Insight Editions · No. 128
Ibn Arabi
Vida y enseñanzas del gran místico andalusí
Fernando Mora
Fernando Mora presents Ibn Arabi's life and teachings, including his travels, doctrine of the unity of being, imaginal world, understanding of love, worship, and spiritual stations.
A study guide to Ibn Arabi by Fernando Mora. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
About the Book
Fernando Mora's Ibn Arabi: Vida y enseñanzas del gran místico andalusí is a Spanish introduction to the life and teaching of Muhyi al-Din Ibn Arabi, born in Murcia in 1165 and buried in Damascus in 1240. One long biographical chapter follows him from al-Andalus across the Maghreb to Mecca, Anatolia and Damascus; fifteen shorter chapters then set out his teaching, from the unity of being and the world of imagination to the heart, love, worship, the Ascension, the stations and the friends of God.
In one sentence: for Mora, Ibn Arabi's many doctrines are faces of one intuition, that there is nothing in being but God showing Himself anew at each instant through the names, and that the human being, made in the divine form, is the mirror in which that showing comes to know itself, so that the long biography and the teaching chapters describe one and the same journey.
A work of presentation rather than polemic. Mora quotes Ibn Arabi at length, chiefly from The Meccan Illuminations and The Bezels of Wisdom, draws on the Western and Spanish scholarship on the master, and links him often with Christian mystics of the Peninsula. The biography takes about a fifth of the book; each teaching chapter is short and can be read alone.
Readers new to Ibn Arabi will find a guided path through his life and main ideas. Readers who know him already will find a compact map of the key terms (being, imagination, the heart, the names, the stations, the seals) with the passages where Ibn Arabi states them. Readers interested in al-Andalus will find a portrait of the masters, men and women, among whom he was formed.
What the book is
Diagrams mark mechanisms already in the chapters.
Chapter Map
Follow the part order. Jump by theme only after one full pass.
The book at a glance
Read Chapter 3 on the unity of being and Chapter 6 on the barzakh early: nearly every later chapter leans on them. The biography can be read on its own as a story. Chapters 13 to 16 form a sequence (the ascent, the stations, the Perfect Human, the friends of God) and are best read in order.
Introduction. The Andalusian Master and His Reader
Fernando Mora opens with a claim and a complaint. The claim: Ibn Arabi of Murcia is one of the highest authors, thinkers, visionaries and contemplatives the Iberian Peninsula has produced. The complaint: his work has been almost ignored in his own homeland until very recently [Intro]. The introduction sets out how the book will correct that, what it will cover, and the stance from which it is written.
The titles and the detractors
In the Islamic world Ibn Arabi has collected many honorific names: ‘the greatest of the masters’ or Magister Maximus (al-Shaykh al-Akbar), Muhyiddin (reviver of the religion), seal of the saints of Muhammad, sultan of the knowers, and the alchemical ‘red sulphur’. Mora says listing them all would fill a page, which shows how much the figure matters for the history of Sufism and of world spirituality [Intro].
Scholars such as Henry Corbin, Mircea Eliade and René Guénon place him among the great representatives of the Perennial Philosophy. His detractors have called him a destroyer of religion, an atheist and an enemy of God, or more mildly:
Others, Mora says, reached reductive verdicts without meaning harm, such as calling him a stubborn pantheist. Menéndez Pelayo put all Jewish and Muslim mystical philosophy under the heading of «panteísmo semítico» (editor's translation: ‘Semitic pantheism’) [Intro].
Iberian spirituality in three languages
Mora argues that the religious and cultural history of Spain cannot be understood while ignoring its Islamic factor. Beside Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross and Miguel de Molinos stand Ibn Masarra of Córdoba, Ibn al-Arif of Almería and Abu Madyan of Seville, and among Jewish masters Maimonides, Abraham Abulafia and Moses de León. When Emperor Charles I said Castilian was the best language for speaking with God, he forgot that on the same reasoning one could speak with God in Hebrew and Arabic just as fluently [Intro].
Who Ibn Arabi was, in brief
| Facet | What the introduction says |
|---|---|
| Traveller and cartographer | A traveller of the unknown and a ‘spiritual cartographer’ in the strictest sense |
| Contemplative and systematiser | He lived deep mystical and visionary states and also explained them in detail |
| Comparisons | His thought has been compared with Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa and Taoism |
| Writer | More than 350 recognised works, about 800 attributed; the Meccan Illuminations has 560 chapters |
| Self-definition | A trujamán, an interpreter of passion and an heir to prophetic wisdom |
| Legends | Murdered by fanatics, died very rich, met Shams of Tabriz and Suhrawardi; Mora calls the meetings very improbable |
Table 1. Ibn Arabi as the introduction presents him [Intro].
His prestige under the Ottomans was so great that any text ascribed to him entered the sultan's library. Misattributions followed: a Sufi version of a yogic-tantric text called Amratkund, and the much-published Treatise on Unity, which Michel Chodkiewicz showed belongs to a follower, Awhad al-Din Balyani (d. 1288). The book also reports that the Taj Mahal was built following the plans of paradise found in the Meccan Illuminations [Intro].
The map of the book
Part I traces the life. Part II sets out the teaching through a series of themes. The introduction previews them: the Unity of Being, summed up in ‘there is nothing in being but God’; the balance between incomparability (tanzih) and similarity (tashbih), which the Quranic verse ‘Nothing is like Him. He is the Seer, the Hearer’ (42:11) holds together; the imagination, both as the nature of everything other than God and as an autonomous domain where ‘spirits are embodied and bodies spiritualised’; the night journey and ascension; essential and ritual worship; the Perfect Human; and the friends of God, including the people of blame (malamiyya) and the solitaries (afrad) [Intro].
‘God’ or ‘Allah’
Mora rejects the idea that ‘God’ and ‘Allah’ name different deities. Arabic-speaking Christians also say ‘Allah’, just as no one would claim the English ‘God’ and the French ‘Dieu’ are gods worshipped only by the English and the French. For him the God of these pages is the God of the mystics, of beauty and love, and also the God of the philosophers, and he adds that this reality always takes the shape of the vessel that receives it:
He closes on method. One does not need Sanskrit to write on Hinduism, and the same holds for Arabic here, though some terms and etymologies cannot be avoided. He keeps technical words to a minimum and removes most bracketed Arabic from the translated passages. He signs as ‘always a student, an apprentice’ in Valencia, 9 September 2010 [Intro].
Part I. The Sun of the West: The Life
Part I of the book is a single long chapter, ‘An approach to the life and work of Ibn Arabi’. It follows him from Murcia to Damascus, drawing mostly on his own autobiographical passages and on Claude Addas, Miguel Asín Palacios and others. Mora warns that this life cannot be read as an ordinary biography: once Ibn Arabi sees himself invested as the seal of Muhammadan sainthood, every event is read in that light [Ch 1].
1. Family and early years
Muhammad b. Ali b. Muhammad b. al-Arabi al-Tai al-Hatimi, as he signs most of his works, was born in Murcia on 28 July 1165 (17 Ramadan 560 of the Hegira) into a well-placed family: a Murcian father, a Berber mother, two sisters, and he the firstborn and only son [Ch 1]. His correct name is Ibn al-Arabi; the shorter Ibn Arabi comes from the Turks and Persians who spread his work, and Western authors have followed them [Ch 1]. The family claimed descent from the Arab poet Hatim al-Tai; Mora calls that descent credible but unprovable, since many Muslims without Arab origins adopted such lineages [Ch 1].
At his birth Murcia and Valencia were ruled by Ibn Mardanish, the ‘King Wolf’ of the Christian chronicles, who resisted the Almohads for years and succumbed in 1172. The Almohad movement, born in the Atlas and named from al-muwahhid (‘unitarian’), began as a call back to the sources of orthodoxy. Ibn Arabi's father entered the new regime's service and the family moved to Seville, where the boy, then eight, began his formal education [Ch 1].
As a child he played at soldiers; he later recalled in a poem being «acostumbrado a cabalgar, afilar espadas y maniobrar en campamentos militares» (editor's translation: ‘used to riding, sharpening swords and manoeuvring in military camps’) [Ch 1]. Two maternal uncles were accomplished ascetics, and Mora sees them as part of his early religious leaning [Ch 1].
The first autobiographical memory
At about twelve he fell gravely ill, very probably with the plague that struck the south of the Peninsula and North Africa around 1176. This is the oldest autobiographical reference in his writings, and the first of his many visions:
He woke to find his father in tears, having just finished reciting that very sura [Ch 1]. Seville, Mora notes, was a mixed city of scholars and ascetics but also of minstrels and rogues, and Ibn Arabi's own remarks suggest that despite his gifts he spent some of his youth in its worldly life [Ch 1].
2. Illumination and Averroes
The date of his conversion is debated, and Ibn Arabi is not explicit, but the famous meeting with Averroes allows it to be placed in early adolescence. Ibn Arabi tells it himself:
The boy answered ‘No’, the philosopher's colour changed, and the exchange ended on ‘yes and no’, with spirits flying from their matter and necks separating from their bodies between the two [Ch 1]. One reading takes it as about bodily resurrection, since the account sits in chapter 15 of the Meccan Illuminations, devoted to that subject. Mora proposes another: an affirmation, a negation, an affirmation and negation at once, and finally what lies between yes and no, an intermediate reality, the barzakh that Part II will treat at length [Ch 1].
Figure 12. The Averroes interview as a sequence leading to the intermediate reality [Ch 1].
Averroes later asked Ibn Arabi's father whether his opinion of the boy matched his own. He thanked God for living at a time when he could see a person who had entered retreat ignorant and come out:
Mora draws three features from this: the ascent came very young, in a short time, and without human teaching. Ibn Arabi met Averroes once more, but this time in a subtle domain: he saw the philosopher through a fine veil while Averroes did not see him. A third time he saw him only as a corpse, at the funeral in Córdoba [Ch 1]. Mora stresses that, whatever some scholars conclude about the superiority of mysticism over philosophy, Ibn Arabi held the Cordoban physician in very high esteem and regarded him as a true believer [Ch 1].
The funeral and the books
Ibn Arabi noted the remark of his companion Abu l-Hakam, that on one side went the master and on the other his works, and wrote verses on it:
3. Entering the Way
Ibn Arabi says he was not formally initiated into Sufism until 1184, when he was twenty. Before that, Jesus, Moses and Muhammad appeared to him in a vision. Jesus urged renunciation of worldly goods; Moses promised transcendent knowledge of unity; the Prophet told him to hold fast to him to be saved, and from then on he never abandoned the study of prophetic traditions [Ch 1]. Having no earthly master to receive his goods, he gave everything to his father [Ch 1].
The decisive scene came in the mosque of Córdoba, in the company of a son of the caliph, Abu Bakr b. Yusuf b. Abd al-Mumin:
He made it a principle to learn every position at first hand:
4. The Andalusian masters
From 1184 he frequented many ascetics and mystics, recorded in two books: Lives of Andalusian Holy Men: The Epistle of Sainthood, composed later in Mecca (1203 to 1204), and The Precious Pearl [Ch 1].
| Teacher | What the book tells of him |
|---|---|
| Abu Jafar al-Uryabi | The first master. An ‘unlettered’ man (ummi) in the spiritual sense, always in invocation. He told the youth to close his door, cut his ties and keep company with the Generous, who would speak to him without veil. |
| Abu l-Abbas | A master with whom Ibn Arabi disagreed about a person; a stranger in the street told him to accept what the shaykh had said, and the stranger was al-Khadir. |
| Abu Yaqub Yusuf al-Kumi | Companion of Abu Madyan (d. 1198). Complained that the youth preferred the company of the dead to the living, since he made retreats among tombs. |
| Abd Allah Muhammad of Aljarafe | Spent fifty years in his mosque; a silent exchange of signs and smiles. |
| Abu Muhammad al-Maururi | Disciple of Abu Madyan, from Morón; turned bitter water sweet and folded the earth. |
| Salih al-Adawi | Forty years without a house; foretold the family troubles to come. |
Table 2. Some Andalusian teachers named in Chapter 1 [Ch 1].
Al-Uryabi used to pray: «Señor, aliméntame con el deseo de amar, no con el amor» (editor's translation: ‘Lord, nourish me with the desire to love, not with love’). Mora sets beside it Ibn Arabi's line that «El Dios Amor no se halla oculto en la rosa, sino que reside en la capacidad de oler su perfume» (editor's translation: ‘The God Love is not hidden in the rose, but resides in the capacity to smell its perfume’) [Ch 1]. The master also lived fully in servanthood (ubudiyya), the creature's return to its original nothingness, which marks the malamiyya [Ch 1].
Al-Khadir, master of those without masters
Al-Khadir appears in the Quran (18:59-81) as the misunderstood teacher of Moses. Tradition holds that he lives forever, moves from place to place, and guides those who have no human master [Ch 1]. Ibn Arabi recounts that he drank from the Fountain of Life while fetching water for an army; when the others ran to drink, God hid it from them [Ch 1]. Ibn Arabi met him three times in the West and, as far as is known, never in the East [Ch 1].
