Insight Editions · No. 131
Imaginal Worlds
Ibn al-'Arabi and the Problem of Religious Diversity
William C. Chittick
William C. Chittick examines Ibn al-'Arabi's metaphysics of imagination, divine self-disclosure, and religious diversity, explaining how beliefs reveal truth while remaining limited perspectives.
A study guide to Imaginal Worlds by William C. Chittick. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
Overview
Chittick (State University of New York Press, 1994) into a study guide covering the Introduction and all ten chapters in three parts. Notes and index are omitted; Futuhat references (volume, page, line) are kept so quotations can be traced.
Argument Map
Introduction: The Greatest Master and the Problem of Diversity
Why should a thirteenth-century Andalusian mystic matter to anyone thinking about religious pluralism today? Chittick's answer: because Ibn al-'Arabi stood in the "Station of No Station", from which every perspective is seen as both true and limited, and because he gave imagination an objective, cosmic status that modern thought has lost.
The Man and the Corpus
Muhyi al-Din ibn al-'Arabi, al-Shaykh al-Akbar ("the Greatest Master"), was born in Murcia in 1165, told in a vision in 1200 to go East, performed the pilgrimage to Mecca in 1202, travelled the central Islamic lands, and died in Damascus in 1240. He left some five hundred works. The Futuhat al-makkiyya ("Meccan Openings") will fill more than 15,000 pages in its new edition; the Fusus al-hikam ("Bezels of Wisdom") summarizes his teaching. He synthesized law, theology, philosophy, mysticism, cosmology and psychology, and within two centuries few expressions of Islamic thought were untouched by him.
Why the West Overlooked Him
Early Orientalists ignored or dismissed him; Nyberg, Asin Palacios and Nicholson began the hard work; in the 1950s and 1960s Burckhardt, Corbin and Izutsu saw his general philosophical interest. Addas's biography Quest for the Red Sulphur and Chodkiewicz's Seal of the Saints and An Ocean Without Shore followed. The neglect had two causes: the corpus is vast and difficult, and Orientalists were confident that modern method gave them superior understanding, so they dismissed what did not suit them. Postmodernism, "for all its excesses", has undermined that confidence, and Ibn al-'Arabi now stands as a monument to preserving rationality while transcending it.
Two Faces of Islam, Two Attitudes to Others
| Religion as activity | Religion as inner attitude |
|---|---|
| Stress on the Shariah and social duty | Stress on love and compassion |
| God of transcendence and rigor | "God's mercy takes precedence over His wrath" |
| Cites verses criticizing unbelievers, Jews, Christians | Cites verses praising prophets and their followers |
| Tends to condemn non-Muslims (and dissenting Muslims) | Gives believers the benefit of the doubt; expects forgiveness to surprise even the bad |
Modern scholars usually cite isolated Sufi passages or reformulate the Sufi message in contemporary language. Chittick takes a third route: set out a few specific teachings in detail.
Is Diversity a "Problem"?
Not for Ibn al-'Arabi. Muslim proverbs already say "The divergence of the religious scholars is a mercy" and "There are as many paths to God as there are human souls." When he discusses the "problem of diversity" (mas'ala khilaf) he traces it to God Himself:
For modern religious studies, however, diversity is a pressing issue, sharpened by scholarship itself (Eliade: to be human is to be homo religiosus) and by a multitude of methods rooted in Western modernity. Christian theologians who resist those assumptions are ignored; those who avoid exclusiveness often discard what most Christians consider essential.
Muslim thinkers ranged from exclusivism through inclusivism to a clear statement of the necessity of plurality; Ibn al-'Arabi is the most sophisticated voice of the last. He did not set out to write a theory of religion, but, as Chodkiewicz says, "He has an answer for everything."
Seal of the Muhammadan Friends
He seems to have claimed the title khatam al-awliya' al-Muhammadiyya, which Chittick renders "Seal of the Muhammadan Friends [of God]" rather than "Saints", since "saint" carries Christian connotations. The model is Muhammad as "Seal of the Prophets": last of the 124,000 prophets since Adam, and the one who gathered all prophetic perfections and sciences.
- Each prophet is a paradigm of human perfection; followers may inherit from him in three dimensions: works (noble character in action), states (inner experience of unseen realities), knowledge (direct perception of modes of reality).
- In every age there are at least 124,000 friends of God, one heir per prophet (III 208.14).
- Most prophets' guidance is lost, so their inheritance comes through later prophets, and best through Muhammad, whose station embraces all.
- Human effort reaches only the door; God decides whether to open it. Hence Futuhat, "Openings".
When the door opened, he found he had inherited all the sciences of Muhammad, and that no one after him except Jesus at the end of time would inherit them in full. Friends of God continue, but inheriting "from Abraham, Moses, and Jesus"; after the Seal, "no friend will be found 'upon the heart of Muhammad'" (II 49.24). The claim is grandiose, but no one since has matched the profundity, freshness and detail of his vision.
The Station of No Station
Every mode of human existence is a station (maqam) of knowledge, with its own works, states and knowledges. To know a station fully one must stand in it. Muhammad stood in all the prophets' stations; they did not stand in his. His full heirs stand "in every station and in no station", placing each in its proper level without being defined by it.
Hence the Shaykh treats every perspective, school and religion as both true and false. He offers no system that covers everything, but a way of seeing why things must be as they are.
The result resonates with postmodern relativity, yet without doubt about the absolute demands of the Real. The Shaykh sees religious teachings as historically relative and personally absolute: specific demands remain necessary for human and cosmic well-being.
Imagination at the Centre
His most distinctive move is to give imagination objective grounding: it constitutes not only the mind but the cosmos. The forms of the world, our minds included, relate to God as dream-images to a dreamer; individual imaginations are streams in an infinite network of imagery (compare Vedantic maya). "He who does not know the status of imagination has no knowledge whatsoever" (II 313.2).
Part I. Human Perfection
Chapter 1: Oneness of Being
Ibn al-'Arabi never used the phrase wahdat al-wujud, yet it became his label. Chittick shows why it fits and why it is not enough: wujud is one, but manyness is almost as real, and the cosmos is best understood as imagination, "He/not He".
A Label He Never Used
Wahdat al-wujud, "Oneness of Being" or "Unity of Existence", is not found in the Shaykh's works; it was chosen by later followers and the direction Islamic thought took after him. He does say things close to it, so the label is literally justified, but he affirms the "manyness of reality" just as vigorously and often calls wujud in its fullness the One/Many (al-wahid al-kathir).
Wujud as Light
As the Essence, wujud is the unknowable ground of all that is found, and is often used almost as a synonym of light (nur), a Koranic name of God. Light in itself is invisible; it is seen only when mixed with darkness. Pure light would annihilate the universe as the unveiled sun would blind us. So we see nothing but wujud, made diffuse and visible by the veils that are the created things. Following Ghazali, who glossed "There is no god but God" as "There is nothing in wujud but God", the Shaykh holds there cannot be two wujuds. But most of his writing explains manyness (kathra) within oneness, and it is "a great error" to think he dismissed multiplicity as illusion.
Immutable Entities
What is a rock, a tree or a sun "in itself"? No entity possesses real wujud. Its reality stays the same whether it appears or not. When found, it displays a borrowed existence, returned to God when it disappears; it never really had existence, so it does not lose it. It stays in its state of "fixity" (thubut) in nonexistence ('adam).
| Immutable entity ('ayn thabita) | Existent entity ('ayn mawjuda) |
|---|---|
| The thing as eternally known by God, in every characteristic it will ever display; a "nonexistent object of knowledge" | The same thing as found in the cosmos, "existent" only conventionally and metaphorically (majaz) |
| Plural, yet no more divides wujud than many ideas divide a mind | What we see is really wujud tinged by the entity's properties (ahkam) and effects (athar) |
God as Manifest (zahir) displays Himself in a locus of manifestation (mazhar), the cosmos, and in lesser loci, the things; as Nonmanifest (batin) He is inaccessible ("He is the First and the Last, the Manifest and the Nonmanifest", 57:3). The prism analogy sums it up: unity lies in the things' manifestation, which is wujud; multiplicity lies in their entities, which have no self-existence.
