Insight Editions · No. 155
Quest for the Red Sulphur
The Life of Ibn 'Arabi
Claude Addas · Translated from the French by Peter Kingsley
Claude Addas reconstructs the life of Ibn ʿArabī from his writings, manuscript records, and contemporary chronicles, tracing his spiritual formation, travels, teachings, and final years in Damascus.
A study guide to Quest for the Red Sulphur by Claude Addas, translated from the French by Peter Kingsley. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
Overview
It follows the book's order: Introduction, ten chapters, Conclusion and the chronological table (Appendix 1). Appendices 2-5 (Sufi lineages, teachers, men of letters, silsilas of the khirqa) feed the Who's Who and the Glossary. The notes are used for context; the bibliography and indexes are left out.
What the book is
Diagrams mark mechanisms already in the chapters.
Chapter Map
Follow the part order. Jump by theme only after one full pass.
Argument Map
The book reads as one journey: roots and election in the West, consecration at Mecca, mission on the road and in Damascus, and a conclusion that ties doctrine to life.
- Core claim. The Shaykh's metaphysics grows out of a lived path of visions, masters, journeys and strict observance; legends both hostile and admiring distort it.
- Scope. Murcia, Seville and Fez, then Mecca, Anatolia, Aleppo and Damascus; Almohads, Ayyubids, Seljuqs and Crusaders, 1165-1240.
- Key figures. Ibn al-'Arabi; masters 'Uryabi, al-Kumi, al-Mahdawi, Fatima of Seville; disciples Habashi, Ibn Sawdakin, Qunawi; Averroes, Kaykaus, the Banu Zaki.
- Best for. Readers of the Futuhat and Fusus who want the man behind them, and anyone studying how sainthood, law and history met in medieval Islam.
The map reads left to right, then down. The Introduction sets the method: the man's own works, the certificates and the chronicles, against later legend. Chapters 1-7 follow him through Andalusia and the Maghrib, from a worldly youth to the call, the masters, the great vision at Cordoba and the inner stations at Fez. Chapter 8 brings him to Mecca, the centre where he is consecrated as Seal. Chapters 9-10 cover the mission in the East: advising princes, writing, forming disciples and settling in Damascus. The Conclusion argues that the spread of his work and his doctrine of mercy are both part of the one vocation.
Chapter Map
| Ch | Title | In one line |
|---|---|---|
| Intro | A Life Without a Biography | Asin Palacios corrected; sama's and chronicles as sources |
| 1 | Home Land | Almohad Andalusia, Arab lineage, father, uncles, "sinful youth" |
| 2 | Vocation | Call, opening before discipline, Averroes, 'Uryabi, Western Sufism |
| 3 | Election | Cordoba vision of the prophets; the Seal doctrine; women masters |
| 4 | The Savants of Andalusia | Ijaza, hadith teachers, theology and philosophy weighed |
| 5 | God's Vast Earth | Tunis, Khadir, Earth of Reality, heir to Abraham |
| 6 | Fez | Abode of Light, "face without a nape", Ascension, Seal realised |
| 7 | Farewells | Last circuit of masters; Averroes' funeral; departure |
| 8 | The Great Pilgrimage | Ayyubid East; Mecca; Futuhat begun; Nizam and the Tarjuman |
| 9 | "Counsel My Servants" | Travels 600-618; Kaykaus; Majd al-Din and Qunawi; mad love |
| 10 | Damascus | Banu Zaki protection; 150 listeners; Fusus; death and legends |
| Concl. | Conclusion and Chronology | Spread East and West; universal mercy; year-by-year table |
- Read the Introduction first for the sources; then the chapters in order, since the life is told chronologically.
- Each chapter opens with a lede and ends with a Takeaways box; timelines, casts and contrast tables carry the dense detail.
- Use the Chronology at the end of the Conclusion as a running index of dates and places.
What this guide covers
Claude Addas reconstructs the terrestrial and spiritual journey of Muhyi l-Din Ibn al-'Arabi (560-638/1165-1240) from his own works, reading certificates, and contemporary chronicles. Peter Kingsley's English (Islamic Texts Society, Golden Palm, Cambridge 1993) is the base.
How the parts nest
Introduction: A Life Without a Biography
Ibn al-'Arabi is among the most studied figures in the history of Sufism, yet when Addas began, no reliable account of his life existed in any language. Her introduction is a short audit of the sources and a statement of method: the Shaykh al-Akbar ("Greatest Master") cannot be read as a rootless metaphysician, because his thought is inseparable from what he lived.
The Problem with Asin Palacios
The standard life was the "Vida de Abenarabi" that opens Miguel Asin Palacios' Islam cristianizado (Madrid 1931), under a hundred pages. Asin was a true pioneer, writing before Osman Yahia's inventory of the manuscripts and before Meier and Corbin, but his base was thin: the Futuhat and the Ruh al-quds, plus two late compilations, Maqqari's Nafh al-tib (d. 1041/1631) and Ibn al-'Imad's Shadharat al-dhahab (d. 1089/1678). He used neither the sama's (reading certificates written into the manuscripts, which date the Eastern journeys almost to the day) nor the contemporary chronicles and dictionaries: Ibn al-Abbar's Takmila, Ghubrini, Tadili's Tashawwuf, Safadi, Abu Shama, Yunini.
| Received account | What the sources show |
|---|---|
| Mosul in 601, Cairo in 603 | 601 Jerusalem; 602 Konya, back to Jerusalem, Hebron; 603 Cairo |
| Grand welcome by Sultan Kayka'us at Konya in 607 (Asin, Corbin) | Kayka'us took the throne only in 608/1211; the Risalat al-anwar was written at Konya in 602, the Mashahid al-asrar at Seville in 590 |
| Silent meeting with Suhrawardi in Baghdad, 608 | The book gives no place or date; it may never have happened |
| Met Abu Madyan at Bougie in 590 | Ibn al-'Arabi says he never met him physically |
| Married Nizam, the inspirer of the Tarjuman; returned West after 598 (Ruspoli) | Invented; he never went back after leaving in 598 |
| Stopped at Casablanca in 598 (Yahia) | The city was built in the eighteenth century |
Asin also left things out, above all the Shaykh's marriage to the mother of Sadr al-Din Qunawi, which shaped the spread of his school. Worse was the prejudice: talk of "mental imbalance" and a "pathological case", and an invented "political hatred against the Christians" that supposedly sent him to Anatolia in 612 to steer Kayka'us' policy. The chronicles show Kayka'us was accused of colluding with the Franks. Addas' verdict: "Interpreting inner states of the soul is one thing; rewriting history is another." Later Western writers mostly copied Asin; R.W.J. Austin is the honourable exception, and even Yahia's chronology misses the Cordoba event of 586, Averroes' funeral in 595 and the visit to Ibn 'Abbas' grave at Taif in 599.
Two Kinds of Arabic Source
| Type | Strength | Weakness |
|---|---|---|
| Tabaqat (biographical dictionaries) | Names, masters, travels, works | Brief, lifeless, copied century to century; Maqqari gathers them but takes up incredible anecdotes, probably from Fayruzabadi (d. 817/1414) |
| Hagiography (al-Qari al-Baghdadi's Manaqib, Sha'rani) | Vivid, devotional | Puts words in scholars' mouths: Dhahabi's dry "model for those who teach the Oneness of Being" becomes "the saint, the ocean of truths" |
| Polemic (opponents) | Shows the hostility | Equally careless: Dhahabi repeats that he married a jinn who beat him; others allege sexual vice, the stock charge against suspected heretics |
Both sides wrote ad maiorem Dei gloriam and set historical truth aside. Mahmud Ghurab's anthology of first-person passages (Damascus 1983) could have helped, but it gives no references for a corpus running to thousands of pages.
The title "Seal of Muhammadan Sainthood" means nothing in a void without people or dates. Addas closes humbly: "It takes a saint to understand a saint" (Julien Green on Francis). Some enigmas are illuminations we can date and place . But the Shaykh holds that "", so the journey leads the reader back to himself.
Boom Without a Life
Addas opens on a paradox: publishing on Sufism and on Ibn al-'Arabi had multiplied in Arab countries and the West, yet no life meeting historical standards existed. The only extended sketch was Asin's "Vida de Abenarabi" in Islam cristianizado (Madrid 1931), under a hundred pages. Asin was a pioneer before Yahia's manuscript inventory and before Meier and Corbin, but his base was thin.
Why Biography Before Doctrine
Research Field She Inherits
Asin's Errors That Matter
- Before this book the standard life (Asin, 1931) was thin, error-strewn and hostile, and later writers copied it.
- The fix is new sources: reading certificates, unpublished treatises, Western and Eastern chronicles, and the Shaykh's own first-person testimony.
- Arabic tradition offers dry dictionaries or partisan legend, from admirers and enemies alike.
- The method: put the visionary back in his time, place and company, and treat his visions as facts of his life.
Chapter 1. Home Land
Ibn al-'Arabi was born in 560/1165 inside the walls of besieged Murcia and grew up in Almohad Seville. The chapter sketches the land (paradise and battlefield), the family (Arab nobility with a striking run of sudden conversions) and the teenager's "jahiliyya", which turns out to be distraction rather than debauchery.
"Andalusia Belongs to God"
The Andalusians loved their country to the point of forgery. Ibn Khafaja (d. 533/1139) sang that "the Garden of Bliss is nowhere else than in your country", and pious compilers invented hadiths in which Gabriel shows the Prophet a western peninsula where "whoever lives there will live in a state of blessedness; whoever dies there will die a martyr". The geographers' praise is stereotyped but largely true: the Guadalquivir valley, the Aljarafe hills west of Seville with their olive groves and bees, orchards of figs and pomegranates, and a population of "prodigious sardine-eaters".
| Group | Position |
|---|---|
| Arabs (from Syria, Yemen) | A closed caste of great families (buyutat) with the best land and offices; Ibn al-'Arabi's family belonged here |
| Berbers | Despised mercenaries until the Almohads raised them to judgeships and scholarship; several of his masters were illiterate Berbers |
| Muwallads (converted Spaniards) | The majority: farmers, craftsmen, traders |
| Christians and Jews | Shrinking, humiliated minorities; 'Abd al-Mu'min tolerated only Muslims; Maimonides fled Cordoba in 544/1149 |
The tolerance of the Cordoba caliphate was a memory. The Seville magistrate Ibn 'Abdun forbade selling a leper's, Jew's or Christian's coat without saying so, barred dhimmis from dressing like notables, and called the churches brothels. Meanwhile the Reconquista tightened: Toledo fell in 478/1085, Saragossa in 512/1118. The Almoravids answered the taifa kings' call for help, then fell to the Almohads, who crossed in 539/1145 under 'Abd al-Mu'min, made Seville their capital and by his death in 558/1162 held almost all of Andalusia.
One shadow remained: Ibn Mardanish, king of the Levant. The Almohad chroniclers paint him as "demented and cruel"; Dozy admired a ruler who dressed like the Christians, hired Castilian and Catalan troops and built them taverns. In 560/1165 the Almohads crushed his army and he shut himself up in walled Murcia for seven years. Ibn al-'Arabi himself never passes judgment on him.
The Descendants of Hatim al-Ta'i
He was born in Murcia, under the rule of Ibn Mardanish as he himself records, on the night of Monday 17 Ramadan 560 (as he told the historian Ibn Najjar). He was the only son, with two sisters. His father held high office under Ibn Mardanish and kept a major post under the Almohad sultans Abu Ya'qub Yusuf and al-Mansur, for which one of his son's masters later rebuked him.
The father's death. He belonged, says his son, to those who have realised "the Dwelling-place of Breaths", the rahmaniyyun governed by the name All-Merciful ("the Breath of the Merciful comes to me from the Yemen"). They perceive by smell, and at death they look alive. Two weeks ahead he foretold he would die on a Wednesday. That day he sat up unaided: "My child, today is the day of departure and meeting." Then he added: "Everything that I heard you say which I did not know, and at times reproved you for, that is my profession of faith." A white light spread from his forehead over his whole body. His son went to the Great Mosque; at midday the father was dead, yet looked so alive the family hesitated to bury him.
The father had not always shared his son's vocation or his Sufism, though he was proud enough when Averroes asked to meet the boy. When Ibn al-'Arabi fell into a coma as a child (perhaps in the plague of 571-72), hideous figures attacked him until a fragrant, powerful being drove them off: "I am the sura Ya-Sin; I am your protector!" He woke to find his father weeping at the bedside, having just recited Ya-Sin.
Is the story too neat? Addas grants that it follows a hagiographical formula, but Ibn al-'Arabi was no lover of theatrical shortcuts, Tadili tells it independently from oral tradition, and lightning metanoia is rare, not impossible. The paternal uncle's case is similar: an old pharmacist sneered at a boy's ignorance of drugs and was told his own ignorance of God would cost far more. He served the boy for the three years left to him and reached high sainthood; at home he would say "Dawn is breaking", smelling the breath God sends from Paradise each dawn. A third uncle, Abu Muslim al-Khawlani, was one of the 'ubbad, devotees fixed on Judgment, Paradise and Hell rather than divine secrets; he prayed all night and beat his legs with sticks: "You deserve more blows than my horse does." Of the mother little is known, except that her son obeyed her, that she frequented his teacher Fatima bint Ibn al-Muthanna, and that she died soon after the father. Addas also corrects Yahia and Austin: Abu l-Walid al-'Arabi, a hadith teacher, was not an uncle but a cousin of the qadi Ibn al-'Arabi, from another family altogether.
Two sudden conversions in the family stand behind his own.From Murcia to Seville
The final siege came after the earthquake of 565 and the sultan's two-year illness. Beaten and wounded, Ibn Mardanish went mad behind his walls (the chronicles say he drowned his children and walled up his viziers) and died in Rajab 567. His sons swore allegiance at Seville, probably with Ibn al-'Arabi's father among the notables, and in 568 the family moved to the Almohad capital.
- 560/1165 Born in Murcia, 17 Ramadan
- 565 Earthquake; Abu Ya'qub falls ill
- 567 Death of Ibn Mardanish; Seville aqueduct and bridge works begin
- 568/1172 Family settles in Seville; father serves the sultan
- 571-72 Plague; probable coma and the Ya-Sin vision
- 574/1178 Flood; Almohads routed near the Aljarafe
- before 580 Uncle 'Abd Allah dies; end of the "jahiliyya"
"In the Time of My Sinful Youth"
Seville was everything Murcia was not: huge, crowded, noisy, gaudy. The Guadalquivir was the "necklace of the fiancée" and the Aljarafe her diadem; the river carried grain, oil and cotton, and also wine, music and pleasure parties that scandalised Ibn 'Abdun. Abu Ya'qub was rebuilding the city: a bridge to Triana, the buhayra palaces, the great mosque whose minaret survives as the Giralda, and the restored Roman aqueduct. The regime was a strict theocracy, yet the sultan, who knew both Sahih collections by heart, kept Ibn Tufayl, Averroes and Ibn Zuhr at court. Austerity and luxury, piety and debauchery, were "the two faces of the fiancée".
The boy had private tutors and studied the Qur'an with a neighbour, Abu 'Abd Allah al-Khayyat, "a man of the Path": "of all the spiritual men I have met since returning to the Path, there is not one I have wanted to be like, except for him and his brother." He also knew Abu 'Ali al-Shakkaz, his uncle's friend and later his teacher. His career seemed set: he travelled with his father and was promised a post as scribe to the governor of Seville.
Addas finds the passage too exact to be a stock before-and-after. He admired his converted uncle and dreamed of being like al-Khayyat, but he would not yet give up the nights of music. On the reliable evidence, his jahiliyya was not a life of vice but ghafla: heedlessness, distraction, giving God the minimum.
Peninsula Under Siege
Ibn Khafaja's verses set the tone: the Garden is in your country; Andalusia belongs to God. Forged fada'il hadiths promised blessing for living there and martyrdom for dying there. Geographers repeated fertility and pride; Ibn 'Abdun's hisba manual shows the other face: intolerance toward Jews and Christians, clothes rules, bans on mixed education. Under 'Abd al-Mu'min only Muslims were tolerated; Maimonides fled Cordoba in 544/1149.
Hatimi Line and Sudden Turnings
- Hatim al-Ta'i: legendary generosity; Yemenite Tayy; "I am al-'Arabi al-Hatimi, brother of magnanimity".
- Born night of Monday 17 Ramadan 560/1165 in besieged Murcia under Ibn Mardanish; only son, two sisters.
- Father: served Mardanish then Abu Ya'qub and al-Mansur; died c.590 among the rahmaniyyun who perceive by smell; white glow at death; "everything I heard you say... that is my profession of faith".
- Yahya b. Yughan: Sanhaja ruler of Tlemcen; rebuked by Tunsi at al-'Ubbad; renounced kingdom; buried beside the hermit; IA later visited both graves with Abu Madyan's.
Seville: Fiancee and Jahiliyya
Land, Blood, and Siege
- Paternal uncle: pharmacy rebuke; three years then death; breaths of Paradise at dawn.
- Yahya b. Yughan: Sanhaji king of Tlemcen; Tunsi's dog-and-blood rebuke; wood-gatherer saint.
- Abu Muslim al-Khawlani: 'ubbad; beat legs in night prayer.
- Mother: frequented Fatima bint Ibn al-Muthanna; died soon after father.
Intolerance and Melting Pot
Father's Death and the Breaths
When the father realised the Dwelling-place of Breaths he perceived by smell; at death such men seem alive. He predicted the day a fortnight earlier: "today is the day of departure and meeting." Everything he had heard from his son and reproved became his profession of faith. A white glow spread from the forehead over the body. Ibn al-'Arabi went to the Great Mosque; when buried the father still seemed alive (Fut I 222). The son had suffered from the father's reserve toward the Path and once took him to Makhluf al-Qaba'ili in Cordoba to pray for him.
- Andalusia was a paradise under siege: rich and refined, but shrinking before the Reconquista and hardening under Almohad rule.
- Ibn al-'Arabi came from the Arab elite (Banu Tayy, Hatim al-Ta'i); his father served Ibn Mardanish and then the Almohads.
- His family had a pattern of sudden conversion (father, two uncles), which frames his own tawba.
- Early signs: the Ya-Sin vision, his father's luminous death, his love for al-Khayyat.
- His "jahiliyya" was heedlessness, not depravity: dancing, music and half-hearted prayer.
Chapter 2. Vocation
When, how and why did Ibn al-'Arabi turn to God? He never wrote a Confessions, but his asides, the oral reports of his disciples and a few late biographies let Addas rebuild the sequence: an illumination that came before any discipline, conversion at the hands of Jesus, the gift of all his goods, a vision of three prophets, a crisis of abandonment, and then the slow schooling of the Path under the masters of Seville.
"When God Called Me to Him"
Five words recur whenever he alludes to his return to God: khalwa (retreat), fath (opening, illumination), waqi'a or mubashshira (vision), tawba (conversion) and ruju' (return). The question of when is answered by his famous visit to Averroes. The philosopher had heard "of the illumination which God had granted me during my retreat" and asked Ibn al-'Arabi's father, a friend of his, to send the boy over on some errand. Yahia dates the visit to 580, but Ibn al-'Arabi says he was "still a boy without any down on my face or even a moustache". He was about fifteen, so the meeting took place no later than 575/1179, and the illumination came before it. That Cordoba's qadi and the sultan's physician should seek out a teenager fits what Ibn al-Abbar says of him: humble, and so devoted to learning that he stopped reading only on his father's death and his wedding night.
Normally fath crowns a long riyada (initiatic discipline), and the Shaykh himself warns novices that illumination before discipline rarely produces "spiritual virility". He was the exception: "my fath preceded my riyada." What happened was jadhba, being snatched out of oneself, not suluk, the step-by-step journey.
On why, his own writings are silent. The only story comes from the unreliable al-Qari al-Baghdadi: at a prince's dinner, as the wine came round and he raised the goblet, a voice called "Muhammad, it was not for this that you were created!" He threw it down, swapped clothes with the vizier's shepherd, and made a ruined tomb in a riverside cemetery his cell, coming out only to pray: "I stayed four days in that cemetery. I then came out with all this knowledge." A far better witness, his disciple Ibn Sawdakin, records: "I went into retreat before dawn and received the illumination before the sun rose... I remained in this place for fourteen months, and so obtained the secrets which I wrote about afterwards. My fath was a jadhba." (Jandi's report of a nine-month fast from Muharram to the Feast probably refers to a later retreat, in 586.) What is certain: the first stage was an immediate, unearned illumination in retreat, very likely in the Seville cemetery he kept returning to.
Conversion at the Hands of Jesus
Illumination happens to a saint; tawba is something he chooses. Here history meets metahistory: "It was at his hands that I was converted; he prayed for me that I should persist in religion... called me his beloved, and ordered me to practise renunciation and self-denial." Jesus was "our first teacher, the master through whom I returned to God". Addas takes Corbin to task for making Khadir the Shaykh's initiator: Khadir's part was real, but it came later and mattered less.