Another vision, of a figure called the ‘imam of the left’, set the tone of his independence:
The women masters
Two old women left an indelible mark. Yasmina, also called Shams Umm al-Fuqara (‘Sun, Mother of the Poor’), lived in Marchena; he knew her when she was already eighty, and says she hid her mystical states and could voice the thoughts of others. Fatima of Córdoba, an ecstatic of more than ninety-five with many disciples, lived only on the scraps people left at her door, yet had a beautiful, rosy face [Ch 1]. Her advice to Ibn Arabi's mother was ‘do not hate him’, and his dying father would say ‘now I understand you, and before I did not’. Mora reads both as signs that the youth's renunciation strained the family [Ch 1]. He also names Zaynab al-Qaliyya, rich and beautiful, who left everything; Ibn Arabi accompanied her from Mecca to Jerusalem:
5. The seal and the Assembly of the Prophets
The year 1190 is a turning point. In Córdoba Ibn Arabi has the first of two visions revealing that he is the seal of Muhammadan sainthood [Ch 1]. In one, all the prophets from Adam to Muhammad gather; The Epistle of Sainthood links it to the death of the Cordoban ascetic Abu Muhammad al-Qabayili, who prayed for all creatures, even the fish of the sea [Ch 1]. Ibn Arabi was not the first Muslim author to speak of the seal of Muhammadan sainthood, but being invested with it marks his whole path [Ch 1].
6. Tunis and the Earth of Reality
In 1193, aged twenty-eight, he crossed from Algeciras for the first time: Ceuta, then Tunis, where he met Abd al-Aziz al-Mahdawi and al-Mahdawi's own master, the surgeon and Sufi Muhammad al-Kinani [Ch 1]. He studied works by Ibn Qasi of the Algarve and Ibn Barrajan of Seville, both victims of the Almohads. In the harbour of Tunis, unable to sleep, he saw a man walking on the water by the full moon; it was al-Khadir, their second meeting [Ch 1].
From 1194 he dwells, he says, in the Earth of Reality, the ‘vast earth of God’ (29:56) that Corbin named the mundus imaginalis, built from the leftover clay of Adam [Ch 1]. Entering that station in Tunis, he cried out without knowing it:
In the Diwan al-akbar he says that in that same year he became fully aware of being the heir and seal of the Muhammadan station:
7. Return to al-Andalus
Back before the end of 1194, he lost his father, probably in Seville. The death is a testimony of bodily luminosity: two weeks before, his father foretold the day of his death; when it came, his body was covered with a white radiance that lit the whole room, and afterward his face looked alive though the pulse had stopped [Ch 1]. On the road to Rota he met al-Khadir a third time, in a ruined mosque among a group of wandering men, where al-Khadir spread a small prayer rug in the air seven cubits above the ground and prayed on it, to convince a companion who denied the miracles of saints [Ch 1].
Still in 1194 he wrote The Contemplations of the Holy Mysteries (Mashahid al-asrar), fourteen chapters of dialogue with God:
He also wrote, in four days at Morón, the treatise translated into Spanish as El divino gobierno del reino humano (The Divine Governance of the Human Kingdom), on the Perfect Human [Ch 1].
8. Across the Maghreb
From 1195 he crossed the Strait again and again. In Fez he received, through an envoy, an offer from the sultan Yaqub Yusuf al-Mansur to enter his service, with a marriage proposal for his sisters, and he refused [Ch 1]. His second stay in Fez brought the station of light:
Mora links this to his teaching that at the first instant of creation both the cosmos and the human being had spherical form [Ch 1]. In 1197 to 1198 he wrote the Kitab al-isra (Book of the Night Journey), still lacking a complete translation [Ch 1].
In January 1199, still in al-Andalus, he wrote the Anqa mughrib (The Phoenix: on the Seal of the Saints and the Sun of the West). In Almería, at the school founded by Ibn al-Arif, he wrote El crepúsculo de las estrellas (The Setting of the Stars), in eleven days during Ramadan 595 (1199) [Ch 1]:
At the end of that year he crossed the Strait for the last time. In 1200, near Marrakech, he reached the station of proximity, so alone in it that he grew afraid; its name was revealed to him later by the spirit of a dead saint. It is the supreme station of sainthood, open only to the malamiyya [Ch 1]. At Bougie in 1201 came the marriage with the stars and letters:
He then spent nine months in Tunis with al-Mahdawi, partly writing the Insha al-dawair (The Production of the Circles), a concise text with diagrams, and passed through Alexandria and Cairo, a land then devastated by famine and plague [Ch 1].
9. Beside the Black Stone
In Mecca he received, in the month of the pilgrimage, the final confirmation that he is the seal [Ch 1]. Circling the Kaaba, he met by the Black Stone the fleeting youth, ‘neither living nor dead’, who commanded him to write; from this meeting Mora traces the Meccan Illuminations [Ch 1].
Nizam and the Interpreter of Desires
In Mecca he was welcomed by the family of the scholar Abu Shuja Zahir b. Rustam al-Isfahani, whose daughter Nizam inspired The Interpreter of Desires [Ch 1]. One night, walking round the Kaaba on the sand, he recited verses, and a young woman touched his shoulder and reproached him for lack of wisdom in matters of spiritual love. Mora reports the relation as purely platonic, and says it changed his low opinion of women; soon he married, first Maryam, then Fatima [Ch 1]. He himself writes:
He goes on that Muhammad loved women not by inclination but because God made them lovable to him, and that he himself became «el más tierno amador de las mujeres» (editor's translation: ‘the most tender lover of women’) for the same reason [Ch 1]. In 1204 he wrote the Taj al-rasail (Crown of Epistles), rhymed love letters to the Kaaba, after a vision in which he had doubted the rank of the Black Stone [Ch 1].
Discouraged at seeing many enter the Way and few go to its end, he thought of serving God anonymously. A vision changed that:
Near the end of this first stay he met Majd al-Din Ishaq b. Yusuf al-Rumi of Malatya, whose son, not yet born, would be Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi (d. 1274), his favourite disciple and later his adopted son [Ch 1].
10. Journeys through the Middle East
After more than two years in Mecca he began roughly eighteen years of travel through Iraq, Anatolia, Palestine and Syria, returning often to Mecca as if circling one centre [Ch 1]. Late in 1204 or early 1205 he left with al-Habashi and Majd al-Din for Jerusalem and Hebron, then spent only twelve days in Baghdad, then Mosul, where he wrote Al-tanazzulat al-mawsiliyya (The Revelations of Mosul), interpreting ablution as the emptying of beliefs and concepts and a return to primordial innocence [Ch 1].
In Mosul he received the mantle of al-Khadir from Ali b. Abd Allah b. Jami, who had received it from al-Khadir in the same garden; from then on Ibn Arabi upheld investiture with the mantle and later passed it to fifteen people, fourteen of them women, the only man being Badr al-Habashi [Ch 1]. He travelled into Anatolia, met the future sultan Kaykaus, visited Cairo again in 1207, and went back to Mecca, renewing ties with Nizam's family [Ch 1].
In Baghdad around 1212 he is said to have met the Sufi Shihab al-Din Umar al-Suhrawardi: they sat with heads bowed for an hour without a word and parted. Asked his opinion, Ibn Arabi said he was imbued from head to foot with the law of the Prophet; Suhrawardi called Ibn Arabi an ocean of divine truths [Ch 1]. In Aleppo in 1213 he wrote a commentary on The Interpreter of Desires to answer jurists who took its poems as worldly love:
11. Anatolia
From 1216 he spent six years in Anatolia, honoured by the now sultan Kaykaus, yet true to the vow of poverty of his youth:
Some biographers say he married the widow of Majd al-Din, mother of al-Qunawi [Ch 1]. In 1221 his second son, Muhammad Sad al-Din, was born, and he buried Badr al-Habashi. Visiting the tomb at noon, he says, al-Habashi answered him from the grave with praises of God, and others saw an immense light rising from it to the sky [Ch 1].
12. Damascus and the work completed
The death of his companion and the political calm in Syria opened a new period. He settled in Damascus, with relations among Ayyubid and Seljuk princes and with respected jurists; Mora therefore gives no credit to stories that he was persecuted there [Ch 1]. The true marvel, he says, is the written legacy.
The Meccan Illuminations
The Futuhat al-makkiyya has 560 chapters, matching the 560 lunar years between the start of the Islamic era and his own birth, and aims to be a compendium of Islamic wisdom. Its six sections correspond to six divine names, all contained in the name the Living (al-Hayy):
| Section | Divine name |
|---|---|
| Spiritual knowledge | The Knower (al-Alim) |
| Spiritual conduct | The Desiring (al-Murid) |
| Spiritual states | The Powerful (al-Qadir) |
| Spiritual dwellings | The Speaker (al-Mutakallim) |
| Mutual dwellings | The Hearer (al-Sami) |
| Spiritual stations | The Seer (al-Basir) |
Table 3. The six sections of the Meccan Illuminations and their governing names [Ch 1].
Elsewhere he describes his heart as clinging to the door of the Divine Presence, «pobre, necesitado, vacío de todo conocimiento» (editor's translation: ‘poor, needy, empty of all knowledge’), and writing down what appears in the exact terms commanded [Ch 1]. He could fill three notebooks a day. Mora notes the apparent paradox that he made a second version of so inspired a text, and that it was not the only one he revised [Ch 1].
The Bezels of Wisdom
In 1229 came the Fusus al-hikam (The Bezels of Wisdom), which he says was given to him whole in a dream:
Little more than a hundred pages in twenty-seven chapters, each devoted to a prophet from Adam to Muhammad, it holds the quintessence of the doctrine and has been both the most attacked and the most commented of his books [Ch 1].
The poetry
He completed al-Diwan al-akbar, also called Diwan al-maarif. His poetic vocation began, he says, when an angel brought him a particle of white light between waking and sleep [Ch 1]. Mora calls him an innovator who used popular forms scorned by the learned, and quotes his view that beauty lies where hearers cannot tell whether the expression is more beautiful than the content [Ch 1].
The Fihris and the Ijaza
Two documents list his works. The Fihris, the oldest, for a disciple, names 248 works, at least 26 from the Andalusian period. The Ijaza to King Muzaffar of Damascus (1224) lists 290 and names seventy of his teachers, again declaring the list incomplete [Ch 1].
13. Last years and death
He had two sons, Muhammad Imad al-Din and Muhammad Sad al-Din (b. Anatolia 1221, d. 1258), and a daughter, Zaynab, whom he once asked in jest, when she was about a year old and still nursing, a question of ritual law; she answered correctly [Ch 1]. Mora observes that the question would scandalise puritans of any age [Ch 1]. Of his wives we know Maryam b. Muhammad b. Abdun al-Bijai, still alive in 1233, and Fatima b. Yunus b. Yusuf, mother of his first son [Ch 1].
He died peacefully in bed in Damascus on 16 November 1240, aged seventy-five. The chief judge and his two sons led the funeral prayers; a traveller reported that the city was covered by a rain of ashes [Ch 1]. The tomb fell into neglect, helped by the attacks of jurists, until the Ottoman sultan Selim I rescued it and in 1518 built the mosque that holds it [Ch 1].
Figure 24. The main stations of Ibn Arabi's life, with the dates the book gives [Ch 1].
14. The posterity
Ibn Arabi lived when Islam faced grave trials: al-Andalus nearing its end and the East undergoing radical change in the time of Genghis Khan [Ch 1]. Mora calls him an axial figure, linking Western and Eastern Sufi traditions in space and the early masters with later ones in time [Ch 1]. Through al-Qunawi his teaching reached the East; it marked Abd al-Karim al-Jili (d. c. 1410), author of al-Insan al-kamil, and spread widely [Ch 1]. Outside Sufism, Mora recalls Asín Palacios's thesis that Dante may have drawn on Akbarian writings for the Divine Comedy [Ch 1].
Part II. Seas Without Shores: Words, Being and the Worlds
Part II of the book, ‘Seas without shores’, sets out the teaching in fifteen chapters (2 to 16). Chapter 2, ‘Words and silences in the divine message’, clears the ground: where Ibn Arabi's thought came from, how he read the Quran, the science of letters, and the place of the religious law.
Chapter 2. Words and Silences in the Divine Message
The question of influences
Nobody grows apart from the culture of his birth, Mora grants, but with Ibn Arabi the question of sources is unusually tangled [Ch 2]. He had solid literary and religious training yet came late to Sufi treatises: Yusuf al-Kumi introduced him to them when he was over twenty, five years after his early illumination [Ch 2]. He cites many Sufis but almost never the great philosophers, Greek or Muslim, an omission Claude Addas reads as evidence that his knowledge of philosophy did not exceed that of a cultivated man of his time [Ch 2].
