Insight Editions · No. 152
Philosophical Sufism
An Introduction to the School of Ibn al-'Arabi
Mukhtar H. Ali
Mukhtar H. Ali examines Ibn al-Arabi’s school through its early commentators, tracing its teachings on divine Being, the Imaginal, spiritual knowledge, sainthood, and prophecy.
A study guide to Philosophical Sufism by Mukhtar H. Ali. 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
Mukhtar H. Ali's Philosophical Sufism is an introduction to the school of Ibn al-Arabi as his first commentators built it: Qunawi, Jandi, Farghani, Kashani, and above all Qaysari, whose Muqaddima gives the book its frame. It moves from Being and the divine names through the worlds and the Imaginal, to unveiling, to the human being as God's vicegerent, and ends with prophethood, sainthood and the return.
Ali writes from inside the tradition. His thesis is in the subtitle of his Conclusion: the founders were Sufis first and philosophers second, and "philosophical" names the intellect interpreting the language of the heart. Much of the book is his own translation from Arabic and Persian sources, and he says the book began as a commentary on his translation of Qaysari, The Horizons of Being, and that it repeats material.
Argument map
Chapter map
1. Where Philosophy and Sufism Meet
The Introduction asks how a visionary who distrusted reason came to found a school called philosophical Sufism. Mukhtar Ali's answer: the experience stayed mystical, but his heirs described it in the shared language of philosophy.
Sufism as method
Ali begins with the Quran's spiritual teaching and the idea that true knowledge comes through self-purification and the illumination of the heart. The path of the soul toward God was called wayfaring, suluk, a movement through states and stations. Toward the end of the second/eighth century its teachings were codified in manuals, and the result came to be called Sufism, "not a separate sect of Islam, but a methodology underlying religious devotions and an inner quest to understand and attain reality".
Greek thought entered the same culture along two lines: Plato (428 to 347 BCE), with a leaning toward mysticism, and Aristotle (384 to 322 BCE), with logic and discursive reasoning. The two fed an older divide between reason and intuition. Esoterics held that knowledge comes by experience, inspiration and unveiling; legalists, theologians and philosophers relied on texts, proofs or both. A third group joined the two, and Ali quotes Sayyid Haydar Amuli (d. 787/1385) on the triad of law, way and reality: "is that you worship Him", the way is reaching His presence, and reality is witnessing Him.
Philosophy in its first sense is the love of wisdom, and "intellectual" need not mean reason alone. In that sense, Ali writes, "mysticism can be considered a branch of philosophy". What was new in Ibn al-Arabi's school was the elaboration of spiritual doctrine in "precise philosophical terminology", so that Sufism became not just a way of conduct but a whole cosmology.
Five schools
| School | Founders (dates as printed) | Way to truth | Ali's note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kalam (scholastic theology) | Ash'ari d.324/936; Maturidi d.333/944; Razi d.607/1210; Iji d.756/1355 | Scripture and dialectic | Answered the big questions but was faulted for fallacies and polemics; wary of Sufis |
| Peripatetic (mashsha') | Kindi d. ca.256/870; Farabi d.339/950; Ibn Sina d.428/1037; Tusi | Deductive reasoning alone | Yet Ibn Sina's Isharat, ninth section, describes the Sufi stations |
| Illumination (ishraq) | Suhrawardi d.587/1191 | Unveiling after purification, plus logic | Plato and Plotinus its Greek masters |
| Transcendent Philosophy | Mulla Sadra d.1050/1640 | Reason, revelation, inspiration | A synthesis of all prior Islamic learning |
| Sufism (tasawwuf) | Hasan Basri d.110/728 to Ibn al-Farid d.632/1234 | Witnessing and unveiling only | Culminates in Ibn al-Arabi |
The name kalam may come from treatises that opened with al-kalamu fi kadha, "the doctrine is as follows", or from the first question it debated, whether God's speech is eternal or created. Al-Ghazali (d. 505/1111) is the theologian who accepted unveiling. The Peripatetics took their name from Aristotle's lecturing while walking. The Ikhwan al-Safa of fourth/tenth-century Basra blended Hermetic, Platonic, Neopythagorean and other teachings into four branches of learning, and Ali sees their Pythagorean and Platonic ideas behind both Illumination and philosophical Sufism. Mulla Sadra called Suhrawardi's Philosophy of Illumination "the apple of the eye of the gnostics and the people of witnessing."
A visionary, not a philosopher
The founder himself had little patience with reasoning about ultimate things. On the soul he writes that only the messengers and the Sufis have known it: "Reasoning will never yield this knowledge." Within his school, however, Ali distinguishes two attitudes: one that relies on unveiling alone, and one, used by the first commentators, that admits both unveiling and reasoning. Even these never treated reason as the road to truth; they used philosophy to explain what purification had already shown.
Ali is candid about the paradox in his title. There is "very little philosophy proper in his works"; Ibn al-Arabi was "a visionary not a philosopher". Taken as discursive reasoning in the manner of Aristotle or Ibn Sina, philosophy is opposed to Sufism, and the phrase is "an inherent contradiction". Taken as the logic and description of a metaphysical system studied apart from its source, it is the only fitting name.
The Shaykh's own account of how he wrote supports the point:
My heart is poor and needy, empty of every knowledge.
He still knew the philosophers and earlier Sufis well, and he granted that "not all knowledge of the philosopher is invalid". But the heart sees by insight, basira, and the intellect by reflection, and only the first reaches the hidden realities. In the Futuhat he puts it bluntly: "Preoccupation with rational thought is a veil". The rare exception, he says, is someone like the divine sage Plato.
2. The Architects of the School
Ibn al-Arabi founded no order and no formal school. What scholars now call his school is a chain of readers, above all Qunawi, Jandi, Kashani and Qaysari, each of whom studied the texts with the one before.
A school made by its commentators
Mohammed Rustom explains the label: the school's central concern is Being, wujud, which is also the central concern of Islamic philosophy, and it borrowed its vocabulary from philosophy and theology. William Chittick notes that the phrase school of Ibn al-Arabi was coined by Western scholars. Ali adds his own image: the works are "a spiritual seed planted in the hearts of the gnostics", whose fruit appears later on the branches. His study therefore treats the master and his commentators together, the latter as "different lamps lit from a single flame".
Qunawi and his circle
Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi (d. 673/1274) was the son of Ibn al-Arabi's friend Majd al-Din Ishaq; when the father died, the Shaykh married his widow and became Qunawi's stepfather. Called al-Shaykh al-Kabir, the Grand Master, Qunawi received permission in his mid-twenties to transmit all his master's works, the Futuhat having been read to him from beginning to end. He was the first to give the teaching a structure, recasting it in philosophical language for a wider audience, though not, Ali insists, to put reason above intuition. Qunawi himself says the early Greek sages built on openings received through practice, and that only after Aristotle did philosophy confine itself to what the intellect discerns.
His world was wide. He glossed Suhrawardi and Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, corresponded with Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, and knew Rumi, Kirmani (with whom he spent around 15 years) and Kubrawi shaykhs. He liked to say, "I have drunk milk from the breasts of two mothers," meaning Ibn al-Arabi and Kirmani. His Fukuk was the first commentary on the Fusus after the Shaykh's own ten-page Naqsh al-Fusus, and he called the Fusus one of the most precious distillations of the master's works, a "quintessence of the spiritual taste" of the Prophet.
| Student | Contribution |
|---|---|
| Tilimsani (d. 690/1291) | Commentaries on the Divine Names, the Fusus, Niffari and Ansari's Manazil al-sa'irin |
| Farghani | Persian, then Arabic, commentary on Ibn al-Farid's Ta'iyya, which Jami called the clearest treatise on esoteric science |
| Iraqi (d. 688/1289) | The Lama'at, Divine Flashes, inspired by Qunawi's lectures; devotee of Rumi |
| Jandi (d. ca. 700/1300) | First full-length Fusus commentary; ten years in Qunawi's service |
Tilimsani's comparison of his two teachers has become famous: "My first shaykh was a philosophizing spiritualist", and his second a spiritualizing philosopher. Ali draws the moral that Sufism is "first and foremost a spiritual path, then an academic discipline". Jandi's own story shows the practice behind the theory: ten years of retreats, forty-day vigils and disciplines. He claims that while Qunawi explained the opening sermon of the Fusus, a mysterious influence gave him at once the meaning of the whole book, just as Qunawi had received it from Ibn al-Arabi.
Kashani and Qaysari
Abd al-Razzaq al-Kashani (d. ca. 730/1330), Jandi's student, studied first with a Twelver Shi'i master and a Sunni Suhrawardi one. His Istilahat al-sufiyya, Sufi Terminology, defined the technical vocabulary for scholars trained in Avicennan philosophy and became a model for al-Jurjani's Ta'rifat. His Quranic hermeneutics, later printed as the Tafsir Ibn al-Arabi, reads the signs on the horizons and in the souls as correspondences between macrocosm and microcosm. His Fusus commentary emphasizes terminology and is among the most systematic in the tradition.
Dawud al-Qaysari was born in Kayseri around 660/1260 and died in 751/1350. Trained in Avicennan philosophy and mathematics, he studied the Fusus with Kashani. In 1336 Sultan Orkhan appointed him to direct the first Ottoman school system, at Iznik, a post he held until his death in 1350, which made him a channel for the teaching across the empire. His Fusus commentary is the third in a direct line back to the Shaykh. Its prolegomenon, the Muqaddima, stands as an independent work; Jalal al-Din Ashtiyani judged it best in many respects, even if Kashani's is more profound. In his preface Qaysari reports divine help while studying with Kashani: "I was singled out among my companions to have received knowledge and acquire meanings without prior reflection and learning."
