says heaven "was smoke"; Zamakhshari (d. 1144) answers that the smoke itself was created [p 30]. Q. 52:35 may mean "from nothing", "by nothing" or "for no purpose", and Wolfson calls the Qur'an's position vague. Leaman, Urvoy, Arnaldez and Burrell agree there is no decisive text [p 30].
Figure 10. Netton's four traits [p 29].
Ibn Rushd adds that the verse "His throne was on the water" implies a being and a time before this one, and that Scripture nowhere says God existed with absolutely nothing else; the theologians themselves read it allegorically [p 30]. For him rational interpretation is not merely allowed but a duty under the Law [p 30 to 31]. The theologians agreed reason matters but suspected the philosophers of using it to defend borrowed ancient theories [p 31].
Parmenides and the Problem of Nonbeing
Gilson traces the issue to Parmenides, who made Being the ultimate reality and so ruled out becoming: a cause must exist before it causes, and any change would mean that what was not begins to be [p 31 to 32]. Following Goodman, Bashier calls the Islamic philosophers good Parmenideans: they rejected pure nonbeing and treated creation from nothing as unintelligible [p 32]. To the theologians this was evasion; Q. 19:8 has God say "you had been nothing", and creation from nothing was a miracle meant to show reason its limits, Ghazali's main strategy later [p 32 to 33].
Figure 11. Parmenides and the problem of nonbeing.
The Mu'tazilites, committed to rational explanation, held that the nonexistent (al-ma'dum) is a "thing". Wolfson links this to Plato's Timaeus: they accepted creation in time from preexistent matter, since the Qur'an gave no evidence against such matter. Whether the nonexistent is something or nothing divided them from the Ash'arites [p 33].
Arguments Against an Infinite Past
Aristotle allows only a potential infinite, such as time, whose parts exist one after another [p 33 to 34]. John Philoponus turned two of Aristotle's own principles against him: no infinite can be traversed, and nothing is greater than the infinite [p 34].
Figure 12. Aristotle's infinite [p 33 to 34].
| Thinker | Argument against an eternal world | Principle used |
|---|---|---|
| Philoponus (1) | An infinite chain of past individuals would have to be crossed to reach today | No infinite can be traversed |
| Philoponus (2) | Men up to Socrates plus men since Socrates would exceed the infinite | Nothing is greater than the infinite |
| Philoponus (3) | Jupiter makes almost three times Saturn's revolutions, yet both would be infinite | One infinite cannot exceed another |
| Nazzam (d. 845), Mu'tazilite | Revolutions with no first could never reach a given day; summing two planets' revolutions exceeds the infinite | Both principles |
| Juwayni (d. 1065), Ash'arite | The revolutions before today have ended, so they are finite | An infinite succession cannot end |
Table 4. The theologians' borrowed arguments for a finite past [p 34 to 35].
Ibn Sina answered from Aristotle's view that every moment is a limit between two times, with no first limit; any first moment implies a "before", and so a prior time [p 35]. Continuous time kept God's causality actual: without it a gap would cut the First Cause off from its effect. The theologians wanted exactly that separating limit, so they held atomistic time, inferred, Maimonides says, from Aristotle's correspondence of space, time and motion [p 35]. Atoms cannot last two instants; God recreates the world at each instant (al-khalq al-mutajaddid) and gives duration as an accident that also cannot last [p 35 to 36]. This led to occasionalism, which troubled Ibn Sina because science depends on regular laws. Bashier's point: Ibn Sina's tension was not a forced bow to orthodoxy, as Ibn Rushd later charged, but a tension inside Aristotelian rationalism itself [p 36].
Ibn Sina's Replies and His Positive Case
In the Isharat Ibn Sina replies: what holds of parts need not hold of the whole; adding to a nonexistent infinite produces no absurdity; and each event depends on one prior event, not on an infinite series, so the regress is harmless [p 36 to 37]. His positive argument: if the world began in time, its nonexistence came in a prior time, so there was no first time. God, a perfect cause, cannot be separated in time from His effect; the conditions were there from eternity, and God's priority is essential, not temporal [p 37]. Goodman adds that temporal stories of absolute creation undermine the very absoluteness they claim [p 37].
Figure 13. Ibn Sina's replies in the Isharat.
Ghazali replied that eternal creation names an act that never happens, and that Ibn Sina used the word "creation" to disguise a belief in an uncreated world [p 38]. Bashier, with Goodman, sees instead an interpretation of creation, the myth standing for the total dependence of beings on God [p 38].
Possible in Itself, Necessary Through Another
Philosophers and theologians shared Aristotle's definitions: the contingent is the possible that exists instead of its contrary; the eternal is that whose nonbeing is impossible [p 38 to 39]. Ibn Sina then introduced two kinds of necessity. Leaman notes the oddity: a thing "regarded in respect to its essence, is possible but, regarded with respect to its actual relation to its cause, it is necessary" [p 39]. Ibn Sina even says the possible "cannot not have existence for in that case it would be impossible", which seems to make the two descriptions identical; he insists they differ in meaning. Bashier judges this an escape from the contradiction, not a resolution [p 39 to 40].
Figure 14. Ibn Sina's synthesis as an early in-between solution to the God and world problem [p 38 to 42].
Essence and Existence
Scholars dispute whether the distinction between essence and existence was Ibn Sina's own; Burrell, Afnan and others trace it to Aristotle's logic [p 40]. Gilson ties it to creation: if the world was created, to be is the first thing that happened to it, so existence is an accident added to essence [p 40]. For Aristotle substance and existence coincide; Ibn Sina split them even in substance, so beings are possible in themselves and necessary only through God's giving of existence, even if the cosmos is eternal [p 40 to 41]. Fazlur Rahman: "the contingent is never rid of its contingency and never becomes self-necessary like God" [p 41].
Figure 15. The cosmos as a middle entity [p 41].
Bashier sets this against the earlier analysis, where the possible had to exist. One line fits Aristotle, the other the theologians. The cosmos becomes a middle entity between the two [p 41]. Teicher assigns the formula to the intuitive part of Ibn Sina's thought: a rationalist body whose soul rests on intuition [p 42].
Chapter 3. Ibn Rushd Versus al-Ghazali on the Eternity of the World
The second round is the most famous exchange in Islamic philosophy: Ghazali's Incoherence of the Philosophers and Ibn Rushd's Incoherence of the Incoherence. Bashier reads it not for its verdict but for what happens to the idea of the limit. By the end, both sides have been pushed to the same question: how can a finite and an infinite limit belong to one reality [p 43 to 57]?
Two Uneasy Combatants
Ghazali (d. 1111) wrote the Incoherence during his period of skepticism, ambivalent toward both theology and philosophy; Leaman calls his relation to philosophy love and hate [p 43 to 44]. Ibn Rushd said he was "an Ash'arite with the Ash'arites", a Sufi with Sufis and a philosopher with philosophers; Ibn Tufayl (d. 1184) said his works "bind in one place and loose in another" [p 44]. Ghazali claimed only to demand and deny, like a skeptic, though he wrote as a theologian [p 44]. Ibn Rushd feared that theory could harm the masses and found most of Ghazali's arguments merely dialectical, yet felt bound to defend philosophy. Since the attack targeted Ibn Sina, with whom he already disagreed, Leaman says he fought "with one hand tied behind his back" [p 44]. Ghazali devotes about a quarter of the book to the eternity of the world, the first of twenty problems [p 44].
Figure 16. The two books of the exchange.
Van Den Bergh locates the contradiction in Aristotle: motion is eternal, yet every causal series must be finite. The philosophers sharpened it by making God both First Mover and Creator from whom the world flows eternally [p 45].
The First Proof: Why Then and Not Earlier?