Neoplatonist or not?
Ibn Arabi has been called a ‘son of Plato’, and many take his Neoplatonism for granted [Ch 2]. Mora asks which Neoplatonism is meant. He distinguishes two historical centres:
| Western Neoplatonism | Eastern Neoplatonism | |
|---|---|---|
| Centre | Alexandria; chief exponent Plotinus | Harran (in present-day Turkey, on the Syrian border), reached by Alexander's armies |
| Shared aim | Finding agreement between Plato and Aristotle | |
| Example in Islam | The Baghdad ‘Peripatetics’, Aristotelian in logic and Neoplatonist in metaphysics | |
Table 4. The two Neoplatonisms Mora distinguishes [Ch 2].
He adds that, in Spanish intellectual history especially, calling someone Neoplatonist often implies discredit: as if the author had to borrow from outside his own tradition. If Ibn Arabi had not read Plato directly, as Addas holds, it is hard to see how Plato could shape him so decisively; and even granting the influence, it would explain little, since all Muslim thinkers of the time were more or less Platonic, Peripatetics included [Ch 2]. The same pattern repeats the old debate over the sources of Sufism itself: Greek philosophy, Hermeticism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, even yoga [Ch 2].
Recent comparisons set Ibn Arabi beside Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa, modern physics, Kierkegaard and even Derrida's deconstruction [Ch 2].
The primacy of the Quran
Mora insists that Ibn Arabi, though never conventional, was neither heterodox nor a heretic [Ch 2]. Against Asín Palacios, who called the Meccan Illuminations the «biblia del esoterismo musulmán» (editor's translation: ‘bible of Muslim esotericism’), recent research shows how thoroughly the Quran structures his work [Ch 2]:
- The Book of Theophanies follows, chapter by chapter, the verses of the second sura, ‘The Cow’.
- The 114 chapters of the section of the Meccan Illuminations on spiritual stations follow the suras of the Quran in reverse order. Mora finds a logic in this: the stations mark the road from the human being to God, while the Quran is a revelation from God to the human being [Ch 2].
A ‘superliteral’ reading
Ibn Arabi's hermeneutic can be called ‘superliteral’, or better, integral: it never cancels the spirit or the many interpretations, but it seeks them in the letter itself [Ch 2]. Mora links it to relegere, one of Cicero's etymologies of ‘religion’: reading the sacred texts again and again to draw out all their senses [Ch 2].
| Verse | Ordinary reading | Ibn Arabi's superliteral reading |
|---|---|---|
| ‘Nothing is like Him’ (42:11) | God has no likeness | Both particles, ka (like) and mithl (equal), are kept: ‘Nothing is like His equal’. That equal is the Perfect Human, created in God's image. |
| ‘Blind, deaf, dumb’ (2:18) | Said of unbelievers | Applied to the malamiyya, since the root k-f-r means ‘to hide’: they conceal their rank. |
| The people of Noah (Bezels) | Unbelievers drowned | Ascetics who plunge into the ocean of divine perplexity; annihilated in God, they find no helper but God. |
| ‘My mercy embraces all things’ (7:156) | A general promise | All creatures are returned to endless beatitude (apocatastasis), excluding eternal punishment. |
| ‘All perishes save His Face’ | Everything but God's Face is extinguished | ‘His’ refers to the thing: it perishes in its form but not in its face, its reality. |
Table 5. Examples of the superliteral reading [Ch 2].
The chapter on the science of letters in the Meccan Illuminations ends with a warning:
The prophets and their heirs are those who come back from those depths out of mercy for the universe; those who stay at the goal never resurface, and no one profits from them [Ch 2].
The science of letters
The ‘science of letters’ (ilm al-huruf) is the most concise and allusive mode of Islamic sapiential expression, close to the Hebrew Kabbalah, and open to less noble uses such as magic [Ch 2]. Strictly it is a science of consonants, since Arabic script notes only consonants:
The vowel brings the inert written letter to life, as the Breath of the All-Merciful breathed spirit into Adam's clay and into the body of Mary [Ch 2]. Mora notes that the Zohar was written down in thirteenth-century Spain, where Ibn Arabi spent nearly half his life. In Islam, Ali ibn Abi Talib (d. 661) is held to be the founder of the science, and it is fully developed in Sahl al-Tustari and his school [Ch 2].
Figure 31. Reading a letter in three dimensions, with the division of the alphabet into fourteen luminous and fourteen dark letters [Ch 2].
The numerical message of the Quran is held to be as important as the verbal one. Ibn Arabi used it, along with other visionary revelations, to predict the Muslim victory at Alarcos in 1195, from the value of the words «Te hemos concedido una clara victoria» (editor's translation: ‘We have granted you a clear victory’) (48:1) [Ch 2]. For him language is a community of living beings, each letter with its function. Letters are generated by the rotation of the celestial spheres arranged around the outermost sphere, and everything that exists, angels, constellations, planets, days, hours, elements, is governed by one or more letters [Ch 2]. Beyond magic and divination, the main aim of the science is the supreme name that crowns the ninety-nine names; whoever gains it attains the fundamental wisdom, complete knowledge of oneself [Ch 2].
The religious law
Ibn Arabi gives many pages to law (sharia), jurisprudence and rites, and Mora takes this as a real axis of his thought, not a concession [Ch 2]. He is not a batini, an esotericist who sets aside the outer form of revelation. He has often been tied to the literalist (Zahiri) school of Ibn Hazm of Córdoba (d. 1064), and once saw in a dream a light enveloping the Prophet and Ibn Hazm, but he refused to be anyone's follower:
His position is eclectic and conciliatory, seeking to validate the views of the Hanbali, Maliki, Hanafi, Shafii and Zahiri schools [Ch 2]. The sources of law are four: Quran, Sunna, consensus and, rarely, analogy; the first two are the active foundations [Ch 2].
The burden of proof always lies on whoever wants to set up a prohibition. He is severe with jurists who multiply bans where the law is silent, and no less with esotericists who twist the message to escape outward observance [Ch 2].
Figure 33. The spiritual path begins with the law and ends with it; the highest saints look like ordinary believers [Ch 2].
Revealed law and essential reality are the start and goal of Sufism, joined by the path (tariqa). The Way is circular: it starts with the sharia and ends with it. Hence the highest saints, the malamiyya, cannot be told apart from ordinary believers [Ch 2]. Mora ties Ibn Arabi's scrupulous respect for the law to his malami vocation: a pure servant who defends no possession, material, intellectual or spiritual [Ch 2]. Yet the law is not rigid. «Dios sólo impone al alma aquello que es capaz de soportar» (editor's translation: ‘God imposes on the soul only what it can bear’) (2:286), and forgiveness and mercy have the first and last word [Ch 2].
Nothing is vile
Every situation, emotion or experience, even anger, attachment or jealousy, is noble in essence because it is rooted in a divine attribute; it becomes ignoble only when it unfolds outside the bounds of the law [Ch 2].
Even disobedience has a place. The forbidden tree of Adam and Eve is, in the Akbarian reading, the tree of duality, and eating from it was needed for love, forgiveness and a whole series of divine names to emerge, names unknown to angels who cannot disobey [Ch 2]. The secrets of forgiveness are revealed only through rebellion; total love is fully known only in distance, separation and exile [Ch 2]. The gravest disobedience, then, is something else:
That ignorance, Mora adds, is ignorance of our indestructible link with the supreme source of existence [Ch 2].
Chapter 3. Unity of Being: ‘There Is Nothing in Being but God’
Martin Lings reports that a prayer Ibn Arabi used began «Hazme entrar, oh Señor, en las profundidades del océano de tu unidad infinita» (editor's translation: ‘Make me enter, O Lord, the depths of the ocean of Your infinite unity’) [Ch 3]. The chapter sets out the master beam of the doctrine, the unity of God or, philosophically, the unity of being (wahdat al-wujud), with its three categories, its theophanies, the hidden treasure, the fixed entities, the divine names and the Cloud.
Being as ‘finding’
The Arabic wujud, usually ‘being’ or ‘existence’, originally means ‘to find’; the participle mawjud, ‘found’, is applied to concrete existents, what Aristotelian-Thomist philosophy calls ‘entities’ [Ch 3]. Particular entities are determinations of unlimited existence (al-wujud al-mutlaq). They share in existence without being existence itself; what defines each is a privation, a limit [Ch 3].
Two kinds of unity
| Henadic unity (ahadiyya) | Monadic unity (wahidiyya) | |
|---|---|---|
| Other names | Pure, exclusive unity | Plural, inclusive unity |
| What it is | Unity in itself, beyond any relation | Unity that contains in potential all numbers; multiplicity is its unfolding |
| Linked theophany | The invisible, essential theophany | The visible theophany in the cosmos |
Table 6. The two unities distinguished in Chapter 3 [Ch 3].
Haydar Amuli, whom Corbin calls the most brilliant Shi'i commentator on Ibn Arabi, uses the image of the ocean and the waves:
The integral sage ‘sees with two eyes’: ocean and waves, light and colours, unity and multiplicity at once, without one view clouding the other [Ch 3]. Mora quotes Toshihiko Izutsu:
The principle echoes Islam's basic teaching, tawhid, in the profession of faith ‘There is no god but God’ [Ch 3]. Mora warns against turning God, the pure act of being, into a supreme entity set beside others, the danger of putting ‘the’ before ‘being’ [Ch 3].
Between the necessary and the impossible
Three ontological categories clarify the relation of oceans and waves: the necessary being (wajib al-wujud), the possible (mumkin) and the impossible (muhal) [Ch 3].
Figure 38. The three ontological categories and the mirror image of the possible [Ch 3].
Of the first only being can be said; it depends on nothing and is unknowable in itself. The impossible is pure nothing that can never become concrete. Between them, the possible can receive existence and non-existence alike and marks the limits of human knowledge [Ch 3]:
Because it is and is not at once, the possible leads to perplexity (hayra) and has no contrary [Ch 3]. Ibn Arabi's favourite figure is the mirror: the possible is the image of unlimited existence reflected in the mirror of absolute nothing. Equally drawn to both poles, it needs God to tip the balance:
Mora stresses that these are not mere notions but processes of self-knowledge: approaching the necessary means stripping away the contingent in ourselves [Ch 3].
Theophanies
What is being? No answer of the form ‘this or that’ is possible, which recalls the reply Moses received on Sinai: ‘I am who I am’ [Ch 3]. Ibn Arabi gives analogies instead, above all light: when a ray passes through a prism it breaks into different colours, yet we are always seeing the same light; the colours have a certain reality without independent existence [Ch 3]. ‘Theophany’ is Greek for divine appearance; its Arabic root (tajalli) relates to removing the bride's veil on the wedding night, and Ibn Arabi defines theophanies as «las luces de lo invisible que se revelan en el corazón» (editor's translation: ‘the lights of the invisible revealed in the heart’) [Ch 3]. They are the limitations God sets on Himself in order to be known. What unfolds the cosmos is neither creation ex nihilo in the usual sense nor an overflow of being as in Plotinus and Philo, but a movement of increasing determination in which absolute existence adapts to the capacity of each possible [Ch 3].
| Theophany | Names | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Invisible | ‘Most holy effusion’ (al-fayd al-aqdas), essential theophany, mercy of mercy | In the divine knowledge, the possibles receive their preparedness; depends on nothing and determines all |
| Visible | ‘Holy effusion’ (al-fayd al-muqaddas), sensory theophany | Creatures emerge in manifest reality according to the capacities set by the first |
Table 7. Two theophanies, matching the two unities [Ch 3].
A prophetic saying alludes to both: ‘God created the creatures in darkness, then poured His Light upon them’ [Ch 3].
‘I was a hidden treasure’
In its unmanifest face, being in itself is an inviolable metaphysical mystery. The Essence, beyond all relations, is not yet a ‘divinity’:
Yet reality holds a principle of division: the longing to be known, voiced in the famous saying: «tesoro escondido y amé ser conocido. Por eso, creé a las criaturas para que me conociesen» (editor's translation: ‘[I was a] hidden treasure and I loved to be known. So I created the creatures that they might know Me’) [Ch 3]. This love is a synonym of existence, breath and movement; the movement from non-existence to existence is the movement of love, on God's side and the cosmos's [Ch 3]. The mercy that embraces all things is not an emotion but the gift of being through the Breath of the All-Merciful: «La existencia misma es una misericordia para cada cosa existente» (editor's translation: ‘Existence itself is a mercy for each existing thing’). Izutsu calls it ontological mercy: indiscriminate, comprehensive, universal [Ch 3].