The Breath of the All-merciful
From the other side, things really are found, and the Shaykh explains this through the Breath of the All-merciful (nafas al-rahman). God's mercy "embraces all things" (7:156); the only thing that embraces all things is wujud; so wujud is God's mercy, bringing things from nonexistence in His knowledge, where they enjoy nothing, to existence, where they perceive and experience their own realities.
- When the All-merciful exhales, He speaks, and the cosmos takes form within His Breath. The infinite "words of God" are the creatures, so multiplicity is real.
- The Breath is the single reality of cosmic wujud; words depend on the Breath, the Breath does not need the words.
- God speaks not under compulsion but because He is merciful and generous by nature, overflowing and bringing the "other" (ghayr) into existence.
- Is a man's breath the man? A man without breath is a corpse; breath without a man is moist air. So neither absolute identity nor absolute difference: the relation remains a mystery.
Divine Names and Human Perfection
What do we know of wujud as wujud? Strictly, nothing: we are nonexistent entities. "What does dust have to do with the Lord of lords?" Yet self-knowledge and knowledge of the cosmos give intimations. The philosophers analysed things; the Shaykh relies far more on scripture, God's self-revelation in language (the Koran and Hadith in practice, though he grants other scriptures' validity in theory). Its message is summed up in the names of God, traditionally ninety-nine. Signs appear "upon the horizons and in themselves" (41:53): verses of the Koran and things of the world are both ayat.
The names cannot finally be counted: each entity displays a property of wujud and so "names" it. Later followers distinguished the ninety-nine "universal names" from the immutable entities as "particular names". Every entity shares in all attributes, but not all display them, so the cosmos is ranked in degrees of excellence (tafadul) according to each thing's preparedness (isti'dad).
"Nothing of the cosmos can have a wujud that is not the form of the Real" (III 409.32). The hadith says God created Adam in His own form, using the name Allah, the "all-comprehensive name" (al-ism al-jami'). Other creatures show particular names; humans can show God as named by all His names. Compare the elephant's power with Genghis Khan's, or a bee's knowledge with the Buddha's; and speech, generosity and justice belong to humans alone except by metaphor.
Incomparability and Similarity
Kalam stresses incomparability (tanzih): nothing compares with God, and the only adequate knowledge is admission of ignorance. The Shaykh accepts it but finds it incomplete. Reason ('aql) knows only what God is not; it needs scripture for what He is, yet theologians interpret (ta'wil) scripture to fit reason, refusing any similarity, and so "follow their own rational faculties, not the prophets". Imagination (khayal) grasps similarity (tashbih). Perfect knowledge needs both eyes.
| Level | Between | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Microcosmic: the soul (nafs) | spirit (from God's Breath, 32:9; luminous, simple) and body (kneaded from clay; dark, compound) | "Imagination has no locus except the soul" (IV 393.11). Spirit/body are qualities, not things. The soul can rise to No Station or sink into dispersion. |
| Macrocosmic: World of Imagination | world of spirits (angels, light) and world of bodies (clay) | Home of the jinn, made of fire, which rises toward light but needs fuel. "God placed sleep in the animate world only so that everyone might witness the Presence of Imagination" (III 198.23). |
| Cosmic: the whole cosmos, the Breath | absolute wujud and absolute nothingness | "The cosmos is all sorcery ... not the Real ... not creation" (IV 151.14), like the sorcerers' ropes Moses was made to imagine moving (20:66). |
Renewal at Each Instant
Each moment of a thing is both the same as and different from the next. "Self-disclosure never repeats itself", so no two instants are alike: the renewal of creation at each instant. "Everything other than the Essence of God is intervening imagination and vanishing shadow ... undergoing transformation from form to form constantly and forever" (II 313.17).
| First perfection | Second perfection | |
|---|---|---|
| Wujud | Incomparability of the Essence | Similarity of the names |
| Perfect humans | Essential reality as the form of God: all one, "the logos"; "no distinction among His messengers" (2:285) | Accidental manifestation in history: each a distinct role; "We have ranked the messengers" (2:253) |
God was "a hidden treasure" who wanted to be known; the cosmos discloses wujud's possibilities, but only perfect humans manifest the form of God Himself.
Chapter 2: Microcosm, Macrocosm, and Perfect Man
Human beings are the last creature, made in the form of God's all-comprehensive name, and therefore the only creature with no fixed station. The cosmos is God's form spread out; the human being is God's form gathered together. Perfection is reached not by growing into a demigod but by shrinking to the nothing one already is.
Two Views of the Perfect Human
When the Shaykh speaks of human beings he usually means perfect ones, seen either as their nonmanifest reality in God's knowledge (the single, eternal reality of all perfect humans, often called the "Muhammadan Reality") or as their historical embodiments, the prophets and friends of God.
In Islamic cosmology the human is created last, using all other creatures, and so harmonizes every link of the chain of being: mineral, vegetal and animal, and the whole invisible and visible hierarchy.
Created in the Form of All Names
Since "God created Adam in His own form" uses Allah, the all-comprehensive name, humans were created in the form of all the names, one reading of "He taught Adam the names, all of them" (2:30). Hence humans display an indefinite variety of divine "faces" (wajh), and every possibility: good or evil, noble or base, compassionate or cruel.
No Known Station
Small World, Great World
The only other creature made in God's form is the cosmos as a whole (which includes humans). God and cosmos mirror each other; the cosmos is the sum of the names' properties and effects. The difference: God exists by His Essence and needs nothing; the cosmos exists only "after a fashion", like a reflection.
| Cosmos ("great human being", macroanthropos) | Human ("small human being", microanthropos) |
|---|---|
| Names in differentiated mode (tafsil): a vast panorama of possibilities | Names in undifferentiated, concentrated mode (ijmal) |
| Created in respect of the multiplicity of names | Created in respect of the unity of names |
| Dispersed, unconscious, passive | Concentrated, conscious, active: knows and shapes the cosmos |
| The body, manifest form | The spirit, nonmanifest meaning |
The Sought-after Entity
The cosmos has no purpose of its own; it exists to bring forth humans. The perfect human is "the Sought-after Entity" (al-'ayn al-maqsuda), God's reason for creation, since only humans can know Him as God. Everything glorifies God (57:1) to the extent it knows Him: flowers as Lord of sun, earth and rain; bees as Lord of flowers; people as Lord of their desires, calling on Provider or Beautiful whenever they use His bounties. Only perfect humans glorify Him by all names: "The perfect human being glorifies God through all the glorifications in the cosmos" (III 77.24).
- Microcosm: the human, in the form of every name, containing the realities that bring the cosmos into being.
- Macrocosm: the cosmos, complete only while perfect humans are in it.
- Muhammadan Reality: the nonmanifest form of God as God knows it, the divine face turned toward creating both.
- Historical perfect human: "the manifest side of the form of God" (III 109.13).
The Path to Perfection
Perfect humans see "Wherever you turn, there is the face of God" (2:115) concretely, and worship God in harmony with every religion, provided they know themselves: "The perfect human being worships God through every revealed religion [shar'], glorifies Him with every tongue, and acts as a receptacle for His every self-disclosure ... on condition that he ... knows himself" (II 69.27). Adam was created perfect, but animality came to dominate his children; still, the human is not a "rational animal": "The human being is defined specifically by the divine form" (III 154.19).