Before the world, all moments are alike, so nothing could fix a moment for its origin. Ghazali replies that an eternal will can choose between similar things, as a hungry man takes one of two identical dates [p 45]. Ibn Rushd answers that willed things are never identical; the man chooses taking over leaving, being over not being [p 45].
Figure 17. The first proof: why then and not earlier?
The deeper split is about reason. For Ghazali reason judges only what the senses supply, so it is still more limited before God's will. His parable has a youth in the Hereafter ask why an adult was ranked higher; God says he would have sinned had he grown up, and the damned then cry, "Why did you not cause us to die young?" [p 46]. Whatever reason assesses has no necessary link to divine assessment [p 46]. For Ibn Rushd that negates rational knowledge, which is knowing causes, and the Qur'an urges "the study of the totality of beings", including the cosmos as a whole [p 46].
Ghazali adds: infinite past revolutions would be divisible by six, four and two, and must be even or odd [p 47]. Ibn Rushd, like Ibn Sina, appeals to the potential infinite. The theologians' syllogism (no beginning means no end; the series has an end; so it has a beginning) fails because beginning and end are correlatives, and the philosophers' infinite has neither [p 47]. Then comes a surprise: neither side's arguments "suffice to reach absolute evidence or afford stringent proof" [p 48].
Kogan notes how odd this is: it rejects the philosophers' own view of a world without a temporal beginning [p 48]. To Ghazali's second objection, that an infinite chain of events needs an eternal limit, Ibn Rushd answers with a median (wasita), eternal as a whole and temporal in its movements [p 48]. Ghazali had already objected to this view in Ibn Sina: a median half eternal, half temporal needs another median to join its halves, without end [p 49]. Bashier sides with the objection: positing the median only neutralised the contradiction. If the relation between finite and infinite is itself contradictory, keeping them apart divides reality against itself [p 49].
The Second Proof: Priority Without Time
The philosophers say God precedes the world essentially, as a man's movement precedes his shadow's; temporal priority would require a time before time. Ghazali answers that time was created and God simply was without the world and then with it; only imagination demands a third essence called time [p 49].
Figure 18. The second proof: priority without time.
Ibn Rushd rejects both temporal priority and Ibn Sina's priority of cause, since causal priority belongs to things in motion. Yet he says the world's posteriority "can only be understood as the posteriority of effect to cause", and elsewhere that "time is something that arises with the world's being", which repeats Ghazali's view [p 50]. Ghazali also argues by parity: if space is finite because bodies are, time should be finite too. Ibn Rushd replies that every moment is the end of a prior time, but a point can begin a line without ending another [p 50 to 51].
To the question whether the world could have been larger, or created earlier, Ibn Rushd borrows Ibn Sina's "necessary through another": a body everlastingly moved, partly eternal and partly temporal, links the corruptible to the eternal [p 51]. The irony is that he leans on a thinker he opposes.
The Third Proof: Plenitude
Given infinite time, every possibility must be realised; so infinite prior worlds would have to exist, which is absurd [p 51 to 52]. Ghazali replies by parity that the world must have some limit in time without its exact moment being fixed [p 52]. Leaman finds it ironic that Ghazali uses Aristotle's gap between possible and actual while Ibn Rushd makes possibility coextensive with reality, like the Ash'arites [p 52]. Bashier goes further: identifying the eternally possible with the eternally existent restates Ibn Sina's formula, which Ibn Rushd called "superfluous and erroneous", insisting the possible cannot become necessary "unless the very nature of the possible were to change into the necessary" [p 52].
Figure 19. The third proof, from plenitude [p 51 to 52].
| Proof | Philosophers | Ghazali | Ibn Rushd | Bashier's note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Identical moments | No reason to begin at one time | Will chooses between similars | Will chooses being over not being; both camps project the soul's picture of time | Median between eternal and temporal only neutralises the tension |
| 2. Priority | Essential, not temporal | Time created with the world | Neither temporal nor causal, yet "effect to cause" | Ends at Ghazali's conclusion |
| 3. Plenitude | The possible must be realised | Limit required, moment open | Possible equals actual | Rebuilds Ibn Sina's formula he rejects |
Table 5. The three proofs for the world's eternity and how each turn sharpens the problem of the limit [p 45 to 52].
Eternal Creation and the Emergence of the Limit
Fakhry calls Ibn Rushd, by "a striking paradox", the staunchest exponent of an eternal universe [p 52]. His paradox is starker than Ibn Sina's because he dropped emanation, the ladder of intellects by which Ibn Sina derived the many from the One [p 53]. Genequand gives two reasons: emanation rests on the possible in itself and necessary by another, and it puts the One so far above the Mover that its existence becomes unwarranted [p 53 to 54]. For Ibn Rushd God is pure actuality; if He stopped acting the world would fall apart. A perfect act carries no predetermined limit, so the world is eternal and creation is continuous [p 54].
Kogan resolves "createdness" through parts and whole: the parts of the world's motion are finite and originated, the totality infinite [p 54]. Teicher: thesis and antithesis both assume "spatialized" time, a straight line, finite or infinite; the true nature of time is incessant change [p 55]. Ibn Rushd calls the Instant (al-an) "a shared Limit between past and future times"; any limited time exists only as a limit between two instants. So time can be neither an actual infinite nor an actual finite [p 55 to 56]. Teicher's claim that this overthrew Aristotle's physics is an exaggeration, but it exposes a tension already in Aristotle, who needed potentially infinite time and actually finite space, with the Limit as "the ultimate part of each thing" [p 56].
Figure 20. Kogan on createdness [p 54].
Figure 21. Two contradictory conceptions of the limit inherited from Aristotle and sharpened by the Incoherence debate [p 56 to 57].
Following Ghazali, Bashier asks why, if the essence of time is neither actually finite nor infinite, the same cannot be said of space. With Ghazali and Ibn Rushd the whole debate "boiled down" to one question: how is a synthesis of the finite and infinite conceptions of the Limit possible? To answer, one must ask what the Limit is, and the rest of the book gives Ibn al-'Arabi's answer [p 56 to 57].
Chapter 4. Mysticism Versus Philosophy: Khadir, Moses and Ibn Rushd
Two meetings carry this chapter. In the Qur'an, Moses follows Khadir and cannot bear his strange acts. In Cordoba, the young Ibn al-'Arabi answers the great Ibn Rushd "Yes" and then "No". In both, Bashier finds one lesson: reason is itself a veil that must be lifted before perfect knowledge comes [p 59 to 74].
Three Methods, One Object
Chittick divides Islamic thinkers into philosophers, theologians and Sufis by method, not subject [p 59]. Philosophers stressed universal, communicable truth, and in Ibn Rushd this peaked in a discovery Bashier calls his greatest and most misunderstood: truth is one even when expressed in contradictory ways. The theologians (world finite) and philosophers (world infinite) were both right from two perspectives, and each argument alone gives at most half the truth [p 59 to 60]. Theologians rejected any conclusion against revelation. Sufis also judged knowledge by revelation, but held that its true meaning comes only through unveiling (kashf), personal knowledge from God, and saw reliance on reason alone as one more veil [p 60]. In Ibn al-'Arabi's account Moses and Ibn Rushd stand for knowledge of the Law; Khadir and Ibn al-'Arabi for knowledge of the saints [p 60].
Figure 22. Three methods, one object [p 59].