The fixed entities
The fixed entities (ayan thabita) are the unchanging content of divine consciousness. They are called non-existent because they never leave their original state: «No huelen siquiera ... el perfume de la existencia» (editor's translation: ‘They do not even smell the perfume of existence’) [Ch 3]. Hence a striking rule:
The non-existent draws existence, the known acts on the knower, the beloved changes the lover [Ch 3]. The concept goes back to the Mutazili school, and Ibn Barrajan of Seville (d. 1141) also used it; Ibn Arabi's contribution is to make the entities the hinge of the whole relation between God and cosmos [Ch 3]. So what appears is God, or His theophanic expression, in its place of appearance, while the cosmos stays veiled:
The most beautiful names
If being is said in many ways, as Aristotle held, the divine names are the words in which God says Himself [Ch 3]. The Quran says four times that ‘God has the most beautiful names’ (7:180; 17:110; 20:8; 59:24); ninety-nine are explicit and many others implicit, often in pairs [Ch 3]. Allah is the totality of opposed names: the Forgiver and the Avenger, the Life-giver and the Slayer, First and Last, Outward and Inward [Ch 3]. Each name has two connotations: God, who is named, and what distinguishes it from the others [Ch 3].
God and the Lord
Names and possibles need each other: the Lord (rabb) requires a vassal (marbub):
The mere preparedness for existence is a kind of ontological prayer calling silently from the depths of nothing [Ch 3]. Every being worships a particular Lord, a personification of one name; only the universal human being relates to all lordly relations at once [Ch 3].
Figure 42. The Essence, the comprehensive name, the particular names and their servants [Ch 3].
The Cloud of the possibles
The possibles are called ‘lower mothers’ and the names ‘higher fathers’, and Ibn Arabi describes creation as a marriage: the entity of the possible is the ‘wife’, divine regard through desire and love the ‘marriage’, and the giving of existence the ‘offspring’ [Ch 3]. The Breath of the All-Merciful carries this: inbreath and outbreath illustrate continuous creation, and the root of breathing is love, a movement of longing toward the beloved [Ch 3].
The Cloud (al-ama) is the totality of names and possibles, the raw material through which hidden treasures are exteriorised. Like a human breath, which is not the person, the Cloud is God and not God [Ch 3]. It is the seat of the name ‘Lord’ as the Throne is the seat of the All-Merciful, and the first thing about which ‘where’ can be asked [Ch 3]. Ibn Arabi gives it several names:
| Name of the Cloud | What it stresses |
|---|---|
| Reality of realities, universal reality, genus of genera | It admits every definition; neither prior nor posterior to the cosmos, but the root of all |
| Absolute imagination (al-khayal al-mutlaq) | It virtually contains every entity; illusory veil and place of manifestation |
| Nature (al-tabia) | The undifferentiated sum of qualities in creation |
| Prime matter (hayula, Greek hyle) | The matrix of all beings, existent, non-existent and not non-existent |
Table 8. The names of the Cloud [Ch 3].
For the individual, the Cloud is the primordial condition, the point of return into which the traveller must plunge to meet his Lord again [Ch 3].
Chapter 4. The Presence of the Worlds
Like many traditional cosmologies, the Sufis divide reality into degrees of existence through which the light of being and knowledge spreads, meeting more or less resistance [Ch 4]. Chapter 4 maps those degrees: the three worlds, the twenty-eight letters of the Breath, involution and evolution, the life of all things, causality, and evil.
Three worlds
The Quran calls God ‘knower of the visible and the invisible’ (13:9). Between the two poles lies an intermediate domain, and the three receive several sets of names [Ch 4]:
| Plane | Older name | Faculty | Stuff |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spiritual, the absent | malakut, world of sovereignty | Intellect | Light (angels) |
| Intermediate, the barzakh | jabarut, mundus imaginalis | Imagination | Fire (jinn) |
| Visible, the witnessed | mulk, the kingdom | Sensation | Clay, dust (bodies) |
Table 9. The three worlds and their correspondences [Ch 4].
Unlike other Sufis, Ibn Arabi places jabarut in the middle, as the world of imagination [Ch 4]. Mora adds that the three planes are also modes of consciousness, levels of identity and ways of knowing, each a further [Ch 4].
The Breath and the twenty-eight letters
Creation is a movement of love: the Breath of the All-Merciful passing through the points of articulation of existence, as human breath passes through the throat, palate and lips to form letters [Ch 4]. The strata of the cosmos are linked to the twenty-eight letters, ordered not by grammar but by place of articulation. William Chittick notes this is only one of four orderings Ibn Arabi uses; the others are temporal, spatial and qualitative [Ch 4].
Figure 46. The cosmos as the Breath articulated in twenty-eight letters, following the scheme printed in Chapter 4 [Ch 4].
The spiritual world without form
A prophetic saying speaks of a white land where the sun takes thirty days to cross the sky, peopled by creatures who do not know that God has been disobeyed or that He created Adam and Iblis. These are the enraptured cherubic angels, matched on earth by the hidden saints [Ch 4]. One of them, called the supreme Pen, First Intellect, white pearl and eagle, receives complete knowledge of creation [Ch 4]. God manifested His Light to the ‘dust’, the first universal matter, and each thing in it received that Light according to its capacity [Ch 4].
The Pen draws the words of existence from the dark ink of the primordial Cloud and writes them on the Preserved Tablet, also called Universal Soul, emerald and dove: the first existent to emerge from another [Ch 4]. Pen and Tablet give the prototypes of activity and receptivity, of masculine and feminine; their union engenders Nature and universal matter [Ch 4]. Nature is the unmanifest side of the cosmos and acts through four qualities, heat, cold, dryness and moisture; universal matter underlies all creation except Pen and Tablet [Ch 4]. The four principles, spirit, soul, nature and body, are to be recognised in oneself, while remembering that they «son herramientas conceptuales que carecen de existencia salvo los trazos que dejan en el cosmos y en nuestra mente» (editor's translation: ‘are conceptual tools that have no existence except the traces they leave in the cosmos and in our minds’) [Ch 4]. Ibn Arabi treats them allegorically in The Epistle of the Tree and the Four Birds, probably from his Andalusian years [Ch 4].
Bodies, forms, and the world of generation
The Throne, spherical, the seat of the All-Merciful (20:5), is the first body with a definite configuration, though not yet dense. Within it is the Footstool, and within that the starless sphere, divided into the twelve zodiacal mansions [Ch 4]. Below the heaven of fixed stars lies the Aristotelian ‘world of generation and corruption’, subject to time. The seven planetary spheres correspond to prophets and days of the week, and the sublunar spheres to the four elements, arranged in concentric circles [Ch 4].
Up to here, only the receptacles are in place. Then come their inhabitants: minerals, plants, animals, angels, jinn and humans. The human being, body of clay and spirit of divine breath, stands at the beginning and end of the series, seed and fruit of the tree of the universe [Ch 4]. The last degree, the spiritual stations, is not a separate category but the differentiation of human beings into an unlimited number of types and capacities; every human experience marks a degree of nearness on the path of return [Ch 4].
Involution and evolution
The first twenty-one letters, from First Intellect to the element earth, are the descending stages, reaching their lowest point in earth; the remaining seven ascend [Ch 4]. Creation continues through the kingdoms, and the last of each is the first of the next:
Everything lives
The cosmos and all its inhabitants, animate or seemingly inanimate, have life and speech. The secret sap of life flows everywhere; the universe cannot be split into living and non-living [Ch 4]. Explaining the name the Living, Ibn Arabi says:
Causality
Many Muslim philosophers called God the cause of the cosmos. Ibn Arabi considered it spiritual discourtesy and bad logic [Ch 4]:
The relation of God and cosmos implies no temporal priority but simultaneity; it would be absurd to speak of an interval between necessity and possibility [Ch 4].
The problem of evil
Ibn Arabi is not strictly a theologian or philosopher, yet he raises the question of evil. Following ancient and medieval philosophy, evil is privation of existence:
The unmanifest side of God cannot be called positive or negative, nor the origin of evil, since it transcends cause and effect. God is not the creator of evil, for He creates things only according to what He knows of them; nor can moral labels be stuck on the cosmos or nature [Ch 4]. Judging an experience good or bad, pleasant or painful, is wholly subjective: nothing is bad in itself, and what we call evil often hides some good [Ch 4].
Chapter 5. The Paradox of God
Revealed texts, mystics and philosophers have all tried to represent the ineffable, from an imposing being with human emotions to a principle beyond any description [Ch 5]. Chapter 5 shows how Ibn Arabi holds together the two faces of God, the hidden treasure of the Essence and the endless theophanies, and why the result is perplexity.
Incomparability and similarity
Islamic theology calls the unmanifest and manifest aspects of God incomparability (tanzih) and similarity (tashbih), roughly transcendence and immanence; Mora compares them with apophatic and cataphatic theology in Christian mysticism [Ch 5]. The two main schools of Islamic theology hold, respectively, each side: the Mutazilis incomparability, the Asharis similarity [Ch 5]. For Ibn Arabi each catches only part of the truth, and he is especially critical of those who cling to incomparability cut off from similarity [Ch 5].
God is incomparable and similar at once, knowable and unknowable, near and far, bound by no positive or negative category, not even by the absence of limits [Ch 5]. Hence a definition of God is impossible:
The same holds for the human being: any definition must take in inner and outer, spirit and body [Ch 5]. Ibn Arabi returns to the verse 42:11 with his reading «Nada hay como “su” igual» (editor's translation: ‘Nothing is like His equal’), and Mora notes the two readings do not contradict each other but mark stages of the mystical path [Ch 5]. In sum, Ibn Arabi holds similarity within incomparability and incomparability within similarity, and adds that once this is established the veil should be let fall and the truth hidden from those not ready for it [Ch 5].
The union of opposites
Quoting the Sufi Abu Said al-Kharraz (d. c. 890), Ibn Arabi says God can only be conceived as a union of opposites, since ‘He is the First and the Last, the Outward and the Inward’ (57:3) [Ch 5]. God has no opposite because He gathers them all. Mora calls this the thin, slippery razor's edge of the Akbarian view: God is ‘yes’ and ‘no’, and beyond both [Ch 5].
In the Book of Theophanies, Ibn Arabi records an imaginal dialogue with Dhu l-Nun the Egyptian (d. 859), and says he is surprised by those who hold that «Dios es contrario a todo aquello que nos representamos, imaginamos o concebimos acerca de Él» (editor's translation: ‘God is the contrary of all that we represent, imagine or conceive of Him’) [Ch 5]. Finally, the shahada, ‘There is no god but God’, is read as: the God purified of ideological artefacts, preconceptions and prejudices about God [Ch 5].
Reason and imagination
Incomparability is the inevitable corollary of the analytical, rational activity of philosophy and theology. Reason cannot admit that God might show Himself in a form [Ch 5]. It has two functions: to govern passion, and to exhaust its own limits [Ch 5]. Passion is not bad in itself but the fuel of all that lives; Ibn Arabi distinguishes an accidental, false passion, which reason should not follow, from an inherent one, agreeable to a person's nature: in the well-being of the constitution lies the well-being of religion, and in that, happiness [Ch 5].
So the mother can be daughter of her son, as old Fatima of Córdoba told Ibn Arabi's mother, or as Dante sings of the Virgin [Ch 5]. Reason's final task is, paradoxically, to reach its own limits [Ch 5]. Reason analyses and divides; while reason tries to ‘tie down’ reality, imagination tries to undo every knot and dissolve limits, with a synthetic understanding able to reconcile opposites [Ch 5].
| Reason alone | Imagination alone | Both together | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Result | Arid, sterile systems; a rarefied God that does not feed the soul | Crude superstition | Incomparability and similarity combined |
| Excess | Gratuitous speculation | Uncontrolled fantasy | |
| What it sees | God is limited by nothing | God appears in every form | Both at once |
Table 10. Reason, imagination and their union [Ch 5].
The combination is hard, Ibn Arabi warns: it is a special knowledge, not acquired by reflection but given by God in the heart [Ch 5]:
Perplexity
The proper condition of those who seek God is unceasing perplexity (hayra), stirred by His opposed faces [Ch 5]. Uniting affirmation and negation, perplexity goes beyond dualist thinking [Ch 5].
Figure 53. Perplexity as circular motion around the Pole, against the straight line that strays from its goal [Ch 5].
The one on a straight path goes off at a tangent, chasing what was always within him; for him there is a ‘from’, a ‘to’ and a ‘between’ [Ch 5]. The true knower is perplexed not because he is lost but because he has found himself, and what he finds is paradox [Ch 5]. The Prophet himself prayed for more:
Part III. Imagination, Light and the Heart
Chapters 6 to 8 turn from what is to how it is perceived: the isthmus of imagination, the light beyond images, and the heart that turns with every self-showing of God.
Chapter 6. The Barzakh and the Light of Imagination
The barzakh, meaning barrier, isthmus, interworld, is a key notion of the Akbarian edifice and appears several times in the Quran [Ch 6]. Chapter 6 shows its forms, the three kinds of imagination, the Earth of Reality, imagination as light, its role in worship, and its limits.