The station of perfection is servanthood ('ubudiyya): no nearness (qurb) without first being a servant. Perfection is not only the highest human aspiration but the only properly human one; those who do not actualize the divine form remain less than human, whatever their worldly deeds. Yet no one should give up: God guarantees everlasting happiness to those who follow the Shariah as far as they can.
Chapter 3: Ethics and Antinomianism
Critics accused followers of wahdat al-wujud of thinking "All is He" frees them from the Law. Chittick shows the opposite: because every character trait is rooted in wujud, only the Shariah can tell people how to use those traits in balance, and no Sufi stressed the Law more than Ibn al-'Arabi.
The Charge and the Record
Jurists and theologians charged that supporters of wahdat al-wujud claim exceptional status: having seen that "All is He" (Persian hama ust), they need not distinguish good from evil or keep a Shariah meant for common people. The texts show that practice of the Shariah was the norm, and "no one has proclaimed the absolute necessity of observing the Shariah with greater vigor than Ibn al-'Arabi". Chittick finds the question urgent now, when much Western spirituality, Eastern, Western or New Age, plays down traditional moral constraints.
Noble Character Traits
Noble traits (makarim al-akhlaq) belong truly to God and only metaphorically to anything else: Just, Generous, Patient, Pardoner, Clement, Grateful. In Avicenna's terms God is Necessary Being and all else a "possible thing" (mumkin) holding wujud on loan, but the Shaykh prefers to answer "What are the attributes of wujud?" with the names. The human task is not to devise an ethical system but "to be, to exist, to be found" as a receptacle of wujud's attributes. Absolute perfection (al-kamal al-mutlaq) is God's alone; human perfection always accepts increase, even among the most perfect.
The example of knowledge
Made in God's form, humans can in principle know all things; knowledge has only accidental limits, an intuition modern science expresses. In Islam the knowable means the principles (usul: God, names, angels, scriptures, prophets, Last Day) and ramifications (furu'). Real knowledge knows God and knows things with a view to their roots in God. Most people develop one or two modes at best, distracted by status and comfort.
Balance Among the Names
Names must be actualized in the "appropriate" manner: in harmony and equilibrium matching their situation in the Real, none too large or too small. Balance brings nearness; imbalance, "a distorted divine form", brings distance. "The servant assumes them ... in accordance with a specific limit, a revealed description, and a determined state. When the servant steps beyond that, then he falls into contention with the Real" (IV 3.4).
- Wujud is colourless light; the cosmos is its spread into countless colours.
- Human perfection is the reverse: recombining many coloured lights into colourless light.
- The names are the primary colours, often opposed: Forgiver/Avenger, Merciful/Wrathful, Life-giver/Slayer, Abaser/Exalter.
- Too much red, green or blue spoils the white. The goal is to be uncoloured by any name, like wujud: the Station of No Station.
- The measuring standard: the Koran and Hadith, i.e. the Shariah, since a ray of light cannot know the sun by itself.
Assuming the Traits (takhalluq)
Takhalluq (fifth form of kh.l.q) means adopting a trait as one's own; the famous command is "Assume the character traits of God!", and a hadith says "God has three hundred character traits; he who assumes one of them as his own will enter paradise." The Shaykh extends the term beyond ethics: "To the cosmos belongs becoming manifest through [the names] by assuming their traits" (II 438.23). Humans differ because, as vicegerents, they consciously bring traits into manifestation, and can do so in ways that do not match their perfection, especially with anthropomorphic names that reason finds absurd.
Blameworthy Character Traits
Here wahdat al-wujud gives a new twist. If all that exists manifests wujud, where does evil come from? Partly from nonexistence, which dilutes wujud: on the hadith "The good, all of it, is in Thy hands, but evil does not go back to Thee", the Shaykh says it "affirms the entity of evil but negates its attribution to the Real ... evil is not a thing but rather a nonexistence" (III 369.27). But acts are positive, and "God created you and what you do" (37:96). Unlike most theologians, he follows his logic:
He shifts the focus from the trait to how it is perceived or employed (masraf): the question becomes interpretation and freedom. "There is nothing in the cosmos that is absolutely blameworthy or absolutely praiseworthy, because aspects and contexts delimit each thing" (III 472.23). There are no fixed entities, only relationships.
Servanthood and Poverty
Guidance aims at one all-inclusive trait, servanthood, first an ontological fact: "None is there in the heavens and the earth that does not come to the All-merciful as a servant" (19:93). The philosophers' possibility (imkan) is the Koran's poverty (faqr): "O people! You are the poor toward God, and God, He is the Independent, the Praiseworthy" (35:15). Recognizing that all qualities belong to God means perfect humility: one can attribute nothing to oneself except ignorance. The basic failing, heedlessness (ghafla), opposite of remembrance (dhikr), is a failure of right relationships.
Perfect humans do not vanish: they alone are truly real among creatures, because they know self and other as they are. Annihilated as limitations, they subsist as faces of God, acting in each situation as wujud demands.
Chapter 4: Self-Knowledge and the Original Human Disposition
Every child is born with the fitra, the original disposition, which Ibn al-'Arabi identifies with the perfect, aware, God-affirming spirit. Society clouds it; the prophets remind; humans remember. The chapter traces how recovering it means realizing wujud's own nondelimitation, through annihilation that is always paired with subsistence.
Fitra: The Bringing Forth
The root f.t.r means to split, bring forth, create; the Koran uses it twenty times, most tellingly in 30:30: "So turn thy face to the religion as one with primordial faith, the bringing forth of God in keeping with which He brought forth human beings. There is no changing God's creation." Commentators read it as humans created worshipping God rightly; the mention of hanif ("one with primordial faith"), associated with Abraham, suggests islam here means revealed religion as such. The core is tawhid.
The Nondelimitation of Wujud
Only wujud is nondelimited (mutlaq); everything else is constrained. But nondelimitation is not mere difference: it must be able to assume every delimitation, or it would be limited by its own unlimitedness. "He possesses nondelimitation in delimitation" (III 454.28); "He possesses all delimitations, so He is nondelimited delimitation, since no single delimitation rather than another rules over Him" (III 162.23).
| As Essence | As Breath / Cloud |
|---|---|
| Nondelimited, incomparable, eternally unknowable | "The Real Through Which Creation Takes Place": assumes all limits, similar to all things |
| Beyond every form | Discloses itself as every form, inner and outer; every finding is wujud's own self-finding |
When a positive quality appears, tawhid says it is wujud's: observe life and know "There is no life but real life". To say wujud is one is to say every real quality exists purely only in the Real.
Imaginal Consciousness
Narrowly, imagination is the soul's faculty that joins sensory forms with formless awareness: "The dreamer sees meanings in the form of sensory objects, since the reality of imagination is to embody that which is not properly a body" (II 379.3). More broadly, it is the soul, whose consciousness is ambiguous by nature. "Has so-and-so achieved consciousness?" might ask whether the chloroform has worn off or whether he has reached buddhahood: consciousness is a continuum with almost infinite range, and the Real's is infinitely more real than any.