He obeyed literally. Having no shaikh to hand his goods to, he gave them to his father: "I parted from my possessions just as a dead man is parted from his family... Two consequences follow. He was unmarried (the rule applies only to those with no family to support), which disposes of Asin's unsourced early marriage; indeed he says he felt "greater aversion for women... than anyone" for eighteen years after entering the Way. And it happened before he met any master, so before 580, when he was under twenty.
Then came the vision on which he dates his return. In it Jesus urged asceticism again, Moses promised him the 'ilm ladunni, the knowledge "from Our presence" given to Khadir (18:65), and Muhammad said: "Hold fast to me and you will be safe!" The Book of Visions tells only the part of general use. Friends wanted him to study books of juristic opinion (ra'y); in a dream armed men surrounded him on an open plain, and the Prophet on a hill pulled him close ("My beloved, hold fast to me"), and the attackers vanished. "From that time onwards I gave myself to the study of hadith." Since he was hard at hadith by 578, the conversion came earlier still.
Like the majdhub he "burned all the stages... in one single leap". But a guide who has never faced the dangers one by one cannot guide, so he had to make the journey again, patiently.
Entering the Way
"Hold fast to me" meant the Sunna and the Qur'an, which 'A'isha called "the very nature of the Messenger". In 578/1182, aged eighteen, he studied the seven readings and Ibn Shurayh's Kafi with the reciter al-Lakhmi, and also with Ibn al-Sharrat. He read hadith and the Prophet's biography with al-Suhayli, author of the Rawd al-unuf, took an ijaza from the qadi Ibn Zarqun, and received from 'Abd al-Haqq al-Ishbili both his hadith compendia and the works of Ibn Hazm. 'Abd al-Haqq was close to Abu Madyan.
That shaikh, unnamed in the text, can be identified by cross-reference as Abu l-'Abbas al-'Uryabi, his first guide, "an illiterate peasant who was unable to write or even count", from Ulya (Loule) in the Algarve. Asked for counsel, he said: "Close your door, break all ties and keep company with the All-Bounteous; He will speak to you without a veil." He invoked only "Allah, Allah", fearing that the "no" of "no god but God" might be his last breath, so that he would die "in the terrible solitude of negation". "My master was Christic at the end of his life, whereas I was at the beginning." For Ibn al-'Arabi saints are heirs of the prophets: one prophet's inheritance shapes each saint's type. He himself passed from Christic to Mosaic to Hudic and on to the Muhammadan inheritance, which in the end includes all the others.
Western Sufism in Ibn al-'Arabi's Time
| School of Almeria (Andalusian) | Maghrebi current | |
|---|---|---|
| Figures | Ibn Barrajan (master), Ibn al-'Arif (disciple), Ibn Qasi | Abu Ya'za, Ibn Hirzihim, Abu Madyan |
| Character | Doctrinal, written (Mahasin al-majalis); popular, so suspect | No doctrine or texts; charisma and miracles (Abu Ya'za read hearts, tamed wild cats) |
| Fate | Summoned to Marrakech in 536 by the Almoravids: Ibn Barrajan died there, his body thrown on the dump; Ibn al-'Arif died the same year; Ibn Qasi claimed to be the Mahdi and was murdered in 546 | Abu Madyan settled in Bougie; huge discipleship, East and West |
| Ibn al-'Arabi's view | Ibn al-'Arif "our master", a muhaqqiq; Ibn Barrajan respected with reserve; Ibn Qasi finally judged "an imitator... an ignoramus" | Abu Madyan, never met, is the Sufi he cites most |
Addas corrects two received views. First, Ibn Qasi: when Ibn al-'Arabi finally read the Khal' al-na'layn closely for his late commentary in Damascus, his judgment slid from "virtually certain he was a man of spiritual experience" to "nothing but a transmitter and an imitator", one who had copied a real master, Khalaf Allah al-Andalusi, and made false claims in a letter to 'Abd al-Mu'min. Second, the claim (Asin, Corbin) that the Almeria school continued Ibn Masarra's supposed "pseudo-Empedoclean" philosophy rests on no document. Stern called it an illusion, and the treatises found in 1972 show a mystic with a common Neoplatonic tone. Ibn al-'Arabi admired Ibn Masarra ("one of the greatest masters of the Way"), but his own Neoplatonism is closer to the Brethren of Purity. Many of his teachers stood in Ibn al-'Arif's lineage; even the illiterate 'Uryabi debated Ibn al-'Arif's sayings with him, while the young disciple, who knew the answer, practised silence. Many others were disciples of Abu Madyan.
The Masters of Seville
'Uryabi taught him, above all, servitude: "Be a pure servant!" The servant who has given up all lordship is "like a stone that falls where it is thrown". 'Uryabi also brought about his first meeting with Khadir.
The episode shows the paradox in all his discipleships: as murid he owed obedience; as 'arif with sure inner sight he could surpass his teachers. He needed suluk not for his own realisation but for tarbiya, training in the techniques by which one masters one's gifts. In a meeting in the barzakh the Imam of the Left told him: "Affiliate yourself to none but God, for none of those whom you have met has authority over you. God Himself has taken you in His charge." He adds: "The state of this Imam was equivalent to my own."
| Function | Titular prophet (ever-living) | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Pole (qutb) | Idris | Each function also has a living substitute on earth |
| Imam of the Left | Elijah / Jesus | Then probably Abu Madyan, who became Pole an hour before he died |
| Imam of the Right | Jesus / Elijah | Jesus accepted his tawba |
| Fourth Pillar | Khadir | Taught him submission |
Several teachers at once were normal in the West, where companionship (suhba) was still informal; the structured Eastern tariqa with its lodges came later. "Whoever wishes to see three hundred men in one man has only to look at me." Eastern contempt for Maghrebi Sufis (an Irbili shaikh in a Cairo lodge in 598 said they knew nothing of the Path) later moved him to write the Ruh al-quds.
Mixed counsel followed. Troubled by men's sins, he was told by 'Uryabi "Occupy yourself with God!" and by Abu 'Imran al-Mirtuli "Occupy yourself with your soul!" Mirtuli wept: "Each of us has directed you in accordance with his state... listen to him." 'Uryabi replied: "He has pointed out the path, whereas I have pointed out the Companion. Do both." Mirtuli, an ascetic poet, was one of the three "men of divine assistance" in every age who help creatures "with gentleness and mercy".
Both men looked like ordinary pious jurists, and both, he says, were malamiyya, the "People of Blame": pure servants without self-will, holding the highest sainthood below prophecy (the Station of Proximity), with no visible miracles, "hidden... concealed among men". Of the afrad, some ride their aspiration and keep out of the world; others ride their acts and are compelled to govern: the Directors (mudabbirun), who have returned to creatures while seeing God's face in everything. He knew four Directors in Seville: Abu Yahya the blind, at whose burial on a windswept mountain the wind fell still and then rose again; Salih al-Barbari, forty years a wanderer and forty in one mosque; al-Sharafi, for whom distances folded and who lit no lamp for fifty years; and al-Shubarbuli, who walked on water. From Jesus who accepted his repentance, to Khadir who corrected him, to the hidden saints of Seville who trained him, the Solitary Ones formed a ring around the young Andalusian.
Fath Before Riyada
No Confessions. The conversion is scattered in asides and oral report to disciples. Key terms: khalwa, fath, mubashshira / waqi'a, tawba, ruju'. Averroes wanted to meet the boy who had already received illumination in retreat: "still a boy without down on my face" points to about fifteen, no later than 575/1179. So fath preceded the famous dialogue.
| al-Qari al-Baghdadi | Ibn Sawdakin (direct) |
|---|---|
| Prince's dinner, voice at the goblet, shepherd's clothes, four days in a ruined tomb; untrustworthy frame | "I went into retreat before dawn and received fath before sunrise... 14 months... my fath was jadhba" |
Jesus, Poverty, Three Prophets
- Almeria: Ibn al-'Arif (Mahasin, "our master"); Ibn Barrajan (hikma, "haqq makhluq bihi"); Ibn Qasi later judged an imitator, not a muhaqqiq.
- Maghreb: Abu Ya'za, Ibn Hirzihim, Abu Madyan (never met physically; most-cited Sufi; disciples Kumi, Mahdawi, Mawruri).
- Ibn Masarra link: Asin/Corbin myth; Stern and Ja'far dissolve the pseudo-Empedocles school claim; IA still esteems Masarra.
'Uryabi, Khadir, Solitary Ones
Fath Before Riyada
Masters, Law, and Blame
Poverty, Law, and Western Debates
Lifelong poverty after stripping possessions to the father: gifts from companions and later princes, never ownership that nourishes the illusion of rububiyya. "Every servant over whom someone exerts a right falls short in servitude." Clothes lent; slaves freed; if something comes he gives it away. Dialogue: God will not demand of those who say they have no right or share.
- His path began with fath before riyada: an ecstatic illumination in retreat by about fifteen, before he met Averroes.
- Jesus was his first teacher and received his tawba; the vision of Jesus, Moses and Muhammad marks his "return".
- He gave away everything and lived as a pure servant ever after; servitude is the goal of his whole teaching.
- He crossed the fatra, then retraced the Path step by step under many masters, beginning with the illiterate 'Uryabi.
- He belonged to no legal school: ijtihad stays open, divergence is mercy, but he was strict with himself.
- Andalusian (Almeria) and Maghrebi (Abu Madyan) currents both shaped him; the Ibn Masarra link and his admiration for Ibn Qasi are myths.
- Obedient as a disciple yet answerable to God alone, he was guarded from the start by the Solitary Ones.
Chapter 3. Election
Three dates carry Ibn al-'Arabi's spiritual destiny: 586, 594 and 598. The first is the subject of this chapter. In 586/1190, aged twenty-six, he saw all the prophets gathered at Cordoba, and his disciples' tradition holds that they had come to greet the new Seal of Muhammadan Sainthood. The same year in Seville was full of retreats in cemeteries, holy fools, women masters and Qur'anic verses "descending" on him.
Cordoba: The Great Vision
"I saw with my eyes all the Messengers and Prophets. Among them I spoke to Hud, the brother of 'Ad. I also saw all the believers, those who have been and those who will be." The Fusus gives the place and date, Cordoba, 586, and says that none spoke to him except Hud, "who explained to me the reason for their gathering". The Ruh al-quds gives one reason. After visiting the Cordoban saint Abu Muhammad Makhluf al-Qaba'ili, he saw the prophets assembled, and a tall, broad-faced, white-bearded man with his hand on his cheek told him: "We have come to visit Abu Muhammad." Next day he learned the shaikh had fallen ill that night; he died a few days later.
There were in fact two visions: one of all the prophets (586), and another, at a different time, of all the believers. In the second he learned that every saint stands "on the foot" of a prophet; he saw 'Uryabi on the foot of Jesus. The deeper reason he told only to close disciples, and it passed from master to disciple: Jandi (Qunawi's pupil), then Qashani and Qaysari, all write that the prophets had gathered to congratulate him on his nomination as Seal of Sainthood.
Giving Jesus a role in the economy of sainthood was new, and it explains the special bond already seen between him and the Shaykh. As for the Muhammadan Seal, Addas answers Ruspoli's claim that Ibn al-'Arabi never claimed it: "I am, without any doubt, the Seal of Sainthood, in my capacity as heir to the Hashimite and the Messiah" (Fut. I 244), and in the Diwan: "I am the Seal of Saints, just as it is attested that the Seal of the Prophets is Muhammad: the Seal in a specific sense, not the Seal of Sainthood in general, for that is Jesus." Others later made the same claim (Sirhindi, Tijani and more). Addas leaves rival claims to God: what matters to the historian is that for Ibn al-'Arabi it was a certainty that shaped his life and work, and Cordoba was its solemn acknowledgment.
Seville: Retreats and Revelations
In Jumada II 586 the new sultan Abu Yusuf Ya'qub al-Mansur, at the height of Almohad power (Bougie retaken, victory at Hamma, later the great win over Castile at Alarcos in 591), came to Seville to clean up the administration. He banned the sale of wine on pain of death and silenced the city's singers. He admired Ibn Hazm, doubted Ibn Tumart's Mahdi claims, took up Zahirite ritual, burned Maliki law books such as Sahnun's Mudawwana, and ordered the ten hadith collections compiled. Worn out, and remorseful over killing his brother and uncle, he withdrew into piety from 594. That year he summoned Abu Madyan, who died on the way and was buried at 'Ubbad. Addas rejects the view that Abu Madyan was arrested as a possible rebel and prefers Ibn Abi Mansur's account: the sultan wanted to enter the Path. Abu Madyan foresaw: "I will not reach him but will die at Tlemcen," and sent word that the sultan would find healing through al-Mariyyi, the revered shaikh of Maghrebi Sufis.
He dates a "sublime spectacle" about the reckoning to Seville 586, but the Turkish or Kurdish title khatun suggests this particular vision belongs to the later Eastern years. What strikes Addas is that the first four he asked for were women. For Ibn al-'Arabi "men and women have their share in every level, including the function of Pole." He took his sisters to Fez to be married after his father died, and his wife Maryam bint Muhammad b. 'Abdun shared his aspiration: in a dream she was told the Way runs through trust, certainty, patience, resolve and sincerity (family details: Chapter 10).
- Fatima bint Ibn al-Muthanna: over ninety, yet with a face "so pink and fresh" that he blushed; she lived on the scraps left outside doors until he and two others built her a reed hut. "I am your spiritual mother and the light of your carnal mother." The Fatiha served her "like Aladdin's genie". "She was a mercy for the worlds."
- Shams Umm al-Fuqara' of Marchena (586): stout-hearted, she hid her state but showed it to him in secret.
The same year he kept company with the bahalil, the holy "demented", whose reason "remains with Him", "reasonable men without reason". Some are overwhelmed by what comes upon them, some are only briefly absent, and some show nothing at all. Some are joyful (al-Salawi laughed even at prayer), others sad (Yusuf al-Mughawir wept without ceasing). He knew the state at first hand: for a time, people told him, he called the prayer and led it as imam without seeing anything, "like someone asleep who gesticulates".
That year he passed under Abu Madyan's influence through his disciples: a month's retreat with Abu Ahmad al-Salawi, eighteen years Abu Madyan's companion, and above all Yusuf al-Kumi, the only teacher who put him through riyada. "He helped me in initiatic discipline while I helped him in the states of ecstasy. He was for me simultaneously master and disciple." Before Kumi he trembled "like a leaf in the wind".
In the same cemeteries he "received" Qur'anic verses. The Prophet received revelation three ways: as furqan on the Night of Destiny, as qur'an through Ramadan, and "in a shower of stars" over many years. Saints can taste the third, a direct perception of revelation, not memorisation: "the Qur'an never stops travelling towards the heart of those who preserve it." Jandi adds, from Qunawi, that at the end of a nine-month retreat in Seville he was told he was the Muhammadan Seal. How that fits with Cordoba, and with later visions that seem to date the investiture differently, Addas leaves open for now.
Three Dates, One Event
The years 586, 594 and 598 are three episodes of one nomination. Cordoba 586 is the solemn acknowledgement: all the Prophets from Adam to Muhammad, and on another occasion all believers. Only Hud spoke, explaining why they had gathered. Jandi, then Qashani and Qaysari, transmit the oral secret: the prophets congratulated him as Seal of Muhammadan Sainthood.
- Legislative prophecy closed; walaya continues the Muhammadan Reality.
- In each prophet the wali is superior to the nabi as such; walaya has no end because God is al-Wali.
- After the Muhammadan Seal, Abrahamic/Mosaic/Jesus heirs continue, but none "on the heart of Muhammad".
- Jesus seals universal sainthood yet remains under the Muhammadan Seal as wali, while as messenger he ranks above the Seal.
- First full exposition after Tirmidhi's enigmatic Khatm al-awliya'; IA answered Tirmidhi's questionnaire in Fut. ch. 73.
Women, Fools, Abu Madyan's Circle
Cordoba 586: The Great Vision
Seal Doctrine and Seville 586
- 586, Cordoba: all the prophets gather, in the school's reading to greet the Seal of Muhammadan Sainthood; three Seals in all (Muhammadan, Jesus, Infants).
- Women can reach every rank, even Pole; Seville 586 brought holy fools and talks with the dead.
Chapter 4. Ibn al-'Arabi and the Savants of Andalusia
No one can verify Ibn al-'Arabi's claims to sainthood, but anyone can ask where he stood among the scholars of his day. Addas reads his Ijaza (a certificate listing his teachers), the literary anthology Muhadarat al-abrar and scattered remarks to measure his training in Qur'an and hadith, in literature, and in theology and philosophy. The answer: deep roots in the first two, a measured respect for theology, and little interest in philosophy.
The Scholarly World of Almohad Seville
The Almohad period has no full modern study and almost no archives. The best tool is Dominique Urvoy's statistical reading of the biographical dictionaries (Ibn Bashkuwal's Sila, Ibn al-Abbar's Takmila). It shows a boom at exactly the right moment.
| Indicator | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Scholars recorded in Seville | 32 | 100 (well ahead of Cordoba) |
| Hadith specialists (Almohad empire) | 57 | 78 |
| Jurists | 76 | 88 |
| Qur'an specialists | 97 | 126 |
His training, begun in 578, thus coincided with the revival. Two sources need clearing first. The Muhadarat al-abrar was denied to him by Hartmann and Brockelmann because of anachronisms, but these are later interpolations in some editions; internal dates show he wrote it between 611 and 627. The Ijaza is addressed to "al-Malik al-Muzaffar", most likely the Ayyubid al-Ashraf, ruler of Damascus when it was written there in 632, when the Shaykh was past seventy and admitted his memory sometimes failed.
Qur'an and Hadith: The Ijaza
The teachers named in the Ijaza (listed in Appendix 3) were among the best-known scholars of the age, and seven of them held official posts as qadi or preacher under the Almohads. Ibn al-'Arabi was formed inside the scholarly elite, not on its margins. At least seven were also Sufis: the hadith scholar Ayyub al-Fihri (a disciple of Abu Madyan, Abu Ya'za and Ibn Mujahid), Muhammad b. Qasim al-Fasi, who would invest him with the Sufi mantle in 594, Mirtuli, Ibn al-Kharrat and others. He kept studying all his life: with Ibn Sukayna in Baghdad, al-Harastani (Bukhari) in Damascus, and Nasr al-Hashimi (Abu Dawud) in Mecca. The Futuhat is saturated with Qur'an and hadith, with a preference for Muslim's Sahih.
- The Prophet told him in a vision to raise his hands at the opening takbir, on bowing and on rising (a practice disputed in Andalusia); he later found the supporting hadiths.
- At Mecca the Prophet said no one who has circled the Ka'ba should be stopped from praying before it at any hour, "because from that person's prayer God creates an angel which will ask pardon of him right up to the Day of Resurrection".
- An angel gave him a lump of clean, bottomless earth that was the verses 2:150-52. "This is how they were revealed to me," said the Prophet. "Can you deny what you are witnessing?"
Literature: The Muhadarat al-abrar
The Muhadarat looks like a standard adab miscellany: stories, sermons, proverbs, histories of kings and prophets, "entertaining and amusing" talk "not serving to undermine religion". Beneath it runs spiritual teaching (Mawruri's visions of Junayd, Bistami and Ghazali questioning Abu Madyan on "the secret of the secret"), to reach non-initiates. It also records his contacts with the grammarians and poets of the Almohad elite (Appendix 4) and some forty written sources, from Qushayri to Jahiz. He valued profane literature as moral wisdom and a teaching tool, citing Ibn Mujahid and Ibn Qassum as precedents. He was also a poet, with thousands of verses in the Diwan, the Tarjuman al-ashwaq and the poems heading each chapter of the Futuhat: "Consider carefully the verses placed at the start of each chapter... you will find in these verses things which are not mentioned in the exposition."
Theology and Philosophy
Surprisingly, his reading in doctrine came late. Only in 586, twelve years into his vocation, did Kumi introduce him to Qushayri's Risala: "I had never heard anything whatsoever about it... I did not even know the meaning of the term tasawwuf." He made up for it fast, and was nicknamed "al-Qushayri"; soon he cites Ghazali, Tirmidhi, Niffari, Ansari, Sulami, Muhasibi and Abu Talib al-Makki.
| Discipline | Verdict | Illustration |
|---|---|---|
| Kalam (theology) | Useful for defending faith against rational deniers, but "one theologian per country is enough" | Respect for al-Juwayni, al-Isfara'ini, Ghazali; urged Fakhr al-Din Razi to leave "this abyss" for retreat and the Way |
| Mu'tazila vs Ash'ariyya | Mostly indifferent; reason yields relative truths taken for absolute ones, so no one is wholly right or wrong | On the vision of God both are right: we see only the "Cloak of Magnificence", which is creation, ourselves; yet "the veil cannot help contemplating Him whom it veils" |
| Falsafa (philosophy) | "Not totally in vain", but reflection "engenders confusion" and is a veil; only rare sages like "the divine Plato" match the people of unveiling | Ch. 167: the philosopher's ascent stops at the seventh heaven; he must go back and follow a prophet |
He also won over a Mu'tazili Sufi of Ronda, Ibn Junayd, who held that man creates his own acts, by expounding "men are qawwamun over women" (4:34) as a share in the divine name al-Qayyum.