Khadir and the Knowledge of Breaths
In chapter fifteen of the Futuhat Ibn al-'Arabi places Khadir among the Realizers in the Knowledge of Breaths, the knowledge of Creative Imagination [p 60 to 61]. Before they exist, the possible things are fixed entities (a'yan thabita) in God's Essence; their longing for manifestation creates a constraint, and God relieves it by breathing them into existence [p 61]. Wherever Khadir settled in a barren place, God made it fertile. The Realizers are masters of "setting souls in bodies" and of clothing and stripping forms. Their knowledge is rooted in the World of Imagination, the barzakh where spiritual and corporeal worlds meet and stay apart, to be described as neither/nor or both/and [p 61]. Not everyone can bear it, "since for every knowledge there are people suitable for it" [p 61].
Moses asks to follow Khadir and is warned he will lack patience. Khadir scuttles a boat, kills a youth and rebuilds a wall without pay; then explains: the boat was saved from a king who seized sound boats, the youth would have grieved his faithful parents with unbelief, and the wall hid two orphans' treasure. He ends: "I did it not of my own accord" [p 61 to 62].
Figure 23. Khadir's three acts.
| Act | What Moses saw | Hidden meaning Khadir gave | Logic |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scuttling the boat | An attempt to drown its passengers | Damage saved it from a king seizing sound boats | Bad returned for good |
| Killing the youth | Murder of an innocent | Spared faithful parents a son's unbelief | Loss as protection |
| Rebuilding the wall | Unpaid work for a hostile town | Kept orphans' treasure until they came of age | Good returned for bad |
Table 6. Khadir's three acts read as paradoxes, each with a destructive face and a constructive face [p 62 to 63].
Netton points to the double face of each act: constructive as known to God, destructive as Moses imagined it [p 62]. Moses judged by opinion (doxa) bounded by the familiar; Khadir saw both the limit of opinion and beyond it [p 63]. The acts were inconsistent even among themselves, so prediction, the basis of rational knowledge, failed. The more Moses tried to dissolve the paradox, the tighter it held. What is needed is to understand the paradox, not to dismiss it as bad reasoning [p 63].
Figure 24. Two views of the same acts [p 62].
God never stops breathing, so the cosmos undergoes perpetual transmutation (tahawwul) and is never the same for two moments. To perceive it one must tell actuality (open, indeterminate) from actualization (a fixed form of it). A true action is a symbol of the present moment, a limit between the actualised past and the unactualised future [p 65]. Khadir's "not of my own accord" names an Instant that belongs to him and to God. Since God creates under the pressure of the fixed entities, He too could say "I did it, not of my own accord", which does not restrict His will; the one-sided idea of creation does that. The saying unites affirmation and negation without erasing difference [p 65].
Figure 25. The cosmos in perpetual transmutation.
Yes and No in Cordoba
Ibn al-'Arabi tells how Ibn Rushd, then judge of Cordoba, wished to meet him after hearing what God had opened to him in retreat. Ibn Rushd embraced him and said "Yes"; he answered "Yes", then, seeing the motive of the philosopher's joy, "No". Ibn Rushd paled and asked whether unveiling gives the same as speculation:
Later meetings widen the gap. Ibn Rushd asked for another interview and thanked God he had seen someone who entered retreat ignorant and left in this condition "without lesson or examination"; "We had affirmed the possibility of this Condition ... but we had never actually seen anyone who had mastered it" [p 67]. In an ecstasy Ibn al-'Arabi saw him behind "a fine veil", unaware of him, "so preoccupied was he with himself", and judged he was not intended for their path. At the funeral the coffin was balanced on a beast by his books, and Ibn al-'Arabi wondered whether his hopes were fulfilled [p 67].
Ibn al-'Arabi respected Ibn Rushd above other rational masters as a philosopher-believer aware that God gives some knowledge outside study [p 67 to 68]. Still, as Addas notes, he thought Ibn Rushd would never reach the saint's knowledge [p 68].
The Knowledge of States and the Three Paths
The saint knows the States (ahwal). In Ash'arite theology a state is a quality of an existent that is itself neither existent nor nonexistent; in Sufism a condition given by grace, changing where stations persist. For Ibn al-'Arabi the state is also ontological: the changing link between created and Creator, the secret of perpetual transmutation [p 68]. Chittick: the cosmos is "the dream of the Real". It is real because it is and is not the Real; to every question about God and the world the Realizers answer "He/not He" (huwa la huwa) [p 68]. The Folk of God alone bring opposites together, since God is First, Last, Manifest and Nonmanifest "in respect of one entity and one relation"; so "they are and they are not" [p 69].
Figure 26. Ibn al-'Arabi's three paths of knowledge, matched to Parmenides' two ways plus a third [p 69 to 71].
Reflection that serves itself misses why God said "Have they not reflected?": to reach the conclusion that knowledge comes from God alone [p 69]. So there are three kinds of thinkers: most theologians and philosophers, guided by their own reflection; those like Ibn Rushd who reflect rightly but stay inside rational limits; and those who rise to knowledge of States [p 69]. Matching them are three paths, of Being, of Nonbeing, and the liminal path between [p 70].
Why associators are "more correct". Ibn al-'Arabi puts unitarians and associators on the same path, and says associators show God's oneness more correctly, since one cannot escape association and voicing tawhid is impossible: to proclaim unity inserts duality into it, as keeping the boat whole would have lost it [p 70 to 71]. So Noah erred in calling his people to a purely transcendent God, inviting them to the Path of Nonbeing [p 71].
Ibn Rushd's Esoteric Restraint
Ibn Rushd himself wrote that the ancients called God the totality of existents, that the Sufi chiefs say "Not-He is but-He", and that this "must not be written down" or made a dogma; to mention it in the wrong place is a sin, and to withhold it from the right people is also a sin [p 71]. Hourani explains: allegorical interpretation is reserved for demonstrative minds, because in others it breeds doubt and sectarian strife [p 72]. Ibn Rushd allows such matters only in strictly rational books, and says the Law ascribes hearing and seeing to God because the masses could grasp God's knowledge no other way [p 72].
Figure 27. Ibn Rushd's esoteric restraint.
Bashier judges this wiser than Noah, yet incomplete. Thinking in either/or terms, Ibn Rushd chose total incomparability and explained away reports of God's delimitation, not noticing that this delimits God: "God is absolutely incomparable with any declaration of incomparability which delimits." Reason brings "one-half the knowledge of God"; the Lawgiver affirms what reason strips away [p 73].
Chapter 5. The Barzakh: Scripture, Tradition, Plato and a New Definition
This is the book's central chapter. Bashier traces the barzakh from a barrier in three verses, through the grave of the hadith, to Plato's Forms, and then gives Ibn al-'Arabi's own definition: a Limit that meets both sides with one and the same face. With it, a large thing can enter a small one, the Real can be known only through the world, and time becomes the correlation between Lord and servant [p 75 to 96].
The Barzakh in the Qur'an and the Tradition
The barzakh appears in Q. 23:99 to 100 (a partition before the dead until they are raised), Q. 25:53 and Q. 55:19 to 20 (a barrier between two seas that they do not transgress) [p 75]. Chapter 55 repeats "Then which of the favors of your Lord will you deny?" thirty-one times [p 76]. Ibn al-'Arabi writes his own version: will you deny the Sea God attached to Himself and hid from the Entities, the Sea He detached and named Worlds, "or the barzakh upon which the All-Merciful (al-Rahman) sat?" [p 76]. His many references to the two seas weaken 'Afifi's claim that he took the barzakh from Philo's Logos; Abu Zayd is right that it has Qur'anic and philosophical roots [p 76].
Figure 28. The three verses [p 75].
In the hadith, the barzakh of Q. 23:100 becomes the grave: two angels question the dead; the grave presses the unbeliever and widens for the believer; in a tradition attributed to Tirmidhi (d. 908) it is a garden of paradise for one and a pit of fire for the other [p 77]. The Prophet said that between his grave and his pulpit lies one of the gardens of paradise. Ibn al-'Arabi links this to reports that the Nile and the Euphrates are rivers of the Garden in another form; the folk of unveiling see them as rivers of honey, water, wine and milk [p 77 to 78].