Self-Knowledge and the Two Hands
Modes of knowing are rooted in names: Knowing, Aware, Seeing, Hearing, Encompassing, Witness, Subtle, Light, Wise, Guardian. Human vision of wujud is described as gnosis (ma'rifa), unveiling (kashf), tasting (dhawq), insight (basira), opening (fath). Knowledge ('ilm) is wujud's primary attribute after life: one in Essence, it knows every possible mode of its self-disclosure, so God is One/Many.
| Right hand: names of mercy, gentleness, beauty | Left hand: names of wrath, severity, majesty |
|---|---|
| Stress oneness; tied to similarity | Stress manyness; tied to incomparability |
| Nearness, harmony, equilibrium, wholeness, consciousness | Distance, disharmony, partiality, difference, ignorance |
| Spirits: invisible, simple, relatively everlasting | Bodies: compound, dark, unconscious |
| Microcosm at its best: unity, luminosity, activity | Macrocosm: dispersion, dim light, passivity |
The Unknown Station
Wujud itself is the original human disposition: to be human is to manifest wujud as wujud. Yet manifestation is not identity; "God's two hands retain their rights even in the experience of wahdat al-wujud." Nonhuman things are ruled by specific attributes and cannot reach the balance that leaves colourless light.
The distinctively human quality is jam'iyya, "all-comprehensiveness": ontologically, the fitra manifesting the all-comprehensive name; practically, the fruit of meditation, concentration and remembrance, gathering the soul's dispersed powers onto the Real.
| Positive (similarity) | Negative (incomparability) |
|---|---|
| Realizing every quality latent in the divine/human form | Stripping away every claim to wujud's qualities |
| The perfect human as vicegerent (khalifa), ruling the macrocosm | The perfect human as servant with nothing of his own |
| Fullness | Emptiness: clearing clouds from the sun. "To be empty of created qualities is to be full of wujud" |
Annihilation and Subsistence
Western scholars fixed on fana' (annihilation) because it recalls nirvana and moksha, but in Sufi texts it is always paired with baqa' (subsistence). Locus classicus: "All that dwells on the earth is annihilated, and there subsists only the face of your Lord" (55:27). "Earth" is the divine/human form as Not He; "face" is the form as He. Annihilation of self-claims is servanthood; what subsists, God's self-disclosure acting through the effaced servant, is vicegerency. The experience preceded the theory: those who underwent it, like al-Hallaj, could say "I am the Real."
- Annihilation is always "from" ('an) something lower; subsistence always "through" (bi) something higher. "Annihilation 'from the higher' ... is not a technical term of the Sufis" (II 512.30).
- Earlier Sufis meant annihilation of disobedience, of seeing one's acts as one's own, "and annihilation from creation" (II 512.27). There are seven levels; by the third, seekers lose awareness of their own attributes and see only God's.
- Witnessing (shuhud) recalls the name Witness: "There is no witness but the Witness." It needs consciousness of what is witnessed, not full self-consciousness.
Becoming Human
Abu Yazid Bastami reached God only when told "Leave aside your self and come": from his own form to "the form of the Real in which God created Adam". At the end of his own mi'raj in Muhammad's footsteps, Ibn al-'Arabi saw that all names go back to one Named Object and one Entity: "That Named Object was the object of my witnessing, and that Entity was my wujud. So my journey had been only in myself" (III 350.30).
Only those who realize this "deserve the name human in the full sense"; in others the dispersive qualities (pictured by the many animal species) rule. Perfect humans pass beyond both hands: "The people of perfection have realized all stations and states and passed beyond these to the station above both majesty and beauty, so they have no attribute and no description" (II 133.19). They actualize God as coincidentia oppositorum (jam' al-addad): "they are and they are not. You did not throw when you threw, but God threw [8:17]" (III 396.19).
Part II. Worlds of Imagination
Chapter 5: Revelation and Poetic Imagery
A jurist claimed Ibn al-'Arabi's love poems were about women; Nicholson thought the Shaykh's own mystical commentary "far-fetched". Chittick argues both misread a poet who knew exactly what imagination is: the place where meanings take sensory form, as they do in revelation itself.
The Tarjuman and Nicholson's Blinkers
Besides several hundred prose works, the Shaykh wrote three divans and thousands of verses. He comments on one divan, Tarjuman al-ashwaq ("Interpreter of Desires"), in Dhakha'ir al-a'laq, written to refute a jurist who said the poems dealt with sensual love. R. A. Nicholson translated the Tarjuman (with selections from the commentary) eighty years earlier, but with no theoretical introduction, and judged that the Shaykh "overshot the mark", descending "with startling rapidity from the sublime to the ridiculous".
Nicholson's choices reflect Western history: thinking means reason, so "ideas"; and with the intermediate worlds banished, only God and the physical remain, so "higher" became "divine". Corbin and others have shown Muslims never lost the worlds between: spirits and imagination. God cannot be seen in His Essence, but in a form, variously called imaginal form (sura khayaliyya, mithaliyya), locus of witnessing (mashhad), locus of manifestation (mazhar), locus of self-disclosure (majla), spirituality (ruhaniyya). Each poem describes such self-disclosures.
| Reason ('aql) | Imagination (khayal) |
|---|---|
| Ideas are thought about | Images are seen, heard, touched, tasted, smelled, inwardly |
| Disengaged (mujarrad) from the senses | A sensory domain, though not physical (dreams prove it) |
| Strings concepts: reflection (fikr) | Perceives meanings in sensory form |
| Knows God's incomparability | Sees God's similarity |
Imagination on Three Levels
Imagination is always a barzakh, an isthmus, defined by two sides; a dream image is true and untrue at once.
- The cosmos: neither existent nor nonexistent, yet displaying God as a mirror shows the viewer.
- The macrocosmic World of Imagination: "neither/nor" or "both/and", luminous and invisible relative to bodies, dark and visible relative to spirits. Here incorporeal realities are embodied (tajassud): angels really have wings there, which is "not simply a figure of speech". The jinn, of fire, have bodies but change form at will.
- The microcosm: (a) the soul, woven of imagination, hence its affinity with jinn and Satan; the task is to strengthen its light toward unity, since happiness in the barzakh after death depends on the integration reached here (Chapter 7); (b) the faculty that "spiritualizes" sensory things into memory and "corporealizes" spiritual things known in the heart, filling the "storehouse of imagination" (khizanat al-khayal).
Reason and Self-Disclosure
The Revelation of Similitudes
Moderns explain scripture through its human authors; the Shaykh keeps the human vehicle but takes revelation (wahy) as God's actual speech, and explains how the formless Word is pluralized in its receptacles, from tasting, as an heir, not as a prophet: "I am not one to follow authority [taqlid] ... I have witnessed the actual situation directly" (III 352.6).
A meaning (ma'na) is a thing's inner reality, opposite to its form (sura), or the suprasensory opposite to sense perception (hiss). Meanings are "disengaged"; sensory things have matter (madda). "The degree of imagination embraces that of sense perception and meaning. Hence it subtilizes the sensory object and densifies meaning" (III 451.2).
Because imagination joins two sides while reason separates, revelation speaks more of similarity than incomparability, which is why rationalists interpret (ta'wil) it away. Language itself is imaginal, joining meanings with sounds; our experience of speech is our most direct way to grasp the Breath of the All-merciful, also called Nondelimited Imagination. The ambiguity of language that contemporary thinkers prize derives from the imaginal nature of the cosmos itself.
Reason remains indispensable for incomparability, and the Koran often appeals to it; philosophy and theology are useful so long as they are not the exclusive source of knowledge. Poetry's role is to awaken imaginal perception of self-disclosures, though real understanding needs a living vision as rare as sound reasoning.
Why Not Say It Plainly?
- Self-disclosure, not Essence: what is seen is God showing Himself in a form, so created things set the reference points.
- Fidelity: what was perceived through the inner senses can only be told in concrete language; abstraction moves further from it.
- Attraction: "I have expressed all this in the tongue of erotic love and amatory affairs, because souls are enamored of such expressions" (Dhakha'ir 5).