He met Averroes once more, in a vision behind a light veil: "He was so absorbed that he paid no attention to me... This is not someone who is destined to follow the same path as me." The believing philosopher outranks the unbelieving one (whose punishment in hell is the ignorance of the simple believer, while the believer inherits the philosopher's knowledge in paradise), but stays below the saint.
- Finding Farabi's Ideal City in a house at Marchena, he read "how to postulate a divinity in the world" ("He had not said God!") and threw the book at its owner's face.
- No reference to Avicenna, Kindi or Ibn Tufayl, and no sign he read Averroes; yet he cites the grammarian Ibn Sid of Badajoz and his Pythagorean "unity by number".
- Greek thinkers known only by hearsay (pseudo-Aristotle's Secret of Secrets, a Hippocratic treatise); his Neoplatonism came via Ibn Masarra and the Brethren of Purity.
- Arabic and probably Berber only. Austin's suggested Kabbala link is unsourced (he once discussed the letter ba' with a rabbi); no Maimonides, no Suhrawardi despite Persian disciples. A yoga treatise (Amratkund) attributed to him is a myth.
Not on the Fringes
Claims of walaya cannot be verified, but social location can. Seville in 585-610 held more 'ulama' than Cordoba. His teachers include at least seven holders of official posts (qadi / khatib). Sufism in Almohad Andalusia strengthened links with hadith and letters; he was close to the official world, not outside it.
Adab, Kalam, Philosophy
Ulama, Adab, and Reason's Limit
Adab Surface, Sufi Depth
- Formed among Seville's 'ulama', he held that saints verify hadith by unveiling; kalam is a limited defence, philosophy a veil.
Chapter 5. God's Vast Earth
The year 589-590/1193-94 is the hinge of Ibn al-'Arabi's life. He crosses to North Africa for the first time and spends almost a year in Tunis with Shaykh 'Abd al-'Aziz al-Mahdawi. There, at about thirty, he enters what he calls "God's Vast Earth", learns that he is the Heir of Muhammad, and comes home a mature master. In the same months his father dies, his family demands that he give up the Way, and he receives the inheritance of Abraham. His first books date from this time too.
Seeing the Whole Road Before Setting Out
The chapter opens with a story Ibn al-'Arabi told his disciple Sadr al-Din Qunawi. On reaching the Mediterranean, "I resolved not to make the crossing until I had been allowed to see all the internal and external states that God had destined for me until the time of my death." He turned to God "with total concentration", and was shown his whole future. He even saw Qunawi's father Ishaq and Qunawi himself, with "the knowledge you would acquire, your experiences and stations". "I then went to sea, with insight and certainty as my possession. Everything was and everything is just as it was bound to be."
At Algeciras he visited Ibrahim b. Tarif al-'Absi, a disciple of Abu l-Rabi' al-Malaqi and of Ibn Mujahid. At Ceuta he studied with three hadith masters: 'Abd Allah al-Hajari, who passed on Bukhari's Sahih to him in Ramadan 589; Ibn al-Sa'igh, a Sufi said to have reached "the level of the Red Sulphur"; and Ayyub al-Fihri, who later died a martyr at Las Navas de Tolosa. He became friends with the city's judge, Abu Ibrahim b. Yaghmar, whom he held up as the model of a just governor. Anger had no hold on him, and when he applied a legal penalty he did so out of obedience to God and mercy toward the guilty, who was cleansed by it. He was a man "who wept abundantly, meditated intensely, practised dhikr unceasingly and reconciled enemies".
Why Tunis? A Message from One of the Seven
The idea of going to Tunis arrived "quite suddenly". Walking the coast from Seville he reached Rota, whose mosque drew pilgrims from all over Andalusia, and there met Muhammad b. Ashraf al-Rundi, one of the seven substitutes (abdal). They spent three days together, and al-Rundi foretold in detail what would happen to him. Back in Seville, Ibn al-'Arabi decided to go back and see him, and asked his mother's permission. Next morning a man from the desert knocked at the door. Between Marchena and Purchena he had met a stranger who sent this message: al-Rundi greets you; he meant to visit, "but he will suddenly conceive the desire to go to Tunis. May he travel in peace and he will see me when he returns to Seville." "The next day I left to visit you", he wrote to Mahdawi.
Addas raises the obvious question: someone must have told him about Mahdawi. The likeliest source is the circle of Abu Madyan, who had been Mahdawi's own teacher.
On the way he stopped at Tlemcen, where he met the poet al-Fazazi and a holy man, al-Tartusi, who spoke critically of Abu Madyan. Ibn al-'Arabi, whose veneration for Abu Madyan "knew no bounds", took against him at once. That night the Prophet rebuked him in a dream.
| The Prophet asked | Ibn al-'Arabi answered |
|---|---|
| Why do you hate so-and-so? | Because he hates Abu Madyan. |
| Does he not love God and me? | Certainly he does. |
| Why then hate him for hating Abu Madyan, rather than love him for loving God and His Messenger? | I have erred. He is now one of the people I love most. |
A Year in Tunis
He stayed nearly a year, with Mahdawi and with Mahdawi's own teacher, Ibn Khamis al-Kinani, a surgeon who lived at the port, another disciple of Abu Madyan. The two men saw each other clearly. Kinani "did not totally unveil himself" even to Mahdawi, his own disciple, but he and Ibn al-'Arabi "revealed ourselves to each other, mutually and voluntarily". Before they parted he made Ibn al-'Arabi promise to say nothing about his true state.
Mahdawi, by contrast, was cool toward him, and the Futuhat preface still carries a trace of hurt. Ibn al-'Arabi took the blame: "I had in fact hidden both from him and from his disciples what I really was by adopting an external manner of behaviour which was atrocious." The worst of it was a verse he recited before the whole gathering:
His affection for Mahdawi never wavered. He wrote the Ruh al-quds and began the Futuhat for him, always calling him "al-wali", the friend of God, and he planned a separate book on his virtues. Looking back on his second stay in 598 he wrote, "We were the four corner supports": Mahdawi, Ibn al-Murabit, himself and Habashi, an allusion to the four Pillars (awtad) of the saintly hierarchy.
The second meeting with Khadir also happened in Tunis. On a boat in the port, up with a stomach ache while the others slept, he saw by the full moon a man walking toward him on the sea. The man raised one foot, then the other, to show that his soles were dry, spoke "in a language which is unique to him", and reached a lighthouse two miles away in three strides, perhaps on his way to Kinani at Marsa 'Idan. Kinani died in 590, so the episode belongs to this first visit.
Entering God's Vast Earth
The great event of the year was inward. In his thirtieth year he entered "God's Vast Earth" (ard Allah al-wasi'a, Qur'an 4:97), also called the Earth of Reality, and with it the Abode of Symbols. "From then onwards he never left and never would leave it." A land no geographer will ever be able to map became his permanent address.
The idea of another earth is older. It appears in traditions about Mount Qaf and the cities of Jabalqa and Jabarsa, and in Zoroastrian thought, as Henry Corbin showed in Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth. Corbin translated chapter 8 of the Futuhat. Addas adds chapter 351, which he did not use, and it gives a different face of the same place: it is the Earth of total servanthood. "Servitude is complete and pure submission, in conformity with the very essence of the servant's nature... It is only realised by those who inhabit God's Vast Earth, which contains both the contingent and the eternal." He quotes 29:56, "You My servants who believe, My Earth is vast, therefore worship Me", and adds: "I myself have been worshipping God in this place ever since the year 590, and we are now in the year 635." It is "a spiritual Earth, intelligible and not of the senses".
Heir of Muhammad
In the Diwan he dates a second realisation to the same place and year:
Addas suggests that the scandalous verse about the Qur'an may have come to his lips at this very moment. Being the Muhammadan Heir (warith) and entering the Vast Earth are two sides of one event. The claims that follow sound extravagant, but they rest on servanthood, not lordship: "In every epoch there is one unique being thanks to whom that age attains its apotheosis. I am that being." "No one to my knowledge has realised the station of servitude better than I have... I am the Pure and Authentic Servant; I have not the slightest aspiration to sovereignty."
Before the Crossing
At Algeciras in 589/1193 he resolved not to cross until shown all future states to death. He saw them, including Ishaq b. Muhammad and Sadr al-Din Qunawi as companions. "Everything was and is as it was bound to be." Red Sulphur (al-kibrit al-ahmar) is the alchemical agent that turns silver to gold: metaphor for the saint's excellence and for inheritance of Muhammad's Station.
Vast Earth and Heirship
Crossing and the Vast Earth
Early Works and Magistracy
Thirtieth year decisive: spiritual magistracy shows outwardly; rapid writing. Mashahid al-asrar and the Risala to Mahdawi's companions share manaqib plan and Niffari style; Addas concludes the Risala is the preface of the Mashahid (BN 6104 first 13 folios). Prefaces legitimise saints speaking with God: "saints of this community are the prophets of other communities." Tadbirat written in four days at Moron for Mawruri; Insha' al-dawa'ir for Habashi revised over years.
Homecoming: Two Uncanny Episodes
He sailed home by night from Ksar to Tarifa to visit 'Abd Allah b. Ibrahim al-Malaqi, a man famous for futuwwa (heroic generosity): "always to be seen busying himself on someone else's behalf, never for himself", pleading with governors and judges for others, his house "always open to the poor".
In Seville a young man he had never met recited to him, word for word, a poem he had composed silently, to himself, in Tunis, about the enclosure of Ibn Muthanna beside the Great Mosque, and gave the exact date. A stranger dressed like a wandering pilgrim had taught it to a group of young men in the east of the city, said its author had composed it in Tunis "at this very instant", and vanished before their eyes. Ibn al-'Arabi took him for one of the rijal al-ghayb, the "men of the Hidden World", who can hear what people say aloud or only in their hearts.
| Sense | Description |
|---|---|
| Technical | Never more than ten; men of fear who speak only in a murmur, hidden by God in earth and heaven; "they walk humbly, and when the ignorant address them they answer: Peace" (25:63) |
| Broad | Men who avoid being seen (like the stranger in Seville), believing jinn, and beings who draw knowledge and food from the unseen |
Death of a Father, and the Family's Demand
His father had been with him in Tunis. A letter to his cousin describes a night when Mahdawi took the disciples to the baths, wrapping each in two long towels before undressing them "to hide our nakedness the better", then led prayers until dawn. Next morning his father asked what had happened and disapproved of "behaviour of such a kind in these times and in this country". In the same letter, written on his return, his father is named with the formula used for the dead. Addas concludes that he died in Seville in 590, with his wife and daughters beside him, and that the mother followed soon after.
That turned his life upside down. As the only son he was now head of the family, responsible for two unmarried sisters, Umm Sa'd and Umm 'Ala', and yet years before he had given away everything and taken a vow of poverty. Relatives lined up to tell him to "put an end to his eccentricities". His cousin came and "with much thoughtfulness and consideration begged me to return to the world for the good of my family".
| When | Event |
|---|---|
| c. 580 | Salih al-Barbari warns him: "When you have tasted honey, leave the vinegar!" The elder sister's engagement to the emir Abu l-'Ala' b. Ghazan "will not take place"; father and emir will die; the family will press him to return to the world: "Don't do what they ask you." |
| Some years later | The emir dies. |
| 590/1194 | His father dies; the family pressure begins exactly as foretold. |
| 590, Seville retreat | He receives the Abrahamic inheritance and understands Barbari's words. |
He refused. He would not give up siyaha, the long journeys far from cities and crowds, "travelling across the earth to meditate on the spectacle of the vestiges of centuries gone by and nations that have passed away". Until he settled in Damascus he never really stopped, first in the West, then in the East. The journeys were also how he met the saints of his time, drew on their blessing and knowledge, and came to know at first hand the spiritual types he would later describe so vividly.
Heir to Abraham
During a retreat in Seville he received an illumination. Its light was then eclipsed, and he said to himself: "This is the contemplative vision of Abraham." "I then knew that from this time onwards I was the Heir of the community which God had commanded both us and His Messenger to follow... 'the community of your father Abraham: it is he who has called you muslimin' (22:78). I realised his quality of father and my quality of son."
In Ibn al-'Arabi's terms, to inherit from a prophet means two things: to share his particular way of contemplating God, and to take on his character as the Qur'an describes it. For Abraham that means clemency and compassion. Years later, writing the Futuhat beside the Station of Abraham in Mecca, he heard a voice: "Enter into the maqam Ibrahim", and then 9:114, "Abraham is compassionate (awwah) and clement (halim)."
| Quality | What he drew from it | Consequence foretold |
|---|---|---|
| Halim (clement), intensive form | One can only be clement toward someone one has power over, so God would give him strength | He would be slandered by people he could crush, would have to forgive them, and would be "heavily afflicted" |
| Awwah (one who sighs) | He sighs at the Divine Majesty and at his inability to glorify it | A permanent sense that no creature can praise God as He deserves |
A Third Meeting with Khadir
On another coastal walk in 590 his companion was a man who denied the miracles of saints. They stopped to pray in a ruined mosque, and a group of wanderers came in. Among them were Khadir and a man "of a higher rank than Khadir", an old friend, who led the prayer. The door faced west over the ocean toward Bakka, roughly halfway between Tarifa and Rota. Then Khadir took a small prayer rug from the mihrab, spread it in the air seven cubits up, and prayed on it. Afterwards he said: "I only did this for the sake of that unbeliever!", pointing to the skeptic in the corner.
Addas reasons that the man above Khadir must have been the Pole or one of the two Imams, since Khadir is the fourth Pillar. That rank is one of function only, since all the afrad stand at the Pole's spiritual level. Elsewhere Ibn al-'Arabi says he met the Imam of the Right, who trains the afrad, in the flesh during his wanderings, and the Imam of the Left only in vision.
The First Books
In the months after Tunis, despite his absences and the family strain, he wrote the Mashahid al-asrar (Contemplations of the Holy Secrets) and a letter to Mahdawi's companions. Here Addas does some detective work.
- Both are dated 590 and addressed to Mahdawi's circle, especially his cousin Abu l-Husayn.
- Both cite the same three works: his Tadbirat ilahiyya, the Lawami' al-anwar and Ibn Barrajan's Kitab al-hikma.
- Both announce a book on Mahdawi's virtues.
- The letter ends by defending phrases like "God said to me" and "I replied to Him". These never appear in the letter itself, but they fill every page of the Mashahid, which is modelled on Niffari's Mawaqif.
- The first 13 folios of the Paris manuscript of the Mashahid match the published letter.
- Ibn Sawdakin, commenting under his master's dictation, skips the opening of the Mashahid as "a preface... on the virtues of Shaykh al-Mahdawi... clear and transparent".
The preface prepares readers for what follows. Taking a saying attributed to Mahdawi, "the saints of this community are the prophets of other communities", it argues that inspired saints, like prophets, speak with God and may say so. The Mashahid then puts that into practice: a series of "abodes of contemplation", each a face-to-face meeting with God.
It was not his first book. It cites the Tadbirat ilahiyya, written in four days at Moron for al-Mawruri, and the Tadbirat in turn cites the Insha' al-dawa'ir, which Osman Yahia dated to 598, after its dedicatee Habashi, whom he first met in 594. The answer is that Ibn al-'Arabi wrote some works in one sitting (the Kitab al-yaqin took a single day at Hebron in 601), let others grow over years, and revised old texts. No one can say which book came first. What is clear is that around his thirtieth year his authority began to show outwardly, he began writing fast, and every major theme of the Futuhat was already present.
- 589-590 is the hinge: first crossing to Africa, a year in Tunis, maturity at thirty.
- In Tunis he entered God's Vast Earth, a world of the barzakh that is also the station of total servanthood, and learned he was the Heir of Muhammad.
- The verse "I am the Qur'an" was a deliberate disguise of his servanthood, and it cost him Mahdawi's warmth for a time but never his own loyalty.
- His father's death tested his vow of poverty; he held to it, as Barbari had told him to.
- In Seville he inherited from Abraham: clemency backed by strength, and a forecast of slander he would have to forgive.
- His writing career begins here; the Mashahid and its preface already set out his doctrine of inspired sainthood.
Chapter 6. Fez
Between 591 and 594/1195-98 Ibn al-'Arabi went to Fez three times, and the city became for him what Mecca would become later: a place of decisive events. There he received the illuminations of expression, sweetness and unveiling. He became "a face without a nape", seeing in every direction while leading prayer. He identified the hidden Pole of his age, made his inward Ascension through the heavens, and learned in detail that he was the Seal of Muhammadan Sainthood. He also met Badr al-Habashi, his companion for the next twenty-three years, trained a circle of disciples under a strict rule, and kept the Almohad court at a distance.
War, Numbers and a Disputed Motive
While he wandered and wrote, Seville lived in fear. The truce of 586 had run out, and in 590 Alfonso VIII of Castile "bathed the whole region of Seville in fire and blood". The Sevillans begged the sultan Abu Yusuf Ya'qub al-Mansur for help, and he reached Seville in Jumada II 591/1195. Ibn al-'Arabi was in Fez. A friend asked whether the army would win that year. "God has spoken about this battle," the friend said, pointing to Qur'an 48:1, "We have given you a resounding victory" (fathan mubinan). "Examine carefully the sum total of the numerical value of the letters." Ibn al-'Arabi added them up and got 591. "I had barely returned to Andalusia before God gave victory to the Muslims." The Almohads crushed Alfonso at Alarcos on 8 Sha'ban 591. The chroniclers exaggerated its importance, but Castile did not challenge al-Mansur again, and Andalusia had a few years of peace.
| Urvoy: "instinct to flee" | Addas: domestic and spiritual reasons | |
|---|---|---|
| Claim | He left when Castile threatened and came back when he thought the danger was over | He was escaping family pressure and seeking the heartland of Moroccan Sufism |
| Evidence | The timing of 591 | He came back before Alarcos, left again in 593 when the danger was gone, and crossed the Strait constantly between 589 and 597 with no link to the fighting |
| Fez's draw | None | The city where Abu Madyan trained under al-Daqqaq and Ibn Hirzihim, full of their disciples |
Al-Idrisi describes Fez as a city of palaces and trades, cheap wheat, fountains under domes, gardens, and "proud and independent" people. It was a commercial crossroads and a centre of learning, where poets and scholars argued, and Sufis came, "more discreetly", in search of masters.
Friends, Saints and a Theologian
His key contact was Muhammad b. Qasim al-Tamimi (d. 603), a hadith scholar who had spent fifteen years in the East. Ibn al-Abbar doubted his reliability as a transmitter, but he was also a Sufi. He passed on stories of the saints of Fez, especially al-Daqqaq, in a book (now lost) that Ibn al-'Arabi studied with him, and in 594 he invested him with the Sufi cloak.
| Figure | Profile |
|---|---|
| Abu 'Abd Allah al-Mahdawi of Fez (d. 595) | Fed the city with wheat during a famine; sat forty years in the Great Mosque facing the qibla, and in sixty years "never turned his back to it". One of the malamiyya (the hidden "people of blame") and one of the "men of ardent desire", never more than five, each of whom fully realises one of the five daily prayers; "through them God maintains the existence of the world". Salih al-Barbari was another. |
| Ibn Takhmist (d. 608) | A malami said to have saved a ship's passengers just by being on board; thought to be one of the substitutes. |
| Ibn al-Kattani (d. 597) | The leading theologian of Morocco, and an ascetic. |
With Ibn al-Kattani he argued about the divine attributes. Some denied that God has attributes distinct from His Essence, some fell into anthropomorphism, and the Ash'aris said the attributes are real additions to the Essence that are "not He and not other than He". Ibn al-'Arabi rejected this last formula as "totally mistaken". Knowing, Living and Powerful are relationships (nisab) and ascriptions (idafat), not entities added to God, "because whatever is perfect through the addition of something is imperfect in its essence". When Ibn al-Kattani gave the Ash'ari view, he replied with the Prophet's words to Abu Bakr about a dream: "You are partly right, partly wrong!" His verdict: here was someone God led astray "in spite of his learning. That is not to call his faith into question, only his intelligence."