The later heirs
| Figure | Date as printed | Why he matters |
|---|---|---|
| Nasafi | d. ca. 661/1262 | Joined Ibn al-Arabi's writings with the Kubrawi line |
| Shabistari | d. 741/1340 | Gulshan-i raz; Lahiji's 800-page commentary on it is the fullest Persian work of the school |
| Haydar Amuli | d. 787/1385 | Recast the school within Twelver Shi'ism; held that Sufism and Shi'ism share one reality |
| Abd al-Karim al-Jili | d. ca. 832/1428 | Al-Insan al-kamil, The Perfect Human |
| Fanari | d. 834/1431 | First Ottoman jurist to be Shaykh al-Islam; Misbah al-uns on Qunawi's Miftah al-ghayb |
| Ibn Turka | d. 830/1437 | Tamhid al-qawa'id; joined Illuminationist and Peripatetic thought |
| Jami | d. 898/1492 | Spread the teaching to the Ottomans, India and China; two works translated into Chinese |
| Nabulusi | d. 1143/1731 | The most widely read Fusus commentary in the Arab world |
| Bursawi | d. 1137/1725 | Ottoman Turkish Fusus commentary; Ruh al-bayan |
Nabulusi's devotion gives the school its warmest line: "I am his suckling child, son of the Shaykh al-Akbar, and he is my father." The notes add a traditional order of study: Qaysari's Muqaddima, then Ibn Turka's Tamhid, then the Fusus, then Qunawi's Miftah with Fanari's commentary, and finally the Futuhat.
3. Being Itself
Chapter 1 builds the ground floor. Before God, creation or the soul, Ali asks what Being is in itself, and follows Qaysari through its negative and positive properties, its necessity, its gradation, and the doctrine for which the school is famous, the oneness of Being.
Why start with Being
Everyone, Ali says, asks at some point how they came to be and where they are going; the quest to know reality "underlies our humanness and separates us from the animals". Knowledge of Being in general also outranks knowledge of particular things. Jalal al-Din Ashtiyani gives the classical rule: a discipline is nobler the more it grounds others, so philosophy, which studies existence, ranks above mathematics, which studies quantity, and mathematics above music. Ali adds that Sufi doctrine is often misread because its ontology is not understood; without it, talk of manifestation, unity in multiplicity or annihilation sounds like nonsense.
Being considered without reference to anything else is absolute existence, Being qua Being. Qaysari defines it by negation:
It is neither a universal nor a particular, nor categorized by generality or particularity.
There is nothing intermediate between Being and non-being
Being and the Real
For the Sufis, Being is inseparable from God, and they prefer the name al-Haqq, the Real, truth and reality, to the name Allah with its religious connotations. Being, Ali writes, is "a more universal concept than traditional notions about God". The Arabic wujud comes from a root meaning both existing and finding, which ties ontology to epistemology: the seeker's knowing is his becoming, and true finding is "the transformation of the self in" being. God cannot be known through things, since things are known through likes and opposites and He has neither; hence the Prophet's saying that he knew God by God and things through God.
What Being is not, and what it is
| Privative (what cannot be said) | Positive (what can be said) |
|---|---|
| Neither external nor mental existence | A unitary reality whose oneness does not oppose multiplicity |
| Neither absolute nor restricted, since both are conditions | The most universal of all things |
| Neither universal nor particular | Self-evident in its reality, hidden in its essence |
| Not a concept, not an abstraction | Simple: no parts, no matter and form, no genus and differentia |
| Not a substance, not an accident | Necessary in itself; absolute good; light |
Quiddity, mahiyya, is the defining limit of a thing, the shape of its existence; what is real is the existence, not the limit. The mind sees "tree", but what is real is the existence of something whose quiddity is tree-ness. Ali notes that this echoes the Peripatetics and Mulla Sadra's primacy of Being, and quotes Sadra: the Sufis "see nothing in existence except God and His manifestations".
Multiplicity arises from manifestation, as the Quran says, Every day He is in a [new] state (55:29). Each particular manifestation is an individuation, ta'ayyun. Ali's favourite image recurs here: "In the same way that a single ray of light produces multiple colors when diffracted through a prism, singular Being produces multiple manifestations in the prism of existence." Sadra sums up the double character: Being's reality is "the most manifest of all things through presence and unveiling" while its quiddity is the most hidden. Qaysari adds that through Being contraries are realized, so that Being joins both sides of a contradiction. The material world is its furthest manifestation and therefore the most multiple; spirits, by contrast, hold contrary qualities at once.
Necessity, contingency and impossibility
Using the Peripatetic argument, Qaysari holds that Being is necessary in itself, for a contingent Being would need a cause and so precede itself. He defines the three modes:
The contingent is the absence of necessity towards either existence or non-existence.
Everything contingent is substance or accident, and Being is neither, so it is necessary. Against those who make Being a natural universal realized only in individuals, Ali cites the hadith There was God and nothing else was with Him. Ibn al-Arabi adds a striking reversal: "The gnostic sees that causes are also caused by their effects", since a cause without its effect remains in non-being. Contingent things do not perish but return to the Unseen; Qaysari says the contingent "disappears and enters the Unseen from where it had emerged." (The printed sentence before it says the contingent does not go out existence, a dropped word; see Part 15.)
Is Being graded?
Tusi held that existence applies to Necessary and contingent by gradation, tashkik. Qunawi, Kashani and Qaysari refuse gradation in Being's essential reality, which would break its oneness, and allow it only in its manifestations.
| View | Claim |
|---|---|
| Peripatetic, general | Separate realities, alike in different respects |
| Graded reality (light model) | One reality differing in intensity, alike and distinct in the same respect |
| Sufi | One reality; only its manifestations differ in intensity; gradation is conceptual |
As Being descends, Qaysari says, its hiddenness intensifies and its perfections weaken. The higher a plane, the more comprehensive, simple and luminous it is; true multiplicity belongs only to the material world. Ali's comparison is breath and speech: the external world is not a vessel for Being, but identical with its manifestation, as words are made with and by the breath.
Transcendence and immanence
God's Essence is unknowable and His manifestations are none other than Himself. Jawadi Amuli explains the paradox: God's invisibility "is due to the intensity of His manifestation, and His remoteness is because of His extreme proximity." The Prophet's words We have not known You as You have deserved to be known express the limit. Ibn al-Arabi's definition of transcendence, tanzih, is privative; immanence, tashbih, rests on verses such as He is nearer to you than the jugular vein (50:16). Jami's verdict is that one who holds only transcendence misses the multiplicity of manifestations, one who holds only immanence materializes God, and only the one who holds both is "the true gnostic and the realized Perfect Man." The Shaykh's quatrain says the same: either alone delimits; both together hit the mark.
The oneness of Being
Wahdat al-wujud is the doctrine most associated with the school, although, Ali notes after Chittick, Ibn al-Arabi never used the term and Qunawi used it twice. It became the target of medieval polemic, Ibn Taymiyya's above all, as if it taught unificationism, ittihad, or incarnation, hulul. In fact it says only that there is nothing in existence except God and His manifestations, or in Imam Ali's words, God is in all things but not by being contained within them.
Two unities must be kept apart. Ahadiyya, the unity of the One, admits no multiplicity at all; wahidiyya, the unity of the many, is the unity of the Names and the origin of multiplicity. Kashani's commentary on the chapter of Sincerity (112) maps this onto the verse itself: huwa, He, is the Essence beyond attributes; Allah is the name that holds all attributes as one with the Essence; ahad, Singular, admits no multiplicity; and the Presence of Unity is one with Singularity "as drops of water are one with the sea."
Tawhid and the views to avoid
Outward profession of God's oneness is its least form; its inward recognition is existential tawhid, whose opposite is hidden polytheism, more hidden than the crawling of a black ant on a smooth stone on a dark night. Amuli says the reality of divine unity "is greater than that which can be expressed in words or intimated by allusions." Ibn al-Arabi divides tawhid into the unity of oneness and individual unity; Qunawi into unity of Acts, Attributes and Essence.
| View Amuli calls problematic | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Hedonism (ibaha) | Sees all phenomena alike, without good and evil or lawful and unlawful |
| Heresy (ilhad) | Keeps the inward and drops the outward Law |
| Pantheism (ittihad) | God identical with the world; wrongly pinned on Ibn al-Arabi |
| Incarnation (hulul) | God descends into the contingent |
| Separation and union (farq, jam') | Seeing creation and not God, or God and not creation |
| Anthropomorphism and pure transcendence | The first breeds unbelief, the second blindness to causes |
Against the charge of pantheism Ibn al-Arabi's own words are decisive: "Rather, He is He and things are things."
The universal degrees
Being viewed under different conditions yields the degrees that later chapters fill in.
Singularity effaces all names and attributes; Qaysari calls it the Comprehensive Union, the Ultimate Reality and the Cloud, al-'ama', a veil and isthmus between the unknowable Essence and the Names, as a cloud lies between earth and sky. Viewed as pervading all things like a river flowing into streams, Being is the Breath of the Merciful, from which creation emanates. The First Intellect is called the Holy Spirit by God's folk, and what philosophers call the rational soul, they call the heart.
4. The Divine Names
The Essence cannot be known; the Names can. Chapter 2 sorts them, explains why they seem to quarrel, shows how they multiply without end, and ends with the ethics that follows: the wayfarer's task is to take on the divine character.
What a Name is
Imam Ali's saying sets the scale: all the secrets of the revealed books are in the Quran, all of the Quran in the Fatiha, all of the Fatiha in the basmala, all of the basmala in its first letter, and all of that in the dot beneath it. Kashani glosses the basmala: "A thing is known through its name." Allah names the Essence as such; through the Merciful each thing reaches its perfection; through the Compassionate human beings reach spiritual perfection.
The Names do not divide God. For Ibn al-Arabi they are relations, not ontological entities: "Something becomes multiple through ontological entities, not through properties, relationships and ascriptions." Qaysari's definition is the standard one: the Essence together with a specific attribute, in one of its theophanies, is a name; the Merciful is the Essence qualified by mercy, the Compeller the Essence qualified by compulsion, and the spoken words are "the names of the names." Adam's being taught all the names (2:30 to 31) means that the human reality was built on the template of the Names, which is why man can mirror them all. False deities are names that you have named (53:23), figurative names with no Named behind them.
Sorting the attributes
Beauty and Majesty
The main division of the Names is Beauty, jamal (mercy, intimacy, nearness), and Majesty, jalal (awe, distance, severity). Ibn al-Arabi refines the usual pairing of intimacy with Beauty and awe with Majesty: Majesty relates God to Himself and bars us from knowing Him by it, while Beauty is "a meaning that relates Him to us". Qaysari insists each contains the other: "Every beauty also has majesty", the awe that beauty produces, and every majesty has a hidden gentleness.
The human being holds both and is called the Great Isthmus. Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq's line is quoted: "Servanthood is a reality whose essence is Lordship." The discipline of the soul expresses Majesty and the inward states it yields express Beauty; worldly pleasures express Beauty and their consequences Majesty. The physician's bitter medicine is Ali's homely example. Ahmad Sam'ani (d. 534/1140) puts the duality in verse:
To the spirits, He spoke of love.