Figure 29. The grave as barzakh in the hadith.
What lies between grave and pulpit is a locus of manifestation that can take opposite forms, as the grave becomes garden or fire according to deeds [p 78 to 79]. Ibn al-'Arabi quotes "God never discloses Himself in a single form to two individuals, nor in a single form twice" and Kharraz's "I knew God by His gathering between the opposites" [p 78]. In the barzakh meanings take bodies; so one grave holding a righteous and an unrighteous man could be wide and narrow at once, impossible to reason but not to imagination [p 79]. Ibn al-'Arabi says he saw "the manner in which the small expands in order for the large to enter into it", like the camel through the needle's eye [p 79].
Exegesis, Theology, Tirmidhi and Ghazali
Exegetes such as Zamakhshari and Baydawi read the barzakh only as the obstacle to the dead's return, and it played no large role in kalam [p 80 to 81]. Eklund notes a shift from a temporal sense (death to resurrection) to a spatial one in mysticism, through Tirmidhi al-Hakim's report from Salman al-Farisi that believers' spirits roam an "earthly barzakh" [p 81]. Rosenthal calls Ghazali Ibn al-'Arabi's great immediate model [p 81]. Ghazali defends the ninety-nine snakes of the grave: a sleeper bitten by a dream snake sweats and cries while nothing moves near him, and the pain is the same whether the snake exists "according to an imagination or an observation" [p 81 to 82]. Ibn al-'Arabi likewise compares the greater death and the lesser death (sleep); in the barzakh one perceives as sensory what waking reason calls impossible [p 82]. Only unveiling keeps pace with the swift change of forms in the Presence of Imagination [p 82].
Plato's Forms and Aristotle's Objection
The Socratic dialogues keep defining an idea and finding each definition wanting, which shows ideas are not identical with any sensible instance [p 83]. Plato then taught that sensible things participate in Forms [p 83]. In the Parmenides he attacked his own theory: if the whole Form is in each of many things, it "will be separate from itself" [p 84]. Bashier reads this not as rigid rationalism, as Cairns does, but as a service: understanding the Forms requires going past reason [p 83 to 84].
Aristotle pressed the point: linking Forms to things needs intermediates, and intermediates need further intermediates, an infinite regress. Ibn Rushd's commentary spells it out [p 84 to 85]. For Aristotle a definition must stop at limits, or knowledge is destroyed [p 85]. Bashier's reply: the argument wins only because intermediates are defined in advance as dualities without a limit of their own [p 85 to 86].
Figure 30. Aristotle's objection [p 84 to 85].
Ibn al-'Arabi's Definition
The same passage mentions the Market of the Garden, whose forms are all barzakhs: whoever desires a form enters it, and God transmutes Himself from form to form while the Entity is one [p 87].
Figure 31. Aristotle's part-limit leads to regress; Ibn al-'Arabi's undivided Limit stops it [p 85 to 87, 90 to 91].
Any definition of the barzakh is tentative, because it is what makes defining possible. Differentiation is the root of things, since limits make knowledge possible [p 87]. But difference is itself a relation, indeed "the most unifying of relations" between Other and its other [p 87 to 88]. Bashier reconstructs the argument: a thing defines itself by differing from all others; differing is a relation; to escape even that relation it must make the other vanish in itself, that is, unite with it. So complete differentiation is complete union, and things cease to be as they come to be [p 88]. The philosopher tosses this away; the sophists come close but wrongly deny that things are real [p 88]. Ibn al-'Arabi accepts both premise and conclusion: things are real and not real, as images of their fixed entities, which are barzakhs between them and the Real [p 88 to 89].
The mirror passage returns, with a new line: since the image is smaller than the man, he knows it is not simply his form [p 89]. The form in a polished surface hides the surface: "So you will never see the surface." The surface stands for the fixed entity ('ayn thabita), close in meaning to Plato's Form [p 89]. Ghazali had said it first: "The glass is clear, the wine is clear" [p 90]. A dull mirror reflects badly; a perfect one vanishes. That is Aristotle's dilemma again, and it arises only if the intermediate is a duality [p 90]. Socrates' answer, a day present in many places, fell to Parmenides; Ibn al-'Arabi's is that the Real is the barzakh between His manifest and nonmanifest faces. Taj al-Din al-Akhlati corrected Kharraz: God does not gather the opposites, "He is the (very) opposites" [p 91].
Two Conceptions of Relation
| Issue | Ibn Sina | Ibn al-'Arabi |
|---|---|---|
| Where relation lives | Each term holds its own idea; fatherhood is in the father only | One relation present whole in both terms, like whiteness |
| Status | Accident, not one thing joining two | Most substantial; knowing relations is knowing God |
| Regress objection | Stopped by making relations related in themselves | Stopped by the undivided Limit |
| God and world | God knowable apart from the world | God as Divinity known only through what depends on Him |
Table 7. Ibn Sina and Ibn al-'Arabi on the relative [p 92 to 94].
Ibn al-'Arabi: "He who knows relations (nisab) knows God" [p 93]. Zayd's sonship gives 'Amr fatherhood and the reverse. To call humans God's slaves makes God their Owner; if the world vanished the Real would remain, but the meaning of Owner would vanish, so there is no difference between Real and world "except through differentiation in meanings" [p 94]. Against Ghazali, who held God could be known without the cosmos: "it is the dependent who confirms the independence of the Independent" [p 94].
Figure 32. Correlation: each term gives the other its name [p 93].
Time as the Limit of correlation. "The son is the father's time, and the father is the son's time"; so "the Lord's time is the vassal" [p 95]. Hence God called Himself dahr. The instant is a limit between past and future, "like a point that we suppose on the circumference of a circle"; the cosmos never leaves the rule of the present state [p 95]. As the present stands between two nonexistent times, God as Limit stands between the world, nonexistent in itself, and the Essence, which never wholly enters existence. This nonexistence transcends existence and contains it [p 95 to 96]. Ibn al-'Arabi's poem calls time "the child of imagination" [p 96]. That reality is the Third Thing, the Supreme Barzakh, the subject of the next chapter [p 96].
Chapter 6. The Third Entity: The Supreme Barzakh
Here the barzakh becomes the answer to the old question of creation. Plato, pressed by a world in constant change, added a third kind to Forms and copies: the Receptacle. Ibn al-'Arabi, pressed the same way, posits the Third Thing, the Reality of Realities, which is neither existent nor nonexistent, neither eternal nor originated, and is "the root of all existent things" [p 97 to 111].
Nonexistent, Form and Fixed Entity
Ibn al-'Arabi sides with the Mu'tazilites against the Ash'arites: "The Barzakh is like the dividing line between existence and nonexistence. It is neither existent nor nonexistent." He wonders how the Ash'arites could reject the view that the nonexistent is a thing with a fixed entity to which existence is later added [p 97]. Bashier treats the Mu'tazilite nonexistent, the fixed entity and the Platonic Form as close in meaning, while noting two objections. Wolfson says Plato never called the Forms nonexistent; Bashier replies that the Mu'tazilites meant a different mode of existence, perhaps even more substantial [p 98]. Chittick says the Platonic ideas correspond to the divine names, while the fixed entities are things "before" existence; Bashier answers that Plato's own idea of participation stays open, and that the two thinkers' examples point to something similar [p 98].
Plato's Receptacle
Reshotko links the Receptacle to the "Argument From The Sciences": induction assumes that observed and unobserved samples share one thing, which cannot be physical since it would be in two places at once, so Forms must exist [p 99 to 100]. In the Timaeus the world is created: the Maker, "past finding out", copied the eternal Forms [p 100].