Forms of the intermediate
Except for the unmanifest side of God, everything else is a borderline state between being and non-being [Ch 6]. Mora lists the main kinds:
The barzakh is the widest presence of existence: imagination «incorpora los significados y sutiliza los objetos sensibles» (editor's translation: ‘embodies meanings and subtilises sensible objects’) [Ch 6].
Three kinds of imagination
Figure 57. Unlimited, discontiguous and contiguous imagination [Ch 6].
As unlimited imagination, all that is not God is image or apparition; the cosmos is a product of divine imagination, and existence has a metaphorical character [Ch 6]:
Still, Mora notes, the cosmos is not wholly illusory; being the meeting of being and non-being, its status is ambiguous [Ch 6].
The vast Earth of God
The discontiguous imagination is an autonomous world, the ‘Earth of God’ of the verse ‘My earth is vast, so worship Me’ [Ch 6]. Tradition says it came from the clay left over from Adam:
If the Throne and all it holds were placed in that Earth, they would be lost in it. There most things logic deems impossible become possible; it has gardens, paradises, living beings and minerals, all endowed with speech, and it cannot receive a body of clay [Ch 6]. The bodies taken by angels and jinn, and the forms seen in dreams, are subtle bodies of this domain [Ch 6]:
After knowledge of the divine names, Ibn Arabi says, no knowledge is more complete than that of imagination: the centrepiece of the necklace, to which the senses rise and the meanings descend [Ch 6].
Imagination as light
Ibn Arabi pictures unlimited imagination as a horn of light through which the archangel Israfil blows [Ch 6]. It is made of light because light is the immediate cause of manifestation: without it nothing would be perceived, no objects of knowledge, sense or imagination [Ch 6]. Since the Real is Light, every object of knowledge relates to Him, and «no existe objeto de conocimiento sino Dios» (editor's translation: ‘there is no object of knowledge but God’) [Ch 6].
Worship and image
One of Ibn Arabi's main contributions, Mora says, is to draw attention to the epistemic value of imagination [Ch 6]. The key is the hadith ‘Worship God as if you saw Him’: the ‘as if’ is the domain of imagination [Ch 6]. Worship and knowledge are equivalent in Sufism; Ibn Abbas, cousin and companion of the Prophet, already linked them, and the verse ‘I created humans and jinn only to worship Me’ (51:56) amounts to saying that the final aim of existence is immediate knowledge of the divine reality [Ch 6]. The body itself is the place of worship:
Every act of worship is necessarily an act of imagination; no one can worship God without representing Him somehow, which seems to contradict the meditative advice to transcend images [Ch 6]. Yet worship should end in direct vision (ruya). Taste and tradition leave no doubt it will occur, though reason doubts it [Ch 6]. Before that, perfection of faith is to worship as if seeing Him, ‘for if you do not see Him, He sees you’ [Ch 6]:
Since in the end He worships Himself, right worship begins by renouncing any reward:
The limits of imagination
The horn is wide at one end and narrow at the other [Ch 6]. Its width is the greatest possible, since its rule extends over all existing things. Its narrowness lies in this: it cannot receive anything, sensible or suprasensible, divine Majesty or Essence, except through a form, and so it is barred from the domain of pure intelligibles [Ch 6].
This prepares the next chapter, on what lies beyond images.
Chapter 7. ‘Light upon Light’: Beyond Images
Where does the immediate vision of God take place? Chapter 7 starts from a prophetic tradition, not accepted by all jurists, in which Muhammad says he saw his Lord in sleep in the form of a beautiful beardless youth, and moves past the imaginal to theophanies without form, the annihilation of the self, and the warning against confusing this with union [Ch 7].
Beyond the imaginal
But some lovers, Ibn Arabi says, are drunk with God with no imaginal mediation, grasping an unconditioned divine object in the field of pure meaning [Ch 7]. In the imaginal world ideas take form, in the sensible world they gain matter, but in the domain of spirits stripped of any substrate they are only spotless luminosity [Ch 7]. Only light perceives light:
God is ‘Light upon light’, and ‘sight does not reach Him’ because He is light and is perceived only through Himself [Ch 7]. Mora insists on the distinction between visible and invisible theophanies, formal and formless, and on the mark of the latter: the provisional abolition of the self. No one can see God and remain alive [Ch 7].
Ecstasy and annihilation
All we can do for the final reality to surface is get out of the way. This loss of reference points, even of identity, defines annihilation (fana) [Ch 7]. It cannot be separated from subsistence (baqa): the negation of the limited ego and the affirmation of what remains [Ch 7]. The shaykh Abd Allah al-Ansari (d. 1089) put it:
The Quran echoes it: ‘All on earth is annihilated and only the Face of your Lord subsists’ (55:26-27); ‘All perishes save His Face’ (28:88) [Ch 7]. Annihilation and subsistence also happen constantly in our supposedly solid reality, through the renewal of creation [Ch 7].
| Lights of beauty | Lights of majesty | |
|---|---|---|
| Domain | Imaginal | Intelligible, pure meanings beyond form |
| Quality | Resplendent | In Asín Palacios's rendering, dark and ‘burning’ |
| Effect | Accompany the polishing of the heart's mirror by remembrance | Consume individual consciousness |
| Christian echo | John of the Cross: «la noche más clara que la alborada» |
Table 12. Two kinds of light on the way to annihilation [Ch 7].
The path toward annihilation is marked by signs: sweetness, rapture, beatitude, inability to move the body. Ibn Arabi stresses that ecstasy, as Asín Palacios calls the state, is unpredictable [Ch 7]. Yet its main quality is its epistemic value: awareness of one's own existential nothingness and ontological poverty [Ch 7]. That awareness is not exclusive to Sufis; Mora quotes Meister Eckhart:
He sets beside it Marguerite Porete, ‘the martyred Marguerite’ [Ch 7].
Rare and transient
For Ibn Arabi annihilation of the self is rarely complete and reached only transiently by some. When the veils lift, the glories of His Face shine and the name of the cosmos vanishes; but the veils cannot always be lifted [Ch 7]. Those who rise to formless theophanies are the people of blame, specifically the afrad, the solitaries, Muhammadan heirs established in the domain of pure light and naked meanings [Ch 7]. The divine reality as it is in itself is too lofty for any limited eye: only God sees God [Ch 7].
Not union
Annihilation-subsistence must not be confused with union (ittihad), which presupposes two independent entities [Ch 7]. If God is with us wherever we are, seeking Him makes no sense:
God has no equal and no opposite; every attribution of nearness or distance, union or separation, is a human construction [Ch 7]. The chapter ends: «nadie salvo Él puede verlo, y nadie salvo Él puede velarlo» (editor's translation: ‘no one but He can see Him, and no one but He can veil Him’) [Ch 7].
Chapter 8. The Science of the Heart
As the macrocosm reduces to three planes, the human microcosm reduces to spirit, soul and body; traditional Sufi psychology sometimes places the heart between soul and spirit [Ch 8]. Chapter 8 presents the heart as mirror, as the ‘container’ of God, and as the place where the God of beliefs is formed.
Names of the heart
As qalb, the word carries the connotations of mirror and of constant change (taqallub) [Ch 8].
Figure 65. The four levels of the heart and the heart as a colourless mirror [Ch 8].
Ibn Arabi compares the heart, polished by detachment and remembrance, to a mirror without colour of its own, taking on the appearance and colour of the images it receives [Ch 8]. So it has no state of its own: a detached heart, turning between the fingers of the All-Merciful [Ch 8]. In the Book of Theophanies the theophany of the heart is the main dwelling of the servant on the path of annihilation and subsistence [Ch 8].
The heart that contains God
In chapter 12 of the Bezels, Ibn Arabi assigns the wisdom of the heart to the Arab prophet Shuayb, whom some identify with the biblical Jethro [Ch 8]. He opens with a famous saying:
He adds the words of Abu Yazid al-Bistami: if the divine Throne and all it holds were multiplied to infinity in a corner of the knower's heart, he would not notice [Ch 8]. Since theophanies vary with forms, the heart expands or contracts to fit the form of each [Ch 8]. More surprising still, Ibn Arabi says that not only does God appear to His servant, but the servant reveals himself to God: through the invisible theophany, the servant's preparedness determines how God appears [Ch 8].
The God created in beliefs
The heart is also likened to the setting that has the exact shape of the stone placed in it [Ch 8]. A central theme of the Shuayb chapter is belief (itiqad, aqida), and the struggle between reason and heart. Beliefs are ramifications from one centre, and Ibn Arabi links the name Shuayb to tashaub, ‘ramification’ [Ch 8].
The man who said his heart could welcome every religious form also wrote that he believed in all beliefs, since each reveals a portion of reality in its own irreplaceable way [Ch 8]:
Partial belief systems condition our view of the infinite. The hadith «Yo estoy en la noción que mi servidor alberga de mí» (editor's translation: ‘I am in My servant's notion of Me’) means God appears to each only in the form of his belief [Ch 8]. The god of beliefs has limits and is the one the heart contains; the absolute God cannot be contained by anything [Ch 8]. On the Day of Resurrection, Ibn Arabi says, God will appear first in a recognisable form, then in an unacceptable one, then again in a recognisable one [Ch 8].
The infinite can enter the finite only through the images we form of it; some are cruder than others, yet all are valid for those who hold them [Ch 8]. The adept of the science of the heart tries not to deny God but to witness Him in every way, becoming the raw material of all beliefs [Ch 8]:
Everyone knows the part and not the whole, except the Perfect Human, whom God taught all the names (2:31) [Ch 8].
Part IV. Creation, Knowledge, Love and Worship
Chapters 9 to 12 follow the self-showing of God into time and back: a creation renewed at each instant, and the three unities of knowledge, love and worship by which the human being returns to the book.
Chapter 9. Continuous Creation
Ibn Arabi closes chapter 12 of the Bezels with the doctrine of continuous creation. Given the heart's openness, its constant turning matches a cosmos that is itself made anew at every instant [Ch 9]. Chapter 9 sets out the doctrine, its critics and allies, and the ‘master of the instant’.
The thesis of recurrent or ‘new creation’ (al-khalq al-jadid) has served philosophers and mystics alike [Ch 9]. Ibn Arabi grounds it in the Quran: ‘They are in doubt about a new creation’ (50:15); ‘Each day He is busy with some matter’ [Ch 9]. Mora quotes José Ferrater Mora on how it has been held by most great Western philosophers, from Thomas Aquinas to Descartes and Leibniz [Ch 9].
| Position | What it holds | Ibn Arabi's verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Ashari atomists | Accidents are renewed at every instant; substance persists | Incomplete, the fruit of mere speculation; it grasps the truth only in part |
| ‘Subjectivists’ or ‘sophists’ (hisbaniyya) | Neither substances nor accidents stay the same from moment to moment; so no objective reality | Right that the whole cosmos changes, wrong not to see the unity beneath the change |
| Ibn Arabi | Final reality exceeds substance and accident; both appear and vanish within one unlimited existence |
Table 13. Three views of renewal, as Chapter 9 presents them [Ch 9].
The people of unveiling:
The cosmos vanishes at every moment and is renewed by the life-giving breath of mercy; apparent continuity is a series of discontinuous existences [Ch 9]. Renewal goes with non-repetition: each transformation unique, each moment exclusive, each detail irreplaceable, as fingerprints show [Ch 9].
Creation and destruction do not happen in successive moments: the moment a phenomenon is extinguished coincides with the moment of its manifestation [Ch 9]. Ibn Arabi uses the same idea to explain the charismata (karamat) of saints, commenting on the feat of Asaf ibn Bajiya, companion of Solomon, who in the blink of an eye ‘materialised’ the throne of Bilqis, queen of Sheba (27:38-40). There was no real movement of the throne, only a disappearance and a reappearance no one notices except those with knowledge [Ch 9].
Chapter 10. Unity of Knowledge: ‘Whoever Knows Himself Knows His Lord’
The chapter opens with an epigraph from the Ocaña manuscript, «La búsqueda del saber es, para Dios, la mejor de las oraciones» (editor's translation: ‘The search for knowledge is, for God, the best of prayers’) [Ch 10]. Seeking knowledge is an imperative for every Muslim, and for Ibn Arabi it ends in knowing oneself.
God's knowledge of Himself is identical with His knowledge of the cosmos, known eternally though qualified by non-existence [Ch 10]. In the human being, knowledge can transmute desire into love and lets one verify the unity of being [Ch 10].
Kinds of knowledge
Unlike other authors, Ibn Arabi uses ilm (knowledge) and marifa (gnosis) interchangeably for the highest understanding [Ch 10]. He takes care not to mix orders of understanding:
| Channel | Source | Character |
|---|---|---|
| The six faculties | Five senses and reason | Ordinary knowledge; conjectural when speculative or inherited from tradition |
| Direct apprehension | Divine revelation, called opening, illumination, unveiling, taste | Innate, not from outside; perfect knowledge comes when God lifts the veils from hearts and eyes |
Table 14. Two channels of knowledge [Ch 10].