Three Illuminations
In 591 at Fez he reached the "Abode of the pact between plants and the Pole", the station of the Pole's authority over the vegetable, mineral and animal kingdoms. That, not just his arithmetic, is how he says he knew about Alarcos in advance. Each abode brings its own sciences, and chapter 216 of the Futuhat explains three of them.
| Illumination | What it is | His claim |
|---|---|---|
| Of expression (futuh al-'ibara) | Given only to the "perfect Muhammadan". Its station is veracity in every word and movement. Speech is not planned and then spoken: "the moment in which he speaks is the same as the moment in which he conceives the discourse". | "Of all the men I have met... not one showed any trace of it... the one thing about which I am sure and certain is that I am one of them." |
| Of sweetness (futuh al-halawa) | A spiritual sweetness felt "like the coldness of cold water", loosening the joints, with a kind of numbness. | For him it lasted sometimes an instant, sometimes "for days and nights". |
| Of unveiling (futuh al-mukashafa) | God is too great to be known in Himself but is known in things. Things are veils; when their status falls away, God appears. | The highest form: "when the vision of God is the very vision of the world". "I have discovered no-one... who noted this particular point." |
The first illumination carries a striking theory of the Qur'an's inimitability. Asked in a vision what makes the Qur'an inimitable, he was told: "It is the fact that it communicates the Truth. Observe the truth and your discourse will be inimitable." This fits the huge weight he placed on exact, literal transmission of divine and prophetic words.
He then distinguishes three ways of seeing. The waqif, who "halts" in God, sees only God; some go so far as to deny that the world is real. The raji', who "returns" to creatures, sees things and God's Face in them, and he ranks this higher: "To be attentive to God and simultaneously to the created object forms part of the perfect acquisition of the Divine Names." Above both is the one for whom seeing God and seeing the world are a single act, the One in the many and the many in the One.
Light, Subtle Bodies and the Secret of Destiny
Also in 591 he entered for the first time the Abode of Light (chapter 348), where he learned the difference between sensible bodies (ajsam), "fine and transparent or dense, visible or invisible", and subtle bodies (ajsad), the bodies spirits take on when seen awake and the forms we see in dreams.
In Fez he also learned of a "strange kind of extinction", the Abode of the Extinction of Sins, which comes in two kinds.
- First kind: people whose sins were never decreed. What looks like disobedience is, for them, permitted, since they have been told, as the fighters at Badr were, "Do what you wish, I have already forgiven you."
- Second kind: people who have seen the secret of destiny (sirr al-qadar) in the "Presence of Pure Light". There they saw their destined actions simply as actions, apart from being permitted or forbidden. Below that Presence lie the Half-Obscurity, where law, good and evil become distinct, and the Pure Obscurity of evil. Such people hurry to do what they know must come from them, "obeying and disobeying" without seeking nearness or meaning to transgress.
- His own case: he saw the Presence of Light, but "God raised me into the Presence of Half-Obscurity while at the same time He preserved me and rendered me impeccable", so that he held the rank of the Light while living under the Law. "For the people of the Way this is more perfect."
The Fusus names the highest group of those who know the secret of destiny. They know that God's knowledge of them is simply knowledge of what they were in their immutable essence, before they existed, and the very highest are shown "both his immutable essence and the sequence of all his future states". That is exactly what he claimed to have seen at Algeciras before crossing the sea.
The Cloak
He seems to have received the khirqa (Sufi cloak) for the first time in Seville in 592. Investiture links a disciple through his master's blessing to an unbroken chain going back to the Prophet. The "cloak" might in fact be a turban or a scrap of cloth. In the West the word mostly stood for suhba, keeping company with a master, and that is how he understood it until he went East.
| Year, place | From | Chain |
|---|---|---|
| 592, Seville | Taqi al-Din al-Tawzari al-Qastallani | via Sadr al-Din Ibn Hamawayh to Khadir, giving a second line to the Prophet (the links in the Hamawayh chain do not quite fit) |
| 594, Fez | Muhammad b. Qasim al-Tamimi | via Abu l-Fath al-Mahmudi |
| 599, Mecca | Yunus b. Yahya al-Hashimi | from 'Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani |
| 601, Mosul | 'Ali b. Jami', companion of Qadib al-Ban | invested by Khadir himself, in the same garden, in the same way (a small cotton cap) |
There is an irony in the family of his first investor. Tawzari's brother Abu l-'Abbas married the widow of the saint al-Qurashi, and their son Qutb al-Din al-Qastallani became a relentless enemy of Ibn al-'Arabi's school, whom Massignon rightly called a "witch-hunter".
The Mosul investiture changed his mind. "From this time onwards I maintained [the validity of] investiture with the khirqa and I invested people with it because I understood that Khadir ascribed importance to it." It was no longer just a sign of companionship but a technique. A master who sees a flaw in a companion meets him alone, takes off the garment he is wearing in his present spiritual state, puts it on the disciple and holds him close, "and the master's state spreads to his disciple". In the Diwan he names fifteen people he invested: fourteen are women, and the one man is Habashi. Most of the women he invested in dreams, including the daughter of the Shafi'i judge Ibn Zaki, whom some sources say he married.
Refusing the Sultan
In 592 the Almohad empire was at its height. Al-Mansur raided as far as Toledo, purged corrupt officials in Seville and, at the gates of Madrid, signed a ten-year truce. Andalusia had nothing to fear, and yet Ibn al-'Arabi left again. The reason was the sultan himself. He sent his former chief judge Abu l-Qasim b. Baqi to invite Ibn al-'Arabi into his service, privately and without pressure. He refused; Barbari's words "were still ringing in my ears". Then the prince asked about his unmarried sisters and offered to find husbands for them: "I have a duty towards them" (the father had served the Almohads). When a messenger came again with the offer, Ibn al-'Arabi thanked him and left at once for Fez with his family and a cousin, where he married off his sisters himself. Addas dates the episode to late 592 or early 593.
A Face Without a Nape
If he had given Fez a symbolic name, Addas writes, it would have been Nur, Light. In 593 he entered the Abode of Light a second time, and this time the inner change came with a bodily charism.
Being "a face without a nape" is a mark of the Pole (though not his alone) and part of the Muhammadan inheritance. Only someone who can see the qibla in every direction, he says, may pray on horseback as the Prophet did. In another treatise the believer is "a face without a nape", the unbeliever "a nape without a face", and the hypocrite "a face plus a nape". The al-Azhar mosque was normally led by Muhammad b. Qasim al-Tamimi.
Recognising the Pole
In 593 he also identified the Pole of the age, Ashall al-Qaba'ili, a foreigner from Bougie with a withered hand. They had often kept company, and the man spoke to him only about the Qur'an. A dream showed him who he really was. Next day, at a gathering in Ibn Hayyun's garden, the respected masters present (among them the malami al-Hassar) deferred to Ibn al-'Arabi on every point. Talk turned to the Pole, who sat there unnoticed. "My brothers, I am going to tell you some amazing things about the Pole of your time." The Pole said quietly: "Say what God has revealed to you, but do not reveal his identity!" Afterwards he thanked him: "You did well in not referring to him by name." "This was in fact a farewell greeting... never did I see him again."
Addas draws the conclusion: at thirty-three he was already recognised by the Sufis of the West as the master par excellence. Another time, people in Fez who had heard of him came looking for him. He slipped away to the Great Mosque and, when they asked him where Ibn al-'Arabi was, told them: "Continue looking for him until you find him." A stranger sat down in front of him, and Ibn al-'Arabi knew by inspiration that he was Ibn Ja'dun, one of the four Pillars, whose son would inherit his rank. "Don't unmask me, don't unmask me!" he said, and left. "When Ibn Ja'dun was absent nobody noticed, and when he was present nobody asked his opinion."
The Ascension of 594
His longest journey, Addas writes, was made in Fez in 594: a journey upward, in spirit, into the Divine Presence, "two bows' length away or nearer" (53:9). Every saint repeats in spirit the Prophet's bodily mi'raj, and each finds different scenery, because the journey is the full realisation of "He who knows himself knows his Lord". Man is a microcosm, a copy of the universe, so all the saint meets happens within: "My voyage took place nowhere else except inside myself." Afterwards comes the descent. The Risalat al-anwar names two kinds of "returners": the gnostic, sent back to perfect himself, and the knowing heir, sent back to guide others. He was the second. His sources are the Kitab al-isra', written in Fez in Jumada 594 in rhymed prose and verse, and the far plainer chapter 367 of the Futuhat, summarised below.
| Heaven | Teaching received |
|---|---|
| 1. Adam | All humans are "on the Right of God" and destined for bliss. God's wrath is not eternal: the Resurrection lasts a limited time, 50,000 years of penalties, after which rule passes to "the All-Merciful, the Most Merciful". |
| 2. Jesus and John | Jesus raises the dead through the spirit he received from Gabriel. John will make "death die", since he has priority in the name Yahya ("he lives"); asked about all the other Yahyas, he says it is through him "that all men live". |
| 3. Joseph | The meaning of the Prophet's remark that he would have answered Pharaoh's call at once if he had been imprisoned as long as Joseph (12:50). |
| 4. Idris, the Solar Pole | Greets him as "Muhammadan heir"; teaches the renewal of creation at every instant; hears of a man at the Ka'ba from a humanity before ours, "there were several Adams". |
| 5. Aaron | Calls him "perfect heir"; gnostics who deny the reality of the world know the self-disclosures imperfectly. |
| 6. Moses | Explains his vision of God, clearing up 7:143. |
| 7. Abraham | Leaning on the Celestial Ka'ba; then the Lote-Tree of the Limit. |
The teaching of the first heaven caused the most scandal among jurists. Reading the Qur'an literally, he noted that it says the damned stay in hell for ever but does not say they are punished for ever. Since mercy "embraces all things" (7:156), the fire will become for them "coolness and peace", as it did for Abraham. Bliss is whatever suits a creature's nature, so those made for the fire will be happy in it, "so much so that if they were to gain entrance to Paradise they would suffer".
At the Lote-Tree: "I became nothing but light." Then came 3:84, "Say: we believe in God and in what has been revealed... to Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob... Moses and Jesus". "Through this one verse He gave me all the verses... I came to know that I was the totalisation of those whose names had been mentioned to me; this was for me the announcement that I had attained to the station of Muhammad." All the divine Names pointed to one Named, "and this Essence was my very own being. The journey I had made was only inside myself... from this I knew that I was a servant in a state of purity, without the slightest trace of sovereignty."
The Seal Made Explicit
The vision at Cordoba in 586 was act one, and 594 was act two. "As for the Seal of Muhammadan Sainthood... I came to know the details about it in Fez, in 594. God showed me the sign of its function, which I will not name." A long poem in the Diwan drops the reticence: God announced to the angels that "My sign of his function of Seal is to be found on his back", where, according to Jandi, Ibn al-'Arabi had a hollow the size of a partridge egg, matching the raised seal between the Prophet's shoulders. The poem goes on: "I knew I was the Seal... four years later [after Tunis] at Fez at the time of the full moon... If I am neither Moses nor Jesus nor their equals, that means nothing to me because I am the totaliser of all that... I am the Seal of the Saints of Muhammad, the specific Seal in the cities and in the deserts."
Why does he sometimes hide the Seal's identity and sometimes reveal it? He says he does not write as an author: the Futuhat contains "not one single letter" not written "under divine dictation, lordly projection or spiritual inspiration", and his books in general were written "to free myself from an inspiration that burns my heart and crushes my chest". Once, told to write "This is a chapter of subtle description and most rare unveiling", he could not go on, waited "virtually at death's door", until a luminous tablet with radiant green lines appeared, and he copied it out to the end. And how does 594 square with Cordoba (586) and Algeciras (589)? Addas promises the answer: a series of linked events, resolved in Mecca in 598-99.
Habashi and the Circle of Disciples
His fame drew many disciples. In Fez he kept a group reciting the Qur'an day and night without a break, "the noblest and most sublime of nourishments"; later "I lost them and simultaneously I abandoned this pure practice". One disciple, the philologist Ibn Zaydan, had denied that the self can be extinguished in God, until al-Mansur rode into Fez in 594. At the sight of the sultan he became "extinguished to myself": no drums, no cymbals, no crowd, and in the press of cavalry nobody jostled him. "Master, the fana' that the Sufis speak of is indeed true."
The Rule He Taught
| Element | Content |
|---|---|
| Foundation | Strict observance of the Law; noble virtues (leniency, humility, generosity, chivalry) |
| Asceticism | Four pillars: hunger, wakefulness, seclusion, silence (Hilyat al-abdal) |
| Guide | Total obedience: "You must only want what your teacher wants" |
| No easy options | No use of legal concessions; no excuse for a broken vow; follow only rulings all jurists agree on. (For ordinary believers, by contrast, he chose the easiest view.) |
| Self-examination | Account each evening for thoughts as well as acts, "while feeling shame with regard to God" |
| Invocation | First the Name "Allah" (as with 'Uryabi), which he speaks of in the past tense; later "la ilaha illa llah", "the best of invocations" for the knowledge it brings |
| Inner stance | Not "self-sufficiency through God", which other shaykhs stressed, but "poverty toward God", the true quality of every creature |
| Forbidden | Musical sessions (sama'), which he called a recent innovation of "libertines"; and gazing at beardless youths, "the most immoral form of wickedness" |
"The Right of God Comes First"
The Kitab al-kunh says: "Do not approach the gates of the sultan." A story from Ceuta (594) shows how firmly he meant it.
In Tunis, by contrast, he used his influence with the ruler on behalf of a notable named Ibn Mu'tib, who was restored to office, while refusing his food and gifts. Why so guarded with the Almohads, whom he seems to have thought corrupt, and so much more accommodating later with Seljuq and Ayyubid princes? He never called the Almohads illegitimate. Addas suggests spiritual timing: the western empire was doomed, while in the East he would receive a formal duty of counsel (nasiha) to the whole community, rulers included.
Three Journeys to Fez
Between 591 and 597 he went to Fez three times: 591; 593 to 594 (maybe 595); then 597 before Tunis and the East. Fez was for him what Mecca would become: a place of decisive events. Al-Idrisi's proud commercial city was also the citadel where Abu Madyan trained under al-Daqqaq and Ibn Hirzihim.
| Urvoy | Addas | |
|---|---|---|
| Claim | Instinct to flee Castile | Family pressure + Moroccan saints |
| Counter | Timing of 591 | Returned before Alarcos; left again in 593 when danger gone; Strait crossings 589-597 show no war correlation |
Illuminations, Light, Destiny
Face Without a Nape, Pole, Ascension
Habashi, Rule, Right of God
Cloak Chains and Court Distance
Three Illuminations and Ascension Detail
Khirqa, Sultan, Discipline
A Secret Told and Taken Back
In 594 he disclosed a divine secret to about eighteen companions, without knowing it should not be told. Rebuked by "the Beloved", he answered: "You sort out this problem with those to whom I confided the secret, because it is You who are jealous about it." At Ceuta he was told it had been "removed from their breasts". He went back to Fez with Habashi, eight days' journey, to check: "God had indeed deprived them of the secret." Then the two returned to Andalusia.
Two decisions came out of these years. He resolved to set down in writing, for saints to come, the knowledge he had inherited, starting with the 'Anqa' mughrib (595), "The Astounded Phoenix, regarding the Seal of the Saints and the Sun of the West". And he resolved to leave the West for the East.
- Fez (591-594) was his second Mecca: Light, the Pole, the Ascension and the Seal all came there.
- Addas rejects the "flight from war" reading; his journeys were driven by family pressure and the pull of saints.
- Divine attributes are relationships, not additions; God is known only as the Lord of things, and knowing the world comes before knowing God.
- The illumination of expression means speaking without premeditation and with complete truthfulness; that is also the secret of the Qur'an's inimitability.
- At al-Azhar he became "a face without a nape"; in 594 his inward Ascension ended in pure servanthood and the explicit knowledge that he was the Seal of Muhammadan Sainthood.
- He held that punishment in hell ends, though the stay does not, which scandalised jurists.
- He trained disciples under a strict rule, banned musical sessions, kept away from rulers, and put "the right of God first".
- Badr al-Habashi joined him for life; the 'Anqa' mughrib and the move East followed.
Chapter 7. Farewells
From 595 to 598/1198-1202 Ibn al-'Arabi said goodbye to the West. He made a deliberate round of Andalusia, visiting each teacher one last time, and he stood at the burial of Averroes. Then he vanished for a year, crossed to Morocco, and on the road to Marrakech reached the station of Proximity, the summit of sainthood. Finally he worked his way east along the coast, taking leave of saints and tombs, until a last nine months in Tunis.
A Planned Farewell Tour
A letter in his correspondence, the Kitab al-kutub, written on his return from Fez in 595, lists every master he had visited in Andalusia since leaving its addressee in the Maghreb (perhaps Abu Yahya al-Sanhaji, for whom he wrote the 'Anqa' mughrib that year). It ends: "Here ends the list of all those I have met, and in future I will not visit anyone for as long as I remain here." Addas notes that every Andalusian meeting in his writings stops in 595. When the record resumes in 597, he is in Morocco.
| Stop | Whom he saw, and what happened |
|---|---|
| Qasr Kutama (Morocco) | 'Abd al-Jalil b. Musa, disciple of Ibn Ghalib |
| Algeciras | Ibn Tarif again |
| Ronda | Abu l-Hasan al-Qanawi, a follower of chivalry (futuwwa); and al-Rundi, one of the seven substitutes |
| Seville | Ibn Qassum, al-Mawruri, al-Mirtuli |
| Cordoba | The burial of Averroes |
| Granada | Abu Muhammad al-Shakkaz |
| Murcia (birthplace) | Ibn Saydabun; last visit |
| Almeria, Ramadan 595 | Writes the Mawaqi' al-nujum in eleven days |
At Ronda he finally introduced al-Rundi to Habashi, as he had long wanted to. Habashi hoped to see a miracle. That evening the host had not lit the lamp, and Habashi asked for light. "All right," said al-Rundi, and he grabbed a handful of grass, struck it with his finger, "Here's some light!", and it caught fire.
In Seville al-Mawruri's words, spoken in front of Habashi, show that everyone understood this was goodbye: "I used to fear for you because of your youthfulness, because of the absence of help as a result of the corruption so rampant in our times, and because of the degeneration I have noticed in the people of our Way... But praise be to God who has consoled me through you!"
Averroes Comes Home
He reached Cordoba, "the venerated city" of "sublime contemplations", just as Averroes was being buried. The philosopher had died in Marrakech on 9 Safar 595 (11 December 1198) and his remains had been brought home. Ibn al-'Arabi stood at the burial with the writer Ibn Jubayr and his disciple Ibn al-Sarraj. The moment closes a circle that opened when the young Ibn al-'Arabi first met the philosopher in Cordoba. Averroes' life story ended as Ibn al-'Arabi's began to move east.
Four Kinds of Men, and a Saint in Eclipse
In Granada he stayed with al-Shakkaz, whose zeal and self-denial reminded him of his own uncle. From him he kept a classification of spiritual men that follows the four senses of the Qur'an named in a hadith.
| Type | Qur'anic sign |
|---|---|
| Men of the outward (zahir) | "Faithful to the pact they made with God" (33:23) |
| Men of the inward (batin) | "Not distracted from the invocation of God by trade or business" (24:37) |
| Men of the limit (hadd) | The people of the Heights (7:46) |
| Men of the ascent (matla') | Those who "come on foot" when called (22:27) |
In Murcia, where he was born, he found Ibn Saydabun, a disciple of Abu Madyan, in a period of spiritual abandonment (fatra): "His Beloved had abandoned him... the power over the world which had been conferred upon him had slipped from his hands." "When I left him he wept, so distressed he was to see me go, and he accompanied me some of the way." He too knew this was the last time. The letter ends here. He gave up visits but not wandering, and walked on to Almeria.
A Book That Replaces a Teacher
At Almeria in Ramadan 595, prompted by inspiration and a confirming dream of Habashi's, he wrote the Mawaqi' al-nujum ("Settings of the Stars") in eleven days.
The chapter on the heart was missing at first. He added it at Bougie in 597, "but already a large number of copies lacking this particular section had been circulated throughout the country". The remark shows two things: his books were already widely copied in the West during his life, and he went back and revised them, which is why dates in his works sometimes clash.
The Silent Year
After Ramadan 595 he disappears until early 597. The year 596 is never mentioned anywhere in his works. No meeting, no event. Addas concludes he withdrew completely, probably into retreat and writing, and prepared for the great departure.
The Station of Proximity
By 597 he was in Morocco. At Salé he parted from his old "teacher-disciple" Kumi with a farewell poem and set off for Marrakech, nine days' walk away. Halfway, in the valley of the Umm Rabi', lay the Berber village of Ijisal (today Guisser). There, in Muharram 597 (October-November 1200), came one of the decisive events of his life.
The station of Proximity is open only to the afrad, the "solitary ones", and it is the highest rank a saint can reach. It sits just below legislative prophecy, and he also calls it "general prophecy". The episode is very human: at the top of the ladder, his first feeling is loneliness, and he is comforted by a scholar dead two centuries.