O frames, toil!
O hearts, rejoice!
Ali then reverses the mapping, making the spirit Majestic and the body, in the printed spelling, imminent and Beautiful (p.60). He presents both readings as perspectives. Hujwiri adds the paired states of the wayfarer: awe when God shows Majesty to the heart, intimacy when He shows Beauty.
Why the Names conflict
Each Name seeks to show its own properties, rule and period, and their properties clash. Ibn al-Arabi asks what the Avenger has in common with the Compassionate, and draws a surprising conclusion from the Quran's Dispute with them in the most beautiful way (16:125): the Prophet is told to dispute "in the same way the divine names dispute". Multiplicity begins in God's knowledge of His own perfections; divine love then individuates each attribute, first in knowledge and then in existence. The intelligible meanings behind this are the Keys of the Unseen, which never enter existence themselves.
Ranking the Names
| Classification | Members | Principle |
|---|---|---|
| The Seven Leaders (Mothers) | Life, Knowledge, Will, Power, Hearing, Sight, Speech | Widest scope; preconditions of all other names |
| The four Mothers | First, Last, Manifest, Hidden, under Allah and the Merciful | Origin and return; seen and unseen |
| Names of the Essence | Allah, Lord, King, Holy, Truth, Light, Eternal and others | Most faithful to the divine Ipseity |
| Names of the Attributes | Living, Merciful, Knowing, Hearing, Seeing and others | Related to creation |
| Names of the Acts | Creator, Provider, Life-giver, Avenger, Guide and others | Rule the phenomenal world |
Ibn al-Arabi ranks the Living highest, as precondition of the rest, and calls Power and Will "gatekeepers" of the Knowing. Unlike the theologians, the Sufis treat hearing, sight and speech as theophanies identical with the Essence: God hears His own speech, hears the Names' petition to appear, and all things hear His command Be!. The Essence itself has no name: names define, "but this door is forbidden to all but God".
The Names of the Acts also differ in duration. Some rule from pre-eternity to post-eternity (the holy spirits, in eternal time, dahr); some rule only post-eternally (the hereafter); some neither (everything in time, zaman). At the Resurrection the world governed by the Manifest passes under the Hidden. This is why some revealed laws abrogate others: each prophet is governed by certain names.
Endless creation
Creation never stops. Ibn al-Arabi: "In every moment", with respect to form, "the world undergoes a new creation in which there is no repetition." Between any two names, says Qaysari, stands a third born of both, like a child of two parents, and the combinations go on ad infinitum. The Shaykh cites Abu Talib al-Makki's dictum: "God never discloses Himself in a single form to two" individuals, nor in a single form twice.
Taking on the divine character
The point of all this is practical. Since God is known only through the Names, wayfaring means traversing them, and the Prophet's command is Assume the characteristics of God. Philosophers, notes Ibn al-Arabi, speak of becoming like God; the Sufis speak of assuming His traits. His three terms are attachment (ta'alluq), assuming the traits (takhalluq) and realization (tahaqquq). Every name can be assumed except Allah. At the end the lover discovers that "the servant has no name of his own", not even the name servant.
Jami explains Adam's teaching as knowledge by tasting: the Perfect Human comprehends every name, his heart being the Throne. The image of God in which man was made is a matter of qualities, not body; the notes add parallels from texts Ali introduces with the words The Bible says, though the passages are cited as 2 Enoch and an apocryphal work on Isaac. The chapter closes with the hadith qudsi of supererogatory prayer: God becomes the servant's hearing, sight, tongue, hand and foot.
5. God's Knowledge and the Archetypes
Chapter 3 is short but carries a key idea: things exist in God's knowledge before they exist in the world, as Permanent Archetypes that have, in Ibn al-Arabi's phrase, never smelled the fragrance of existence.
Knowing Himself, knowing the world
Theologians, philosophers and Sufis agree that God's self-knowledge belongs to His Essence. Ibn al-Arabi goes further: "God's knowledge of Himself is identical to His knowledge of the world", because the world is always witnessed by Him, even while it does not exist. This, he warns, is "an ocean in which the speculative thinkers have perished". Every faculty a creature has, hearing or sight, is the divine Hearing or Seeing showing through it. Ali's image: God pervades all things but all things are not God, as a mirror reflects the sun without being the sun.
The Permanent Archetypes
The first theophany is the Holiest Emanation, through which the Names emerge; then through the Holy Emanation the realities in God's knowledge are individuated as the Permanent Archetypes, al-a'yan al-thabita. They are called permanent because God's knowledge is His Essence and cannot change. Qunawi lists their other names: quiddity, a non-existent known, a fixed thing. Qaysari gives them a double face:
In the former, they are like bodies for spirits, and in the latter, they are like spirits for bodies.
The Archetypes remain in the Unseen, in pure potentiality; external things are their manifestations. They are not created, majʿula, since only what exists externally can be called formed, just as an idea in the mind is not yet made. Philosophers call them quiddities; the Sufis prefer Archetypes because, on the plane of God's knowledge, quiddity and existence are one. Our own mental concepts are faint copies: in Qaysari's words, the forms of quiddities in our minds are "shadows of the forms in [divine] knowledge", which is why real knowledge of things requires a heart lit by God.
Against the philosophers
Some philosophers made God's knowledge of things identical with the First Intellect and the forms in it. Qaysari answers that the First Intellect is contingent and originated, so it is itself an object of God's knowledge and cannot be that knowledge. If it were, it would equally be His power. God knows particulars as He has power over them, by His Essence. Knowledge, knower and known are distinct only in concept. The chapter's last word: God perceives the realities of things "in the way that He perceives the reality of His own Essence".
6. How the One Becomes Many
Chapter 4 answers the old question of how multiplicity comes from unity with a chain of images: ink and letters, sun and rays, breath and words, pen and tablet. Each names the same descent from Singularity to the created world.
Unity within multiplicity
The first individuation is the Singularity, in which all multiplicity is effaced; through the Holiest Emanation the Names emerge in the Unity; through the Holy Emanation the Names manifest the Archetypes. The Quran's you will not see in the creation of the Merciful any discrepancy (67:3) is read as saying it is all one emanation. Reason grasps that there is no god but God; only faith grasps unity within multiplicity. Ibn al-Arabi: the believer is one who acknowledges "the unity within divine multiplicity".
Amuli's image is the ink and the letters:
only the ink has external existence.
The sun and its rays serve the same purpose: near the sun the rays grow more intense and less distinct, until rays and sun are one. Each degree of Being is multiple in relation to the one above and unified in relation to the one below.
Kinds of contingent things
Ali divides the contingent into the possible and the impossible, which sounds odd but is how the book prints it. The impossible covers hypothetical contraries that cannot even be conceived, and the Reserved Names that stay forever in the absolute Unseen because their essences seek the Hidden and flee from the Manifest. Every possible entity that seeks existence receives it; to withhold it would undermine God's magnanimity.
Substance and accident are borrowed from philosophy and transformed. For Qaysari Substance is the reality of Being itself, uncreated, prior to the First Intellect; accidents are the manifestations of the Names. "Do you not see that the divine Essence remains veiled by the names?" Likewise substance is wrapped in accidents. The parallel runs throughout: universal names are finite and their branches infinite; so too the genera of substance and the entities.
Expansive Being and the Breath of the Merciful
Expansive Being, al-wujud al-munbasit, is the shadow of the Essence that spreads over the Archetypes; mental and external existence are "shadows of that shadow". It is also called Substance, the First Engenderer, the Outstretched Parchment and the Muhammadan Light. The First Engenderer is uncreated and higher than the First Intellect, which is the first created thing.
The Breath of the Merciful explains why creation is speech. Ibn al-Arabi: "The letters are containers for meanings, while the meanings are their spirits." He links the Breath to the Cloud of the hadith, He came to be in a Cloud, neither above which nor below which was any air, and adds that the entities appear in the Breath "just as letters become manifest within the human breath". Farghani calls it the first thing individuated from the absolute Unseen, holding both activity and receptivity.
Divine words
The first word was Be! (kun). For Ibn al-Arabi the world is "but a tree whose original light is from the seed" of that word. Kashani defines a word as any reality, essence or individuation of God, so the heavens and the earth are words. In the microcosm the word is the Supreme Spirit and above all the prophets; Jesus is His Word which He cast into Mary (4:171). Ja'far al-Sadiq's description of the Complete Word divided into four parts, with one name kept hidden, ends These are the thirty Names, though the list as printed has 33 entries, with Originator and Mighty each appearing twice. Each scripture, Ali adds, is the breath of the prophet who received it, fitting his spirit as a key fits a lock.
The Intellect, Pen and Tablet
The Intellect is the first created thing, though the Sufi Intellect is wider than Aristotle's nous; Ibn Sina already equated the Active Intellect with the Holy Spirit. A hadith has God tell it to retreat and approach, and then say that He has created nothing better. It is also the Muhammadan Light and the White Pearl. Kashani explains the name: as a drop of heaven-water becomes a pearl in the oyster, "the Intellect is like the receptive oyster of contingency"; the soul, an isthmus between intellect and nature, is the Emerald or Red Ruby.
| Term | Macrocosm | Microcosm | Governing name |
|---|---|---|---|
| Supreme Pen | First Intellect, Mother of the Book, Tablet of Decree | Intellect | The Merciful; the Director |
| Guarded Tablet | Universal Soul, Manifest Book, Tablet of Destiny | Soul, heart | The Compassionate; the Distinguisher |
| Book of Effacement and Establishment | Universal Body, temporal world | Changing states | Life-giver, Life-taker |
| Throne | First sensory form, seat of the Merciful | Heart of the believer | The Merciful |
| Pedestal | Manifestation of the Guarded Tablet | The Compassionate |
The Pen receives knowledge in summary and writes it on the Tablet in detail. Qunawi gives it two faces: toward its Lord it is Intellect, receiving; toward creation it is Pen, acting. In Ibn al-Arabi's account the Tablet arose from the Pen's own desire for a place to write. Fayd Kashani applies it to the heart: realities flow from the Guarded Tablet onto our hearts "by the pen of the Intellect". Kashani's list of four tablets is garbled in the printing and spells the Guarded Tablet al-lawh al-ma'fuz (p.93). The Throne rests on water, which for Ibn al-Arabi means it rests on knowledge, and The heart of the believer is the Throne of the Merciful.