- Courtesy (adab): bound up with wisdom (hikma). "Her speech restores to life, as tho' she ... were Jesus" compares her to Jesus, not to God's breath, because "we do not resort to declaring anything similar to the Divine Presence unless we find nothing in engendered existence" (Dhakha'ir 13). "If God has struck that as a similitude ... let us stop with that" (III 345.12).
| Self-disclosure of the Essence ("lightning") | Self-disclosure in imaginal form |
|---|---|
| "Flashes of lightning ... have no subsistence" (II 98.21) | The form is retained and can be interpreted |
| No rain: "imagination has nothing to retain and reason has nothing to understand"; only the heart's witnessing "while the heart beats wildly" | Yields "rain", gnostic sciences that bear fruit, as Gabriel imaginalized gave Jesus to Mary |
| "Thy lightning never breaks its promise of rain except with me": the poet alone reached this station | Abundant examples in the hadith literature |
Chapter 6: Meetings with Imaginal Men
Ibn al-'Arabi met the dead, the distant and the ancient: an ancestor from forty thousand years ago, a Spanish seeker seen from Damascus, Sulami 170 years after his death, a caliph's son at the Kaaba. Chittick uses these accounts to show how imaginal perception works, and why, without a divine "mark", visions are the most deceptive thing there is.
Three Worlds and Two Eyes
The universe has three worlds: simple spirits (pure life, intelligence, light), compound bodies, and between them imagination, whose inhabitants are both simple and compound, so the two sides can interrelate. Spirit and body are configurations of tendencies, not discrete things; the only absolute difference is between God as wujud and cosmos as nonexistence. Imagination lets spirits become embodied and bodies spiritualized; our minds spiritualize objects merely by perceiving them, as dreams show.
Discerning Imaginal Realities
Both eyes work through sight, and telling them apart is one of the hardest sciences, unknown even to many of the Folk of God: "Nothing causes greater obfuscation in engendered existence than imagination's becoming confused with sense perception ... The most necessary science for the Folk of God to obtain is this science" (III 507.30).
The Mark ('alama)
Without the mark, people cannot even tell the imaginal appearance of a spirit from that of God Himself ("the property of the divine and the spiritual sides is exactly the same", II 333.31), nor distinguish the three kinds of created spirit that can appear: angels, jinn and humans. The term echoes the hadith of God's self-transmutation (tahawwul) at the resurrection, when people deny Him until He appears in a form bearing the mark they recognize (see Chapter 9).
God in His jealousy (ghayra) may give a lover still bound by nature "a mark that it is not able to deny", "incontrovertible knowledge" (al-'ilm al-daruri), so it recognizes Him in a natural form and then in all secondary causes, "and loves the secondary causes for His sake, not for their sake" (II 331.12).
| Some Sufis, and Ghazali | Ibn al-'Arabi |
|---|---|
| Delusion (talbis) by satans is possible only in the world of the elements; once heaven's doors open, the traveller is safe | True only for a mi'raj in body and spirit, like the Prophet's. One who ascends by mind or "spiritual reality" (ruhaniyya) while his body stays in his room will be deluded unless he has the divine mark, by which he stands "upon a clear sign from his Lord" (11:17) (II 622.22) |
The Shaykh claims the marks: "I distinguish the spirit when it becomes embodied in the outside or inside world from a true corporeal form. But the common people do not" (III 44.12), where "common people" means most Sufi adepts, not the man in the street. Hence: "Every unveiling that is not unmixed, completely untainted by anything of the bodily constitution, cannot be relied upon" (Risala, p. 18).
Varieties of Imaginal Perception
| Criterion | Options |
|---|---|
| 1. State of the observer | Waking (eye of sense or eye of imagination) or non-waking (dream; or a state, hal, such as absence, ghayba, or annihilation) |
| 2. Reality imaginalized | God; angels (luminous spirits); jinn (fiery spirits); humans, living or dead |
| 3. Form taken | Any form, so long as it is sensory |
| 4. Cosmic location | "Discontiguous" (macrocosmic, "out there") or "contiguous" (microcosmic, "in here") imagination; perhaps tied to which eye sees, though the Shaykh rarely draws the line |
Location also bears on effects. A sorcerer's simiya' food leaves the eater hungry; with the friends of God, "if you eat, you become full, and if you receive ... gold or clothing ... it stays with you ... We experienced it through tasting with the spiritual reality of Jesus at the beginning of our wayfaring" (III 43.19).
Five Meetings with Imaginal Men
Many visions are called Incidents (waqi'a, from Koran 56:1), which may occur asleep or awake.
Eyesight Fixes the Spirit
Chapter 7: Death and the Afterlife
The grave, the resurrection, the Garden and the Fire are to be taken literally, Ibn al-'Arabi insists, once one knows what kind of reality they are: imaginal. After death inside and outside reverse, people build their own paradises and hells from their souls, and the Fire's chastisement, though not the Fire, eventually ends in mercy.
The Compulsory Return
Eschatology belongs to the "return" (ma'ad), the third principle of faith after tawhid and prophecy. Scholars distinguish the voluntary return (al-ruju' al-ikhtiyari), the path to perfection in this life, from the compulsory return (al-ruju' al-idtirari), death and resurrection. This chapter treats the second.
The Isthmus after Death
"Beyond them is a barzakh until the day they are raised up" (23:100): the period the Prophet called "the grave". The Shaykh ties it to imagination via "two seas that meet together, between them an isthmus" (55:20): "If it were not for the isthmus, the two seas would not become distinct" (III 47.26). The seas may be wujud and nonexistence, spirit and body, or this world and the next.
The soul grows through three Koranic stages: the soul that commands to evil (12:53), that blames (75:2), at peace (89:27). The spirit already has the fitra's perfection; it is the soul that must mature, using the body as its vehicle. God's spirit is like the sun, individual spirits like sunlight in many windows; to keep them distinct He creates barzakh bodies: "They never cease to be distinct for all eternity. They never return to their original state of being one entity" (III 188.1).
The Unfolding of the Soul
The barzakh is determined by life here. From puberty, when reason appears, people are responsible for their growth; the Scale of the Shariah brings the soul into equilibrium so it ascends toward the spirit's luminosity; without it people sink to "the lowest of the low" (95:5) or drift into horizontal dispersion. "Complete souls are those that declare God's unity and have faith" (III 175.21), faith including works.
The Next World
"There is nothing in existence but barzakhs" (III 156.27), so the term is elastic: the grave is sometimes "the first waystation of the next world" (IV 282.13), sometimes distinct from a next world that is "verified, existent, and sensory" (I 311.21). Pharaoh's people are "exposed to the Fire, morning and evening" in the barzakh (imaginally), then "admitted" to it at the Hour (sensorily) (40:45-46). Both levels are imaginal, but the next world is more real: subtler, more luminous, closer to spirit. The raised body has the same substances but a different constitution (I 307.14).
- "People are asleep, but when they die they wake up": death removes the covering, "so your sight today is piercing" (50:22).
- But that is "like someone who sees that he wakes up in the midst of his dream" (II 313.6).
- At the resurrection God comes in His name Light; "each soul will know ... what it has sent before and left behind" (82:5) (II 485.33).
- Servanthood, abasement here, appears there as elevation: "He who was a sheer servant in this world will be a sheer king in the next." What counts is the state of the soul, not outward kingship: "I do not care in which station or state God has placed His servant outwardly" (I 221.18).