Knowing the cosmos
‘We will show them Our signs on the horizons and in themselves until it is clear to them that it is the Truth’ (41:53) [Ch 10]. All knowledge comes through an indication, since ilm derives from alama (sign). God is a sign of the cosmos, and the cosmos a mark of God in our knowledge of Him [Ch 10]. In a certain station one sees that nothing walks in the cosmos without carrying its message, like a messenger [Ch 10].
‘Whoever knows himself knows his Lord’
Mora recalls the Delphic ‘Know thyself’ and Socrates, then the prophetic saying that many Sufis before and after Ibn Arabi commented [Ch 10]:
The saying does not claim absolute unity of God and self: whoever knows himself does not become God or unite with Him; one kind of understanding lets one infer the other [Ch 10]. Self-knowledge abolishes the belief that the self exists apart from its source, and amounts to a mystical form of the profession of faith [Ch 10]. Strikingly, the self that is the main veil also holds the main clue:
The mystic sees himself in God and God sees Himself in the human, like two mirrors facing each other; the receiver sees only his own form in the mirror of reality, never reality itself [Ch 10]:
Figure 73. Self-knowledge and knowledge of God as two mirrors facing each other [Ch 10].
The silent wisdom
Knowledge of God is unfathomable: the deeper one goes, the more one knows that one does not know. Ibn Arabi writes that Abu Bakr, like Socrates, openly professed ignorance as part of his wisdom; but there are also sages who do not even profess ignorance and keep a holy silence that limits their understanding in no direction, positive or negative [Ch 10]. Only the seals of the prophets and saints and their heirs reach this silent intuition, whose seat is the Niche of Lights of the Light Verse [Ch 10].
Chapter 11. Unity of Love: ‘There Is Only One Lover and One Beloved’
Knowledge is the cornerstone of the teaching, yet the passionate pages on love are no less essential [Ch 11]. Chapter 11 draws mainly on Ibn Arabi's treatise on love in the Meccan Illuminations (chapter 178), alternating fiery words with exhaustive analysis of passion in all its forms.
Love and knowledge
The word ‘love’ (hubb, mahabba) has been cheapened over the centuries; it is easy to say ‘I love you’ without knowing who loves or who is loved [Ch 11]. Ibn Arabi ranks knowledge above love:
Yet he also writes:
Every desire, longing or attachment, however small or degraded, is the same love misunderstood and cut off from the whole, ignorant of who the true lover and beloved are [Ch 11]. Ibn Arabi first lays the scriptural foundations of love, citing both the Torah and the Quran [Ch 11].
The descent of love
Whatever its name, love bursts in mysteriously and unplanned. It can be known but not fully defined:
Love is a knowledge of taste: unless we live it we do not know it, and even then we cannot explain it [Ch 11]. Mora follows Ibn Arabi's degrees:
| Degree | What happens |
|---|---|
| Presentiment | The beloved is not yet distinct, but the symptoms are there: ardent desire, exhaustion, sleeplessness. The lover seeks the Beloved by the Beloved: «¡El Amado está en mí y, no obstante, no lo está!» |
| Love of love | Passion so full that the lover forgets the person loved, as Qays, the mad Majnun, with Layla |
| Imaginal love | Ibn Arabi says his love took before his eyes the sensible form of his Beloved |
| Sensible love | Tied to bodies of flesh, subject to the decay of all that is temporal |
Table 15. Degrees of love in Chapter 11 [Ch 11].
The divine nature of love
God loves freely, as the saying of the hidden treasure shows [Ch 11]. Whatever form the beloved takes, it reduces to Him, as in worship [Ch 11]. Mora notes the closeness of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (II.4.5): a husband is truly loved only when the Self is loved [Ch 11]. Ibn Arabi:
He goes further: it is God who loves Himself through His creatures, and ‘He will love them and they will love Him’ (5:54) means God loves Himself in us [Ch 11]. God made the world at the summit of beauty, since He loves beauty [Ch 11].
The non-existence of the beloved
Most of Ibn Arabi's reflections on love depend on the primal relation between the names and the possibles [Ch 11]:
Every form of love repeats that original situation. When we finally obtain what we desired, the kiss or embrace, what we loved was not the obtained thing but its continuation, which does not yet exist. Any object of desire is non-existent in itself, which Mora takes as one reason why, however much we think we reach what we long for, our longing is never fully satisfied [Ch 11].
Love as a union of opposites
Genuine love gathers seemingly contradictory sides: the lover, united with the beloved, never stops longing to see him [Ch 11]. A poem attributed to Abu Madyan of Seville: «Mis ojos los lloran, y con todo están en mis pupilas.» (editor's translation: ‘My eyes weep for them, and yet they are in my pupils.’) [Ch 11]. It resonates with lines from The Interpreter of Desires:
God is the Far-Near; His remoteness is His nearness [Ch 11].
Divine, spiritual and natural love
Love, the longing of the part for the whole and of the whole for the part, spans every domain [Ch 11].
Figure 81. The three kinds of love; spiritual love alone unites body and spirit [Ch 11].
On our side, love of God takes four forms: for His sake, which is the essential worship all beings give unknowingly; for our own sake, tied to hope of reward and fear of punishment; for both at once, known only in direct contemplation; and finally the discovery that the love the mystic feels for God is the very love with which God loves him, or rather loves Himself [Ch 11]. Corbin, Mora notes, puts it that the divine Being is both Beloved and Lover [Ch 11]. Our love has no temporal origin: we heard the creative word ‘Be!’ while we were forms in the substance of the opaque Cloud [Ch 11].
All beings are lovers without knowing it, deceived by the being on whom their love falls [Ch 11]. Spiritual love is possible only toward a being with free will; it aims at the union of spirits through shared breath. In a kiss or embrace, the breath of one spreads into the other [Ch 11]. Ibn Arabi quotes the line «Yo soy aquel a quien amo, y aquel a quien amo, ¡soy yo!» (editor's translation: ‘I am the one I love, and the one I love is I!’) [Ch 11]. Natural love loves its object for the happiness it brings and seeks the union of bodies that prolongs the lover's own existence [Ch 11].
The treatise lists the qualities and names of lovers: to be dead, deprived of reason, walking toward God through His names, mobile as a bird, always awake, hiding one's grief, weary of the veil between lover and beloved [Ch 11].
The religion of lovers
God made the Prophet love three things of this world: women, perfume and prayer. Ibn Arabi closes the Bezels with the wisdom of Muhammad's singularity, where this saying is commented [Ch 11]. Contemplation of God in a woman is the most perfect open to the mystic, since in her he sees God as both active and receptive [Ch 11]:
Whoever loves women this way loves them with a truly spiritual love that joins body and soul; whoever loves them only by natural impulse loses the science of desire and relates only to a form without spirit [Ch 11]. A particular woman in whom finitude and infinity meet, like Dante's Beatrice or Ibn Arabi's Nizam, evokes the divine presence [Ch 11]:
Adepts of the religion of lovers are often tested by women as beautiful as they are wise. Mora recalls Ibn Arabi's night meeting with Nizam by the Black Stone, and Ruzbihan Baqli's similar encounter, which led him to write The Jasmine of the Lovers, holding that divine love is the true origin of human love [Ch 11].
Chapter 12. Essential Worship and Ritual Worship
Worship (ibada) is synonymous with servanthood (ubuda), and has fundamental implications in Islam [Ch 12]. Chapter 12 distinguishes the worship all things give by existing from the worship prescribed by the prophets, and then walks through the prayer, remembrance, self-examination and retreat.
All beings, and for Ibn Arabi there are no inanimate objects, worship God without voluntarily submitting to Him. Existence divides into worshipper and worshipped; paradoxically God in Himself escapes all worship [Ch 12]. Only the human being can join both kinds [Ch 12].
Essential glorification
‘Do you not see that whoever is in the heavens and the earth glorifies God, and the birds with wings outspread? Each knows its prayer and glorification’ (24:41) [Ch 12]. Mora quotes William Chittick:
Ibn Arabi links glorification with incomparability, since ‘Glory be to God’ in the Quran is always followed by a negation of what is ascribed to Him [Ch 12].
Primordial nature and essential religion
Fitra, primordial nature, is linked to fatir, ‘separation’; one of God's names is the Separator of Heaven and Earth. Primordial nature is a light that splits undifferentiated unity [Ch 12]. It recalls the Covenant, when God drew the offspring of Adam from their loins and asked ‘Am I not your Lord?’ (7:172):
A key word, cited twelve times in the Quran, is hanif, the pure unitarian, archetypally Abraham, destroyer of idols, above all the idol of one's own ego [Ch 12]. Ibn Arabi distinguishes two religions:
Essential religion is submission (islam), ‘the religion of God is islam’ [Ch 12].
The world of the Command and the world of Creation
| World of the Command (amr) | World of Creation (khalq) | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Unity of existence where the order ‘Be!’ is not yet differentiated | The differentiated world made of elements |
| Inhabitants | Angels and «intelectos desapegados, carentes de todo deseo» | Beings composed of matter |
| Rule | Universal mercy (rahma) | Law and its distinctions |
| Knowing | The sage who knows God through God | Knowledge acquired step by step |
| Divine aspect | ‘Will’ (mashia) | ‘Desire’ (irada) |
Table 16. Command and Creation as Chapter 12 contrasts them [Ch 12].
The world of the Command is the human being's deepest treasure, but he must become aware of it; only when natural perfection is completed by acquired perfection can he pass beyond prohibitions, because his own form will then be identical to the divine command; he will have taken on the image of God in which he was created, seeing that religious law and essential reality are one [Ch 12].
The Islamic prayer
Ibn Arabi treats ablution as an act of worship in its own right, not a mere prelude to prayer (salat) [Ch 12]. Then comes orientation to the qibla, outer and inner alike: «Dile al cielo (de tu espíritu) que no te vele con su sutileza, y a la tierra (de tu cuerpo) que no te vele con su densidad» (editor's translation: ‘Tell the heaven of your spirit not to veil you with its subtlety, and the earth of your body not to veil you with its density’) [Ch 12].
The obligatory recitation is the Fatiha, with its ‘straight path’, which Ibn Arabi makes universal:
Even ‘the curve is straight in reality, like the curve of a bow’ [Ch 12]. Prayer is intimate dialogue, and so it is not vision:
Only one under an imaginal contemplation of his Lord, ‘as if you saw Him’, can join contemplation and conversation [Ch 12].
The movements of the prayer
Figure 88. The prayer retraces the movement from non-existence to existence; each posture matches a kingdom [Ch 12].
Ibn Arabi's advice on the raising of the hands:
He asks the worshipper to throw behind him what each theophany has given and ask for a greater light [Ch 12]. Prostration is annihilation and nearness: ‘Prostrate and draw near’ (96:19) [Ch 12]. Answering al-Hakim al-Tirmidhi's question ‘What is prostration?’, and citing Sahl al-Tustari, who reached the station of the heart's prostration, he writes:
The path begins and ends with prostration, yet full prostration does not last [Ch 12].
Remembrance
If the ritual prayer is obligatory, dhikr, remembrance of the divine names, is the chief supererogatory work [Ch 12]. Early in life Ibn Arabi practised the name Allah, received from the master who brought him into the Way, appealing to ‘the remembrance of God is greater’ (29:45) [Ch 12]. Later he recommended the formula of unity:
‘Remember Me and I will remember you’ (2:152): remembrance is two-sided [Ch 12]. Yet remembering, though nearer than forgetting, is not yet true nearness, which requires presence [Ch 12].
Examination of conscience
Ibn Arabi received the method of self-examination (muhasabat al-nafs) in Seville from Abu Abd Allah b. Qassum (d. c. 1209), his companion for nearly seventeen years, who had it from Ibn Mujahid (d. 1178) [Ch 12]:
Ibn Arabi added the examination of thoughts as well as acts. Mora sees in this practice a constant focus on the self that stops blaming others and circumstances [Ch 12].
The spiritual retreat
Ibn Arabi made many, and his own early opening came in one [Ch 12]. Inner solitude comes first:
He doubted extreme self-denial: renunciation of things, he says, can occur only through ignorance and the veil over the eyes; if people saw that the whole cosmos glorifies its Creator, how could they renounce it? [Ch 12] The outer retreat usually lasts forty days, in line with the saying that the springs of wisdom flow for whoever devotes himself to God for forty days [Ch 12]. He advises detachment from material desire, control of runaway fantasy, frugal food, and dhikr until imagination empties and the world of abstract meanings appears [Ch 12].
Part V. The Journey and the Friends of God
Chapters 13 to 16 describe the road and those who travel it to the end: the Night Journey and Ascension, the states and stations, the Perfect Human, and the hidden friends of God.