Marrakech at Its Height
Marrakech, founded by the Almoravids and rebuilt by 'Abd al-Mu'min (who built the Kutubiyya), was the capital of al-Nasir, whose father al-Mansur had died in 595, shortly after Averroes (whom he had disgraced in 592 and then recalled). The empire was huge but fragile. Castile was only held off; within fifteen years the Almohads would be crushed at Las Navas de Tolosa, and the Banu Ghaniya rebels were ravaging Ifriqiya and would take Tunis in 600.
| Achievement | Darker side |
|---|---|
| Finished the Giralda and Kutubiyya; rebuilt Rabat with the Hasan mosque, whose minaret still stands | In his last year forced Jews to wear distinctive blue garments, "similar to the mourning garment worn by widows", which the chronicler Ibn 'Idhari praised |
| Built a free hospital and visited the sick every Friday | Left an empire about to decline under his son |
Two Saints of Marrakech
| Figure | Profile |
|---|---|
| Abu l-'Abbas al-Sabti (d. 601), patron saint of the city | From Ceuta, settled in the capital at al-Mansur's request. Wholly devoted to charity: "his teaching revolved around sadaqa"; Averroes said that for him "existence proceeds from generosity". Jurists wrote an indictment of him, and when the sultan read it, legend says, the charges had turned into praise. He told Ibn al-'Arabi he had asked God to give him in this world everything reserved for him in the next, and so could make ill and heal, give and take power, all through almsgiving, keeping back only "one quarter of a dirham" of merit for the afterlife. Ibn al-'Arabi: "I too did the same practice in my early stages... but in my case... we obtained this from God without any wish for it on our part." |
| Muhammad al-Marrakushi | His motto was 52:48, "Endure patiently the decree of your Lord, for you are under Our eyes." "Never have I seen him despondent. He would greet calamities with joy and laughter." Never left Ibn al-'Arabi's side, and no one grieved more at his going. |
A Bird for the Journey
In Marrakech he had a vision of the divine Throne, held up by pillars of light like lightning, with a shadow of "inexpressible tranquillity" beneath it. Under the Throne lay a treasure, Adam, from whom came the words "there is neither strength nor power save through God". Among many beautiful birds, the loveliest greeted him and said it would be his companion to the East: "He is Muhammad al-Hassar of Fez. He has asked God to be able to go to the East; take him with you!" In Fez he found the man, who said: "I asked of Him that He allow me to go to the East, and I was told, 'So-and-so will take you there'. Since then I have been waiting for you." "I took him as my companion in 597 and brought him to Egypt, which is where he died."
Abu Madyan's Country
He passed through Tlemcen and visited the tomb of Abu Madyan at al-'Ubbad, the master he had never met but revered above all. At Bougie, still full of Abu Madyan's memory, he dreamed that he was married to all the stars of heaven, then to all the letters of the alphabet. A friend took the dream, without naming him, to an interpreter, who said: "This is the bottomless sea. Whoever had this dream will receive a portion of the celestial sciences, of the hidden sciences and of the mysteries of the stars and of the letters which nobody else has obtained in his time... he can only be the young Andalusian who has just arrived," and named him. The interpreter asked to meet him; Ibn al-'Arabi declined and left.
The Four Pillars of Tunis
His last stop in the West was Tunis, for nine months, with Mahdawi, Mahdawi's servant Ibn al-Murabit and Habashi. The coolness of 590 was long gone. "We were the four pillars supporting the being of the universe and the [Perfect] Man. That was the state in which we parted... because I had decided to perform the Greater and the Lesser Pilgrimage with the intention of subsequently returning to your noble company."
| Literal reading | Addas's reading |
|---|---|
| He set out for Mecca intending to return to Mahdawi in Tunis | His methodical farewells, the Algeciras vision of his whole future, and the role of Seal received at Fez (a universal role, moving from the edge of Islam to its centre) all show he knew it was for good. The promise was friendship's courtesy, "powerless to hold in check a divine decree". |
Mahdawi did travel East after 600, but nothing in Ibn al-'Arabi's writings suggests they ever met again.
Planned Farewell, Silent Year
On return with Habashi in 595 the decision for the East was already taken. The letter in Kitab al-kutub ends: "in future I will not visit anyone for as long as I remain here." Andalusian ziyara stops at 595; 596 is a blank year of retreat and writing; departure end 596 / early 597.
Proximity and Last Maghreb
Farewells West
Methodical Farewells
- The departure was planned: a farewell round in 595, then "I will not visit anyone" again; he stood at Averroes' burial.
- The Mawaqi' al-nujum (Almeria, eleven days) is a manual "replacing a teacher".
- At Ijisal in 597 he reached the station of Proximity, alone there, comforted by al-Sulami's spirit; last meetings ran from Marrakech to Tunis.
Chapter 8. The Great Pilgrimage
In 598/1201-2 Ibn al-'Arabi left the West for good. He crossed a famine-stricken Egypt, made a detour through Hebron and Jerusalem, and reached Mecca for the pilgrimage. There the long series of initiations reached its end: in a vision the Prophet seated him on a "seat of tamarisk" as his supreme Heir. At the Ka'ba he met the mysterious "Youth" whose silent body held the whole of the Futuhat, and Nizam, who would inspire the Tarjuman al-ashwaq. He quarrelled with the Ka'ba itself and saw himself as its two missing bricks. Addas opens with a portrait of the Ayyubid East he was entering.
The East Under the Ayyubids
The East had its own Christian armies. The Crusaders took Jerusalem on 14 July 1099 and massacred its Muslims and Jews; it took two centuries to expel the Franks. Saladin ended the Fatimid caliphate in 567/1171 and retook Jerusalem on 27 Rajab 583 (2 October 1187). The Third Crusade won back the coast, and the treaty of Ramla (1192) left the Franks the shore from Tyre to Jaffa. Saladin died months later aged fifty-five, and the unity he had built proved "more apparent than real". His heirs fought among themselves, usually Cairo against Damascus, until his brother al-'Adil became sultan in Cairo in 596/1200 and shared the lands out among his own sons, while Aleppo stayed with Saladin's son al-Zahir.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 492/1099 | Crusaders take Jerusalem |
| 567/1171 | Saladin ends the Fatimid caliphate |
| 583/1187 | Saladin retakes Jerusalem |
| 588/1192 | Treaty of Ramla; Saladin dies months later |
| 596/1200 | Al-'Adil sultan in Cairo |
| 597-98 | Famine and plague in Egypt |
| 626/1229 | Al-Kamil hands Jerusalem to Frederick II |
| 646/1248 | Seville falls to Castile |
| 656/1258 | Mongols end the Abbasid caliphate |
With an empty treasury, al-'Adil traded with the Italian republics and pursued "peaceful coexistence" with the Crusaders. This quiet abandonment of holy war peaked when al-Kamil gave Jerusalem to Frederick II, to public fury, especially in Damascus. Yet the Ayyubids were pious patrons. They sought diplomas of investiture from the caliph; al-'Adil joined the futuwwa, the chivalric order the caliph al-Nasir and the Sufi Suhrawardi had organised to bind princes to the caliphate; and they built madrasas, khanqahs and Cairo's first house of hadith. Al-'Adil made up to the jurists by banning wine smuggling and abolishing illegal taxes. Ibn al-'Arabi, his guest at Mayyafariqin, admired something else: "I have met many kings but I have seen none" who showed such openness with his grandchildren, in council before princes and ambassadors, "and I noticed that he showed consideration and kindness towards his wives".
- Shaykh 'Atiq of Lorca, a centenarian in Damascus with a "bond of brotherhood" with al-'Adil, asked him to stop squeezing the chief judge for 20,000 dinars. That night the sultan dreamed the guards of hell threatened him, and he returned the money. 'Atiq to the judge: "It would have been quite enough for me to speak on your behalf to my Sultan. You could have spared me the trouble of having to go and speak to yours!"
- Al-Kamil walked to visit the Andalusian saint al-Qurtubi, who brought him a message from the Prophet, and carried it out "in every detail".
- Hasan Tawil, a Maghrebi shaykh, raised a crowd chanting "The mosque!" when al-Kamil let Christians block the restoration of a mosque that had become a church. The sultan hid in a customs warehouse; the Shaykh of Shaykhs had to pray inside the church as if it were a mosque. Al-Kamil exiled Hasan, then recalled him after his own dream of hell's guards.
Ibn al-'Arabi's own dealings with princes fit this picture. He did not seek rulers out in the East, but he no longer refused them. The Prince of Homs gave him a hundred dirhams a day, and in 632 he wrote a certificate for al-Ashraf of Damascus.
Addas rejects the idea that the princes were only courting him for political gain: he was a foreigner, "generously received and tolerated", with little political weight. Relations between rulers and foreign Sufis were not always smooth either. Saladin had Suhrawardi, the Master of Illumination, executed in Aleppo in 587. The masses suspected local Christians of siding with the Franks, and riots broke out in the crisis years (615, 640, 648), though the sultans opposed them. The posts nearest to power, such as Shaykh of Shaykhs, went to Iranians: Suhrawardi in Baghdad, the Banu Hamawayh in Syria. One of the Hamawayh sons negotiated the handover of Jerusalem.
There was also an influx from the West. The Reconquista pushed Andalusians east, and Alexandria gave newcomers lodging, a teacher and a pension. Scholars such as Ibn Dihya (tutor to al-Kamil) and the grammarian Ibn Malik (author of the Alfiyya) did well there. Many Sufis came too: twenty-seven of the shaykhs in Safi al-Din's memoir were Andalusians, and al-Shadhili settled in Egypt after persecution in Tunis. They helped give Sufism the shape of organised orders. Fewer went to Syria, among them Ibn al-'Arabi and disciples such as al-Tilimsani. The fate of the Moroccan al-Harrali, expelled from Damascus in 632 by the jurist 'Izz al-Din b. 'Abd al-Salam over a Qur'an commentary, shows the friction between western Sufis and eastern jurists.
Was He Condemned to Death in Egypt?
The chronicler Ghubrini (d. 704/1304) reports that the people of Egypt tried to have Ibn al-'Arabi executed, "just as had happened to Hallaj", for ecstatic sayings, and that a shaykh, al-Bija'i, saved him. Addas does not believe it.
| Problem | Detail |
|---|---|
| No source | Ghubrini names no informant, and every later writer copies him |
| Careless author | He gives the death date as 640 instead of 638 and calls him "Ibn Suraqa", apparently confusing him with a contemporary of the same honorific and kunya |
| Silence | Neither Ibn al-'Arabi, quick to denounce fanatical jurists, nor any disciple mentions it; he never names his supposed "saviour" |
| Out of character | He condemned ecstatic sayings as "foolishness and pretentiousness", so it is hard to imagine him excusing himself with "he who is intoxicated cannot be blamed" |
Through Egypt
His route from Tunis to Egypt is unknown; he probably went by sea along the coast to Alexandria. He arrived in a country devastated by the famine and plague of 597-98. Chroniclers claimed three quarters of the population died (surely exaggerated), and the historian Abu Shama tells of mass flight and cannibalism. Ibn al-'Arabi records the reaction of his friend Abu l-'Abbas al-Hariri, who saw babies dying of hunger and cried out, "Oh Lord, what does this mean?" He was told: "Have I ever abandoned you?... Don't protest!" The adults had broken God's laws and the infants were born of adultery. Thus "appeased", al-Hariri accepted it. The answer is hard for a modern reader, and Addas reports it without comment.
Al-Hariri and his brother Muhammad al-Khayyat, Ibn al-'Arabi's childhood Qur'an teacher and neighbours in Seville, had moved to Cairo in 590. His portrait of al-Khayyat is tender: a devoted son to his mother until her death, "one could hear his heart beating when he prayed", "he suffered wrong without retaliating", he fed and clothed the poor, and he was the same "when I left him, when I met up with him again, and when I left him there". With al-Hariri there was friction.
| Ibn al-'Arabi on al-Hariri | Al-Hariri on Ibn al-'Arabi |
|---|---|
| When seized by revelation he hurried back "disturbed and trembling", afraid to lose himself, a sign of some remaining claim to lordship. "If only the poor chap knew that when he separated himself from matter his soul returned to its original home!" | Asked by letter to share his openings "through your inner being", he answered with a vision: in a circle of saints, two stood in the middle, Ibn al-Sabbagh and an Andalusian, and the one who raised his head first was the Supreme Pole. It was the Andalusian. Then: "If you are up to it, dear brother, I will reply to you from Egypt." |
In Cairo he stayed at Saladin's Sa'id al-Su'ada' convent. It began badly: a shaykh from Irbil set out to prove there were no real Sufis in the West. His answer, two years later, was the Ruh al-quds, his portraits of the saints of Andalusia. He spent Ramadan 598 with the two brothers and they planned to go to Mecca together, but al-Khayyat fell gravely ill and al-Hariri would not leave him. Al-Hassar, his companion from Fez, also died in Egypt, so Ibn al-'Arabi left with Habashi.
The Detour Through Palestine
He did not take the usual pilgrim route (up the Nile to Qus, across to 'Aydhab, over the Red Sea). He went first to Hebron, to Abraham's tomb, then to Jerusalem to pray in al-Aqsa, then to Medina to greet the Prophet, and finally to Mecca, partly on foot. Safety may have played a part, but Addas proposes a spiritual reason.
The early episodes of his vocation correspond to the seven heavens. The seventh is Abraham's, and he visited Abraham at Hebron before going on to the Prophet and the House of God, the "arrival" at which the Ascension culminates. His last thirty-eight years of teaching match the "return" to creatures.
Consecration at the Supreme Centre
In the month of pilgrimage, 598, at "the navel of the earth", the series of initiations closed. The Futuhat opens with the vision:
| Act | Place, year | What it did |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Announcement | Cordoba, 586 | All the prophets assembled; only Hud spoke; Muhammad stayed in the background |
| 2. Clarification | Fez, 594 | At the end of the Ascension, detailed knowledge of the Seal and its sign |
| 3. Consecration | Mecca, 598 | Solemn enthronement by Muhammad, with the Messengers of all earlier communities present, recognising the role's universality: "not just an event but an advent" |
Like the Muhammadan Reality, the source of all prophecy from the beginning of time, the Seal is the source of all sainthood. He is the Prophet's
substitutewithin sainthood. In the Prophet, sainthood is veiled by prophecy; in the Seal it is openly shown. Yet there is no superiority, "because all in all both functions plainly belong to one and the same being". Hence his insistence on the word
heir.
Against critics such as Ibn Taymiyya, he makes clear that the summit of sainthood does not touch the prophets' privileges: "I arrived at this divine Gate, I found it open and without either guard or doorkeeper... Then I caught sight of a closed skylight. I was going to knock on it when I was told: 'There's no point in knocking! It will not open... That is the Skylight of the Prophets and the Messengers: when the Religion had been made perfect it was bolted.'" When he calls supreme sainthood "general prophecy", he never confuses it with legislative prophecy.
The Youth and the Birth of the Futuhat
The first chapter of the Futuhat describes another encounter at about this time. During the circuits of the Ka'ba, before the Black Stone, he met "the Evanescent Youth, the Silent Speaker, He who is neither alive nor dead, the Simple Composite", circling the House "like a living person revolving round a person who has died". Ibn al-'Arabi embraced him and wiped "the sweat of revelation" from his forehead. The Youth spoke only in signs. His Beauty unveiled itself and Ibn al-'Arabi fainted, as Moses did on the mountain. "Observe the details of my constitution and the disposition of my form! You will find what you ask of me written upon me, because I neither speak nor converse... I am Knowledge, the Known and the Knower."
| Interpreter | Reading |
|---|---|
| Michel Valsan | A personification of the Holy Spirit |
| Henry Corbin | Ibn al-'Arabi's own celestial twin, his luminous double |
| Addas | Also possibly a self-disclosure of God at His House; the readings do not exclude each other. "He revealed to me all my names; and I knew myself; and I knew what was not me." |
"Lift my veils and read what is contained in my inscriptions. Whatever you observe in me, put it in your book and preach it to all your friends." That is how the Futuhat al-makkiyya (The Meccan Openings) began. Fritz Meier asked whether Ibn al-'Arabi meant he had read 560 chapters in a supernatural book. Addas's answer has two parts. He read in a being, not a book, and in compressed symbolic form that needed unfolding. And the book did not arrive finished. Fresh inspirations kept surprising him over many years. Disciples' questions prompted additions: a remark by Ibn Sawdakin made him take a new approach to the attribution of acts in chapter 296. Earlier treatises were built in, such as his answers to al-Tirmidhi's questionnaire, which became a hundred pages of chapter 73. By 598 he was already a master and his doctrine was formed.
| Feature | Detail |
|---|---|
| First draft | 599/1202 to 629/1231 |
| Revision | 632/1234 to 636/1238 |
| Original autograph | 37 volumes |
| Chapters | 560 |
| Contents | Jurisprudence (the last 450 pages of volume 1 in the Cairo edition), metaphysics and the spiritual path (500+ chapters), the Prophet's practice (closing chapter of counsels) |
| Vocabulary | About 900 technical terms (Su'ad Hakim), most already attested before him |
He claimed inspiration for the form as well as the content, and so warned readers about the odd order of chapters: a chapter on the secrets of the law "would have been preferable" before the one on worship, "however, things turned out this way. In fact the sequence was not of my choosing". Yet the prose is unusually sober: "It is my principle in this book to be, as far as possible, concise and brief."
| Massignon | Addas |
|---|---|
| "Authoritarian... formal and pompous... crammed with technical expressions... a uniformly impassive and icy tone" | Authoritative, yes: he writes from certainty and personal experience of every station. But "there is no light without warmth or knowledge without love"; he writes of his masters with emotion, and his compassion reaches even plants and minerals. The jargon serves precision for an expert readership. |
| Addas's diagnosis: Massignon, author of The Passion of al-Hallaj, "was never able to forgive" Ibn al-'Arabi for his reservations about Hallaj. | |
The Mission: Preserve the Law
The inscription on the seat sums up his life. He is the Prophet's supreme heir in all the sciences that do not belong to legislative prophecy alone, and his mission is to preserve the Sacred Law. For him the revealed law (shari'a) and essential reality (haqiqa) are one: "The shari'a is the haqiqa." To preserve the Law is to keep open, for future generations, the one prophetic inheritance that can still be passed on, which is sainthood. He was not a lawgiver: revelation is closed. His task was to gather the wisdoms entrusted to him and pass them on until the "Seal of Children", who, according to the Fusus, will be the last human born and the last saint. Addas notes that this effort to consolidate the tradition began at a dramatic moment, with the Reconquista in the West, the Crusades and soon the Mongols in the East.
- Scripture first. He preferred Qur'anic and prophetic terms, and so placed 'ilm (knowledge) above ma'rifa (gnosis), reversing Sufi custom, because God calls Himself 'alim, never 'arif.
- Raising the word. Su'ad Hakim calls it the "ascension of the word": terms lifted from their practical sense to a metaphysical one. Khalwa, "retreat", really refers to the eternal solitude of the divine Essence.
- Stations and their abandonment. In chapters 118-175 each classical station is followed by its own abandonment (servanthood, then abandoning servanthood; sincerity, then abandoning sincerity), since every station implies a duality, leading to the "non-station" where God is "Alone, without associate".
- One word, many meanings. Wujud can mean "finding", the created world, existence, or Being itself. This polysemy has caused misreadings of the "Oneness of Being" (wahdat al-wujud), a phrase he never used. It appears rarely in Qunawi and was spread by Ibn Taymiyya as a polemical label.
Nizam
Also at the Ka'ba, late in 598, came the meeting behind his finest poetry. On an ecstatic night he was reciting verses aloud as he circled, and felt "a light tap on my shoulder, made by the gentlest of hands". A young woman "of the daughters of Rum" asked, "Oh master! What did you just say?", and interpreted each verse as he repeated it. Her name was "Freshness of the Eyes". She was Nizam, daughter of the Persian imam of the Station of Abraham, Abu Shuja' b. Rustam, whose aged sister Fakhr al-Nisa' was "the wise shaykha of the Hijaz". From the father he received al-Tirmidhi's hadith collection, from the aunt a general licence, and from Nizam the inspiration for the Tarjuman al-ashwaq (The Interpreter of Desires). She was his Beatrice.
- "Every time I mention a name it is her I am naming", but "my allusions throughout were to divine inspirations". The jurists of Aleppo called it erotic verse dressed up as mysticism anyway, so he wrote a commentary spelling out the spiritual meanings.
- Date: not 598 but Mecca, 611 (Nicholson). Addas adds two arguments: the preface treats Abu Shuja' (d. 609) as dead, and the poems mention places in Baghdad, which he first visited in 601.
- Massignon thought Nizam retired to the Baghdad women's convent of Dar al-Falak; possible, not provable. A Baghdad "wife... whom time had separated from me" in the Muhadarat is someone else.
Quarrelling with the Ka'ba
For him the Ka'ba, like everything, is alive; it speaks and hears. It once called on him, audibly, to circle it, while Zamzam asked him to drink. He refused politely in verse, fearing their dignity would veil his nearness to God, and judged the Ka'ba's rank below his own. The House took revenge.