Water condenses, melts, becomes air and fire and returns, so we cannot call anything "this", only "such". A unifying principle must receive all things without taking the form of any; it is grasped "by a kind of spurious reason, and is hardly real" [p 100 to 101]. Bashier reads "spurious" as reason's view from outside, not a verdict of illusion: the Receptacle is imaginal. The Forms were posited because things can be identified; deeper reflection shows they cannot, so a third thing is needed to keep variability stable in a universe always being actualised [p 101 to 102]. Reason must lift itself twice, hence the "bastard" label [p 102].
Figure 33. Why we can say only "such", not "this".
| Step | Plato (Timaeus) | Ibn al-'Arabi |
|---|---|---|
| Observation | Elements turn into one another; nothing is a stable "this" | Two seas meet yet stay distinct |
| First posit | Forms explain identification | Fixed entities (whiteness, humanity) as essential limits |
| Crisis | Identification itself fails in a changing world | Things and their limits both turn out to be relations |
| Third posit | Receptacle, "hardly real", known by spurious reason | Third Thing, neither existent nor nonexistent |
Table 8. Parallel routes from a changing world to a third kind of being [p 99 to 104].
The Third Thing
From the two seas we infer a Limit that must be an undivided unity, or regress follows. Its main example is the fixed entity, such as whiteness or humanity: the "essential limits of limited things", without which they cannot be conceived [p 102 to 103]. It runs through all beings unfelt, "like the line that divides the shade from the sun", known by reason, not the senses, unlike the "formal and verbal limits" of rational thinkers [p 103].
Figure 34. Inferring the Third Thing.
To explain how limited things share in undivided limits, the limits must come first, and things lose their independent status: "The forms in the cosmos are all relations and states that are neither existent nor nonexistent", and their annihilation is the time of their being [p 103]. Worse for common sense, the limits themselves, the "realities", are combinations of more general realities, relations of relations without end [p 103 to 104]. That describes an unlimited god who has not yet entified Himself. It cannot be the Real, who is not limited even by unlimitation. So a Third Thing is needed that unifies the limited and unlimited aspects of existence [p 104].
In the Book of the Description of the Encompassing Circles Ibn al-'Arabi divides things into three modes [p 105]:
Figure 35. The three modes of existence in the Encompassing Circles, with the Third Thing as the Supreme Barzakh between God and the world [p 105].
The Third Thing "increases by the multiplicity of existents without suffering any division"; it is and is not the world, is and is not God, and may be called "the root of the universe", "the atom" and "Primordial Matter" [p 105]. It is the root of the Sphere of Life, the Divinity where the Name Allah gathers the Most Beautiful Names, and of the Real Through Whom Creation Takes Place, the Cloud ('ama'), level of the fixed entities [p 105]. These levels are not separate in reality; the Third Thing unifies them. Kashani places it at the level of Unity (ahadiyya), "the Reality of Existence in Itself" [p 105].
That seems to clash with Ibn al-'Arabi's rule that nothing comes from the Real as Essence [p 105 to 106]. Bashier resolves it from his description of God: "no thing is similar" to Him, "though He is the Hearing and Seeing". Incomparability and comparability together are the closest pointer to an Essence limited neither by limitation nor by unlimitation [p 106].
Creation Revisited
Discontinuity between God and world meant nonbeing, which philosophers avoided; continuity meant an infinite world, equally irrational [p 106]. Ibn Sina's potential infinite failed to link the actually finite to it; Ibn Rushd's circle let both camps be right in different respects [p 106 to 107]. But the aim is to relate an infinite world to the same finite world, "not from two different respects but absolutely", and no thinker before Ibn al-'Arabi had worked out the paradox inside relation [p 107].
Figure 36. The old dilemma of creation [p 106].
That level explains apparent contradictions. In the Circles an associate for God and a camel through a needle's eye are impossible; in the Futuhat association is universal and a better sign of unity, and he witnessed something like the camel's passage [p 108]. Reason cannot grasp this reality because it is the root of reason; Ibn al-'Arabi agrees with Parmenides' warning against nonbeing only for reason that equates God with Being without qualification [p 108 to 109].
The Essence is unknowable, but, as Chittick notes, that forbids positive rational claims, not all speech [p 109]. Kashani adds a second reason: God's Essential Limit includes all limits of outer and inner things, which are infinite, so it can never be known [p 109]. A second light, of faith, unveils each thing's own unity and so God's: "In each thing He has a sign signifying that He is one" [p 109 to 110]. Such unity resists definition; thinkers who argue whether God is body or substance could not define "one essence in the world" [p 110].
Unity harmed by speech. When oneness is demonstrated it becomes association, since the One becomes One in Himself plus One by another's proof. "Unification abides in silence"; once Unity speaks it gives birth to existence, and so to association. "Unification (tawhid) inflicted the harm upon itself" [p 110 to 111]. Analysis starts from duality and moves away from unity; what is needed is liminal knowledge, whose possessor is the Perfect Man, "a microcosmic epitome of the Infinity of Reality" [p 111].
Chapter 7. The Perfect Man: The Knowing Side of the Third Thing
If the Third Thing is the barzakh in being, the Perfect Man is the barzakh in knowing. He strikes a careful limit between reason and the heart, unity and difference, stability and change, and so becomes a polished mirror in which God sees His form and creation sees its own [p 113 to 128].
Stability in Variegation
Most Sufis held that variegation (talwin), moving from state to state, is an imperfection to be overcome by stability (tamkin). Ibn al-'Arabi held, as Chittick notes, that true realization is stability in variegation, a balance only the Perfect Man can keep [p 113].
Figure 37. Variegation and stability.
The Conclusion of Divine Love
Ibn al-'Arabi often cites the tradition "I was a Treasure but was not known, so I loved to be known" [p 113]. Without creation no knowledge of the Real would be manifest, so the Real depends on us; yet His "love to be known is an indication that He is not known", since He is the nonmanifest that never fully shows [p 114]. Love attaches not to its attainment but to its permanence. A lover may object that an embrace was achieved and love remained; Ibn al-'Arabi answers that the object is now the continuance of the embrace, which is nonexistent and endless [p 114]. So the infinite Essence, once given finite form, is no longer the Essence: love shows God's dependence and independence at once [p 114].
The lover joins opposites: if the beloved wants separation, so does he [p 115]. Only the Perfect Man unites natural love (for the manifest) and spiritual love (for the nonmanifest) [p 115]. Ibn al-'Arabi describes the soul's journey: absorbed in bodily needs, she forgets her covenant; reason shows her she is contingent and needs a Maker; a messenger proves himself and she obeys, but her worship mixes love, fear and desire [p 115]. God, jealous of association, discloses Himself to her in a natural form with a mark she cannot deny, then a sign by which she knows Him in all things, until she sees "that no other loved Him but Himself, since He is the lover and the beloved, the seeker and the object sought" [p 116].
Figure 38. Only the Perfect Man unites both [p 115].
Izutsu: the Perfect Man is fully aware of the Real's permeation (sarayan) of all things [p 117]. Abraham's title, Friend of God (khalil Allah), symbolises this, says Corbin, not only for friendship but for takhallala, "to mix, mingle, interpenetrate": a relation of Real (Haqq) and creation (khalq) whose duality "comports no alterity" [p 117].
Abraham and the Three Lights
Abraham sees a star, the moon and the sun, says of each "This is my Lord", and turns away as each sets (Q. 6:75 to 78) [p 117]. Some commentators, cited by 'Abdullah Yusuf 'Ali, read these as premises against star worship, not stages of enlightenment [p 118]. Ibn al-'Arabi's Abraham first calls them "a hunter's net for snaring the minds of my people", then tells his Follower to make his heart like the Ka'ba, since nothing encompasses the Real like the believer's heart; the man of reflection replies, "I wish I had not made my reason (aqli) my guide" [p 118].