Chapter 13. The Night Journey and the Ascension
«El musulmán es, ante todo, un viajero.» (editor's translation: ‘The Muslim is, above all, a traveller.’) Islam is a road from God to the human being through revelation and from the human being to God through the awakening of each person's inner potential [Ch 13]. Chapter 13 follows the journey of the Prophet, then Ibn Arabi's own ascension through the seven heavens, the return, and the station of leaving travel behind.
The journey that never ends
In The Splendour of the Effects of Travel Ibn Arabi treats travel in theological, mystical and ontological senses [Ch 13]:
Beings, once out of non-existence, are always returning to Him and then travel in Him, who has no beginning or end [Ch 13]. But as with every station, the stage of travel is followed by its overcoming [Ch 13]. The Abrahamic religions hold several accounts of prophets' otherworldly journeys; the route is the cosmological one of manifestation, run in reverse [Ch 13].
The Prophet's journey
From the nearest place of worship (Mecca) to the farthest (Jerusalem), and from there through the material, imaginal and spiritual spheres: so runs the Prophet's journey [Ch 13]. Ibn Arabi opens his Kitab al-isra with:
The common view dates it to the tenth year after revelation began, a time of persecution [Ch 13]. In its first part the Prophet rode an extraordinary creature, al-buraq [Ch 13]. Ibn Arabi notes one difference: the saints travel only in spirit, while at least once, Ibn Arabi holds, the Prophet made the journey without leaving his bodily envelope [Ch 13]. The journey is ‘nocturnal’ because it runs beyond the visible domain of appearances [Ch 13]. It passes through God's signs but does not lead to God Himself, who is confined to no place [Ch 13].
Ibn Arabi's ascension
Ibn Arabi describes his own journey in chapter 367 of the Meccan Illuminations, and in chapter 167 he compares it with alchemy: gold, the perfection to which all substances tend, transmutes the apparent constitution of things [Ch 13]. The horizontal Night Journey dissolves the composite, sublunar nature; once stripped of its wrappings, the traveller rises vertically [Ch 13]. The start is a meeting with the ‘eternal youth’, as later in Mecca:
The meeting takes place at the mysterious ‘spring of Arin’, a point equidistant from all extremes [Ch 13].
| Heaven | Prophet | Teaching received, as the book reports it |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Moon | Adam | Secrets of the mercy that embraces all things |
| 2. Mercury | Jesus and John the Baptist | How life spreads through all things (Jesus is spirit, John is life); the stronger state rules the weaker |
| 3. Venus | Joseph | Formation, ornament, beauty; poetic knowledge and dream interpretation; sphere of active imagination |
| 4. Sun | Idris | The heart of the cosmos; perpetual revolution of theophanies; error is relative |
| 5. Mars | Aaron | Fear, affliction and divine wrath; each has his own path |
| 6. Jupiter | Moses | Jealous love; the request to see God without veil |
| 7. Saturn | Abraham | Gravity, serenity, stability and the divine snare (the traveller may think he has arrived); the Visited House is the heart |
Table 17. The seven heavens of Ibn Arabi's ascension [Ch 13].
In the heaven of Jesus, he learns not to judge others' words:
Idris explains that God always agrees with whatever is said of Him:
Meeting Aaron in the fifth heaven, Ibn Arabi asks how he got there without being seen on the road:
In the seventh heaven he sees the Visited House (52:4) and finds it is his own heart, which angels enter every day [Ch 13]. At the Lote Tree of the Limit the world of generation and corruption ends [Ch 13]. Beyond the Throne there is no body with shape or dimension. There the verse ‘Say: We believe in God and in what was sent down to Abraham, Ishmael and Jacob’ descends on him [Ch 13]:
He then grasps the true meanings of all the names and sees that they refer to a single Named [Ch 13]. Having reached the Muhammadan station of greatest nearness, transformed into pure light, the traveller sees every trace of himself erased [Ch 13].
Figure 93. The ascension retraces in reverse the descent by which the cosmos was manifested [Ch 13].
The return
Then comes the return (ruju), the other half of the road [Ch 13]:
| Who | Name |
|---|---|
| Does not come back | waqif, ‘the one who stops’ |
| Comes back for his own sake | arif, gnostic |
| Comes back in a general sense, to guide others | The knower, whom the book ranks higher |
Table 18. Those who return and those who do not [Ch 13].
The return to daily life has real risks. He ‘wakes among his people’, and if he speaks of his journey, the jurist says he lies, claims prophecy or has lost his mind; others laugh, and a few take a lesson and believe [Ch 13]:
The station of leaving travel
Chapter 175 of the Meccan Illuminations, one of the shortest, is on the station of abandoning travel. ‘He is with you wherever you are’ (57:4), so crossing distances is an added effort [Ch 13]:
Chapter 14. Spiritual States and Stations
The Night Journey and Ascension come suddenly, as a gift, but there is also a gradual road of states and stations [Ch 14]. More than 360 of the 560 chapters of the Meccan Illuminations deal with this theme, structured by suras, divine names and letters [Ch 14]. Chapter 14 sets out the difference between states and stations, the paired ‘counter-stations’, and four great stations named after the kingdoms of nature.
States
The technical term hal, ‘state’, comes from classical Sufism, probably introduced by Dhu l-Nun [Ch 14]. States are the most attractive face of the path, yet they are only passing effects the traveller notices in himself, often tied to charismata, which true knowers do not seek [Ch 14]:
States that possess the subject are a sign of immaturity and instability; as the perfect one's station rises, his states decrease [Ch 14]. Extraordinary experiences lead easily to self-deception, since one can be ‘deceived’ even by God: the friends of God call it deception when favours continue despite the servant's opposition to the command [Ch 14].
Stations and counter-stations
Stations, Ibn Arabi says, have no existence apart from the one who passes through them [Ch 14]. Since early Islam, scholars classified them; Ibn Arabi's list is distinctive because each station is paired with its counter-station: each chapter on a station is answered by one that refutes it or sets it in a wider perspective [Ch 14].
Each station has its states and knowledges, but one may tread a station without its states. Stations still carry duality, and so imperfection; the whole set is transcended at the end [Ch 14]:
Whoever reaches the last stage is limited by no particular quality but contains them all, reflecting the totality of the names [Ch 14].
The integration of the kingdoms
Following Ibn Arabi's indications, Mora sets out four great stations summing up the modes of existence and consciousness in the cosmos: animals, plants, minerals and humans, also linked to the movements of the prayer [Ch 14]. For Ibn Arabi the lower kingdoms perceive God directly:
Figure 98. The four great stations in Mora's reading of Ibn Arabi [Ch 14].
The station of animality (maqam hayawan) means laying aside conceptual activity, becoming a creature without speech or reasoning, sunk in inner silence; then one knows by taste that what one sees is God, the seer being the same as the seen [Ch 14]. Ibn Arabi gives chapter 336 of the Meccan Illuminations to the station of plants: unlike animality, here speech returns as the ‘illumination of expression’, granted only to the perfect Muhammadan, together with an inner sweetness felt in the senses but spiritual in origin [Ch 14]. The station of minerality is also called the station of proximity, of the ineffable, of free prophecy, or the no-station: nothing in the human being is higher than the mineral, the inertia of the stone that stays still unless pushed [Ch 14]. Last is the station of the Perfect Human, of praise and intercession, where all stations end; it belongs to the Prophet, who, unlike the other prophets, kept his one assured request for the future life, to use it for the greatest sinners of his community [Ch 14].
Chapter 15. The Perfect Human Being
The notion of the Perfect Human holds a central place in Ibn Arabi's view of the world, and has even served as a name for his whole work [Ch 15]. The book reports that the scholar A. A. Affifi traced the concept back to Philo and his doctrine of the logos, judging that Ibn Arabi was the first to set out such a doctrine and also the last to produce a logos doctrine of any importance [Ch 15].
Three perspectives
The doctrine can be approached in three ways [Ch 15]:
| Perspective | The Perfect Human as | Notes in the book |
|---|---|---|
| Metaphysical | The governing intelligence of the cosmos | Equivalent to the First Intellect, which holds the seed of all things; also called light, spirit and other names |
| Mystical | The timeless light at the base of revelation and prophecy | The Muhammadan reality, the ‘true prophet’ (verus profeta) moving from prophet to prophet and saint to saint |
| Anthropological | The spiritual potential within human beings | Strictly, those who know themselves fully and perceive their unity with the original being: prophets, envoys, saints |
Table 19. The three senses of the Perfect Human [Ch 15].
Since the Muhammadan revelation sums up and confirms the earlier ones, true Muslims accept what the earlier prophets taught as well [Ch 15].
Eye and mirror of the cosmos
On earth the human being is like the First Intellect in heaven, joined to it because the light of the intellect lives within him and existence is a circle [Ch 15]. The Perfect Human filters the divine gaze both ways:
As the creature that receives the divine light most fully, the human being alone deserves the name microcosm (al-alam al-saghir), while the cosmos is called the ‘great human being’ [Ch 15]:
The cosmos is like an unpolished mirror that reflects all the names, but dimly; the human task is to polish it [Ch 15]. The human being, Ibn Arabi adds, gives back an inverted image of the divine one, an inversion that ends only after death:
Figure 102. Right becomes left: the human being as an inverted image of the names [Ch 15].
The form of God
God created Adam according to His form, so the human being has the form of the all-gathering name and can receive all the divine qualities [Ch 15]. Some realities are inseparable from the divine command, such as the spirit and the cherubim; others are made with one hand, such as the Garden of Eden or the Torah; only the human being is made with both hands (38:75), joining eternity and time, being and non-being [Ch 15].
The Perfect Human is also a living Quran, a go-between for God and creation like the holy book. Perfect lovers are ‘bearers of the Quran’, and to them Ibn Arabi applies Aisha's answer when asked about the Prophet's character: «Sus rasgos de carácter eran dignos del Corán» (editor's translation: ‘His traits of character were worthy of the Quran’) [Ch 15].
Chapter 16. The Friends of God
Human beings who become mirrors of the original light and models of selfless service are called prophets, envoys and saints [Ch 16]. Each friend of God inherits, wholly or in part, from a prophetic type, and that inheritance shapes his kind of sanctity [Ch 16]. The Muhammadan alone has no particular station:
The people of blame
Ibn Arabi divides religious people into three groups [Ch 16]:
| Group | Practice | Limit or mark |
|---|---|---|
| Common devotees and ascetics | Keep the Law and ascetic exercises to purify themselves | «ni idea alguna tienen de los estados místicos y de las moradas» (editor's translation: ‘have no idea of the mystical states and the dwellings’) |
| The Sufis | Ascetic too, but know the deep experiences and infused knowledge | Prize mystical experiences and charismata, and may fall into a religious exhibitionism that inflates the ego |
| The people of blame (malamiyya) | Claim no intellectual or spiritual merit, no special sanctity | Fill the ranks of the highest friendship, with the ‘solitaries’ at the top |
Table 20. Three kinds of religious people [Ch 16].
Their name comes from the verse in which God swears by the ‘soul that blames’ (75:2) [Ch 16]. They are the hidden saints:
They hold no defined teaching role, and never formed an independent school [Ch 16]. Ibn Arabi counts the Prophet himself among them, since on returning from the Ascension he spoke only of common matters, such as the five daily prayers, alms and fasting, and kept the secrets of his meeting with God to himself [Ch 16]. For them the outer Law is their inner state; they add nothing to the five prayers beyond the usual supererogatory acts [Ch 16]. Here Ibn Arabi ranks the obligatory works above the supererogatory:
The pure servant has no choice of his own; he has broken the idol of his ego [Ch 16]. Stripped of all names, those of servanthood and those of his divine form, nothing remains but his essence, a spotless mirror and receptive nothingness [Ch 16].
The solitaries
Among the people of blame the highest are the ‘trustees’ (umana), who keep the treasure of divine wisdom secret unless commanded; beyond them, the elite of the elite, are the ‘solitaries’ (fard, pl. afrad) [Ch 16]. All afrad belong to the malamiyya, but not all malamiyya are afrad [Ch 16]. Their station is the station of proximity [Ch 16]:
- an unknown station, denied even by Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, Ibn Arabi says [Ch 16];
- he entered it while passing through Guisser (Igisil) in Morocco, feeling strangeness, loneliness and great joy, as if it were his true homeland, without even knowing its name at first [Ch 16];
- it is signalled by the Quranic words to the people of Yathrib, «no tenéis ningún lugar donde permanecer, retornad pues» (editor's translation: ‘you have no place to stay, so return’) (33:13) [Ch 16];
- it is reached only by pure divine choice, independent of works, as with the Mahdi and those like him [Ch 16];
- it is the book from which the religious Law flows [Ch 16].
Al-Khadir is the master of those who have no human master; the meeting of al-Khadir and Moses (18:60-82) shows him holding knowledge that comes straight from God [Ch 16].