More Signs Around the House
In 599, also before the Ka'ba, he received his third Sufi cloak, that of 'Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, from Yunus b. Yahya al-Hashimi, a reliable hadith scholar who taught him sacred sayings at the Yemeni corner, his favourite meeting place. From these he compiled forty divine sayings, the core of his Mishkat al-anwar. At Ta'if, by the grave of Ibn 'Abbas, he wrote the Hilyat al-abdal on the four virtues of the Substitutes: silence, solitude, wakefulness and hunger.
| Encounter | What happened |
|---|---|
| Al-Sabti, son of Harun al-Rashid, dead four centuries | A man passed through two pilgrims walking arm in arm without parting them; Ibn al-'Arabi stepped in his footprints and did the same, then caught him: "I know you are a spirit who has taken a body!" "You are correct." He had worked only on Saturdays: God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh, so he gave six days to God and one to his own needs. "Who was the Pole of your time?" "It was I; there's nothing in that to cause pride!" |
| An "ancestor" | In a dream, a man who had died "around forty thousand years" ago: "Which Adam are you referring to?" He recalled a saying that God created a hundred thousand Adams. |
| The seven Substitutes | Met praying behind the Wall of the Hanbalis: "I have never seen people behave in such a way, so preoccupied were they with God." |
The year 599 also brought omens of the catastrophic century ahead. A wind of ash darkened the Yemen, and in the Hijaz and Iraq people saw "the stars dance and disintegrate". Ibn al-'Arabi watched from the courtyard of the Ka'ba as comets struck "each other like sparks from a fire" until dawn, so thick that the stars could not be seen. In Yemen at the same moment, dust like zinc lay knee-deep and lanterns were needed at midday. Plague emptied Ta'if from Rajab to Ramadan 599: victims died within five days or lived, and the townspeople fled to Mecca "without even closing the doors".
Ayyubid East: Patronage and Tension
After Saladin the empire looked united and was not. al-'Adil arbitrated, took Cairo in 596/1200, and divided among sons. Madrasas and khanqahs rose; futuwwa bound princes to caliph al-Nasir through Suhrawardi. Saints interceded; princes obeyed dreams of hell-keepers. Ibn al-'Arabi did not seek rulers yet did not refuse them: Zahir of Aleppo granted 118 requests in one audience after a sharp rebuke about mediocre magnanimity.
Centre of the Earth
Nizam and the Living Ka'ba
Investiture and the Book
Ayyubid Patronage Without Capture
Cairo to the House
- The Ayyubid East combined pious patronage, compromise with the Crusaders, and close, sometimes tense, ties between sultans and saints. In the East he advised princes freely, as with al-Zahir's 118 cases.
- The story that he was condemned to death in Egypt rests on one careless chronicler and does not hold up.
- His detour through Hebron and Jerusalem can be read as following the pattern of the Ascension: ascent, arrival, return.
- At Mecca in 598 the investiture was completed: seated by the Prophet as Heir, "sent by God to preserve the Sacred Law". The prophets' skylight stays bolted.
- The Futuhat came from the silent Youth at the Ka'ba, unfolded over thirty-five years and 37 volumes, in an order "not of my choosing".
- He reworked Sufi vocabulary toward scripture and metaphysics; he never used "wahdat al-wujud".
- Nizam inspired the Tarjuman (written in 611) and "the religion of Love". The Ka'ba quarrel and the dream of the two bricks closed his Meccan initiation.
Chapter 9. "Counsel My Servants"
From 600 to about 618/1204-21 Ibn al-'Arabi lived on the road between Mecca, Iraq, Anatolia, Syria and Egypt. A dream in which God told him "counsel My servants" gave this period its purpose. The Seal's mission was not only to guard esoteric knowledge for an elite but to guide everyone, rulers included. In these years he wrote about fifty works, met Majd al-Din Ishaq, father of his greatest disciple Sadr al-Din Qunawi, advised the Seljuq sultan Kaykaus, went through "mad love" and continuous fasting, and buried Habashi.
A Mission Widened
At Mecca, discouraged by the weakness of his disciples, he resolved to look after himself alone. Then in a dream he stood before God at the Judgement, fearing punishment for neglect. "Servant of Mine, fear nothing! All I ask of you is that you counsel My servants." From then on he taught everyone: jurists, dervishes, Sufis and simple believers. Every Muslim owes good counsel, since "religion is good counsel" (nasiha), but God had told him directly, more than once, at Mecca and at Damascus, so the obligation fell on him more than on anyone else.
| Side | Audience | Form |
|---|---|---|
| A trust (amana) | The saints | Guarding and passing on the Prophet's spiritual sciences |
| Counsel (nasiha) | Everyone: kings, jurists, gnostics, ordinary believers | Plain guidance, as the Prophet "was sent to all men" |
Writing on the Move
Between 600 and 617 he wrote nearly fifty works, most under ten pages and fast: the Kitab al-yaqin took one afternoon at Hebron in 602. Short does not mean slight. The Kitab al-alif, al-ba' and al-mim pack the science of letters into a few pages. Three longer works stand out.
| Work | Content |
|---|---|
| Answer to al-Tirmidhi | First reply to al-Tirmidhi's questionnaire, written to expose false claimants to sainthood; later expanded into chapter 73 of the Futuhat |
| Kitab al-tajalliyat (Self-disclosures) | Joins divine unity and the self-disclosures that ground the many without breaking the One: God showing Himself to Himself. It includes dialogues with Junayd, Tustari, Hallaj and Dhu l-Nun, which he insists "actually happened". It scandalised a reader Ibn Sawdakin had taken for a friend. |
| Tanazzulat al-mawsiliyya (Mosul revelations) | Written in "enigmatic and symbolic language" to frustrate the "scholars of formalities"; 54 chapters on the inner meaning of ablution and prayer, matched to the heavens and their prophets; chapters 46-54 describe his own Ascension |
Who Came to Hear Him
The reading certificates (sama'), which record who attended each reading, let historians follow his movements and his circle. Of the fifty or so listeners recorded between 600 and 617, nearly all are unknown to the biographers, and most appear only once: travellers whose paths crossed his, or locals taking their chance as he passed through. Regular followers formed only after 617.
| Disciple | Role |
|---|---|
| Badr al-Habashi | His constant companion, from the Maghrib onward |
| Isma'il b. Sawdakin | "The gnostic, the child most dear". With Habashi he urged the commentary on the Tarjuman (Aleppo, 611); recorded his answers; wrote commentaries on the Tajalliyat, Mashahid and Isra'; issued certificates for the Futuhat after the master's death. With Qunawi, one of the few direct disciples who taught in writing. |
| Ibn Qamar al-Dimashqi | In 35 certificates (27 for the Futuhat), from Malatya in 615 to Damascus; his son-in-law |
| Ahmad al-Mawsili | A Mosul transmitter; his daughters Umm Dalal and Umm Raslan attended Futuhat readings in Damascus in 636-37 |
| Ibn Sukayna; al-Ubbadhi | The only two known to biographers: a Baghdad hadith master (with whom learning flowed "both ways"), and the later imam of the Dome of the Rock |
Majd al-Din and Sadr al-Din Qunawi
The meeting with Majd al-Din Ishaq al-Rumi in Mecca in 600, foreseen at Algeciras in 589, proved a turning point for Iranian Sufism. The Seljuq historian Ibn Bibi calls him "model of devotees" and "glory of the Pillars", and the caliph called him "support of the gnostics". He was a senior figure at the Seljuq court of Anatolia, close to Kaykhusraw (who wrote him a poem calling him home from exile) and to Kaykaus, who in 611 sent him to Baghdad to receive caliph al-Nasir's futuwwa investiture and then made him responsible for initiating others, a duty later passed to his son. When Kaykhusraw's reign was secure in 600-1, Majd al-Din went home and persuaded Ibn al-'Arabi to come: through Baghdad (twelve days) and Mosul in 601, to Konya in 602.
Several Persian and Arab biographers say that after Majd al-Din's death Ibn al-'Arabi married his widow, Qunawi's mother. None of Ibn al-'Arabi, Qunawi or Jandi mentions it, but an early Persian life of Awhad al-Din Kirmani does, and Addas finds it "more than probable", perhaps between 612 and 618. A son, Sa'd al-Din, was born at Malatya in 618.
Kirmani belonged to Ahmad Ghazali's school and loved music and "contemplating beauty" in young men, practices that Shams-i Tabrizi criticised. Ibn al-'Arabi did not hold this against him and saw in him a genuine realisation. Their friendship was deep. Once in Damascus, Kirmani sensed by prayer that his friend was upset at having left books in Malatya, and despite protests rode there and back to fetch them.
- Two inheritances. Arab from Ibn al-'Arabi, Iranian from Kirmani: "I have tasted milk from the breasts of two mothers!" That made him the bridge to Persian and later Shi'i gnosis.
- Wide links. He was close to Jalal al-Din Rumi (who asked that Qunawi lead his funeral prayer), knew Kubrawi masters, and corresponded with the philosopher Nasir al-Din Tusi.
- The lens. Ibn al-'Arabi dedicated the second draft of the Futuhat to him. "In the Eastern lands of Islam... Ibn 'Arabi has always been seen through his eyes" (Chittick).
- The label. He gave the doctrine the name "Oneness of Being" (wahdat al-wujud): handy but reductive, and by systematising it he made it easier for literalist critics to attack.
- Works and pupils. About 25 works: the Miftah al-ghayb, a commentary on the Fatiha, and the Nafahat ilahiyya on his own experiences. His pupils 'Iraqi, Farghani and Jandi shaped the later commentators Qashani and Qaysari.
The Sultan of Rum and the Christians
Kaykaus (d. 615) gave Ibn al-'Arabi a house, which he promptly gave to a beggar. Their letters, from 609 on, read like a father writing to his son; he even signs as "father". The sultan was an enemy of the Ayyubids, whom Ibn al-'Arabi liked, and he was suspected of dealings with the Franks and of favouring Christians.
| Asin Palacios | Addas |
|---|---|
| "The Futuhat exude political hatred for the Christians"; he returned to Anatolia in 612 "to supervise the Empire's anti-Christian policy" | The 609 letter reminds the sultan that he is God's deputy, answerable for injustice, and condemns "the sound of bells" and the neglect of the traditional rules for protected non-Muslims (no new churches or repairs, three days' hospitality for Muslims, no spying, no public display of their religion). This asks for the Law to be applied, not hatred. It was written in the year of Las Navas de Tolosa, with Franks holding Muslim lands and Byzantium still strong. |
Roads, Types and Rival Claims
In Mosul he met Thabit b. 'Antar, whom chroniclers called a liar and a braggart. Ibn al-'Arabi called him "among the most devout and noble of men", while admitting a "certain disequilibrium" in a man who read him his own imitation of the Qur'an. At Dunaysir he met two rare types: 'Umar al-Farqawi, one of the "men of intention", who keep constant watch over their motives and are "on the heart of Jonah", given to sadness; and a greengrocer of the "men of Rajab", frozen motionless each Rajab, who could see disguised extreme Shi'ites in the form of pigs. Chodkiewicz argues, against Corbin, that a secret Shi'i would never tell such a story. Ibn al-'Arabi also held that each of the first four caliphs was the Pole of his time.
In Baghdad the caliph al-Nasir once rode past. "Whoever is the first among you to greet him will lose my respect!" The caliph, expecting greetings, greeted them first, and they answered in chorus. Asin Palacios saw "occult rebelliousness". In fact the Prophet's practice is that the rider greets the walker first, and the caliph thanked them. A famous silent meeting with Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi ("impregnated with the Sunna from tip to toe"; "an ocean of essential truths") is reported only by later writers, and Addas doubts it happened.
| Year | Place, event |
|---|---|
| 600 | Mecca: "Counsel My servants"; meets Majd al-Din |
| 601 | Baghdad (12 days); Mosul: Khadir's cloak, Tanazzulat |
| 602 | Konya; first time in Syria; Hebron (Kitab al-yaqin) |
| 603-604 | Cairo with al-Hariri; Mecca again |
| 606 | Aleppo |
| 608 | Baghdad: dream of the "coffers of divine deception"; Mecca |
| 609 | Letter to Kaykaus |
| 611 | Mecca: Tarjuman; Syria: its commentary |
| 612 | Sivas: dream of Antioch's fall, fulfilled 20 days later |
| 612-618 | Anatolia, mostly Malatya; marriage; son Sa'd al-Din (618); Habashi dies |
| by 620 | Egypt: entrusts Qunawi to Kirmani; then Damascus |
On 11 Ramadan 608 in Baghdad he dreamed that heaven's gates opened and the coffers of divine deception poured down "like rain". "I awoke in a state of fear... and I saw that this is only granted through knowledge of the Scales of the Law." At Sivas in Ramadan 612 he dreamed that Kaykaus, besieging Antioch, set up catapults all around it and that the enemy commander was killed. The city fell twenty days later, on the feast at the end of Ramadan, and he sent the sultan a poem from Malatya.
Love Without an Object
On his first visit to Syria, perhaps in 602, he went through a "mad love": "an inner passion, an agonising desire, a state of subjugation and languor, which prevents one from sleeping and eating while making one incapable of knowing for whom... I loved, and I had no idea whom I loved." His imagination gave the Beloved a bodily form, "just as Gabriel had assumed a body in front of the Messenger of God". Whenever food was set before him the Beloved stood by the table: "So you can eat while you contemplate Me!" He stopped eating for days, yet "I grew fatter and put on weight simply by looking at Him", to his family's astonishment. From then on he could keep the Prophet's continuous fast (wisal), fed by his Lord at night, so that people asked where the delicious smell of food on him came from.
Konya: The Longest Night
In Konya he lived through "a night which was the longest I have ever had to live through", when he understood the difference between two kinds of decree.
| Term | Meaning (Fusus) |
|---|---|
| Qada' (decree) | God's judgement on things according to His knowledge of them |
| Qadar (measure, timing) | The timed bringing into existence of what things already are in their essence, "and no more" |
In Konya he also met Saqit al-Rafraf, a saint "unique" in his category, whose verse is "By the star when it sets" (53:1): wholly turned toward his own soul and God, contrite and humble, a man whose mere sight changed the state of whoever saw him.
The End of the Road
At Malatya, around 617-18, he buried Badr al-Habashi, who died in his house "completely willing and prepared to meet his Lord". The bond did not break. "I went to his tomb during the afternoon and complained to him about something that had happened to me after his death. He answered me from his tomb and praised God. I heard his voice quite distinctly." With Habashi gone, the wandering ended too. He set out for Damascus and never left it again.
Counsel My Servants
Despondent at disciples' weakness in Mecca, he resolved to look after himself alone. A Judgement dream answered: "Servant of Mine, fear nothing! All I ask is that you counsel My servants." Religion is nasiha to God, Messenger, leaders, community. The Seal's mission has two faces: amana of spiritual sciences for the elite, and universal guidance like the Prophet sent to all (7:158).
- Habashi: constant.
- Ibn Sawdakin: "child most dear"; Wasa'il notes; commentaries; issued Futuhat sama's after death.
- Ibn Qamar: son-in-law; 35 sama's.
- Majd al-Din: Seljuq dignitary; met Mecca 600; drew him to Rum; father of Qunawi.
Qunawi, Kaykaus, Longest Night
On the Road of Counsel
Letters, Dreams, End of Wandering
- A dream of judgement, "Counsel My servants", widened his mission from guarding esoteric knowledge to guiding everyone, and explains why he now advised rulers.
- The wandering years produced about fifty works (Tirmidhi answers, Tajalliyat, Tanazzulat) and a stream of mostly unknown listeners; a core of Habashi, Ibn Sawdakin and Ibn Qamar stayed.
- Friendship with Majd al-Din led, probably through marriage to his widow, to fatherhood of Qunawi, who systematised and named the teaching and carried it to Persia, though "Oneness of Being" was his label, not his master's.
- His letter to Kaykaus asked for strict application of the rules for non-Muslims. Addas reads it as defence of the Law in wartime, not hatred; a modern reader may judge it more harshly.
- He met the caliph by the Sunna's rules, foresaw Antioch's fall, lived through "mad love" and the Konya night of qada' and qadar, and spoke with Habashi beyond the grave.
Chapter 10. Damascus, "Refuge of the Prophets"
From 620/1223 until his death in 638/1240 Ibn al-'Arabi lived in Damascus and never left Syria again. Addas makes two arguments. First, against later legend, the Damascus jurists did not persecute him: he was protected by the Banu Zaki dynasty of grand qadis and taught some 150 recorded listeners, most of them men of the religious establishment. Second, these were the years of the "meeting of the two Seals": the Prophet handed him the Fusus al-hikam in a vision, he finished both drafts of the Futuhat, and he trained the circle, led by Qunawi, that carried his teaching east.
Ibn al-'Arabi and the Syrian Jurists
A Coveted City
Addas opens with Ibn Jubayr's praise of Damascus as "the paradise of the East", a bride whose orchards hug her "like the calyx hugs the flower". The description recalls Seville, and she suggests the Andalusian may have chosen it partly for that echo. Damascus was also fought over like Seville: it was besieged about a dozen times between 589 and 658, and nearly always both besiegers and besieged were Ayyubids. The prize was obvious. The city was the end point of trade routes from the Jazira, Anatolia and northern Syria, a gathering point for pilgrim caravans and the junction of the military roads to Egypt and the Jazira.
- The succession. After Saladin's death four wars ended with his brother al-'Adil taking the city in 595 and handing it to his son al-Mu'azzam. Damascus then had relative peace from 595 to 624, broken by an attempt by Zahir and Afdal in 597.
- Wars without much damage. Apart from the sieges of 626 and 635, the fighting under the walls was mild and usually ended in negotiated settlements (Humphreys, From Saladin to the Mongols).
- Society unchanged. Soldiers held power, as under the Zangids. The 'ulama' ran the institutions of daily life and stood between the princes, who appointed them, and the people, who consulted them.
The scholars could be used or could resist. In 626/1229 Sultan al-Nasir Dawud had the preacher Sibt Ibn al-Jawzi rouse the city against al-Kamil, who had just handed Jerusalem to Frederick II. In 637/1240 the jurist 'Izz al-Din al-Sulami attacked from the pulpit al-Salih Isma'il's plan to cede two fortresses to the Franks and sell them arms, and issued a fatwa banning arms sales to non-Muslims. The grand qadi, always a Shafi'ite until Baybars' reform of 664, held authority from Qinnasrin to al-'Arish and was normally drawn from the city's noble families. Ibn Jubayr mocked the scholars' inflated titles, "Sun of the Faith", "Full Moon of the Faith", and the way they "trailed their coat tails" before the great.
Suspect Foreigners
The jurists felt besieged by subversive ideas from East and West. As early as 587/1191 they had Suhrawardi executed in Aleppo, and the arrival of more and more Andalusians and Maghrebis in the early 7th century sharpened the worry. These immigrants were well received: Ibn Jubayr praised the generosity shown to those who knew the Qur'an by heart, and they had a zawiya in the Umayyad Mosque, another in the Kallasa and two madrasas. But Louis Pouzet shows they never formed a quarter or a community. The chronicles record the distinguished (the grammarian Ibn Malik, the Banu Birzal of Seville, the Banu Zawawi of Bougie) and the notorious.
| Label | Who | Who used it |
|---|---|---|
| Respectable | Ghazali, Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi | Accepted by jurists |
| Ittihadiyyun (Unionists) or ashab al-hulul (incarnationists) | Hallaj (always first), Ibn al-'Arabi, Ibn al-Farid, Ibn Sab'in, Shushtari, Tilimsani, Ibn Sawdakin, Qunawi | Qastallani, Ibn Taymiyya, Sakhawi (d. 902, the "exhaustive" list) |
| People of Theophany vs People of Absolute Unity | School of Ibn al-'Arabi vs school of Ibn Sab'in | Ibn Khaldun (d. 808), the one who drew the distinction |
Protected, Not Persecuted
Unlike Harrali, Ibn al-'Arabi suffered no persecution in Syria; he was on close terms with several of the city's most respected jurists.The qadi
'Abd al-Samad al-Harastani(d. 614) taught him
Muslim's Sahihin the Umayyad Mosque and gave him a general licence. He knew
Shams al-Din al-Khuwayy(d. 637), grand qadi in 623-629 and 635-637, and foresaw his appointment in a vision.
Later stories embroider these ties. Khuwayy "served him like a slave" and gave him 30 dirhams a day; he married the daughter of the "great Malikite qadi"; the qadi Ibn Zaki was his friend. Addas traces all of them to one source, a fatwa by Fayruzabadi (d. 817), the author of the Qamus, written in Yemen for King al-Nasir b. Ahmad, whose scholars reproached him for keeping Ibn al-'Arabi's books. Fayruzabadi wrote a century later and cites nothing.
- The Malikite qadi's daughter. No Malikite could be grand qadi before 664. At most the story means 'Abd al-Salam al-Zawawi (d. 681), later the first Malikite qadi, who was in Syria from 616; it cannot be confirmed. His supposed resignation "because of a look from the Shaykh" happened in 673, 35 years after Ibn al-'Arabi died.
- "Qadi Ibn Zaki". Muhyi l-Din Ibn Zaki only became qadi in 641.