7. The Five Presences and the Perfect Human
Chapter 5 lays out the five Universal Worlds, the planes in which God is present, and reaches the figure at the centre of Ibn al-Arabi's thought: the Perfect Human, who holds all the worlds in one.
Worlds as signs
The Arabic 'alam, world, shares a root with 'alama, sign: the world is that through which something is known, and, for the Sufis, everything other than God. From one angle the worlds are infinite, since every individual is a sign of a name and every name holds all others. From another they are five, because the universal divine Presences are five. Ibn al-Arabi calls them Presences, hadra, because God is present in each; Chittick glosses the term as "the mode in which God displays His own reality,"
Five ways to count five
The commentators agree there are five but disagree on which five. The disagreement is principled. Qunawi treats the Presences as degrees of individuation, so he leaves out the Essence, which is neither individuated nor known, and puts the Perfect Human at the centre. Kashani stresses divinity in the first three levels (Essence, Names, Acts) and creation in the last two, and drops the Perfect Human. Farghani reasons from where entities appear: in the first two degrees nothing manifests but God, first because the Archetypes cease entirely and then because, though distinct in knowledge, they have no outward qualities; in the three created degrees theophany falls on simple entities (spirits), on subtle compound entities that cannot be divided (imagination), and on dense divisible ones (sense). Qaysari's two lists, in his commentary and in the Muqaddima, do not even agree with each other.
| Author | The five Presences | Where the Perfect Human stands |
|---|---|---|
| Qunawi | Knowledge (Names, Archetypes); Spirits; Perfect Human; Imaginal World; sensory world | The central Presence; Essence excluded |
| Kashani | Essence; Names and Attributes (Divinity); Acts (Lordship); Imaginal; Sensory | Left out |
| Farghani | Two divine degrees (first and second individuation), three created (spirits, imagination, sense) | A sixth, comprehensive degree |
| Jami (Naqsh al-Fusus) | Essence; Names; Acts (spirits); Imaginal; Visible | Follows Kashani |
| Qaysari (Muqaddima) | Archetypes; spirits (Invincibility and Dominion); Imaginal; Kingdom | The fifth, embracing the other four |
Qunawi reduces everything to three: "the Unseen, the Visible and the reality which comprehends both." The Dominion, malakut, is the angelic world; Qunawi says the classes of angels are forms of the human reality's inward faculties, the Throne-bearers like major organs and the planets like limbs. The Kingdom, mulk, is the sensory world of life and death and of true multiplicity. Qaysari's summary sentence: the Perfect Human is a universal world because he holds all the others, in summary through his spirit and in detail through his heart, and "through him the comprehensive name Allah is known."
The books of God
The Presences are also God's books. Words are the entities arising in the Breath; books are the ordered degrees that hold them. The existential books are the horizons and the souls; the written books are the scriptures.
| Book | Macrocosm | Microcosm |
|---|---|---|
| Mother of the Book | First Intellect, things in summary | Spirit and intellect |
| Manifest Book / Guarded Tablet | Universal Soul, things in detail | Heart |
| Book of Effacement and Establishment | Universal Soul imprinted on the Universal Body | Soul, always in flux |
Ibn al-Arabi multiplies the image: the Tablet is to the Intellect as Eve to Adam; the Pen has three hundred and sixty nibs, aspects and tongues, conveying three hundred and sixty seas of knowledge. Qaysari cites a poem attributed to Imam Ali: "Do you suppose that you are a small particle", when the Great World is folded within you?
The Perfect Human
The Perfect Human is the final Presence, the book holding all existence. Ibn al-Arabi gives the reason for his vicegerency: God made his outward form from all the realities of the world and his inward form on the model of His own, and "he has obtained (his vicegerency) only because of his comprehensiveness." Usually the human is the Small World and creation the Great World; Kashani notes that for Ibn al-Arabi it is the reverse, because creation without the Perfect Human would not contain everything.
Qunawi makes him the comprehensive isthmus between necessity and possibility, with no intermediary between him and God. Ibn al-Arabi calls him the heart in the body of the world, the Flourishing House, citing the hadith that heaven and earth cannot contain God but the heart of a believing servant can; he is called a heart, qalb, because he turns into every form. Jami adds that without this isthmus, which opposes neither side, the world would receive no divine grace and "the world would cease to exist."
8. The Imaginal World
With the ontology in place, Ali turns to knowledge. Chapter 6 treats the Imaginal World, the isthmus where meanings take form, and what it explains: clairvoyance, dreams and the life after death.
An isthmus with two faces
A barzakh, for Ibn al-Arabi, is like the line between shadow and sunlight: it separates two things without going to either side. The senses may not see it, but the mind grasps a barrier, and "If the senses perceive them, then it is one of the two things, not the barzakh". The word mithal comes from the root for resembling. Qaysari defines the Imaginal World as a world of luminous substance, measurable like matter, luminous like intellect, "It is not a composite material body nor is it an immaterial intellectual substance".
The same reality is the Disconnected Imaginal World when taken as a cosmic plane and the Connected Imaginal World when taken as the soul's faculty. Ibn al-Arabi: "The common folk do not know the imagination nor enter it except when they dream"; the elite see it awake. It is also the widest of the Presences, because it combines the Unseen and the Visible, and its work is "to embody and give form to that which has neither body nor a form".
Mulla Sadra holds that the imaginal power is a substance separate from the body and survives its failure. His quoted sentence repeats itself in the print (the soul's imaginal power is a substance, and the imaginal power in man is a substance); see Part 15.
Clairvoyance: firasa
When imagination is lit by a divine light it gives firasa, perspicacity. The gnostic reads the existential books with the firasa of faith. Qaysari cites the hadith "Be wary of the believer's clairvoyance, for he sees with the light of God." Akram al-Majid, Ali's teacher figure in the notes, contrasts it with discursive firasa built on study, which at best is speculative. The one endowed with it, he writes, hits the mark at the very first instance, without interpretation, supposition or calculation. Firasa applies to the souls and to the horizons alike: it is ascertaining the inner reality of a thing through its outward form. Ibn al-Arabi describes adepts who could judge from a footprint alone whether its owner was felicitous or wretched, like a tracker.
| Whose firasa (Tilimsani) | Acquired by | What it reveals |
|---|---|---|
| Gnostics (Sufis) | Arrival at the Presence of Union | Things concerning God; who is fit to stand before Him |
| Ascetics | Hunger, seclusion, inner purification | Forms and hidden matters of creation only; they are veiled from God |
Dreams
Ibn al-Arabi says God gave sleep to animals so that all might witness the Presence of Imagination and "know that there is another world that resembles the sensory world." Sleep is either pure rest or a transferal of the faculties from outward to inward, and dreams belong to the second. The Prophet's two sayings frame the field: dreams come from God, from Satan, or from the self, and "The sound dream is one of the forty-six parts of prophethood."
Nabulusi says dream interpretation is permitted like Quranic exegesis, since dreams, like verses, are sound or ambiguous. Qaysari lists the causes of sound dreams in the soul (attention to God, truthfulness, purification), in the body (balanced constitution) and in both (religious duties, staying in ablution, invocation from evening until sleep).
The posthumous barzakh
The same name covers the state after death, the Lesser Resurrection. Ibn al-Arabi distinguishes the two: the first is the possible Unseen, from which things can still appear in this world; the second is the impossible Unseen, with no return except in the hereafter. He counts six domains in all.
| # | Domain (Ibn al-Arabi) |
|---|---|
| 1 | The covenant, "Am I not your Lord?" |
| 2 | This world, dunya |
| 3 | The barzakh after the lesser and greater deaths |
| 4 | Resurrection on the Earth of Awakening |
| 5 | Paradise and the Fire |
| 6 | The Dune outside the Paradise |
Imam Ja'far's saying puts it plainly: that men will be raised up in the form of their actions, or in another version, of their intentions. Sadra makes it a moral sorting: in this world man stands "between becoming an angel, a devil, a brute, or a predatory beast." And these forms are not mere imaginings: they are "more intensely real and actual than these forms existing in [earthly] matter".
9. Unveiling: How the Gnostic Knows
Chapter 7 is the epistemology of the school. Unveiling, kashf, is presented as the method of prophets and saints, ranked by sense, by world, by divine name and by the levels of the heart.
Knowledge without thought
Ali lists the forms of unveiling: witnessing, tasting, theophany, inspiration, revelation, clairvoyance and intuition. Ibn al-Arabi's claim is blunt: "The prophets and saints among God's folk did not have knowledge of God through thought (fikr); God purified them from that." Specific revelation ended with Muhammad, but Imam Ali's sermon describes servants in every age with whom God "whispers in their thoughts and speaks to in the depths of their intellects." They are, the sermon continues, "lamps in the darkness and guides through these doubts", as though they had already crossed into the hereafter and seen what lies beyond. Amuli calls this direct knowledge, 'ilm ladunni, the light cast from the lantern of the Unseen on a pure heart; it belongs to prophets and saints alike, while revelation belongs to prophets alone.
Reason keeps a place. It lets the gnostic describe truths to others and prepares the soul by outlining the path. Guenon is cited: theoretical knowledge is "merely a preparation, though indispensable, for true knowledge." Still, Ibn al-Arabi closes the door: "He who has no unveiling (kashf) has no knowledge."
| Ibn al-Arabi's three knowledges | Reached by | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Intellectual | Proofs | Partial |
| Of states (ahwal) | Tasting; cannot be defined or proved | Partial |
| Of mysteries (asrar) | Cast by the Holy Spirit in the inner heart | Comprehensive: knows all the others |
Amuli adds a lopsided comparison: inherited divine knowledge is useful without formal learning, but formal learning "is of no use without esoteric knowledge." Unveiling is also called inherited knowledge, since the saints inherit what the prophets received; the hadith that the scholars are the heirs of the prophets is read this way. Jurjani's definition is the standard one: gaining awareness of what lies behind the veil. When the source of the disclosure is in view it is called theophany or manifestation; when the perceiver is in view, unveiling or witnessing.
Unveiling through the senses
Kashf lexically is removing a veil, as a woman uncovers her face. Qaysari lists five sensory forms, each with a prophetic precedent.