Prophets, envoys and saints
True sanctity belongs to God, who also calls Himself by that name, so that it is a divine name [Ch 16]. Envoys and prophets are all saints, but not the other way round; sanctity is common to all ranks, and prophets and envoys are special grades of it [Ch 16].
Figure 107. Sanctity contains prophecy, which contains the mission of envoys [Ch 16].
Envoys receive the mission of passing on a religious Law; prophets may or may not legislate. Some prophets are also envoys, such as Moses, Jesus, Muhammad or Noah, whom tradition holds to be the first of them [Ch 16].
The three seals of sanctity
A ‘seal’ closes a series; Muhammad is the seal of prophecy, and early Sufis asked whether a saint also closes the cycle of sanctity [Ch 16]. Ibn Arabi distinguishes three seals:
| Seal | Who, in the book | What it closes |
|---|---|---|
| Specific (Muhammadan) sanctity | Learned of in Fez in 595 AH (1198); elsewhere Ibn Arabi says he himself is this seal | The saints who inherit fully from Muhammad |
| General sanctity | Jesus, when he descends at the end of time | After him no saint holds general prophecy |
| Seal of the begotten (‘of the children’) | The last true human, in the footsteps of Seth, born in China | Sanctity as a whole and humanity as we know it |
Table 21. The three seals [Ch 16].
Of the Fez knowledge, Ibn Arabi writes that God showed him the seal and the sign of his function, «sin embargo, omitiré su nombre» (editor's translation: ‘but I shall leave out his name’) [Ch 16]. The book stresses that this confirmation did not come once for all but took shape over time, as the biographical chapter showed [Ch 16]. Of Jesus he says: «Tiene un ministro llamado Juan. Es espiritual en lo que respecta a su origen, y humano en cuanto a su lugar de manifestación.» (editor's translation: ‘He has a minister called John. He is spiritual in his origin and human in his place of manifestation.’) [Ch 16]
The last seal will be born with a sister who comes first, his head between her feet; in his days barrenness will spread, with much cohabitation and no generation [Ch 16]. Mora adds that, however strange such words seem to a sceptical modern reader, Ibn Arabi's vast work cannot be understood without them [Ch 16]. And the master himself gives the key for reading them:
Who's Who
The people who matter for following the book, grouped by the part they play in it. Dates are given only where the book prints them; names without printed dates appear without them. People the book mentions only in passing are left out. Descriptions say what part each figure plays in the book, not who they were in general.
Ibn Arabi and his household
| Name | Dates as printed | Role in the book |
|---|---|---|
| Muhyi al-Din Ibn Arabi | b. Murcia 28 July 1165; d. Damascus 16 November 1240 | The subject: the Greatest Master (al-Shaykh al-Akbar), author of The Meccan Illuminations and The Bezels of Wisdom. |
| Muhammad Sad al-Din | 1221-1258 | His second son, born in Damascus. |
| Badr al-Habashi | Abyssinian companion of many years and the only man among those to whom Ibn Arabi passed the mantle; buried by him in 1221. | |
| Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi | d. 1274 | Favourite disciple, later his adopted son and a main commentator; the link between Andalusian Sufism and the great Eastern masters. |
| Awhad al-Din Balyani | d. 1288 | Follower to whom, the book reports, a treatise long credited to Ibn Arabi actually belongs. |
Masters and companions in al-Andalus and the Maghreb
| Name | Dates as printed | Role in the book |
|---|---|---|
| Abu Madyan | d. 1198 | Master of Seville living in Bejaia, perhaps the leading living master of the age; by Ibn Arabi's own account they never met physically. |
| Abu Yaqub Yusuf al-Kumi | Companion of Abu Madyan, who introduced the young Ibn Arabi to Sufi treatises. | |
| Fatima of Cordoba | Ecstatic woman master of over ninety-five, for whom he built a reed hut; she called herself his divine mother. | |
| Yasmina (Shams Umm al-Fuqara) | Woman master of Marchena, eighty when he knew her, who hid her states. | |
| Abu Abd Allah b. Qassum | d. c. 1209 | Companion for nearly seventeen years, link in a chain of transmission. |
| Ibn Mujahid | d. 1178 | Earlier master in that chain. |
| Averroes | The philosopher of Cordoba who met the young Ibn Arabi and questioned him about illumination and reason. | |
| Ibn Mardanish | d. 1172 | Ruler of Murcia and Valencia at Ibn Arabi's birth, who resisted the Almohads. |
The East
| Name | Dates as printed | Role in the book |
|---|---|---|
| Nizam | Daughter of the scholar Zahir b. Rustam in Mecca, who inspired The Interpreter of Desires. | |
| Kaykaus | Seljuk ruler (Kaykaus I) with whom Ibn Arabi formed a close friendship and teaching bond. | |
| Jalal al-Din Rumi | d. 1273 | Persian master named as a friend of al-Qunawi. |
| Sad al-Din al-Hamawi | d. 1252-3 | Credited with a marginal note in a manuscript of The Production of the Circles describing the cosmos as an eye. |
| Selim I | Ottoman sultan who restored the neglected tomb and built its mosque in 1518. |
Figures of the earlier tradition
| Name | Dates as printed | Role in the book |
|---|---|---|
| Ali ibn Abi Talib | d. 661 | Son-in-law of the Prophet, held to be the founder of the science of letters. |
| Dhu l-Nun the Egyptian | d. 859 | Probable introducer of the term hal; Ibn Arabi records a dialogue with him in the imaginal domain. |
| Abu Yazid (Bayazid) al-Bistami | d. 874 | Quoted on remembrance and on the one who has neither morning nor evening. |
| Abu Said al-Kharraz | d. c. 890 | Cited by Ibn Arabi: God can be conceived only as the union of opposites. |
| Mansur al-Hallaj | d. 922 | Mystic and martyr, disciple of Sahl al-Tustari; the two are held by Ibn Arabi as chief exponents of the science of letters. |
| Ibn Hazm of Cordoba | d. 1064 | Chief figure of the literalist (Zahiri) school with which Ibn Arabi's legal position is often linked; Ibn Arabi saw him in a dream as one body with the Prophet. |
| Abd Allah al-Ansari | d. 1089 | Quoted on the final goal: «Hasta que desaparezca lo que nunca ha sido y sea lo que nunca ha dejado de ser» (editor's translation: ‘Until what never was disappears and what never ceased to be remains’). |
| Abu Hamid al-Ghazali | d. 1111 | Formulated with Ibn Arabi the creed that there is nothing in being but God; Ibn Arabi says he denied the station of proximity. |
| Ibn al-Arif | d. 1141 | Almerian master whose doctrine left a mark on Ibn Arabi's work. |
| Ibn Barrajan | d. 1141 | Sevillian Sufi who already spoke of the fixed essences. |
| Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi | d. 1191 | The ‘master of light’, whose text The Crimson Archangel the book quotes on al-Khadir. |
Later readers
| Name | Dates as printed | Role in the book |
|---|---|---|
| Abd al-Karim al-Jili | d. c. 1410 | Later author marked by Ibn Arabi's work, writer of The Perfect Human Being. |
| Henry Corbin | Scholar of the mundus imaginalis, whose Shi'i reading Mora questions. | |
| A. A. Affifi | Scholar who traced the Perfect Human to the doctrine of the logos. |
Synthesis
This closing section steps back from the chapters. It gathers the book's main lessons, sets out the frameworks that recur from one chapter to the next, weighs the method, and shows how the parts connect. Everything here restates the book; the editor adds arrangement, not facts.
Ten takeaways
- There is nothing in being but God. The unity of being is the root from which every other doctrine grows: creatures have no existence of their own, only the existence lent to them as places where the names appear [Ch 3].
- God is known through the names. The Essence stays beyond reach; what can be known are the names, each a relation between God and the world, and each creature a mirror of some of them [Ch 3; Ch 5].
- God is a paradox. Transcendence and likeness must be held together; to keep only one is to know half of God. Reason alone tends to the first, imagination alone to the second; the heart joins them [Ch 5; Ch 8].
- Imagination is a world, not a fancy. The barzakh stands between spirit and body, giving bodies to meanings and meanings to bodies. Visions, dreams and the life after death take place there [Ch 6].
- Beyond images there is light. The imaginal is not the last word; the book stresses a domain of pure light beyond forms, and this is one ground of Mora's reservations about Corbin [Ch 2; Ch 7].
- The heart turns. Its very name speaks of change. A heart that follows each new self-showing of God can receive every form of belief [Ch 8].
- Creation is renewed at each instant. The world vanishes and returns with every breath, and the same self-showing never repeats [Ch 9].
- Knowledge, love and worship are one return. ‘Whoever knows himself knows his Lord’; there is only one Lover and one Beloved; the essential worship of all things underlies the ritual worship of the Law [Ch 10; Ch 11; Ch 12].
- The journey ascends and descends. The Ascension through the heavens, the states and stations, and the four great stations of animal, plant, mineral and Perfect Human trace a path in which the highest station is the no-station [Ch 13; Ch 14].
- The highest saints are hidden. The people of blame and the solitaries keep the outer Law as their inner state and go unnoticed; Ibn Arabi reads even his own claim to be a seal as a call to turn inward [Ch 16].
Frameworks that recur
| Framework | Where it appears | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| The two faces of each thing | Chapters 3, 5, 6, 9 | Every creature is ‘He’ and ‘not He’ at once, by turns showing and veiling God. |
| The mirror | Chapters 3, 10, 15, 16 | The cosmos is an unpolished mirror; the human being polishes it, and the pure servant becomes a spotless one. |
| The isthmus (barzakh) | Chapters 6, 7, 13 | A third thing that joins two while being neither, the key to imagination, death and the Ascension. |
| The names | Chapters 3, 5, 13, 14 | Divine names govern the heavens, the stations and the qualities of each creature. |
| Outer and inner | Chapters 2, 12, 16 | The Law and its meaning are not rivals; for the highest saints the outer Law is the inner state. |
| Ascent and return | Chapters 1, 13, 14, 16 | The traveller rises, then comes back to live among people; the return is the mark of perfection. |
Table 22. Recurring frameworks in the book [editor's arrangement].
Figure 114. The teaching chapters as one movement [editor's arrangement].
A closer look
Strengths. The book lets Ibn Arabi speak: most chapters are built around long passages from The Meccan Illuminations and The Bezels of Wisdom, so the reader meets the master's own images. The biography draws on Ibn Arabi's accounts of his masters, giving unusual room to the women who taught him. Mora is open about the limits of his sources, warning more than once that anecdotes must be taken with great caution [Ch 1].
Limits. As an introduction it surveys rather than argues; difficult doctrines such as the fixed essences or the seal of the begotten are stated more than examined. Mora's frequent parallels with Christian mystics help a Spanish reader but are drawn briefly. His reservations about Corbin are stated in a few lines, without a full discussion [Ch 2].
Questions to carry. How far can the imaginal be trusted, given the warnings about self-deception in Chapter 14? If the highest saints are hidden, what is the place of a public master like Ibn Arabi himself? Chapter 16 ends with his own answer: the outer events he narrates are there to turn the reader towards the inner kingdom.
Connections between the parts
The life and the teaching mirror each other. The visions of youth, the meeting with Averroes, the Earth of Reality, the seal received in Fez and the Ascension of the Andalusian years in Part I become, in Parts II to V, the doctrines of illumination and reason, the barzakh, the seals of sanctity and the Night Journey. Read side by side, the biography shows the teaching lived, and the teaching explains why Ibn Arabi told his life as he did.
Glossary
Terms as the book uses them, written without diacritics in the editor's text. The meanings given are those the book gives or the sense in which it uses the term; they are not wider dictionary definitions, and the list is limited to words that matter for following the teaching.
| Term | Meaning in the book |
|---|---|
| wahdat al-wujud | Unity of being: there is nothing in being but God |
| wujud | Being or existence |
| ayan thabita | Fixed essences, the possible things as known by God, receptive of existence |
| tanzih and tashbih | Transcendence and likeness, the two sides of knowing God |
| tajalli | Theophany, God's self-showing, never repeated |
| barzakh | Isthmus, the third thing between two that joins them; the world of imagination |
| qalb | Heart, the organ that turns with each self-showing |
| hal | State, a passing experience given by God |
| maqam | Station, a stable dwelling acquired on the path |
| isra and miraj | Night Journey and Ascension |
| al-insan al-kamil | The Perfect Human, mirror of all the names |
| al-alam al-saghir | Microcosm, the human being as small world |
| walaya | Sanctity or friendship with God, common to all spiritual ranks |
| malamiyya | People of blame, the hidden saints |
| afrad (sg. fard) | Solitaries, the highest rank among the people of blame |
| khatam | Seal, that which closes a series |
| qurba | Proximity; its station is that of the solitaries and the people of blame |
About this book
Ibn Arabi: Vida y enseñanzas del gran místico andalusí by Fernando Mora, 2011. 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