- What is certain. In the Maghrib he was a friend of Abu Zakariya al-Zawawi (d. 611), studied his works and made a day's retreat with him (Ruh).
The 'Izz al-Din Affair
For centuries both sides argued over whether 'Izz al-Din al-Sulami, the strictest Shafi'ite of the age, had called Ibn al-'Arabi the Pole (qutb). Addas sorts the texts into three versions.
| Version | Source | What 'Izz al-Din says |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Earliest | 'Abd al-Ghaffar al-Qusi (d. 708), Wahid | His servant asks to see the Pole; he points to Ibn al-'Arabi among his students: "Yes, he is the Pole." |
| 2. Hostile | Safadi (d. 764) after Dhahabi after Ibn Taymiyya | "A bad and lying shaykh" who teaches the eternity of the world; he even married a jinn who beat him |
| 3. Harmonised | Al-Qari, Maqqari, Ibn al-'Imad (via Munawi) | Silent when a pupil calls him a heretic; that night tells his servant he is the Pole |
Ibn al-'Arabi mentions 'Izz al-Din once, in his Diwan, and in a vision. The jurist was teaching law from a platform; asked about God's generosity, he quoted a verse. Ibn al-'Arabi could not recall his own poem on the subject, so God gave him new verses on the spot, and 'Izz al-Din listened smiling. Then the qadi Shams al-Din al-Shirazi (qadi in 631, d. 636) rode by, dismounted and asked the Shaykh to kiss him on the mouth. Asked what it meant, Ibn al-'Arabi said the man thought well of him, had become aware of his sins "and knows that his end is near".
The Banu Zaki
Friends and enemies agree on one point: the protection of the Banu Zaki. This was probably a main reason he chose Damascus over Aleppo, where Ibn Sawdakin lived. The family supplied seven grand qadis across the 6th and 7th centuries.
- Zaki al-Din Tahir (d. 617): grand qadi 598-612 and 614-616. Harassed by al-Mu'azzam for sheltering the Andalusian Sufi 'Atiq al-Lawraqi, whom Ibn al-'Arabi met in 616-17.
- Muhyi l-Din Ibn Zaki (d. 668): his brother and Ibn al-'Arabi's protector. In 658/1260 he went to Hulagu to ask for safe conduct and came back grand qadi from Qinnasrin to al-'Arish. Abu Shama accuses him of seizing the madrasas for his family; one went to 'Imad al-Din, the Shaykh's son. Accused of preferring 'Ali to 'Uthman; Yunini says he got this from "his shaykh" Ibn al-'Arabi, which Addas rejects because the Shaykh's writings refute any Shi'ism.
- The evidence. Abu Shama, who was at the funeral, says he was buried in the Banu Zaki tomb; Yunini (d. 726) says he died in Ibn Zaki's house and Ibn Zaki washed the body. Addas adds two facts earlier writers missed: three certificates put Ibn Zaki at Futuhat readings in 633, and Qunawi's Nafahat show him close to the circle after 638.
A lesser jurist, Zayn al-Din Yusuf al-Kurdi (d. 643), earns praise as one of the few who kept the Sunna of two extra rak'as before the sunset prayer. Addas concludes: about 150 listeners appear in the certificates of 620-638; the teaching was open; the jurists mostly respected him. The war waged by Ibn Taymiyya and Qastallani less than fifty years later shows by contrast that in life he stayed "above all possible suspicion" through a life in strict conformity with the shari'a.
Sufis, Madmen and Hidden Saints
His links with Damascus Sufi circles are less clear. Did he know Harrali, or the Haririyya, whose master was jailed in 628? Sources are silent. He did meet 'Afif al-Din Tilimsani in 634. Born near Tlemcen, Tilimsani had made forty retreats in Anatolia and become Qunawi's disciple; Qunawi brought him to Damascus (twelfth certificate of the Futuhat). Later, in Egypt between 648 and 652, Qunawi introduced him to Ibn Sab'in, who said: "Qunawi is a man of realisation, but there is a young man with him who is wiser than he!" Tilimsani became Ibn Sab'in's son-in-law and disciple and commented on the Fusus, Niffari's Mawaqif and Harawi's Manazil. Ibn Taymiyya called him "the most pernicious of the lot"; another writer, "pig's meat on a china plate", the china being his admitted gift for verse.
- Three madmen of God (muwallahun). Mas'ud al-Habashi (d. 602), ruled by stupefaction; Ya'qub al-Kurani, a sad madman met at the White Bridge; and 'Ali al-Kurdi (d. 622), who, Abu Shama says, was never seen to pray, fast or wear sandals, yet "presided over the people of Damascus like a master over his household". Ibn al-'Arabi wrote a short work explaining al-Kurdi's sayings.
- Four men of Reverential Fear and Majesty. They assist the four Pillars and stand "on the heart" of Muhammad, Shu'ayb, Salih and Hud. He had known all four in Andalusia and taken them for ordinary believers; only in Damascus did he recognise their rank.
The Meeting of the Two Seals
Why Syria
After twenty years criss-crossing the East, aged sixty, he settled in Syria. He gives one reason, in the Chapter of Recommendations: "Live in the land of Sham if you can", citing the hadith that God prefers it and chooses His elite from it. Cairo had given him no friends beyond the Hariri brothers he knew from Andalusia, and in Ghubrini's (probably invented) story Egypt is where jurists condemned him to death. Syria, by contrast, held friends: the Banu Zaki in Damascus and, until 613, King Zahir in Aleppo, where he stayed six times between 600 and 618 and kept a house.
The Fourteen Apostles
In Aleppo a group of fourteen inseparable disciples first appears. They are named together in about thirty certificates, one at Aleppo in 617 (the Kitab al-mim wa l-nun wa l-waw), the rest at Damascus in 633.
Two Aleppo jurists were devoted to him. Najm al-Din Ibn Shani al-Mawsili (d. 631) brought him a man who had reached the "Abode of Magnificence", where the believer's heart contains God; Ibn al-'Arabi solved his problem and kept him as a companion. Kamal al-Din Ibn al-'Adim (d. 660), historian of Aleppo, later qadi and vizier, was told to read the Dhakha'ir al-a'laq, the commentary on the Tarjuman, to the city's jurists. In Aleppo too the sura al-Ikhlas appeared to him and he heard "It is yours to the exclusion of all other believers"; he understood that "it was my essence... none other than my very self".
Life in Damascus
He lived near the Rawahiyya madrasa by Bab al-Faradis, probably in the Banu Zaki house, the house where he died and which six centuries later sheltered Emir 'Abd al-Qadir. When Ibn Rawaha died in 623, the Shaykh testified (Abu Shama says "pretended") that the founder had called him and Taqi al-Din Ibn Khaz'al to witness the removal of Ibn Salah from the madrasa, a claim that started "endless controversy".
| Item | Figure |
|---|---|
| Daily pension, ruler of Homs (Mujahid Shirkuh) | 100 dirhams (Nafh; treat with caution) |
| Daily gifts, Ibn Zaki and Khuwayy | 30 dirhams each |
| Disciples his house could seat | 30+ |
| Futuhat certificates 633-638 | first 57, about 120 names (nos. 58-71 issued after his death) |
| Listeners 620-638 | about 150, some 20 identifiable, about 30 regulars |
| Certificates for the Fusus | 1, to Qunawi alone |
He refused property and lived on gifts, which Maqqari says he gave away; Ibn Jubayr confirms that a Maghrebi seeker in Damascus "will find... the end of all concern for his subsistence". He had at least two wives, Fatima bint Yunus, named without the formula for the dead in the Futuhat's last lines (c. 636), and Maryam bint Muhammad b. 'Abdun, alive in 630, and two sons: 'Imad al-Din (Fatima's) and Sa'd al-Din, born in Malatya in 618, later a poet (d. 656). A daughter, Zaynab, at about one year old and still nursing, answered his joking question on ritual law ("he must perform the great ablution") to everyone's amazement. In the Diwan he describes burying a daughter with his own hands.
Who Sat in the Room
The certificates (sama') let Addas reconstruct the audience.
- Abu Bakr al-Balkhi. Heard the Tajalliyat in 620, the 'Abadila in 626, 27 Futuhat readings in 633 and the Tanazzulat in 634.
- Ayyub b. Badr al-Muqri'. A copyist of the works, on Sakhawi's heretic list. On 10 Rabi' I 638, a month before the Shaykh's death, he was reader, scribe and sole hearer of the Tanazzulat.
- Dynasties of hearers. Three generations of Hamawis: the preacher Abu Bakr b. Sulayman (d. 649 aged 90, in 33 certificates), his sons Ahmad and 'Abd al-Wahid, and a grandson in 17 (children often attended). Two generations of Birzalis, and the three Ibn al-Sa'igh brothers, one of them a future grand qadi.
- Others. Mahmud al-Zanjani, also a disciple of Suhrawardi; Ahmad al-Takriti (25 certificates), later a court preacher; a son of Ibn Zaki; Ibn Sawdakin's nephew from the military elite (halqa).
Not every disciple appears in a certificate. Yahya b. al-Akhfash, from Marrakech, wrote to him that he had seen the Prophet in the Great Mosque by the copy of the Qur'an attributed to 'Uthman. The Prophet told him to be Ibn al-'Arabi's companion and to pass on an order: write a poem in praise of the Ansar, especially Sa'd b. 'Ubada. Hassan b. Thabit supplied a verse, and the poem was to be taken on Thursday night to a tomb and handed to a man called Hamid. Ibn al-'Arabi composed the qasida on the spot.
How He Trained Disciples
Ibn Sawdakin's notes, especially the Kitab wasa'il al-sa'il, preserve his spoken voice: plain, practical advice, far from Massignon's "grammarian of esotericism".
- No fixed litanies. "Giving oneself a programme of regular prayers... are things I condemn." Habit lets the "gross nature" perform them heedlessly; invoke God whenever you can, with presence, and the concentrated energy takes effect.
- Do not think about the dhikr. Hold to it as "an act of worship prescribed for me" and it works by its own virtue.
- Law first. The Futuhat ends with a hundred pages of elementary precepts on duties to God and to people. "The right of God comes first" (haqq Allah ahaqq); shari'a and reality are one.
- Purity in small things. Never cut hair, nails or beard or take off clothing without ablution, because all we own will testify at the Judgement. In the baths his companion Ibn Lahib called out before he could speak: "I am in a state of purity! I understood you."
- Examination of conscience (muhasaba) daily.
- Seventy thousand shahadas for a soul: he "saw its blessed effect at the time of my wife's death".
Late in life he preferred the shahada to the single name "Allah" taught him by 'Uryabi, and he opposed musical sama'. Yet Jandi reports Qunawi and Ibn Sawdakin at a musical session in Damascus with the Kubrawi Sa'd al-Din Hamawayh, who stood throughout, head bowed, and afterwards said: "The Messenger of God was there." Hamawayh called Ibn al-'Arabi "a shoreless ocean".
Princes and Jerusalem
- 615 al-Mu'azzam rules Damascus: popular, scorns pomp, rides alone; Hanafi zealot
- 616 humiliates qadi Zaki al-Din with a ridiculous robe of honour; the qadi dies of grief within months
- 622-623 Mu'azzam allies with the Khwarizmian Jalal al-Din; al-Kamil offers Frederick II Jerusalem for help
- Dhu l-Qa'da 624/Nov 1227 Mu'azzam dies, months after Genghis Khan
- 22 Rabi' I 626/18 Feb 1229 Treaty of Jaffa cedes Jerusalem; muezzins protest; Sibt Ibn al-Jawzi preaches amid "cries, weeping and moaning"
- Rabi' II-Sha'ban 626 al-Kamil and al-Ashraf besiege al-Nasir Dawud; the worst siege in memory; city yields June 1229
- 628-629 al-Ashraf jails Shaykh 'Ali al-Hariri, expels the Qalandariyya, turns a brothel into the "Mosque of Repentance", confines the rationalist Sayf al-Din al-Amidi
- 635-637 Ashraf and Kamil die; al-Salih Isma'il wins, then exiles 'Izz al-Din to Egypt
How did he react to the loss of Jerusalem? Surely with shock, Addas thinks, given his letter to Kaykaus; the only written trace is the ruling in the Recommendations that a Muslim may not live in Jerusalem while Christians hold it. His works never take a political position, just as they never mention Ibn Tumart's claim to be the Mahdi. That is not indifference: such passing matters "held no place in the message God had instructed him to transmit".
Two visions of the Prophet in 624 settled old questions. On 20 Rabi' I the Prophet told him angels are superior to men, citing the hadith that whoever mentions God in an assembly is mentioned "in an assembly better than his". On 23 Dhu l-Qa'da he said animals will not be resurrected: "It is certain, no interpretation."
The Fusus al-hikam
At the end of Muharram 627/December 1229, in Damascus, the Prophet appeared holding a book: "This is the book of the Fusus al-hikam. Take it and give it to humanity." Ibn al-'Arabi promised to pass it on "without adding anything to it or taking anything away... I am neither a prophet nor a messenger, but simply an inheritor." This is the meeting of the two Seals: the Seal of the Prophets hands a book to the Seal of Muhammadan Sainthood.
Every later attack on him, from the 8th century to now, has targeted this one book. "One would think they haven't read the Fusus!" cried Ibn Hajar at those who praised him. Yet the Unity of Being, Pharaoh's salvation and the non-eternity of hell are all in the Futuhat too. The difference is concentration: thousands of pages there, about a hundred here, which lazy jurists could attack by copying Ibn Taymiyya's list. From the 8th century he is called "the author of the Fusus" and "the shaykh of wahdat al-wujud".
Three aspects of Being in the Fusus, as Addas outlines them. They are aspects, not stages: no hierarchy and no succession in time.
"Oneness of Being" in Outline
Addas calls wahdat al-wujud a "convenient" but "dangerous" label, because it reduces the doctrine. She gives a short outline, relying on Izutsu and 'Afifi.
- Two onenesses. "The Oneness of God from the point of view of the Names that lay claim to us is the Oneness of Multiplicity; ...in the sense that He has no need of us or of the Names, it is the Oneness of Essence." A third aspect is the unfolding outward, since each Name needs a place of manifestation: a Lord needs a vassal.
- Names and Essence. Each Name is the Named with respect to Essence and distinct with respect to its meaning, so each contains all the others. They are the riches of the hidden treasure: "I was a hidden treasure and I wanted to be known."
- Prototypes. The fixed entities have permanence (thubut), not existence. Granting them existence would mean either associating partners with God or an eternal world. God knows them; they do not know themselves. The Names' longing to be manifest gives them existence, yet they never leave God: "The world is not God, it is only what manifests in the Being of God."
- Two effusions. The most holy effusion gives rise in God to the possibilities; the holy effusion gives them existence. They are simultaneous and perpetual: God is "the eternal bestower of abundance". "His treasuries are His knowledge; what they contain is us."
- Destiny. God "only wanted what is": knowledge follows its object. "It is the object that acts upon the knowledge." Hence God's conclusive argument at the Judgement: "I manifested you in existence in conformity with the knowledge of your essence that you gave Me."
- Mirrors. "He is the mirror in which you see yourself, and you are the mirror in which He sees His Names." The receptacle shapes the theophany, from the saint's transparency to the unbeliever's opacity. Only the Perfect Man sees God in every form and so validates every belief: "He is the Worshipped in everything one worships."
Ibn al-'Arabi, vision of 6 Rajab 633/1236, on whether acts belong to God or man (Futuhat II, 204)
In that same vision God told him He creates things "in causes and not through causes".
Qunawi, the Last Visions and the Futuhat
In 627 he also drew up an index (Fihris) of his works for Qunawi, who had rejoined him in 626 and appears with him in certificates for 626-630 and 634. Their study focused on the most esoteric works: the 'Anqa' mughrib, Kitab al-isra', Maqam al-qurba and above all the Fusus. Jandi describes how understanding passed on. As Qunawi commented on the prologue, "the Breath of the Merciful began to breathe in rhythm with his breathing", and Jandi grasped the whole book at once. Qunawi told him that the same had happened to him when Ibn al-'Arabi commented on the prologue.
- 20 Rabi' I 628. God spoke to him "as He spoke to Moses", without intermediary, on "the blessed plain", in a space the size of a palm, saying: "Be a heaven of revelation, an earth of water-sources and a mountain of immutability."
- 9 Jumada I 629. He is told he will have a thousand spiritual children (chronology).
- Safar 629/December 1231. He finishes the first draft of the Futuhat.
- 632/1234. He begins the second draft, with additions and deletions of style and nuance only. 1 Muharram 632 (26 September 1234): he writes the Ijaza for al-Ashraf.
- 24 Rabi' I 636/1238. Second draft complete.
Death and Legends
God had told him: "Tell your disciples: make the most of my existence before I go!" They came more and more often to the readings. He died on 22 Rabi' II 638/November 1240 (the Nafh says the 28th; Abu Shama, who was present, says the 22nd), a final ascension to "the Supreme Friend".
- Murdered for blasphemy. Damascenes still tell how jurists killed him for saying "The lord you worship is beneath my feet", and a chest of gold was found beneath that spot when his grave was dug. Addas calls it "a complete fabrication", a storyteller's invention; Abu Shama's account and Yunini's mention nothing of it.
- Three days of mourning. Al-Qari al-Baghdadi says the sultan, viziers and scholars walked in the procession and shops closed for three days. Abu Shama, who attended, says only: "a fine burial".
Addas ends with his own wish from the Futuhat: that whoever prays over him at death be a servant whose "hearing, sight and speech" are God, the hadith of the supererogatory works, which for him names the identity of the Real and creation realised by the saint. Her answer, like that of "stunned and grateful readers" over the centuries, is: amin.
Protected, Not Persecuted
Damascus was paradise and battlefield: besieged about twelve times between 589 and 658. Soldiers held power; 'ulama' brokered. Maghrebi and Andalusian immigrants were watched under the label ittihadiyyun. Yet Ibn al-'Arabi was not persecuted. The Banu Zaki qadis protected, housed, and buried him. About 150 listeners in sama's 620-638 show discreet but open teaching.
Meeting of the Two Seals
Fusus, Oneness, Death
Audiences and Subgroups
Doctrine Compacted: Fusus and Being
Protection Circle
Audiences, Politics Silence, Last Speech
- Damascus was rich, contested and ruled by soldiers, with 'ulama' as brokers. The jurists feared Sufi "Unionists", yet Ibn al-'Arabi was not persecuted: the Banu Zaki qadis protected, housed and buried him.
- Addas strips away late, admiring legends (Fayruzabadi, al-Qari) and hostile ones (Ibn Taymiyya's chain) alike, by checking dates and the earliest witnesses.
- About 150 listeners, mostly religious officials, show a teaching that was discreet but open: the Futuhat for many, the Fusus for Qunawi alone.
- His training was practical: presence over routine, Law first, purity, self-examination, and 70,000 shahadas even for an enemy.
- In 627 the Prophet handed him the Fusus: 27 prophetic wisdoms, the typology of sainthood, and the compact statement of doctrine that all later attacks targeted.
- He finished the Futuhat twice (629, 636), took no public political stand, and died in 638.
Conclusion and Chronology
Addas's short Conclusion asks what happened to the teaching after 638. Her answer has two halves: the doctrine and the khirqa akbariyya spread from Syria to China, and the dimension readers most often cut away, universal mercy, is the one that defines him. Her Appendix 1, a year-by-year table of his life set against world events, follows here as a condensed timeline.
"My Words Would Reach East and West"
The Diwan al-ma'arif opens with a vision between waking and sleep. An angel brought him a fragment of white light, "the sura al-Shu'ara'". Then something like a hair rose from his chest to his mouth, became a living creature with head, tongue, eyes and lips, swelled until its head touched both horizons, East and West, and shrank back into his chest. "I then knew that my words would reach the East and the West."
They did, Addas says, more often by "diffuse and subterranean" routes than open ones: Syria, Egypt, North Africa, Iran, Turkey, India, Indonesia, China.
| Measure | Evidence |
|---|---|
| Commentaries on the Fusus | 120 catalogued by Osman Yahia, and the list is incomplete; many by Iranians, Sunni and Shi'i, in Arabic and Persian; 6 in Turkish |
| Vernaculars | Urdu, Malay (Hamza Fansuri, Raniri; al-Attas's studies), probably Chinese (unconfirmed by Joseph Fletcher) |
| Peking | The Futuhat was still in the one mosque that stayed open through the Cultural Revolution (Chodkiewicz, oral report) |
| The school proper | Qunawi, Jandi, Qashani, Qaysari; later Jami, Nabulusi, Emir 'Abd al-Qadir |
- Beyond the school. Later Sufis took over his technical vocabulary and key ideas, often without naming him or even knowing the book. In India the spread ran mainly through Arabic and Persian works by Ahmad Sirhindi and Shah Wali Allah. Addas warns that Sirhindi is wrongly painted by modern Indian writers as "a reincarnate Ibn Taymiyya".