Witnessing, shuhud, Ibn al-Arabi defines as seeing things by the proofs of unity and "seeing God in things." Razi counts the veils at seventy thousand, of light and darkness, each matched by an eye in man's nature. Other traditions give eighteen thousand or three hundred and sixty thousand; Razi prefers seventy thousand because it matches an authentic report. Veils of darkness come from attachment to bodily nature; veils of light are subtle and, at the top, belong to the names and attributes. Purification lifts the dark veils first, and the heart then receives inspiration. He names three benefits of visions: they show the wayfarer his own states, they nourish the soul until it loses intimacy with creation, and some stations can only be crossed by them.
Form, meaning and the false criterion
Unveilings of form can concern worldly matters only, and the Sufis often dismiss them. Amuli complains that most people of his time take the unveiling of form, telling hidden facts about people, as the mark of a gnostic and reject those who speak about God. His reply: God keeps His elect from discerning creatures, and "The people of God are not worthy of the creatures, just like worldly people are not worthy of God."
Unveiling of meaning without form comes from the names the Omniscient and the Wise. Its lowest grade is intuition, hads: Jurjani calls it "the immediate arrival of conclusions from their premises in contrast to reflection".
| World | Inward of | Plane |
|---|---|---|
| Kingdom (mulk) | - | material |
| Dominion (malakut) | Kingdom | Imaginal |
| Invincibility (jabarut) | Dominion | Intellectual |
| Divinity (lahut) | Invincibility | divine |
Every unveiling is also the theophany of a name: hearing from the All-Hearing, sight from the All-Seeing, all serving under the Omniscient. Witnessing the Archetypes in divine knowledge is the highest station.
The heart's ladder
The truest unveilings occur in the heart. Asked by Dhi'lib whether he had seen his Lord, Ali answered "Would I worship a lord whom I have not seen?", adding that hearts see Him through the verities of faith.
Satan reaches only the breast; the heart is the Throne and true Ka'ba. Razi on the spirit's level: "man's witnessing of God becomes mingled with the taste of God's witnessing of Himself". Discipline creates receptivity, but the deciding factor is divine attraction given to servanthood, whose model is the Prophet's ascent. Qaysari's line names the condition: God reveals Himself only to one "whose trace is effaced and name is erased". Ali ends with a saying of Jesus: "Knowledge is forged into your hearts!"
10. The Human Vicegerent and the Mirror
Chapter 8 places man opposite divinity: the comprehensive being in whom God sees Himself, the seal on the world's treasury, and the polish on the mirror of creation.
Why there is a human being
The Fusus opens with the reason: God wished to see His names, or His own Essence, in a comprehensive being, because "the vision a thing has of itself is not the same as the vision it has through something else which acts like a mirror." In the Naqsh al-Fusus Ibn al-Arabi compresses his anthropology: the world is a harmonious body and Adam its spirit; the names are to the Perfect Human what faculties are to a body; man is "prior in intention and final in creation, outward in form and inward in rank or station." He is servant of God and lord of the world, and none sinks lower: man alone claims lordship, and man alone worships stones. So he is "a replica of two forms, God and the world."
The point is sharpened by the angels' failure. Asked to name the names, they answered "We have no knowledge except what You have taught us"; each was confined, in the verse Ali cites, to a specified station. Ali draws the logical consequence: were there a creature whose reality man did not encompass, that creature could hold a degree over him in the respect he lacked, and his vicegerency would be undermined. Comprehensiveness is not a decoration of the office; it is its condition.
Qaysari makes the spirits of the world particulars of the human Supreme Spirit. Fayd Kashani reads "God taught Adam all the names" as a range of faculties, from the essences of things to the use of instruments, that makes man the Great Book of God.
The comprehensive isthmus
Because the human reality manifests the Essence, and the world manifests the name Allah, man is not only an isthmus but the comprehensive isthmus. Qunawi calls him "a transcription (nuskha) comprehending both Presences." Ja'far al-Sadiq calls the human form "the greatest proof of God for His creation." It is "the book that He wrote by His own hand", the summation of knowledge in the Guarded Tablet, and the bridge spanning paradise and hell. Ali adds that God has no need of the contingent to prove His existence; divine wisdom required that man be made in His form so that every perfection could be manifested through him. The angels, each confined to a fixed station, could not name the names; Adam could, which is why he and not they received the prostration (Ali's note: obedience, not worship).
Ibn al-Arabi's Insha' al-Dawa'ir puts it as a shadow line: man is the dividing line between the shadow and the Sun, perfect in the temporal and the eternal. The same nobility yields the Prophet and Abu Jahl, Moses and Pharaoh: the "best form" and the "lowest of the low". The printed passage says that God "does enter the temporal", where the argument needs a negation; see Part 15.
Macrocosm and microcosm
| Macrocosm (Qaysari) | Microcosm |
|---|---|
| First Intellect | Immaterial spirit |
| Universal Soul | Heart (which, unlike the Soul, can reflect) |
| Universal nature; Soul imprinted on the celestial bodies | Animal soul |
| Universal prime matter | Subtle ethereal (animal) spirit |
| Universal Body | Blood |
| Body of the Great World | Limbs |
Qunawi's sequence of emanation runs Pen, Tablet, Throne, Pedestal, heavens, elements, the three progeny, and finally man, "who is colored by all that which passed before him." Qaysari calls the individualized world the Great Man because the human reality and its requisites are manifested in it. The terms can also be reversed: the Great Man can mean the human being, as the manifestation of the name Allah, and the Small Man then means the world, as the spirit's descent through the levels. Ali's rule is that the terms have multiple designations, each naming the same essence from a different angle. Since Being is one reality governed by contrary names, the names have their manifestations in the microcosm just as in the macrocosm.
Three books
A book is anything that carries inscription, so the soul is a book too: "Read your book!" The Quran reveals itself only where reader and verse correspond. When words come from a perfected heart, God speaks through the servant; the Prophet is the "speaking Quran", and Aisha's report is cited: that the Prophet's character was the Quran. God's word is the descending Quran, the Prophetic word the ascending one.
The mirror and its polish
Existence mirrors the Face of God, and man is both image and medium. In the Fusus, though, the world is the mirror and Adam its polish: "Adam became the burnish of that mirror, and the spirit behind the form." Jami: without Adam the world was a sound body without a spirit. Sells places the polishing cosmologically in Adam and mystically in the heart's polishing in union; the hadith adds that the polish of the heart is invocation. Ibn Sina uses the same image for the soul adorned with virtues: it becomes a polished mirror in which the forms of things appear "as they are in themselves without any distortion". Jami's gloss on the Arabic pair al-jala' wa-l-istijla' (Kashani: the Essence manifest for Itself in Itself, and for Itself in something else) explains why a mirror is needed at all: the second kind of vision requires an other. Jami closes: the world subsists through the Perfect Human's grace "as long as the Perfect Human remains within it."
11. The Existential Circle and the Muhammadan Reality
Chapter 9 bends the hierarchy into a circle. Being descends from a single point to the extreme of multiplicity and returns through the human ascent, and the point where the circle begins and closes is the Muhammadan Reality.
Two bows
The image comes from the Prophet's night ascent: "within two bows' length (qawsayn) or nearer." The two bows are two arcs, the Arc of Descent and the Arc of Ascent, the origin and return of Islamic philosophy. Ibn al-Arabi insists on the shape: the affair proceeds from God and returns to Him, and "This does not happen linearly, or it would never go back to Him, but it does go back."
The human frame is the last of creation and the farthest from unity, but man's inner reality is divine, so he can journey back. Qunawi: whoever reaches his original nature is the one created "in the best form"; whoever does not remains "the lowest of the low," distant through multiplicity from his station of Oneness.
The first point
The first point is the Muhammadan Reality, also called the Muhammadan Light and the First Intellect; Ashtiyani identifies it with the first individuation. Ibn al-Arabi in the last chapter of the Fusus: "he was a prophet while Adam was between clay and water." The Perfect Human and the Muhammadan Reality name the same complete mirror, the first by its finality and the second by its primordiality.
Ibn al-Arabi in the Anqa' Mughrib: the Muhammadan Reality was given existence first, and out of it God drew the universe. Kashani adds that the knowledge of the one individuated through the first individuation, the person of Muhammad, is the most complete gnosis. Qaysari explains the Fusus's title for the final chapter, the wisdom of singularity: nothing stands above his degree of divine comprehensiveness except the degree of the singular Essence.
Lordship and servanthood
Each name governs for a period and then yields; the name Allah governs every world in every period, and the Muhammadan Reality is its locus. Qaysari: the comprehensive divine name is its Lord, and "from it all other names receive emanation and assistance." Lordship here means possession, nurture and bringing things to perfection. Ranked upward: mineral, plant, animal, man; among men the prophets; among them the five resolute ones (Abraham, Noah, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, per n.17); and Muhammad above all.
But this lordship belongs to his reality, not his humanness, in which he is a servant: "Say, I am only a man like you." Qaysari turns even this into perfection: "deficiencies are also perfections from another perspective". His descent is a perfection as his ascent is; even his weeping at separation, or the constriction of his heart among the hypocrites, carries spiritual meaning. He is, in the Quranic phrase Qaysari applies, the gathering of the two seas. Amuli's contrast: all prophets manifest the prophethood of the Supreme Spirit, which is eternal, while theirs is accidental and interrupted, except Muhammad's.
The Pole
There must always be a vicegerent, and he is the Pole, quṭb. Ibn al-Arabi: "The Pole is both the center of the universe, and its circumference." Lesser Poles are heirs of Jesus, Abraham, Joseph or Noah, ranked by their prophet, all drawing from Muhammad's lamp-niche; they differ in knowledge but not in office. Each prophet's vicegerency is governed by only some names; the full reality could not appear at once, so it appeared in forms suited to each age, according to the name Time (al-dahr). Ali's note gives Ibn al-Arabi's gloss that Time is transmutation and fluctuation, and the hadith in which God says He is time.
| Figure | Governed by | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Moses | the Manifest | Manifest prophet |
| Khidr | the Hidden | Hidden saint in Moses' time |
| Muhammadan vicegerency | both | Present in Moses and Khidr alike |
Qaysari reads We do not differentiate between any of the messengers ontologically: each messenger manifests the one Supreme Spirit, as each name is one with every name, yet they differ in degree as names differ in scope. That is why earlier laws were abrogated and the Quran's remains. After legislative prophethood closes, Pole-hood passes to the saints, and sainthood too must end before the Greater Resurrection.