Figure 39. Abraham and the three lights (Q. 6:75 to 78).
This is not a verdict against reason. Reflection (fikr) is a trial God placed on reason: it works on images supplied by imagination, yields sound proofs and specious ones, and reason, judging by them, may add to its ignorance [p 118]. God commands reason to reflect so that it learns it can know God only by God, as the saints do [p 119]. Freed, reason can practise what Kalwaitis calls "radical reflection": to "listen" and leave "everything as it is" [p 119]. Only the Perfect Man does this, because the Real has become his hearing and sight [p 119].
Destitution and the Receptacle of Beliefs
"The possessors of riches are imprisoned", said the Prophet. Whoever holds to a form that delimits the Real is imprisoned by it; only the destitute, from whose witnessing all forms have gone, see Him undelimited [p 120]. Those who declare God comparable to a form are possessors of riches; so are those who declare Him incomparable, since that too delimits. The Perfect Man binds God with both, sharing with philosophers that God is unlike creation and exceeding them in seeing that God is not bound even by incomparability [p 120]. For Chittick, incomparability is reason's view and comparability imagination's; Bashier stresses that imagination is a third view combining both, vacillating to see He/not He [p 120].
All beliefs reduce to two moments, the Real related to finite forms and the Real unrelated to them; in the Perfect Man both are held as transcended moments in active reciprocal permeation, which is the essence of Time [p 121]. Hirtenstein calls him the Son of the Instant (Ibn Waqt): he does not aim, since that would open a gap between what he is and will be [p 121 to 122]. Since Time is the world, he is the epitome of the world, a dividing line between the world's temporality and the Real's eternity; "creation is the human being" in the sense of its final cause [p 122].
The Logic of Perfection
No way to the Real is straight; the straight way is "circularly straight". The follower of the straight way bends away from his aim, while the perplexed who circles the center "does not have a beginning nor an end to limit him" [p 123]. "You worship only what you set up in yourself"; the color of water is the color of the cup. The perfect is the one whose bewilderment grows; "more perfect than the perfect" is the one who recognises Him in faith, in rational proofs and in heresy, since heresy too is a swerve from one belief to another [p 123].
Izutsu compares this with Chuang Tzu's Tao: positing Beginning forces No-Beginning, then No-No-Beginning; Being forces Nonbeing, then the negation of that negation [p 124]. Reflection keeps producing Nonbeing, Being, Nonbeing; the third move marks reason's limit and is the logical counterpart of a Nothing beyond Being and Nonbeing. Recognising such a Principle transcends the reflection that leads to it [p 124 to 125].
Figure 40. Izutsu's comparison with Chuang Tzu [p 124].
Figure 41. The structure of "You did not throw, when you threw, but God threw": being as a limit between two kinds of nonbeing [p 125 to 128].
Ibn al-'Arabi's favourite example is Q. 8:17, "You did not throw, when you threw, but God threw". God negated, affirmed, then negated again, so throwing becomes a Middle limited by two negations; Muhammad is "a thrower/not a thrower" and Muhammad/not Muhammad in the Word of the Real [p 125]. Muhammad's being belongs to his fixed entity in the Word; God brought things from nonbeing "and the negation of nonbeing" through the Word, and by knowing the Word the Perfect Man knows himself, since he is the Word [p 126]. John Little calls it "the dialectical process of Divine Self-manifestation and Self-realization" [p 126]. So the seeker of perfection constantly suffers bewilderment: "the affair is all bewilderment, and that deviation (dalal) is the same as guidance" [p 126].
Muhammad's affirmation is "like the instant of time (al-an)", between a past that is realized nonbeing and a future that is absolute nonbeing [p 127]. Absolute nonexistence makes God known better than relative nonexistence because it never receives being, "out of jealousy lest it become an associate" [p 127 to 128]. God is First and Last as a barzakh between the two names, like the instant that is the present in both [p 128]. Man's situation signals God's: both are the limit situation, the subject of the final chapter [p 128].
Chapter 8. The Limit Situation
The last chapter reads one short text, chapter 451 of the Futuhat, titled "In The Articulations is the Knowledge of the Stairs". Its claim: the paths by which God's words come down are the same as the stairs by which creatures climb back. God and creation are intertied, and the tie is nothing added to either [p 129 to 141].
Articulations and Stairs
The possible things are "the words of God that do not run out", compounded through the word Be. In the hidden domain they exist in a collective form; in the manifest domain they fluctuate "instant by instant, since the infinite cannot enter into existence" [p 129 to 130]. God gave His words levels, made them halt with themselves, veiled Himself in them, ordered them to seek Him and set up stairs, entering the stairs "with the ruling property of limit" [p 130]. Some say they are He; some that all we can know is that He is not known; some that He is known in one respect only; some that every group is right [p 130].
Nothing leaves traces except relations, "nonexistent things that possess a smell of existence" [p 130 to 131]. "The leg is intertwined with the leg" (Q. 75:29): our affair is knotted with His [p 131]. The Tie that joins them "is nothing other than what is required by the two things through their very essence, and no additional affair of existence is needed" [p 131]. Yet they are not alike, so something must distinguish them that is in neither alone [p 131].
Makharijare the points of articulation in the throat and mouth; Chittick links them to the Breath of the All-Merciful, in which God's words, the world, take shape.
Ma'arijare ladders. The title says the descents and the ascents are identical: God's coming down and creation's going up are one act, a state of mutual permeation (
takhallul) [p 131 to 132].
Figure 42. The two terms of chapter 451.
The Paradox of Infinity
The possible things are infinite because they are rooted in the unlimited "storehouse of the fixed entities" [p 132]. Yet some come before others. Chapter 524: "being greater and falling short both may occur in that which is infinite"; Chittick calls these paradoxes where some infinities are greater, "even though this is rationally impossible" [p 133]. This is the theologians' old argument against an eternal world. For Ibn al-'Arabi a world limited in time is half the truth: the world is infinite because being never stops passing over the fixed entities, and finite because each thing has its own reality [p 133].
Figure 43. The paradox of infinity [p 132].
The answer is a thingness prior to essence and existence. The Real "does not have being through passage that He might be qualified by finitude or infinitude, for He is the entity of being". The existent thing, finite in its own entity, has no end to being's passage, "So in respect of being finite, it is infinite" [p 134]. The Real is the Limit joining finite and infinite, and makes the levels He enters in His likeness, beyond both [p 134].
Four Kinds of Reflective Knower
| Group | Claim | Attitude | Ibn al-'Arabi's verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | We are He | Comparability (tashbih) | Partly right: the possible depends on the Necessary |
| 2 | Knowledge is knowing He is not known | Incomparability (tanzih); close to Cusanus | Closer to his view |
| 3 | Known in one respect, not another | Complementarity | Right, since He is tied to creation through His Names |
| 4 | Every group is right | All views as moments | His final position |
Table 9. The four groups of possessors of reflection in chapter 451 and where Ibn al-'Arabi stands [p 135 to 138].
Ibn al-'Arabi often cites Abu Bakr: "Incapacity to attain comprehension is itself comprehension", so "that is knowledge/not knowledge" [p 136]. Reflection rightly used yields only what God is not [p 136]. Cusanus (d. 1464) states it best: the intellect is to truth as an inscribed polygon to a circle; however many angles are added it never equals the circle, and "the more deeply we are instructed in this ignorance, the closer we approach to truth" [p 136 to 137]. Smirnov marks the difference: for Cusanus God is undefinable because no definition fits Him; for Ibn al-'Arabi because all definitions fit Him [p 137 to 138].