Inside/Outside: The Great Reversal
The macrocosm is diverse outwardly; microcosms are diverse inwardly: bodies look alike, souls are unique. God as Manifest changes endlessly; as Nonmanifest He is fixed. Humans, His mirror images, show this reversed.
| This world | Next world | |
|---|---|---|
| Outward form | Fixed (one body) | Changing: forms "taken away from it and placed upon it continuously and forever" (III 441.14) |
| Inner self | Changing thoughts, renewed each moment | Fixed in a single form |
| "Be!" | Works only in the imagination | Works outwardly: "I give to you to say to a thing 'Be!' and it will be" (III 295.16) |
| Who follows whom | "He wears your form": the Real engenders what you will in imagination | "You wear His form": you vary with His self-disclosures (III 502.24) |
| Shariah | Fixed prescription for the fixed outer form | None; so "strive here so that your thoughts may be praiseworthy ... then your form in the next world will be beautiful" (IV 420.1) |
Why a next world at all? Creation is "a similitude struck for Himself"; wujud's perfection needs knower and known. Here "Be!" engenders only in imagination; there it embraces both imagination and sense perception, so "the next world is more tremendous in perfection" (IV 252.2).
The Garden and the Fire
Against philosophers who allowed only an "intellectual configuration" (nash'a 'aqliyya), the Shaykh affirms two: "The soul is resurrected in the form of its knowledge, and the body in the form of its works" (I 99.20). The difference between Garden and Fire goes back to God's two hands.
Every elemental thing is natural, but not every natural thing is elemental: the spheres, lower angels, mental faculties and simple elements are natural but not elemental, with subtle, imaginal bodies. Hell's substance resembles this world, "neither pure chastisement nor pure bliss": "Therein they neither die nor live" (20:74). Even there, pure wrath cannot exist.
The Cooling of the Fire
- "Forever within it": the pronoun is feminine, referring to the Fire, not the chastisement.
- Nothing in Koran or Hadith says chastisement is eternal, unlike the bliss of the Garden.
- "God forgives all sins" (39:53); punishment is "an appropriate recompense" (78:26), and a limited sin cannot warrant unlimited punishment.
- "Good-pleasure is the unfolding of mercy without end, but wrath will be cut off" (III 382.35).
- Unbelief and ignorance "have no entity in wujud"; seeking support and finding none, "they dissolve and become nothing. Hence the final end will be felicity" (III 417.35). Faith is supported by the Faithful, knowledge by the Knowing.
- "The cosmos is the object of mercy in its very essence; it experiences pain only in what occurs to it accidentally" (III 207.28).
God keeps both hands: hell never ceases to exist, and the Avenger's rights are met by imaginal chastisement, for bliss needs its opposite (III 119.2). After the day of resurrection, which the Shaykh thinks lasts fifty thousand years (70:4), "the All-compassionate takes vengeance upon wrath through His mercy ... The property of mutual contradictoriness remains forever in the names, but not in us" (III 346.14). Then serpents and scorpions sting for their own ease and the stung feel a pleasant numbness, "but neither the Fire nor those within it know" that mercy has reached them (III 411.15).
| Garden | Fire |
|---|---|
| Eight gates; vision (ru'ya) of God | Seven gates, eventually opened; an eighth gate locked forever: the veil (I 299.5) |
| Bliss with vision | Bliss "while being veiled", since vision would bring shame, and shame is chastisement (III 119.7) |
Reason that interprets scripture away "has faith in his interpretation, not in the revealed report" (I 218.26), following its own created faculties while refusing to follow its Lord: "one of the most wondrous errors that occur in the cosmos!" (I 288.27).
Part III. Religious Diversity
Chapter 8: A Myth of Origins
Why are there religions and laws at all? In Chapter 66 of the Futuhat, Ibn al-'Arabi tells a story in which the divine names hold a council, quarrel, and are put in order by the name Lord. Human laws and revealed religions both spring from that ordering; the difference is how far each knows God.
Reason, Imagination and Revelation
The Shaykh relies less on theologians' "dry ratiocination" than on images rooted in openings, tasting, Koran and Hadith. His constant theme: all things are interrelated through their roots in the divine names. Reason knows incomparability only; revelation balances it with similarity. "The common people stand in the station of declaring similarity, the People of Unveiling declare both similarity and incomparability, and the rational thinkers declare incomparability alone. Hence, God combined the two sides in His elect" (II 116.7).
The Koranic View of Revelation
Prophets guide to felicity and warn; Adam was told: "whosoever follows My guidance shall not go astray ... but whosoever turns away from My remembrance, his life shall be a life of narrowness, and ... We shall raise him blind" (20:123-24).
Divine Names and the Origins of Religion
Instead of saying prophecy comes from mercy and guidance, Chapter 66 looks deeper into wujud, and shows that man-made law (namus, from Greek nomos) springs from the same divine motives as revealed religion. The account personifies the names in a way "probably unprecedented in Islamic sources": change the names' names and you would have a polytheistic myth. The Shaykh warns readers not to imagine "manyness or an ontological gathering".
The order is not arbitrary: power depends on desire, desire on knowledge, knowledge on wujud (life): the four names Living, Knowing, Desiring, Powerful, all embraced by Allah.
The Name Lord: Making Wholesome
The name Lord (rabb) signifies islah: to make whole and sound, order, remedy, reconcile. The cosmos needs its maslaha ("means to wholesomeness") more than anything: "The cosmos needs the Lord more than any other name" (II 442.20). Its opposite is ifsad, corruption, which explains the angels' objection to Adam: "What, wilt Thou place therein one who will work corruption and shed blood?" (2:30). They glorify only their Lord, knew caprice would rule the earth, and were right; "their mistake was only that they hurried to pronounce these words without knowing God's wisdom" (II 251.24). The Lord gives each possible thing its time, place and level "in order to glorify Him and to know Him with the knowledge that is appropriate for it ... There is nothing more" (IV 199.15).
Chapter 66 Retold
| "Wise regulation": laws (namus) | Revealed religion (shari'a) |
|---|---|
| Cast into the dispositions of great human beings, sages who legislated for each city and clime by its constitution | Brought by a messenger, a person sages thought had "no position in knowledge" |
| Preserve property, lives, families, kinship; namus "cause of good" (as jasus, spy, brings evil) | Designates acts that bring nearness to God, tells of resurrection, Garden and Fire |
| Founders inspired by God "of which they were unaware"; knew nothing of the next world ("monasticism they invented", 57:27) | Speaks to the weak-minded and the brilliant alike, "making their rational faculties wholesome" |
| Reason ascends to a First, One, without likeness: "the furthest limit of the rational faculty" | Knowledge of God "of which reason is ignorant" |
Contrast Ibn Tufayl's Hayy ibn Yaqzan, in which unaided philosophy reaches what prophets know; the Shaykh "disagrees vehemently". True philosophers acknowledge the prophets because they see reason reaches only incomparability.
Chapter 9: Diversity of Belief
Every belief is a knot tied in the heart, and every knot is true because each catches some self-disclosure of wujud; yet every knot is also false because it binds the Unbound. God appears to each person in the form of that person's belief. The perfect human sees Him in all forms, while still walking the path of a particular prophet.
Forced to Be Free
People are born with the fitra but shaped by environment. Felicity is every thing's final destiny, but strictly human felicity, the full vision of God's self-disclosure, depends on actualizing all latent attributes, which depends partly on effort. Made in God's form, humans share His freedom: "The freely choosing human being is compelled to have free choice" (III 300.22). The Shaykh speaks of 5,105 degrees of paradise, only twelve exclusive to Muslims (I 319.18); followers of different religions experience death differently even when all reach felicity, since self-disclosure never repeats. Posthumous states depend on works and on the ideas and beliefs that produce works.
The Roots of Belief
Because "God" is wujud, the analysis covers those who reject God too, and modern beliefs in social and political goals, ideologies and programs. "There are none but knowers of God. However, some ... know that they know God, and some ... do not ... [such a person] is only ignorant of the fact that this [divine] name applies to that object of witnessing" (III 510.32).