12. The Supreme Spirit in the Microcosm
Chapter 10, the longest of the doctrinal chapters, maps the inward human being: one Supreme Spirit called by many names as it descends, from spirit through soul and heart down to the breast, and back up through the inner heart, the mystery and the hidden.
One spirit, many names
The human reality is the Supreme Spirit, the first creation and nearest to the Essence, from God's own breath. Qaysari: it is the manifestation of the divine Essence with respect to its lordship. It is also the First Intellect, the Pen, the True Adam and the Muhammadan Light, matching the three hadith of the first creation: my light, the Intellect, my spirit. Kashani announces three aspects of the First Intellect and then gives two (receiving in summary; writing out in detail); see Part 15.
Kubra states the governing rule: soul, heart and spirit "give expressions to a single thing." It is soul when defiled, heart when purified, spirit when near to God. Qaysari allows both readings: one thing with aspects, or distinct things, and both are correct.
Adam, the angels and Iblis
The angels bowed to the Supreme Spirit in Adam, the locus of the name Allah, while each angel manifests a single name. Rumi: a superior is not commanded to bow to an inferior. Ali's sermon frames it as a trial: had God made Adam of dazzling light, all would have bowed and "the trial of the angels would have been lighter." The "two hands" are read as Beauty and Majesty, spirit and body, Manifest and Hidden. Ibn al-Arabi: Iblis was part of the world and "He had not actualized this all-comprehensiveness." Ali's ranking follows: angels have intellect without desire, animals desire without intellect, and man both, so whoever lets intellect master desire stands above the angels.
The Jinn, of smokeless fire, correspond to the Universal Sensory Intuition, which grasps particulars, not universals. Khomeini identifies that faculty with "the Iblis of Iblises and the Greatest Satan". Ibn al-Arabi tells of the Jinn Harith who frowned at Adam's form, forgetting the secret of water from which the Jinn's own life arises. A note cites Ali's sermon: Satan had worshipped God for six thousand years, and lost it all through the vanity of one moment.
The spirit and the world of Command
"The spirit is from my Lord's command": Command is the world brought about by "Be!" with no intermediary, Creation the world brought about through matter and the six days. Razi's chain: the Kingdom subsists by the Dominion, the Dominion by the spirits, the spirits by the human spirit, and "the human spirit subsists by God's attribute of self-subsisting." Ali distinguishes five spirits by possessor.
| Spirit (Ali) | Prophets | Believers | Unbelievers, animals |
|---|---|---|---|
| Holy Spirit | yes | ||
| Spirit of faith | yes | yes | |
| Spirit of strength | yes | yes | yes |
| Spirit of desire | yes | yes | yes |
| Corporeal spirit | yes | yes | yes |
The soul
When the spirit governs a body it is the soul: an intermediary, the spirit its father and the body its mother. Ibn Sina's definition, the first perfection of a natural body possessing organs, yields vegetal, animal and rational souls; Ali's four souls end in the sacred rational and the universal divine. Abu Talib al-Makki gives the soul four afflictions: lordly arrogance, satanic cunning, beastly appetite, and responsibility for servanthood all the same. Ali then lays out seven stations.
| # | Soul | Verse | Mark |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Commanding (ammara) | 12:53 | Animal desire; human only in figure |
| 2 | Reproachful (lawwama) | 75:2 | Faith flickers; regret |
| 3 | Inspired (mulhama) | 91:8 | Open to divine and satanic hosts; needs a shaykh |
| 4 | Tranquil (mutma'inna) | 89:27 | First stage of perfection |
| 5 | Contented (radiya) | 89:28 | Sees divine attributes in itself |
| 6 | Pleasing (mardiyya) | 89:28 | Returns to guide others |
| 7 | Perfected (kamila) | - | Spiritual guardianship; the Pole |
The heart
Qaysari: it is called heart for its fluctuation between the side facing God and the side facing the animal soul. The root qalb means to turn over. A hadith gives the servant "two eyes in his heart" by which he sees the Unseen. Ali adds that the heart is superior to the spirit: the spirit holds the attributes in union, while the heart holds union and differentiation, universals and particulars.
The child is the true heart that combines all the properties [of the parents] and those of the mystery (sirr).
Razi says the heart is to the body as the Throne to the world, with one advantage: the heart is aware of the grace it receives, and the Throne is not. Kashani reads the Verse of Light: the niche is the body, the lamp the spirit, the glass the heart, the olive tree the soul, its oil the soul's receptivity. Ja'far al-Sadiq's four levels of scripture (expression for common people, allusion for the elite, subtleties for saints, realities for prophets) ground this kind of ta'wil. The chapter's set piece is God's answer to David: His treasure, greater than the Throne, is "Lo, it is the heart!" The reported dialogue gives the heart a full geography: its earth is gnosis, its sky faith, its sun yearning, its moon love; it has four pillars (reliance, contemplation, intimacy, remembrance) and four doors (knowledge, action, patience, contentment). Kubra adds why purification matters: the heart is subtle and, like water, "taking on the color of its container", it takes the form of whatever faces it, as a mirror does.
Intellect, breast, inner heart, mystery, hidden
| Degree | Qaysari's reason for the name | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Intellect ('aql) | It binds and delimits what it perceives | Jami: delimitation first occurred in the First Intellect; Amuli: intellect on the right, soul on the left |
| Breast (sadr) | The side facing the body | Tirmidhi: like a courtyard, or the shell to the pearl; Satan's reach ends here |
| Inner heart (fu'ad) | Fa'd means wounded, stricken by its source | Tirmidhi: seat of vision, where the heart is seat of knowledge |
| Mystery (sirr) | None perceives its lights but the possessors of hearts | Sees God in all things; Ja'far: servanthood is a reality whose essence is Lordship |
| Hidden (khafi) | Concealed even from the gnostics | Annihilation: sees nothing but God |
Amuli cites four stations in the Quran's own vocabulary: breast the abode of Islam, heart of faith, inner heart of gnosis, kernel (lubb) of divine unity. Tirmidhi on the breast: "The breast is to the heart what the shell is to the pearl." Knowledge acquired by study stays in the breast only through repetition, because the breast is a passageway; what rises into it from inside the heart is firmly established.
The intellect has its own founding hadith, reported from Ja'far al-Sadiq: God created the Intellect from the right side of His Throne, told it to turn away and it turned away, told it to turn toward Him and it did, and said He had ennobled it above all creation. Mazandarani's commentary reads the light as the Intellect's creation from the Essence without intermediary, concluding that "distance does not exist in the spiritual world." Amuli makes the intellect the manifestation of the Gentle Names and the soul of the Mighty Names; only the heart manifests all the names, and it belongs to the people of the right or the left according to which side it leans toward. Razi's closing passage makes each degree a link, the hidden joining divine attributes to the world of spirituality under the maxim "acquire God's characteristics as your own."
13. Prophethood, Sainthood and the Four Journeys
Chapter 11 reads prophethood through the ontology of the names. The prophet arbitrates a cosmic conflict; sainthood, wilaya, is the inward side of prophethood that never ends; and the wayfarer's road is mapped as four journeys.
What a prophet is
Nabi means one who informs. Jami: a prophet informs the servants about God, and is a messenger if commanded to bring or abrogate a Law. Qaysari: a guide "leading them towards their perfection", as their receptivities in the Archetypes require. Verse 62:2 gives four tasks, which Ali names ideological, ethical, legislative and spiritual. Miracles fit their times, in a saying attributed to the tenth Imam (d. 254/868): Moses against magic, Jesus against disease, Muhammad against eloquence. Qaysari explains why miracles are needed at all: every manifestation seeks the supreme station, so prophethood was coupled with the supernatural as a challenge that distinguishes the true prophet from the false. Ali notes that saints also work wonders, and that, by strength of soul, the wicked can share in the supernatural too. A long hadith adds that God sent no prophet without first perfecting his intellect above all the intellects of his people.
The just arbitrator
Each name seeks to show its properties, and the names of Beauty and Majesty conflict: "He who looks at the divine names will see that there is a divine conflict." In the outward world the entities are veiled from one another by the name the Manifest, so the conflict sharpens. It is resolved only by the name the Just, through a just arbitrator, who for Qaysari is the true prophet, the pre-eternal and everlasting Pole: the Muhammadan Reality, the hidden prophet who guides every prophet.
Wilaya
The root w-l-y means to be near, follow, border, befriend. With kasra, wilaya is authority and guardianship; with fatha, walaya is love. The chain runs from God (You are my wali) through the Messenger to the saint who inherits the prophetic reality inwardly. Ali reports, as the central Shi'i position, that spiritual authority passed from the Prophet to Imam Ali and the Imams, and notes that Sufi lineages also trace their cloak to Ali. The shaykh is to the Sufi what the Imam is to the Shi'i: a relative saint beside an absolute one.
Qunawi gives the name al-Wali two works. Generally, it moves creatures from the darkness of non-being to the light of Being; specifically, it moves the gnostic from his own knowledge into the vastness of God's, from the darkness of veils to the light of witnessing. Ali's note on 2:257 observes that darkness is plural there and light singular: light is unity, darkness the domains of multiplicity.
Because al-Wali is a divine name and nabi is not, sainthood never ends while prophethood is sealed. Ibn al-Arabi: wilaya "is a universal, all-encompassing sphere, and for this reason, it does not end." Kashani locates it geometrically: every universal name has a central point; whoever reaches it is a saint, and whoever returns from it to inform others is a prophet.
Annihilation and its two roads
Qaysari distinguishes general sainthood (all believers, ranked by unveiling, proof or imitation) from specific sainthood: "the annihilation of the servant in God" and subsistence through Him. Annihilation is not non-existence but the human aspect effaced in the divine; the coal in the fire is the standard image. Qunawi grounds it in love: a thing can only love another through a shared meaning, and knowing that affinity drives one to remove separation.
| Road | Initiated by | Means | Verse |
|---|---|---|---|
| Attraction | The Beloved | No effort or master; primordial providence | 21:101 |
| Wayfaring | The lovers | Effort, discipline, a master | 29:69 |
The first road belongs to prophets, specific saints and their followers, whose attainment is pure bestowal before the world was made. Some authors, Ali reports, read Imam Ali's saying about God's wine as describing them: those who drink it become intoxicated, enraptured, blessed; they melt away, become pure and sincere, seek and find and attain, and "there remains no difference between them and their Beloved." These are the individuations of absolute wilaya, manifestations of the name al-Wali, and the divinely appointed saints inherit the Prophet's sainthood until it reaches its seal.