- A different accent. Following James Morris, she notes that Qunawi's circle wrote in a register shaped by Avicenna, which shifted the emphasis: in Ibn al-'Arabi himself "warmth" is never separate from "light".
- The initiatic line. The silsilas recorded by Murtada al-Zabidi and al-Sanusi show the khirqa akbariyya passing from Syria through Iran and back to the Islamic West in the 19th century with Emir 'Abd al-Qadir. It is still transmitted almost everywhere in the Muslim world.
The Amputated Dimension
His disciples read this posterity as proof of his spiritual authority over the saints, not just of genius. Addas goes further. For Ibn al-'Arabi the Prophet's umma, for which he will intercede, includes all human communities. (Hallaj, she notes, misread "my community" and reproached the Prophet for excluding non-Muslims; Isma'il Haqqi cites a lost text saying the prophets gathered at Cordoba in 586 partly to intercede for Hallaj over this.)
Futuhat IV, 163
He also calls himself one of the human "forms" that bear the Throne alongside its four angels, at its best column, "the treasury of Mercy", which made him "an absolutely merciful being". Interpreters, Muslim and Western alike, who see only "an inspired metaphysical construction" have amputated the heart of the heritage: its universality and generosity. In a vision God told him: "Make My servants know what you have perceived of My generosity... Why do My servants despair of My mercy when My mercy embraces everything?"
Chronology of a Life (after Appendix 1)
- 17 Ramadan 560/1165 born at Murcia (the year 'Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani dies)
- 568/1172 family settles in Seville
- c. 575/1180 meets Averroes at Cordoba
- 578 reads the Qur'an with Abu Bakr b. Saf al-Lakhmi
- 580/1184 begins the Path under Shaykh 'Uryabi (Ya'qub al-Mansur's reign begins)
- 586/1190 Cordoba vision of all the prophets; Seville cemetery verses; meets al-Kumi, al-Sadrani
- 589/1193 Algeciras vision of his destiny; Ceuta hadith lessons (Saladin dies)
- 590/1194 Tunis with al-Mahdawi; Earth of Reality; second meeting with Khadir; father dies; third Khadir meeting near Rota
- 591/1195 Fez: marries off his sisters; Abode of Light; predicts Alarcos
- 593-594/1197 Fez: "face without a nape"; meets the Pole; Ascension and Kitab al-isra'; knows himself Seal of Muhammadan Sainthood (Abu Madyan dies)
- 595/1198 farewells; Averroes' funeral at Cordoba; Mawaqi' al-nujum at Almeria in 11 days
- 597/1200 Abode of Proximity; Marrakech vision of the Throne; meets al-Hassar at Fez; Bougie
- 598/1201 leaves the West for good; Cairo; Hebron, Jerusalem, Medina; Mecca: Futuhat begun, consecration as Seal, the Youth, Nizam
- 600/1203 Ruh al-quds; meets Majd al-Din (Crusaders take Constantinople)
- 601-602 Baghdad, Mosul (khirqa of Khadir, Tanazzulat), Konya (meets Kirmani), Damascus, Hebron
- 603-608 Cairo, Mecca, Aleppo, Baghdad (608 vision of divine ruse)
- 609/1212 letter to Kaykaus (Las Navas de Tolosa)
- 611 Tarjuman at Mecca; commentary at Aleppo
- 612-618 Anatolia, mostly Malatya; son Sa'd al-Din born and Habashi dies (618)
- 617 Aleppo reading to the "fourteen apostles"
- 620/1223 settles in Syria
- 624 visions on angels and animals
- 626 Qunawi rejoins him (Jerusalem ceded; Damascus besieged)
- 627/1229 Fusus vision; Fihris for Qunawi
- 628 God speaks to him as to Moses
- 629/1231 first draft of the Futuhat finished
- 632 second draft begun; Ijaza for al-Ashraf
- 633 dialogue on the attribution of acts; many certificates (Cordoba falls to Castile)
- 634 Diwan; Tilimsani visits
- 636/1238 second draft finished
- 22 Rabi' II 638/Nov 1240 dies at Damascus; buried in the Banu Zaki tomb (Mongols had taken Kiev)
From Periphery to Centre
Addas closes on the reach of a life that began in besieged Murcia and ended in Damascus. Words that were meant to counsel servants reached from Syria toward China through about 120 commentaries on the Fusus, vernacular literatures, and a living khirqa akbariyya. Later Sufism absorbed his vocabulary even where it did not cite him; Qunawi's school gave the teaching an Avicennan accent that made it teachable and attackable.
Mercy as the Measure
- His influence spread from Syria to China, through about 120 commentaries on the Fusus, vernacular literatures and a living khirqa akbariyya.
- Later Sufism absorbed his vocabulary even where it did not cite him; Qunawi's school gave it an Avicennan accent.
- For Addas the core is not metaphysics alone but universal mercy: an umma that includes everyone, and intercession for all he sees.
Synthesis
The whole biography in takeaways, frameworks, a critical reading, the main figures and the few places where its ideas genuinely touch present-day work.
Portable Frameworks
- 'Uryabi: first murshid, Christic, illiterate.
- Abu Madyan: never met in body; most-cited; Imam of the Left then Pole.
- Habashi: 23 years; awtad candidate.
- Mahdawi: Tunis master; cold then pillar.
- Qunawi: systematiser; sole Fusus hearer.
- Banu Zaki: Damascene protection and burial.
Chronology and Currents (appendices folded)
Key Takeaways
- Life and doctrine are one. Addas's central claim: the metaphysics of the Futuhat and Fusus grew out of a lived path of visions, masters, journeys and strict observance, and cannot be read as abstract system-building.
- Sources beat legends. Reading certificates (sama'), contemporary chronicles and his own first-person testimony overturn Asin Palacios' 1931 life and the late stories of both admirers (Fayruzabadi, al-Qari) and enemies (Ibn Taymiyya's chain).
- Opening came before discipline. He received an ecstatic illumination (fath) in retreat by about fifteen, then retraced the Path step by step under masters. Grace first, method second.
- He was the Seal of Muhammadan Sainthood, as heir. From the Cordoba vision (586) through Fez (594) to Mecca (598), he came to know himself as the Seal: the saint who inherits the Prophet's whole sainthood, while the door of prophecy stays shut.
- The Law is the road, not a stage left behind. Shari'a and reality are one; "the right of God comes first". He followed no legal school yet kept the Law more strictly than most jurists, and this is why the Damascus jurists left him alone.
- Mercy has the last word. He saw himself as heir to the Prophet's mercy "towards the worlds", held that punishment in hell ends, and promised to intercede for everyone he sees. Readers who keep only the metaphysics have, Addas says, amputated the heart of his work.
- A family of sudden converts. His father and two uncles turned to God abruptly; his own "sinful youth" was heedlessness (dancing, music, half-hearted prayer), not depravity.
- Pure servanthood is the goal. He gave away everything and lived on gifts; every inner station, including the Ascension of 594, ends in servitude, not in grandeur.
- Women masters. Two of his first teachers were women, among them Fatima of Seville, and he held that women can reach every rank, even that of Pole.
- Western Sufism had two streams. The Andalusian (Almeria, Ibn al-'Arif) and the Maghrebi (Abu Madyan) currents both shaped him; the supposed debt to Ibn Masarra is a myth.
- Learning was real but bounded. He studied hadith and Qur'an all his life under official 'ulama', but held that saints verify hadith by unveiling. Kalam is a limited defence and philosophy usually a veil.
- Averroes as foil. The young visionary's "yes... no" to the philosopher sets unveiling against reason, and years later he stood at Averroes' burial in Cordoba.
- Fez was a second Mecca. The Abode of Light, the "face without a nape", the meeting with the Pole and the inner Ascension all came there in 591-594.
- Departure was planned. The 595 farewell round and the move East in 598 were deliberate; the "flight from the Reconquista" reading does not fit the evidence.
- The Futuhat had a single source. It began at the Ka'ba in 598 from the silent Youth, unfolded over 35 years in 37 volumes in an order "not of my choosing", and was finished twice, in 629 and 636.
- "Counsel My servants" widened the mission. A dream at Mecca turned him from guarding esoteric knowledge for an elite to guiding everyone, rulers included, which explains his letters to Kaykaus and his visits to courts.
- He was hard-line on the Law for non-Muslims. His 609 letter urged Kaykaus to enforce the old rules on dhimmis. Addas reads this as wartime defence of the Law, not hatred; a modern reader may judge it more harshly.
- Qunawi was the hinge to the East. His stepson and chief disciple systematised the teaching, coined the label "wahdat al-wujud" for it, received the Fusus alone, and carried the school to Persia, where it was read through his eyes.
- Damascus jurists protected him. The Banu Zaki qadis housed, funded, washed and buried him; about 150 recorded listeners, mostly religious officials, attended readings that were discreet but not secret.
- Audience matched content. The Futuhat, too vast to attack easily, was read to many; the doctrinal treatises went to small circles; the Fusus had one certificate, for Qunawi.
- The Fusus became the target. Its 27 prophetic wisdoms give the typology of sainthood (Mosaic, Abrahamic, Christic saints) and a compressed doctrine. All later attacks aimed at it, though every "scandalous" theme is also in the Futuhat.
- Knowledge follows the known. In the Fusus outline God creates according to what each fixed entity is; the creature "gives" God the knowledge by which it is judged, so destiny and justice meet in predisposition.
- Practice was concrete. He rejected fixed litanies in favour of presence, told his disciples not to speculate on the dhikr, demanded ablution even for a haircut, kept a daily self-examination, and recited 70,000 shahadas even for a man who cursed him.
- No politics in the writings. He kept a watchful eye on princes but wrote nothing on Ibn Tumart's Mahdism or the cession of Jerusalem, because such matters were outside the message he had been charged with.
- His influence went underground and everywhere. It spread through about 120 Fusus commentaries, Persian, Turkish, Urdu and Malay literature, and the khirqa akbariyya, which reached Emir 'Abd al-Qadir and is still passed on.
Frameworks and Mental Models
| Name | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Fath before riyada | Opening by grace can precede discipline; the path is then retraced methodically | Reading his early life and his view of sudden conversion |
| Three Seals | Muhammadan Seal (himself), universal Seal (Jesus), Seal of the Infants | Placing his claim within the hierarchy of saints |
| Sainthood vs prophecy | Saints are heirs; legislative prophecy is closed; walaya is the inner face of nubuwwa | Answering "did he claim to be a prophet?" |
| Hierarchy of saints | Pole, two Imams, four Pillars, seven Substitutes, Solitary Ones, men of the Unseen | Following the visions of Chapters 2-7 and 10 |
| God's Vast Earth / Earth of Reality | An imaginal barzakh-world where bodies are spiritualised; also total servanthood | Reading the Tunis episodes and his cosmology |
| Prophetic inheritance | Each saint is "on the heart" of one or more prophets (Abrahamic, Christic, Mosaic) | Interpreting the Fusus and saint typology |
| Ascent, arrival, return | His life mirrors the Ascension: West as ascent, Mecca as arrival, East as return to creatures | Seeing the shape of the whole biography |
| Trust and counsel | The Seal guards esoteric sciences (amana) and counsels everyone (nasiha) | Explaining varied styles and his dealings with rulers |
| Qada' and qadar | Decree follows knowledge; timing brings into existence only what things already are | Thinking about destiny and responsibility |
| Three aspects of Being | Ahadiyya, wahidiyya, manifestation; aspects, not stages | Unpacking "wahdat al-wujud" without reducing it |
| Discreet, not clandestine | Open readings for broad works, closed rooms for doctrinal ones | Assessing claims that he taught "in secret" |
| Legend audit | Trace each story to its first teller, check dates and offices, weigh partisanship | Any later report of his life, hostile or admiring |
A closer look
- An insider's biography. Addas, Chodkiewicz's daughter, writes from within the Akbarian tradition. She tests legends rigorously but accepts visions, miracles and the Seal claim as Ibn al-'Arabi reports them. A secular historian would treat many episodes, like the instant journey to Mecca or Habashi speaking from the grave, as hagiography.
- One witness for most of the life. For the Western years the main source is the Shaykh himself. Where he is silent (on politics, on Ibn Tumart, on the loss of Jerusalem), Addas reads the silence charitably, as a matter of mission rather than caution.
- Hard edges softened. The letter to Kaykaus on dhimmis, the ruling that Muslims may not live in Christian-held Jerusalem and the "pigs" vision of extreme Shi'ites are explained by context. The explanations are reasonable, but they remain apologetic.
- Asin Palacios treated harshly. Her correction of his errors is just, yet he wrote without the manuscripts and certificates she had. His thesis on Christian influence is set aside more than refuted.
- Thin on doctrine by design. The Fusus outline in Chapter 10 runs to a few pages and leans on Izutsu, 'Afifi and Corbin. Readers need Chodkiewicz and Chittick for the metaphysics.
- Dated since 1989. Later work (Hirtenstein, Elmore, the Ibn 'Arabi Society editions) has refined the chronology and the list of works. Treat some dates and attributions as provisional.
- Universal mercy as the last word. The conclusion's emphasis on universal salvation is faithful to strong texts, but the Futuhat also contains stern passages. Mercy is Addas's chosen key, not the only one.
Who's Who
| Name | Role in the story |
|---|---|
| Ibn al-'Arabi (560-638) | Muhyi l-Din, the Shaykh al-Akbar; born Murcia, died Damascus; Seal of Muhammadan Sainthood |
| 'Ali b. Muhammad | His father, servant of Ibn Mardanish then the Almohads; died a luminous death |
| Abu Ja'far al-'Uryabi | First master, illiterate, "Christic"; taught the dhikr of "Allah" |
| Fatima bint al-Muthanna | Aged woman master in Seville who called him her spiritual son |
| Abu Ya'qub al-Kumi | Seville master; their roles of master and disciple were at times reversed |
| Abu Madyan (d. 594) | Great Maghrebi master; never met in person, but sent messages; spiritual father of many of his teachers |
| 'Abd al-'Aziz al-Mahdawi | Tunis master; dedicatee of the Ruh al-quds and Futuhat |
| Khadir | The immortal guide, met three times; source of a khirqa |
| Averroes (d. 595) | Philosopher-qadi of Cordoba; the "yes/no" meeting; buried with the Shaykh present |
| Badr al-Habashi (d. 618) | Abyssinian companion from Fez to Malatya |
| Nizam | Daughter of the Meccan imam Abu Shuja'; inspired the Tarjuman al-ashwaq |
| Isma'il b. Sawdakin | Aleppo disciple who recorded the master's oral teaching |
| Majd al-Din Ishaq | Seljuq dignitary, met at Mecca 600; father of Qunawi |
| Sadr al-Din Qunawi (d. 673) | Stepson and chief disciple; systematiser; link to Rumi and Persia |
| Kaykaus I (d. 615) | Seljuq sultan of Rum; correspondent and "son"; gave him a house |
| al-Zahir (d. 613) | Ayyubid king of Aleppo who heeded his intercessions |
| Awhad al-Din Kirmani | Persian Sufi friend to whom he entrusted the young Qunawi |
| Muhyi l-Din Ibn Zaki (d. 668) | Damascus qadi, protector and host; washed his body |
| 'Izz al-Din al-Sulami | Strict Shafi'ite jurist; did he call him the Pole? |
| 'Afif al-Din Tilimsani (d. 690) | Qunawi's disciple, later Ibn Sab'in's; reviled by Ibn Taymiyya |
| Mu'ayyad al-Din Jandi | Qunawi's disciple; Fusus commentator; source of many anecdotes |
| Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728) | Hanbali polemicist who led the war on the Fusus |
| Fayruzabadi (d. 817) | Admirer whose fatwa seeded many unsourced legends |
| Abu Shama | Damascus chronicler at the funeral; a sober check on legend |
| Asin Palacios | Spanish Arabist whose 1931 "Vida" Addas corrects |
| Emir 'Abd al-Qadir (d. 1883) | Algerian leader, heir of the khirqa akbariyya, lived in his Damascus house |
Glossary of Key Terms
Arabic terms as used in Addas's book, with brief meanings.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| abdal | Substitutes: the seven saints who each govern one clime |
| adab | Courtesy, right conduct; also polite letters |
| ahadiyya / wahidiyya | Oneness of Essence / Oneness of Multiplicity (the Names) |
| 'ayn thabita (a'yan) | Fixed entity, immutable prototype: a thing as known by God |
| afrad | Solitary Ones: saints outside the Pole's authority |
| awtad | The four Pillars of the saintly hierarchy |
| barzakh | Isthmus between two realities; the imaginal world |
| dhikr | Invocation, remembrance of God |
| fath | Opening: sudden illumination given by grace |
| fatra | Interval of abandonment after the first opening |
| fayd aqdas / muqaddas | Most holy / holy effusion: possibilities in God / their existence |
| fuqaha' / 'ulama' | Jurists / religious scholars |
| hudur | Presence with God |
| ijaza | Licence to transmit texts; his Ijaza for al-Ashraf lists teachers and works |
| insan kamil | Perfect Man: the full mirror of God and the cosmos |
| isti'dad | Predisposition: what an entity is ready to receive |
| ittihadiyyun / hulul | "Unionists" / incarnationism: polemical labels for his school |
| jahiliyya | "Ignorance"; for his youth, heedlessness (ghafla) |
| kashf | Unveiling: knowledge by direct disclosure |
| khalwa | Spiritual retreat |
| khatm al-walaya | Seal of Sainthood (Muhammadan or universal) |
| khirqa (akbariyya) | Initiatic cloak; his own line of transmission |
| madhhab | School of law (Maliki, Shafi'i, Hanafi, Hanbali, Zahiri) |
| malamiyya | People of Blame: saints who hide their state in ordinary life |
| mi'raj / isra' | Ascension / night journey, the Prophet's and the saint's |
| muhasaba | Daily examination of conscience |
| muwallah | "Madman of God", reason taken by divine attraction |
| nasiha | Good counsel, owed to all |
| qada' / qadar | Decree by knowledge / its timed bringing into existence |
| qutb | Pole: the head of the saintly hierarchy in each age |
| riyada | Spiritual discipline |
| sama' | (1) Reading certificate; (2) musical spiritual concert |
| shari'a / haqiqa | Revealed Law / reality; for him one and the same |
| shaykh al-akbar | "The Greatest Master", his title |
| suhba | Companionship with a master (before formal orders) |
| tajalli | Theophany, self-disclosure, renewed each instant |
| tawba | Repentance, turning back to God |
| tayy al-ard | "Folding of the earth": saints' miraculous fast travel |
| 'ubudiyya | Servanthood, the goal of the path |
| wahdat al-wujud | "Oneness of Being": later label for his doctrine (Qunawi's school) |
| walaya / nubuwwa | Sainthood / prophecy |
| wiratha | Inheritance: saints as heirs of the prophets |
Expanded terms (Addas usage)
| Term | Meaning in this book |
|---|---|
| afrad | Solitary Ones outside ordinary Pole authority; IA among them |
| fath | Opening; his preceded riyada (jadhba) |
| fatra | Slackening after first fire; he crossed it |
| kibrit ahmar | Red Sulphur: saint's excellence; Muhammadan Station |
| malamiyya | People of Blame; pure 'ubudiyya hidden in ordinary life |
| mi'raj | Ascension; saints' is inward; Fez 594 |
| nasiha | Counsel owed to all; widened mission after Mecca dream |
| qurba | Proximity; Ijisal 597; afrad station |
| sama' | (1) reading certificate dating travels; (2) musical concert he banned for disciples |
| Seal (khatm) | Muhammadan (IA), Universal (Jesus), Infants (last birth) |
| 'ubudiyya | Servanthood; goal of the whole teaching |
| wahdat al-wujud | Later school label (Qunawi); not IA's phrase |
| wiratha | Inheritance: saints on the foot of prophets |
| wajh bi la qafa | Face without a nape; Fez 593 unveiling |
| ard al-haqiqa | Earth of Reality / God's Vast Earth; Tunis 590 |
Names and places (quick)
| Name | Role in Addas |
|---|---|
| Abu Madyan | Most-cited; Imam of Left then Pole; never met in body |
| 'Uryabi | First murshid; Christic; illiterate of Ulya |
| Habashi | 23 years; awtad candidate; buried Malatya |
| Mahdawi | Tunis; cold 590; pillar 598 |
| Qunawi | Systematiser; sole Fusus hearer; names wahdat al-wujud |
| Banu Zaki | Damascene qadis; home, wash, bury |
| Nizam | Ka'ba circle; Tarjuman inspiration (611) |
| Kaykaus | Seljuq; house gift; Pact letter 609 |
| Fatima b. Muthanna | Spiritual mother; Seville; Fatiha servant |
| Khadir | Fourth Pillar; meetings Seville, Tunis, coast, Mosul chain |
About this book
Quest for the Red Sulphur: The Life of Ibn 'Arabi by Claude Addas, 1993. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
Insight Editions · rajeshrmahapatra.com/insight-editions