All Beliefs Are True
Most theologians: only belief in a true religion is true. The Shaykh: it depends what "true" means. If it means corresponding to reality, all beliefs are true, since a belief that matched nothing could not exist. "God has made no error in engendered existence" (II 267.33). "People like us, who have an overview of all the stations ... recognize that each is correct in his own level ... there is absolutely no error in the cosmos" (II 541.23). All speech is God's: "speech has homesteads, loci, and playing fields ... so vast that the eyes of insights are unable to perceive their outer limits" (III 545.11).
Each entity has its entification (ta'ayyun) and preparedness: "He who discloses Himself ... is One in Entity, but the self-disclosures ... are diverse because of the preparednesses of the loci" (I 287.19). "Every observer of God is under the controlling property of one of God's names. That name ... gives to him a specific belief" (II 85.14).
The Two Commands
| Engendering command (al-amr al-takwini) | Prescriptive command (al-amr al-taklifi) |
|---|---|
| "Be!" and it is (36:82): gives wujud to all things as they are | Instructions for felicity: prayer, fasting, alms, moral limits |
| Cannot be disobeyed | Can be rejected, leading to chastisement ('adhab) that eventually turns sweet ('adhb) |
| Arises from nondelimited wujud, God as such | Arises from specific attributes: guidance, compassion |
| Disobedience to the prescriptive command is always obedience to the engendering command. | |
God is also Misguider (mudill), implied by thirty-five Koranic verses. Does God make people sin and then punish them? No: entities are immutable; God does not "make" (ja'l) them do anything, He gives them existence. "God wills only the actual situation. His will in the things is that they be what they are" (III 356.30). The sun shines; sinners sin. No one blames the gardener when an apple tree does not yield grapes; hence Satan's reply at the resurrection: "Do not blame me, but blame yourselves" (14:22).
Paths to God
- Path of God: "the general path upon which all things walk ... It includes every divinely revealed religion and every construction of the rational faculty ... and it embraces both wretched and felicitous" (III 410.24).
- Straight path of the Blessing-giver: asked for in the Fatiha ("the path of those whom Thou hast blessed", 1:6-7); brought by all the prophets; leads to felicity.
- Path of Muhammad: the Koran's guidance; the Muhammadan leader "acknowledges [other paths] and has faith in them" but serves God only through this one, because "His revealed religion embraces them, but they do not embrace it" (III 410.21).
Equilibrium
Perfection is not static but conscious participation in creation renewed each instant. Those who strive "to the extent of their capacity" (wus') will see in paradise what the perfect taste now: "In the Gardens, at every instant there is a new creation and a new bliss, so that boredom will never occur" (II 280.27).
The prescriptive command serves the engendering command by actualizing human possibilities, highest and lowest, that could not otherwise exist: "If not for the existence of the revealed religions, there would be no disbelief in God resulting in wretchedness" (II 248.3); "Prescription alone makes the entity of evil manifest from Satan" (IV 223.27). The five human attributes, life, knowledge, desire, power, speech, must be balanced ("knowledge without power", "power without knowledge"), and since the fitra is unknowable wujud, people need revelation to understand themselves. Balance rests on mercy's precedence: mercy belongs to wujud's nature; wrath to delimitation.
The Marks of Belief
All knowledge is constricted by the knower: "You judge your object of knowledge only in terms of yourself. Hence you know only yourself" (III 161.25). "Neither your heart nor your eye ever witnesses anything but the form of your own belief concerning God" (Fusus 121). "No one has ever seen anything except his own belief" (III 132.29). "The creatures ... worship nothing but a created thing ... There are none but idol-worshipers" (IV 386.17). Clinging to delimited beliefs breeds conflict, plain in the modern world as shared beliefs dissolve.
God "entrusts His affair" to creatures in speech, so their utterances (maqalat) about Him differ; "He discloses Himself to the possessor of each utterance in accordance with ... his utterance" (IV 100.8). "God receives the form of every belief. Were this not so, He would not be a god ... God exists within every conceptualization, just as He exists in the exact contrary of that conceptualization" (IV 133.30).
Nondelimited Belief
God can take the form of every belief precisely because He is incomparable with every belief. The gnostics ('arifun), in No Station, acknowledge every belief's rights. As knotting, all beliefs are false; as self-disclosures, all are accepted: "Were it not for His self-disclosure in the forms of the gods, no happy souls would take pleasure in Him" (IV 332.11).
The People of Unveiling have "an all-inclusive overview of all religions, creeds, sects, and doctrines ... [The Possessor of Unveiling] ascribes it to its place. He offers an excuse for everyone who holds a doctrine and does not declare him in error." The perfect human is "a barzakh between the Real and the cosmos ... a mirror ... within which the Real sees His form and creation sees its form" (III 398.11). At the resurrection only the animal human being denies God's self-disclosures (IV 246.12).
The Circle of Religious Diversity
"We never chastise, until We send forth a messenger" (17:15): not "a person". The proof must be clear to each person; only those who grasp it and refuse out of obstinacy, spite or envy are accountable. "This verse has within it a tremendous mercy, because of the diversity of human dispositions" (III 469.25). Chapter 48 ends with a diagram, drawn "so that the possessor of imagination may gain nearness to knowledge" (III 398.24):
| Diverse because of | Example |
|---|---|
| Divine relationships (names) | Rulings change ("To every one of you ... a revealed law", 5:48); wine lawful under Christ, forbidden under Muhammad |
| States | The sick call "O Healer!", the hungry "O Provider!", the drowning "O Helper!"; "Each day He is upon some task" (55:29) |
| Times | Spring, summer, autumn, winter act on bodies as on trees (71:17) |
| Movements | Of the spheres, which make night, day, seasons |
| Attentivenesses | Moon and sun move at different speeds: "Each of them floats in a sphere" (21:33) |
| Goals | Good pleasure toward Zayd, wrath toward 'Amr |
| Self-disclosures | Abu Talib al-Makki: "God never discloses Himself in a single form to two individuals, nor in a single form twice" |
| Revealed religions | Even law schools differ; shown the opponent's belief, the Ash'arite and his rival each deny God, until He appears in their own mark |
Chapter 10: The Divine Roots of Religion
Chittick's closing chapter pulls the book together. The first Shahadah is universal and innate; the second is particular and historical. Reason sees God's incomparability, imagination sees His similarity, and revelation joins the two. Religions are providential knots, tied by the Guide so that people can untie the knots that keep them from felicity.
Two Shahadahs
| "There is no god but God" | "Muhammad is the Messenger of God" |
|---|---|
| Self-evident and universal; the message of all 124,000 prophets | Specific to Islam; needs a historical context |
| Belongs to the fitra; prophets only remind (dhikr) | Brings a particular path, the Path of Muhammad |
| Grasped by reason: incomparability | Mythic and imaginal: similarity |
"None knows God but God"; people know Him only as far as He reveals Himself, and the initiative is always His. True knowledge declares Him incomparable and similar at once.
Gods of Belief
Everything is a barzakh between the ocean of the Real and the ocean of nonexistence: He/not He. The disclosure takes the colour of the receptacle. Junayd: "The water takes on the color of the cup." Rumi: "If you pour the ocean into a jug, how much will it hold?"
Beliefs "take Him apart and put Him together ... But in Himself, He does not change" (IV 393.6). Each person is a unique knot, retied at each instant, and partly free to steer it: every act "paves the way for changing perceptions of reality". "God is known through every knotting ... He is a receptacle for everything that you tie Him to ... it is the mark which is between you and Him" (IV 416.29). "The god of each believer is constricted by his proofs" (IV 435.11).