The seal of sainthood is disputed. Ibn al-Arabi says universal sainthood begins with Adam and is sealed by Jesus. Amuli sets out the two camps:
| View | Absolute Seal | Relative Seal |
|---|---|---|
| Ibn al-Arabi, Qaysari | Jesus | Ibn al-Arabi |
| Sa'd al-Din Hamuyah, Kashani, Amuli | Ali ibn Abi Talib | al-Mahdi |
The four journeys
Later followers, notably Mulla Sadra, framed wayfaring as four journeys; Qumsha'i (d. 1306/1888) abridges Sadra.
Sabzawari (d. 1290/1873) gives an ascending ladder of ten: Muslim, person of faith, worshipper, ascetic, gnostic, saint, messenger, resolute one, and the seal, which he calls "the ten complete", although nine degrees are printed (Part 15). Messengership pertains to the Kingdom, prophethood to the Dominion, wilaya to the Invincibility. The chapter ends with existential wilaya and the saint's marvels, karama: knowledge through the Omniscient, power through the Able, "You did not throw when you threw."
14. Resurrection and the Return
Chapter 12 closes the circle: Being seen from its return. Ali distinguishes macrocosmic, lesser, intermediate and microcosmic resurrections, and the Conclusion turns from doctrine back to practice and the shaykh.
The egg and the womb
Sadra: the Rising is behind the veils of heaven and earth, related to this world "like that of a human to the womb and a bird to the egg." The shell must break before the inside shows. Qaysari: on that day "everything will appear in its true form". The names the Hidden and the Manifest exchange roles: what was hidden (souls, intentions, meanings) becomes manifest, and the forms of paradise and hell appear.
| Resurrection | When | What happens | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lesser | At physical death | Entities pass from corporeal to their hidden spiritual forms; the barzakh | Qaysari; "Whoever dies, his Resurrection has already begun" |
| Intermediate | By the wayfarer's will | Voluntary death of the lower self, rebirth | "Die before you die" |
| Greater (macrocosmic) | After all contingency perishes | Even angels and the names return to the Singularity | Amuli; "Everything shall perish, except His face" |
| Microcosmic (of the spirit) | In annihilation | Essence, attributes and acts of the servant effaced in God's | Amuli, Qaysari |
The macrocosmic Resurrection
It is governed by names of finality and sovereignty: the Hidden, the Last, the Just, the Compeller, the One, the Restorer, the Effacer and others. Amuli defines it as "the cessation of the manifestations of contingency" and the arrival of manifestations proper to the Essence. The Sufis deny that it is merely later in time: paradise and hell, says a hadith, are closer to each of you than your shoelaces. Sadra: nothing a person meets in the next world, houris or punishment, is "outside the essence of the soul and separate from the soul's being." Those with only rational knowledge doubt these things, Qaysari says; certainty comes only by unveiling, and failing that, one should have faith in the prophets' descriptions. Qaysari states the logic of the end: individuations exist through theophanies at the degrees of multiplicity, and "they cease due to the theophanies of the Essence at the degrees of Unity." Even the angel of death dies, in the hadith Ali cites, before all are restored for judgement.
Voluntary death
The Intermediate Resurrection is the spiritual death of the wayfarer before natural death. Ali's sermon describes him: he brought his intellect to life and extinguished his self, "until his bulk became light and coarseness became subtle." Ali's note compares Jesus' words to Nicodemus on being born again. Qaysari ties the three together: God's engendering of things and hiding in them, and His annihilation of them at the Greater Resurrection, are both His manifestation in His oneness; the Lesser Resurrection transforms entities into their hidden spiritual forms; the Intermediate one happens by the wayfarer's will once he has died the death of the lower self.
The resurrection of the spirit
Amuli counts three resurrections of form (death, barzakh, Judgement) and three of meaning. Qaysari's image: the servant's aspect disappears in Lordship like stars in sunlight, "whereby the Lord becomes manifest and the servant becomes hidden." The hadith of supererogatory works describes the result: God becomes the servant's hearing, sight, tongue, hand and foot. Then comes subsistence, separation after union, which for Amuli is the ultimate station of the Perfect Human, the "two bows' length or nearer" and the Praiseworthy Station. Ali places this resurrection at the end of the Arc of Descent, though earlier chapters assign the return to the Arc of Ascent (Part 15).
Conclusion: practitioners first
Ali offers Qunawi's prescription for insight: besides grace, the disabling of outer and inner faculties and "a cleansing of the mind of all knowledge and belief." Philosophy was the nearest discipline for the students' setting; Ibn al-Farid and Rumi said the same truths in poetry, because different names govern different saints, and Ibn al-Arabi received the Omniscient. The school lives on through the shaykh: Ali ibn al-Husayn's saying, "He who does not have a sage to guide him, perishes." Adab, in its highest form, is the right response to each theophany in the heart; "He who has no adab with his shaykh can never have adab with God." Knowledge is praised when it refines character and harms when it becomes a veil. The Futuhat, he says, is to Ibn al-Arabi what the Quran is to the Muhammadan unveiling: words in which the reader meets the realities according to his own capacity and correspondence, the mirroring of the three books again. He ends with Ja'far al-Sadiq: if people knew the value of the gnosis of God, the world would be worth less to them than what their feet trample. His hope is modest: that this brief introduction may shed light for readers both inside and outside the Islamic tradition, since its questions about Being, the cosmos and human nature belong to every time.
15. Notes on the Text: Slips Kept as Printed
The items below are inconsistencies and misprints in the printed text, listed so that readers can see them; page numbers are the book's printed pages.
Dates that disagree
| Person | One place | Another place |
|---|---|---|
| Ibn al-Arabi (death) | 638/1240 (pp.5, 9) | 637/1240 (back cover) |
| Qutb al-Din Shirazi | d. 709/1309 (p.4) | d. 710/1311 (p.12) |
| Ibn al-Farid | d. 632/1234 (p.5) | d. 632/1235 (p.13) |
| Nasir al-Din Tusi | d. 672/1274 (p.3) | d. 673/1274 (p.12) |
| Muhammad Salih al-Mazandarani | d. 1051/1671 (Ch.4 note) | d. 1081/1670 (Ch.10 n.75) |
| Mulla Hadi Sabzawari | d. 1289/1873 (Intro note) | d. 1290/1873 (p.186) |
| Hujwiri | "(465/1072)" printed with no "d." | |
Names
| Item | As printed |
|---|---|
| Farghani's name | Sa'ad al-Din (p.13) vs Sa'id al-Din (p.7) |
| Fanari | Hamza Fanari (p.17) vs Shams al-Din al-Fanari (p.8) |
| Sells | Michel Sells (p.141) vs Michael Sells (n.36) |
| Ibn al-Arabi | without al- (p.7; Ch.8 n.27) |
| Ibn Taymiyya | Ibn al-Taymiyya (Ch.1 n.61) |
| Qunawi's al-Fukuk | al-ukuk (Ch.5 n.29) |
Grammar and misprints in the main text
| Page | As printed (italics, not quotation) |
|---|---|
| 7 | indispensible |
| 14 | fibnally, inside the Jandi quotation |
| 37 | Being becomes manifests |
| 39 | does not go out existence |
| 46 | I refuge in You from You! |
| 49 | there is not God but He! |
| 56 | These verses indicates |
| 57 | The divine names the theophanies (no verb) |
| 60 | the body is imminent |
| 67 | the sea run dry (18:109) |
| 85 | refers relative existence |
| 90 | nor equal, nor similar, nor equal |
| 91 | by the by the Pen |
| 93 | al-lawh al-ma'fuz, in a garbled passage on the four tablets |
| 99 | according to various typology |
| 102 | it refers the sensory world |
| 109 | That barrier that the minds grasps |
| 121 | the knowledge mysteries |
| 123 | Razi's quotation opened at We have removed your veil and never closed; So God, placed His palm |
| 127 | possesses spiritual significance and provide |
| 135-138 | comprises of; relate the names as that God had commanded them; the form the Universal Soul |
| 137 | He does enter the temporal, where the argument requires "does not"; lower and baser than him! |
| 144 | To you Lord is the return |
| 146-150 | the comprehensiveness reality; a stray closing quotation mark after Amuli; since was given; linking Adam with the Muhammad |
| 152 | Kashani promises three universal, spiritual aspects and gives two |
| 157 | indivisible or susceptible to measure (sense needs "nor"); greater the simplicity |
| 168 | Amuli also expound |
| 176-185 | What is concealed in his heart of the Prophet; to performs miracles; the God's knowledge, the God's Beauty, the God's subsistence; superior than |
| 186 | Sabzawari's ladder: nine degrees printed, called the ten complete |
| 190-194 | paradise and hell is closer; the microcosmic Resurrection placed in the Arc of Descent; the God's Essence |
| 195 | its founders of this school; the Sufism is |
Verse and note references
| Where | Issue |
|---|---|
| p.144 vs p.194 | "two bows' length" cited as 53:9, later as 53:93 |
| p.128 vs p.163 | the blind-hearts verse cited as 22:46, later as 22:45 |
| p.170 | 53:11 printed as (53:1); 20:7 printed as (20:07) |
| p.189 | the moon verse cited as (75:8) |
| p.127 / n.31 | passage given to Qaysari in the text, note cites Amuli |
| Ch.9 n.19 | refers to a hadith at the end of the section that is not there |
| Ch.11 n.50 | says the degrees of the spirit are in chapter nine; they are in chapter ten |
| Ch.12 n.13 | Muqaddima, 37-39, outside the range of every other Muqaddima reference (133-233) |
| Intro notes | n.31 La Philosphie Shi'ite; n.33 unclosed parenthesis; n.62 al-Muqaddama |
| Ch.2 notes | n.46 ends serves as the link between God.; n.63 opens "The Bible says" and then cites apocrypha (2 Enoch and a work on Isaac) |
| Ch.4 n.48 | for the one whom I have been created |
| Ch.5 n.27 | the four elements described as cardinal directions |
| Ch.6 n.12 | imagination listed among corporeal faculties, speech and intellect among sensory ones; a "third faculty" with no first or second named |
Repetitions and doublets
16. Synthesis
What the book claims, how its frameworks fit together, where it is strong and weak, who its cast are, and what its ideas offer readers who work with AI, enterprise systems and banks.