Figure 44. Two routes to an undefinable God: beyond all limits (Cusanus) and encompassing all limits (Ibn al-'Arabi), after Smirnov [p 136 to 138].
Complementarity comes close but wrongly expects a finished knowledge by adding the two views; learned ignorance forgets that the Real is also limited by every limit. The Real is "not limited in one respect and unlimited in another respect, but rather limited and unlimited absolutely": Akhlati's "He is the (very) opposites" again [p 138 to 139]. Hence the Tie, something that is nothing, "the closest definition of the limit situation" [p 139].
The Lotus Tree of the Limit
Ibn al-'Arabi reached the limit situation on a night ascension to the Lotus Tree of the Limit, which is in the form of Man, with four rivers as four kinds of given knowledge. He cried, "Enough, enough! My (bodily) elements are filled up, and my place cannot contain me!", saw all the Names return to one Entity, his own being, and knew he was "a pure 'servant,' without a trace of lordship" [p 140].
Opening is a liminal act, both acting and being acted on, and its author is the Perfect Man. Jandi sums it up: the Root Reality receives activity and passivity, manifestation and nonmanifestation, and demands a "barzakh-reality" that brings delimitation and nondelimitation together "while keeping them separate" [p 140 to 141].
The Author's Conclusions
Bashier closes by defending his method, admitting its limits, and making a larger claim: philosophy is in crisis because it has cut itself off from its ancient and medieval roots, and the Limit is one root worth recovering [p 143 to 147].
Defending the Method
Chapters 2 and 3 cover familiar ground, but presenting it in relation to the Limit adds what he calls "terribly missing" from Ibn al-'Arabi studies: relationality [p 143]. He finds it unclear why some judge Ibn al-'Arabi's view of philosophy by an anecdote of him tossing away a philosophy book and not by his words defending it [p 143 to 144]. He grants that the unsystematic style makes reconstruction hard: he often had to join a statement from one chapter of the Futuhat with another from elsewhere [p 144].
Sympathy over critique. He concedes the book is highly sympathetic. Heavy critique before the thought is set out in order would only add confusion; the first task is "to bring some order into his work" [p 144]. Tracing a notion back to its mystical roots proved far harder than the familiar modern work of purging philosophy of them [p 144].
Why Persevere
Two reasons. First, modern philosophy is not progressing because it disconnected itself from medieval and ancient thought, which still can guide us despite its unsystematic expression [p 145]. Second, the Limit turns up across history:
| Source as cited | Form of the Limit |
|---|---|
| Zoroastrian text on Ohrmazd and Ahriman | Endless Light and Endless Darkness, limitless, yet "at the border both were limited" by the emptiness between [p 145] |
| A religious text on Monogenes and Limit | Limit as separator and confirmation of the All, with four powers [p 146] |
| Plato, Parmenides | "this queer thing, the instant", between motion and rest, occupying no time [p 146] |
| A modern writer on the rainbow | Descartes renamed "iris" the "arc-in-the-sky", yet the iris of each eye is a ring between white and black, "threshold, open door, and bridge" [p 146 to 147] |
Table 10. Examples of the paradoxical Limit beyond Ibn al-'Arabi offered in the conclusions [p 145 to 147].
He ends by praising Chittick, who speaks for Ibn al-'Arabi "as Ibn al-'Arabi would speak for himself", and admits he may not have kept that standard of care, hoping the work still contributes to a hard field [p 147].
Synthesis
Key Takeaways
- The barzakh separates and unites in one act. Between two seas it keeps them distinct and, by doing so, makes them one system [p 7, 11].
- A limit cannot be a part. If it had a face toward each side, another limit would be needed between its faces, without end; the true barzakh meets both sides with one face [p 7, 86 to 87].
- Knowledge lives in intervals. The musician's "time" is the interval between two letters; knowing its literal definition is not knowing it [p 1 to 2].
- Kun models the Limit. Two letters show, one is hidden between them; the hidden letter stands for the Real and for the perfect human [p 3 to 4].
- Mystical experience includes representation. After presentation comes an endless effort to represent it; closure and disclosure limit each other [p 14].
- Paradox can be a tool, not a shield. Ibn al-'Arabi uses the Liar ("I saw my form I did not see my form") to show the liminal nature of things, against the view that mystics hide behind it [p 16 to 18].
- Rorty's error was about mirrors. He still assumed representation must be of a given reality, the assumption he attacked in analytic philosophy [p 24].
- Both theologians and philosophers leaned on Aristotle. The atomists used his principles against an infinite past; Ibn Sina used his continuous time against them [p 34 to 36].
- Ibn Sina's formula was a paradox he would not admit. Possible in itself, necessary through another, made the world a middle entity [p 39 to 42].
- Ibn Rushd diagnosed a shared projection. Both camps treated the soul's picture of time, finite or infinite line, as reality [p 48].
- Positing a median only neutralises a contradiction. If the relation of finite and infinite is itself paradoxical, separating them divides reality [p 49].
- The debate reduced to one question. How can a finite and an infinite conception of the Limit be joined [p 56 to 57]?
- Reason is a veil when it serves itself. God commands reflection so that reason learns it knows God only by God [p 69, 118 to 119].
- Khadir's acts model actuality. Destructive to opinion, constructive in the whole; "I did it not of my own accord" unites affirmation and negation [p 62 to 65].
- There are three paths. Being, Nonbeing, and the liminal path between, entered by those who know God [p 70].
- Proclaiming unity introduces duality. "Unification abides in silence"; once unity speaks it begets existence and association [p 70 to 71, 110 to 111].
- Relations are substantial. "He who knows relations (nisab) knows God"; God as Owner is known only with the owned [p 93 to 94].
- Time is the correlation between Lord and servant. "The Lord's time is the vassal"; God is dahr, the point on a circle [p 95].
- Complete differentiation is complete union. To escape even the relation of difference, a thing must make the other vanish in itself [p 88].
- The Third Thing is neither existent nor nonexistent. It is eternal with the Eternal, originated with the originated, and the root of all [p 104 to 105].
- God is limited and unlimited absolutely. At the level of the Supreme Barzakh God does not become finite; He already is [p 107 to 108, 138 to 139].
- The Perfect Man is a polished mirror. God and creation each see their form in him [p 116 to 117].
- Hold every belief as a moment. "Make yourself a Prime Matter for all forms of belief" [p 121].
- Being is an affirmation between two negations. "You did not throw, when you threw, but God threw" [p 125 to 127].
- The tie between God and creation adds nothing. It is what both require by their essence, something that is nothing [p 131, 139].
- God is undefinable because all definitions fit Him, unlike Cusanus, for whom none do [p 137 to 138].
Frameworks to Reuse
| Framework | What it says | Use it to | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| One-face Limit | A boundary that serves both sides with one essence stops regress | Design interfaces that do not need their own interface | [p 86 to 87] |
| Presentation and representation loop | Every representation is partial and prompts new presentation | Treat models and documents as provisional closures | [p 14] |
| Projection test (Ibn Rushd) | Ask whether a quality belongs to the thing or to our picture of it | Spot when a model's shape is mistaken for reality's | [p 48] |
| Median check (Ghazali) | A half-and-half mediator needs a further mediator | Detect layering that merely relocates a problem | [p 49] |
| Actuality vs actualization | The open whole versus a fixed form of it | Judge actions by fit with an unfolding whole | [p 65] |
| Three paths | Being, Nonbeing, the liminal path | Map stances: affirm, negate, hold both | [p 70] |
| Correlative time | Each term is the other's time | Model mutual dependencies as defining each other | [p 95] |
| Four reflective stances | Comparable, incomparable, complementary, all-correct | Run structured debates on contested questions | [p 135 to 138] |
Table 11. Reusable frameworks drawn from the book.