Reason, Imagination, Revelation
Reason knows innately that Nothing is like Him (42:11); imagination recognizes the Real within images. "Reason has nothing but the attribute of incomparability, while transmitted knowledge has the like of that along with the attribute of similarity" (IV 357.24). Both delimit God, so "revealed religion is closer than reason to asserting God's nondelimitation" (IV 423.11). In Himself He is "neither known, nor unknown; rather, He makes incapable."
Names, Distance and Nearness
| Incomparability | Similarity |
|---|---|
| Far, majestic, severe, wrathful: an aloof king, a strict father | Near, loving, forgiving, gentle: a caring mother |
| Distance, multiplicity, dispersion, suffering | Nearness, unity, equilibrium, joy |
| Reason separates; pushed alone, the world looks disconnected | Imagination unites; pushed alone, God is identified with His manifestations |
Because mercy precedes wrath, similarity is more basic: He is with you wherever you are (57:4), though we are not with Him wherever He is. Islamic teachings stress incomparability, but their purpose is to establish similarity. So reason, though the necessary starting point, must serve imagination, and the right vision uses "both eyes."
The Divine Form: All and Nothing
Only humans are signs of God as God: He taught Adam all the names (2:31). Felicity is nearness, actualizing the divine form; "imagination must dominate over their reason, though it must conform to reason's guidance." Since the divine qualities are unknowable, reason cannot be the final arbiter of goodness; revelation must show the proportions.
| God as | Human as | |
|---|---|---|
| Similarity | All: every real quality | Vicegerent: full actualization of the attributes |
| Incomparability | Nothing: no thing among things | Servant: emptiness, poverty |
Prophecy and Guidance
Freedom cannot be imposed, nor felicity without destroying humanity. So the Guide, moved by mercy, sends prophets with a map to felicity. Revelation "ties knots that are conducive to ultimate happiness. And it provides the means to untie the knots that prevent people from being all and nothing." The sages grasped incomparability unaided but had to wait for prophets to learn the path to salvation. "Union" is always relative: from relative distance to relative nearness, with veils lifted continuously forever. Guidance ensures the coming self-disclosures will be congenial; misguidance means they may not be.
Providential Limitations
Outwardly guidance regulates activity and therefore conflicts with other regulations; inwardly it leads to the One, to peace and love. The perfect stand at "the point at the center of the circle of wujud" (Qunawi), recognize the necessity of error for the whole and the need to avoid it for felicity, and then freely re-enter limitation to guide: "He is nondelimited, but he speaks only in a mode that is delimited by the situation" (IV 194.14).
Appreciating Knots
- Religion appears because the Guide desires human wholeness and felicity.
- No manifestation of the Guide embraces the whole; each religion speaks differently.
- Each revealed religion is a unique imaginal world conceived in the All-merciful Breath, moving people from the many to the One.
- Its forms come from both the founder (prophet, avatara, buddha, sage) and the cultural receptacle: "the water assumes the color of its cup, but the cup is nothing but frozen water."
- Each diagnoses distance, prescribes nearness, and ties gods of belief that point toward an open-ended felicity; many contain the means to dissolve their own myths.
Synthesis
Key Takeaways
- Diversity begins in God: the One discloses Himself through many names, and self-disclosure never repeats.
- Wujud is one; everything else is He/not He, a barzakh between the Real and nonexistence.
- Creation is renewed every instant in the Breath of the All-merciful.
- Knowing God needs both eyes: incomparability (reason) and similarity (imagination).
- The human is the cosmos in concentrated, conscious form, made in the divine form.
- Lacking a fixed station, the human can become anything; perfection is the Station of No Station.
- Servant before vicegerent: becoming nothing precedes becoming everything.
- Oneness of being does not license antinomianism; it makes revealed measure indispensable.
- The fitra is the divine form, clouded by society and recovered through remembrance.
- The World of Imagination is real: meanings take bodies there, in revelation, poetry and vision.
- Imagination is ambiguous: angel and demon may wear any shape, so marks and the Shariah are needed to tell them apart.
- The afterlife is imagination made outward: deeds become bodies, desires become worlds.
- Mercy is essential, wrath accidental; even hell ends in a sweet chastisement.
- Laws share one root in the name Lord; messengers agree on roots and differ on rulings.
- Belief is a knot: unavoidable, true as a glimpse, false as a limit.
- "There is no error in the cosmos", yet error must be avoided for felicity.
- The engendering command cannot be disobeyed; the prescriptive command can.
- Everyone worships the god of his own belief, which becomes his mark at the resurrection.
- "Vision in the next world follows upon beliefs in this world": widen your beliefs.
- Believe in all religions, have faith in one; take from the Messenger without a scale.
- Religions differ because names, states, times and self-disclosures differ: the circle closes.
- Revelation joins reason and imagination and so is closest to nondelimitation.
- Religions are providential knots that help untie the knots blocking felicity.
- Even the "critical" method is a knot; God as Guide outranks God as Critic.
Frameworks at a Glance
| Framework | Chapter | Use it to |
|---|---|---|
| He/not He; barzakh | 1, 10 | Hold the in-between status of everything |
| Incomparability + similarity | 1, 5, 10 | Balance reason and imagination |
| Microcosm / macrocosm / Perfect Man | 2 | Read the human as the cosmos made conscious |
| Station of No Station | 2, 4, 10 | Define perfection as non-fixation |
| Annihilation / subsistence | 4 | Map the work of self-knowledge |
| Three worlds: spirit, imagination, body | 5-7 | Locate revelation, vision and the afterlife |
| Sages' laws vs revealed laws | 8 | Separate worldly order from guidance |
| Engendering vs prescriptive command | 9 | Reconcile "no error" with moral duty |
| Three paths | 9 | Place every religion relative to one's own |
| Circle of diversity | 9 | Explain why religions must differ |
| Servant / vicegerent | 10 | Order emptiness before fullness |
Glossary of Key Terms
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 'abd | Servant; the human as nothing before God |
| 'adhab / 'adhb | Chastisement / sweetness: hell's pain finally turns sweet |
| 'alam al-khayal | World of Imagination, where meanings take bodily form |
| al-amr al-takwini | Engendering command, "Be!", which cannot be disobeyed |
| al-amr al-taklifi | Prescriptive command of revealed law, which can be disobeyed |
| 'aql | Reason; perceives incomparability; literally "fetter" |
| 'arif | Gnostic, knower who sees God in every form |
| a'yan thabita | Immutable entities, things as known by God |
| barzakh | Isthmus; anything between two things, above all imagination |
| dhikr | Remembrance, reminding; the prophets' task |
| fana' / baqa' | Annihilation from the unreal / subsistence through the Real |
| fitra | Original human disposition, the divine form |
| al-Haqq | The Real, God |
| huwa la huwa | He/not He: the status of every created thing |
| i'tiqad | Belief; literally knotting |
| al-insan al-kamil | The perfect human, the cosmos' spirit and mirror |
| isti'dad | Preparedness, a receptacle's capacity for self-disclosure |
| kashf | Unveiling: seeing without reasoning |
| khalifa | Vicegerent; the human as everything |
| maqala | Doctrine, utterance about God |
| Maqam la maqam | Station of No Station, human perfection |
| nafas al-rahman | Breath of the All-merciful, in which creatures are words |
| Shahada | Testimony: "No god but God"; "Muhammad is the Messenger of God" |
| Shari'a | Revealed law, the prescriptive measure |
| ta'ayyun | Entification, a thing's specific determination |
| tajalli | Self-disclosure; never repeated |
| tanzih / tashbih | Declaring incomparability / asserting similarity |
| wujud | Being, existence, finding; God in the strict sense |
About this book
Imaginal Worlds: Ibn al-'Arabi and the Problem of Religious Diversity by William C. Chittick, 1994. 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