- Philosophical Sufism names the school of Ibn al-Arabi and his commentators, not a fusion of two disciplines on equal terms: practice comes first, philosophy second.
- The founders recast visionary knowledge in philosophical terms because that was the language of their audience.
- Qunawi, Jandi, Farghani, Kashani and Qaysari form the line that turned the Fusus into a curriculum.
- Being is one and graded, like light: the same reality, stronger or weaker.
- The Essence is beyond all knowing; everything said is said of its levels.
- Manifestation is the key concept, as causality is in science.
- The divine names are relations between the Essence and the world, and each seeks to show itself.
- The Permanent Archetypes, the things as God knows them, never leave knowledge; they have not smelled existence.
- Multiplicity arises through the two emanations: the Holiest into knowledge, the Holy into existence.
- There are five Presences, though the commentators count them five different ways.
- The Imaginal World is an isthmus: luminous like spirit, formed like matter.
- One plane explains theophany in form, clairvoyance, true dreams and the grave.
- Unveiling is the school's method; reason prepares but cannot arrive.
- Unveilings are ranked by sense, by world, by divine name and by levels of the heart.
- Man is the comprehensive being in whom God sees Himself as in a mirror.
- The Perfect Human is the seal on the world's treasury; the world lasts while he remains.
- Macrocosm and microcosm match point for point: Intellect to spirit, Soul to heart, Body to blood.
- Being descends and returns in a circle whose first point is the Muhammadan Reality.
- Soul, heart and spirit name one reality at different degrees of purity.
- The heart outranks the spirit because it holds both union and differentiation.
- The prophet arbitrates the conflict among the names; sainthood is the inward side of prophethood and never ends.
- The road to God runs in four journeys: to God, in God, back to creation, and among creatures by God.
- Resurrection is already under way: the lesser at death, the intermediate in voluntary death, the greater at the end.
- Ali's last word is practical: adab, the shaykh, and knowledge that does not become a veil.
Frameworks in the book
| Framework | Parts | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Five schools | Kalam, Peripatetic, Illuminationist, Transcendent, Sufism | Part 1 |
| Levels of Being | Essence, Unity, Oneness, Names, Archetypes | Parts 3-6 |
| Two emanations | Holiest (knowledge), Holy (existence) | Part 6 |
| Five Presences | Archetypes, spirits, Imaginal, Kingdom, Perfect Human | Part 7 |
| Three books | Existential, written, comprehensive | Parts 7, 10 |
| Sensory unveilings | Sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste | Part 9 |
| Heart's ladder | Breast, heart, inner heart, spirit, mystery, hidden | Parts 9, 12 |
| Existential circle | Arc of Descent, Arc of Ascent | Part 11 |
| Seven souls | Commanding to Perfected | Part 12 |
| Nested offices | Sainthood, prophethood, messengership | Part 13 |
| Four journeys | Creation to God to creation | Part 13 |
| Four resurrections | Lesser, intermediate, greater, microcosmic | Part 14 |
How the parts connect
The book's order is its argument. It begins where Qaysari's Muqaddima begins, with Being, because everything else is a mode of it. The divine names come next because they are how one Being relates to many things, and the Archetypes follow because the names need objects in God's knowledge before anything exists outwardly. Only then can multiplicity be explained, through the two emanations, without compromising unity.
The five Presences turn that logic into a map. Once there is a map, the question becomes how anyone could know it, and the answer is the Imaginal World and unveiling: the plane where meanings take form, and the faculty that perceives them. Knowledge in this school is not a report about the map; it is travel through it.
The traveller is the human being, and the middle of the book shows why only he can travel. He is the comprehensive isthmus, holding every level in himself, so that to know himself is to know the cosmos and its Lord. The existential circle gives the travel a shape, and the chapter on the Supreme Spirit gives it an inward geography: soul, heart, spirit, mystery, hidden.
The last chapters close the loop. Prophethood and sainthood are the offices that guide the journey, and the four journeys are its stages. Resurrection is its end, already present in the voluntary death of the wayfarer. The Conclusion then reminds the reader that all of this was first lived and only afterwards written, and that the written form is meant to serve the living one.
The isthmus. Whenever two orders meet, a third holds the properties of both: the Imaginal World, the heart, the Perfect Human, the prophet among the names.
Two aspects. Everything has a face toward God and a face toward creation: the Muhammadan Reality's lordship and servanthood, the heart's two eyes, the saint's annihilation and subsistence.
A closer look
Limits. The book is built on Qaysari's Muqaddima and Ali says it repeats itself; it does, with several long passages printed twice (Part 15). Shi'i hadith and Imams are woven into the school's doctrine with little comment on how far Ibn al-Arabi and his Sunni commentators shared that frame; the seal-of-sainthood debate is named and then set aside. Hadith are cited as proofs without discussion of their status. Copy-editing is weak: misprints, conflicting death dates and wrong verse numbers recur. The voice is that of a believer within the tradition, which is a strength for exposition and a limit for critical distance.
Who's Who (book dates only)
Sadr al-Din Qunawi: d. 673/1274. Jandi: d. ca. 700/1300. Afif al-Din Tilimsani: d. 690/1291. Sa'id al-Din Farghani: d. ca. 699/1300. Iraqi: d. 688/1289.
Abd al-Razzaq Kashani: d. ca. 730/1330. Qaysari: b. ca. 660/1260, d. 751/1350. Izz al-Din Kashani: d. 735/1335.
Sa'd al-Din Hammuya: d. 650/1252-53. Aziz al-Din Nasafi: d. ca. 661/1262. Shabistari: d. 741/1340. Haydar Amuli: d. 787/1385. Jili: d. ca. 832/1428. Shams al-Din al-Fanari: d. 834/1431. Ibn Turka: d. 830/1437. Abd al-Rahman Jami: d. 898/1492. Lahiji: d. 912/1507. Fansuri: d. 933/1527.
Mulla Sadra: d. 1050/1640. Bursawi: d. 1137/1725. Abd al-Ghani Nabulusi: d. 1143/1731. Muhammad Rida Qumsha'i: d. 1306/1888. Mulla Hadi Sabzawari: d. 1290/1873 (1289/1873 in an Intro note). Ashtiyani: d. 1426/2005.
Kindi: ca. 256/870. Farabi: 339/950. Ibn Sina: 428/1037. Ghazali: 505/1111. Suhrawardi: 587/1191. Razi (theologian): 607/1210. Nasir al-Din Tusi: 672/1274 or 673/1274. Qutb al-Din Shirazi: 709/1309 or 710/1311.
Najm al-Din Kubra: 618/1221. Najm al-Din Razi: 654/1256. Ibn al-Farid: 632/1234 or 632/1235. Rumi: 672/1273. Ibn Taymiyya: 728/1328. Jurjani: 816/1413. Muhammad Salih al-Mazandarani: 1051/1671 or 1081/1670. Shaykh Baha'i: 1030 AH/1620-21.
17. Glossary
Terms as Mukhtar Ali renders them, with the Arabic he prints.
| Term | Arabic | Meaning in the book |
|---|---|---|
| Being, existence | wujud | One graded reality; the root also means finding |
| Essence | dhat | God in Himself, beyond name and knowledge |
| Divine names | asma' | Relations between the Essence and the world; each seeks manifestation |
| Permanent Archetypes | a'yan thabita | Things as known in God's knowledge; never exist outwardly |
| Individuation | ta'ayyun | A determination of Being; the first is the Muhammadan Reality |
| Holiest / Holy Emanation | fayd aqdas / muqaddas | Into knowledge (Archetypes) / into existence |
| Manifestation, theophany | zuhur, tajalli | God's self-display; the key concept of the school |
| Presence | hadra | A plane in which God is present; five universal Presences |
| Kingdom, Dominion, Invincibility, Divinity | mulk, malakut, jabarut, lahut | Sensory, angelic/Imaginal, Intellectual and divine worlds |
| Imaginal World | 'alam al-mithal | Luminous world of forms between spirit and body |
| Disconnected / Connected Imagination | munfasil / muttasil | The cosmic plane / the soul's faculty |
| Isthmus | barzakh | What separates two things while sharing both; also the post-mortem state |
| Clairvoyance | firasa | Perspicacity by divine light; reading inner states from outer forms |
| Unveiling | kashf | Direct perception of hidden realities, of form or of meaning |
| Witnessing | shuhud | Seeing God in things; unveiling viewed from the perceiver |
| Tasting | dhawq | Experiential knowledge of states |
| Intuition | hads | Immediate conclusion from premises; the lowest unveiling |
| Inspiration / revelation | ilham / wahy | Without an angel, for saints / through an angel, for prophets |
| Direct knowledge | 'ilm ladunni | Knowledge from God's presence, without intermediary |
| Perfect Human | al-insan al-kamil | The comprehensive being; the fifth Presence |
| Vicegerent | khalifa | Man as God's deputy, the seal on the treasury |
| Muhammadan Reality | al-haqiqa al-Muhammadiyya | First individuation; first point of the existential circle |
| Arc of Descent / Ascent | qaws al-nuzul / al-su'ud | Being's unfolding / the return to God |
| Pole | qutb | The vicegerent of the age, axis of the circle of existence |
| Supreme Spirit | al-ruh al-a'zam | The human reality, First Intellect, Pen |
| Soul | nafs | Spirit as governing a body; seven stations |
| Heart | qalb | The fluctuating mirror between spirit and soul |
| Breast, inner heart, kernel | sadr, fu'ad, lubb | Outer face of the heart; seat of vision; seat of unity |
| Mystery, hidden | sirr, khafi | Higher degrees: seeing God in all things; annihilation |
| Sainthood | wilaya | Authority and nearness; the inward side of prophethood |
| Annihilation / subsistence | fana' / baqa' | Effacement of the human aspect / life through God |
| Saintly marvel | karama | A display of power by a saint |
| Esoteric interpretation | ta'wil | Return of a text to its origin and inner meaning |
| Conduct | adab | Right comportment, finally toward each theophany |
| Gnosis | ma'rifa | Understanding spiritual meanings; the goal |
About this book
Philosophical Sufism: An Introduction to the School of Ibn al-'Arabi by Mukhtar H. Ali, 2021. 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.
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