Figure 45. The lineage of in-between concepts that Bashier sees feeding the barzakh [p 8, 73 to 74, 107].
A closer look
Strengths. The book links Ibn al-'Arabi to the kalam and falsafa debates in a sustained way, adding what the author calls relationality to the field [p 143]. The reading of the barzakh as a one-face Limit that stops Aristotle's regress is clear and memorable [p 85 to 91]. Setting Ibn Sina's and Ibn al-'Arabi's views of relation side by side sharpens both [p 92 to 94].
Limits the author admits. He calls the work highly sympathetic and not sufficiently critical, and says he often stitched statements from different chapters and works to reconstruct arguments [p 144]. He also concedes he may not have kept Chittick's standard of care [p 147].
Points a reader may question. (1) The identification of the fixed entity with the Platonic Form is argued against Wolfson's and Chittick's explicit reservations, mainly from shared examples [p 98]. (2) Much of the Plato and Rorty material is read through secondary sources (Reshotko, Habermas, Cairns), so the comparisons rest partly on interpreters. (3) The claim that the Limit holds "absolutely", not "in respects", is said to exceed reason by design; a critic will ask what would count against it [p 107, 139]. (4) The modern examples in the conclusions (the Zoroastrian text, the rainbow) are offered as suggestive, and the author leaves their analysis to the reader [p 145 to 147]. (5) Several Qur'anic verse numbers in the text appear to be printed inconsistently (for example the Khadir passage); this guide avoids citing those numbers.
Who's Who
Only dates printed in the book are given; where the book prints none, none is shown.
| Person | Role in the book | Date as printed |
|---|---|---|
| Ibn al-'Arabi | Subject; author of the Futuhat; vision at Cordoba | vision in 586 at Cordoba; "In the year 1190" [p 2] |
| Ibn Rushd (Abu al-Walid) | Philosopher, judge of Cordoba; complementarity thesis | |
| al-Ghazali (Abu Hamid) | Theologian; Incoherence of the Philosophers | d. 1111 [p 43] |
| Ibn Sina | Philosopher; eternal creation; possible and necessary | |
| Jandi | Commentator on the Fusus; revealed the Seal secret | d. 1330 [p 3] |
| Kashani | Commentator on the Fusus; Reality of Realities | |
| Baydawi | Qur'an commentator on creation from nothing | d. 1286 [p 29] |
| Zamakhshari | Qur'an commentator: the smoke was created | d. 1144 [p 30] |
| Nazzam | Mu'tazilite; arguments against an infinite past | d. 845 [p 34] |
| Juwayni | Ash'arite; argument from ended revolutions | d. 1065 [p 35] |
| Ibn Tufayl | Philosopher; on Ghazali's works | d. 1184 [p 44] |
| Suhrawardi (Shihab al-Din Yahya) | Turned to Plato over Aristotle | d. 1191 [p 23] |
| Tirmidhi (al-Hakim) | Tradition of the grave as garden or pit; earthly barzakh | d. 908 [p 77] |
| Abu Sa'id al-Kharraz | "I knew God by His gathering between the opposites" | |
| Taj al-Din al-Akhlati | Companion: "He is the (very) opposites" | |
| John Philoponus | Arguments against an eternal world | |
| Cusanus | Learned ignorance; polygon and circle | d. 1464 [p 136] |
| Richard Rorty | Antirepresentationalist; The Linguistic Turn, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature | edited 1967; published 1979 [p 21] |
| William C. Chittick | Leading scholar of Ibn al-'Arabi, cited throughout | |
| Henry Corbin | Scholar; World of the Barzakh; takhallul | |
| Steven Wasserstrom | Critic of Corbin's "mystocentrism" | |
| Michael Carter | "Infinity and Lies in Medieval Islam" | |
| Abu al-'Ila 'Afifi | Read Ibn al-'Arabi as pantheist | |
| Toshihiko Izutsu | Compared the Supreme Barzakh with the Tao |
Table 12. People who appear in the book, with only the dates the book itself prints.
Glossary
| Term | Meaning in the book |
|---|---|
| barzakh | Limit, barrier, isthmus; Arabised from Persian pardah; what separates two things and by that act unites them [p 7, 11] |
| Supreme Barzakh | The Third Thing between the Real as Manifest and as Nonmanifest [p 96, 105] |
| Third Thing (al-shay' al-thalith) | Reality neither existent nor nonexistent, eternal with the Eternal and originated with the originated [p 104 to 105] |
| Reality of Realities | Another name for the Third Thing; root of all realities [p 105] |
| fixed entity ('ayn thabita) | A thing as known in God before existence; the main example of the barzakh; compared to Plato's Form [p 61, 89] |
| al-ma'dum | The Mu'tazilite "nonexistent", held to be a thing [p 33, 97] |
| hal, ahwal | State(s): in Ash'arite theology a quality neither existent nor nonexistent; in Sufism a changing condition given by grace; for Ibn al-'Arabi the link of created and Creator [p 8, 68] |
| maqamat | Stations, characterised by persistence, unlike states [p 68] |
| kashf | Unveiling; the Sufi way to the true meaning of revelation [p 60] |
| fikr | Reflection; a trial upon reason when followed uncritically [p 118] |
| ta'bir | Interpretation, literally crossing over [p 23] |
| tahawwul | Perpetual transmutation of the cosmos [p 65, 68] |
| al-khalq al-mutajaddid | Perpetual renewal of creation; in kalam, recreation each instant [p 35, 78] |
| dahr, zaman | Aeon (God's name for His time, the Limit) versus linear time [p 4, 95] |
| al-an | The instant; a shared limit between past and future [p 55, 95, 127] |
| wasita | Median, Ibn Rushd's eternal-temporal mediator [p 48] |
| kun | "Be!"; two manifest letters and a hidden one [p 3 to 4] |
| al-kawn | Engendered existence; both "all that is" and "all but God" [p 4 to 5] |
| wahdat al-wujud | Oneness of Being; unification that does not exclude differentiation [p 5] |
| tawhid | Unification; declaring God one, which speech itself compromises [p 5, 110 to 111] |
| shirk | Association of others with God; called universal and a better sign of unity [p 70 to 71, 108] |
| tanzih, tashbih | Declaring God incomparable; declaring God comparable [p 70, 135, 138] |
| ta'til, mu'attila | Divesting God of attributes; those who do so, on the path of Nonbeing [p 70] |
| al-insan al-kamil | The Perfect Man; the Supreme Limit between Real and creation [p 9, 116] |
| takhallul | Mutual permeation of Real and creation; from khalil, Friend [p 117, 132] |
| talwin, tamkin | Variegation and stability; perfection is stability in variegation [p 113] |
| makharij, ma'arij | Points of articulation and stairs; descent and ascent as one act [p 131] |
| nafas al-Rahman | Breath of the All-Merciful, the matter of God's words [p 131] |
| 'ama' | The Cloud; the Real Through Whom Creation Takes Place [p 105] |
| huwa la huwa | "He/not He", the Realizers' answer about God and world [p 68] |
| Receptacle | Plato's third kind in the Timaeus, "nurse of all generation" [p 100] |
| complementarity thesis | Ibn Rushd's view that two accounts may both be true though their conjunction contradicts [p 8, 12] |
Table 13. Key terms.
About this book
Ibn al-'Arabi's Barzakh: The Concept of the Limit and the Relationship between God and the World by Salman H. Bashier, 2004. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
Insight Editions · rajeshrmahapatra.com/insight-editions