Insight Editions · No. 157
Rethinking Ibn Arabi
Gregory A. Lipton
Gregory A. Lipton traces how modern Western readers recast Ibn Arabi as a religious universalist, contrasting that interpretation with his writings on Muhammad, revelation, and religious law.
A study guide to Rethinking Ibn Arabi by Gregory A. Lipton. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
About the Book
Gregory A. Lipton's Rethinking Ibn Arabi (Oxford University Press, 2018) is a study of how the Andalusian mystic Ibn Arabi (d. 1240) came to be read, in the modern West, as a prophet of religious universalism, and of what that reading leaves out. Lipton sets the universalist map of Ibn Arabi beside the territory of his own writings and shows where the two fail to match.
In one sentence: for Lipton, the modern picture of Ibn Arabi as a pluralist who held all religions to be equally valid paths is not a neutral discovery but a projection, shaped by Romantic and Perennialist ideas of religion and by a racialized history of the Semitic and the Aryan, and it hides an Ibn Arabi who placed the law of Muhammad above every other and read all earlier revelations as subsumed in it.
A work of critical intellectual history joined to close textual reading. Each chapter takes a passage or theme that universalist readers have used, from the famous lines of The Interpreter of Desires about a heart capable of every form to the letter to the Seljuk sultan Kayka'us, and reads it again inside the whole of Ibn Arabi's corpus, chiefly The Meccan Openings. Alongside this runs a genealogy of the modern idea of religion, from Schleiermacher and Kant through Guenon and Schuon, which explains why the universalist reading seemed natural.
Readers who know Ibn Arabi through the Perennialist writers will find here a challenge to that inheritance, argued from the Arabic texts. Students of religion will find a case study in how the category of religion itself was built, and how claims to stand above all traditions can carry a particular tradition's hierarchy inside them. Readers interested in the politics of the Almohad and Ayyubid world will find Ibn Arabi placed in his own setting of sultans, conquest and the protected status of Jews and Christians.
What the book is
Lipton reads Ibn Arabi against the modern claim that the Shaykh taught a free religious universalism. The book tracks how Perennialist and academic readers turned select poems and metaphors into a doctrine of equal paths, then shows those readings against the letter to Kayka'us, the cosmology of abrogation, and the hierarchy of the Perfect Man.
Chapter Map
Prologue and Introduction set the double bind. Chapter 1 (camels and the heart of every form) dismantles the religion-of-love reading. Chapter 2 (solar cosmology) recovers exclusion and abrogation. Chapter 3 tests Guenon and Schuon on validity and scripture. Chapter 4 exposes the Aryan myth under Perennialist metaphysics. Chapter 5 returns to Kant and the hubris of zero degrees.
The argument at a glance
Lipton's case runs in two directions at once. Looking back to the thirteenth century, he argues that Ibn Arabi's statements about the many forms of belief are about the knowledge of God, not about the equal validity of religious communities, and that his cosmology places Muhammad as a sun whose light swallows the stars of earlier prophets. Looking at the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he argues that the universalist reading grew from a Western discourse in which religion meant inner belief, in which the Semitic was set below the Aryan, and in which the observer claimed a view from nowhere. The two lines meet in the figure of Schuon, who drew on Ibn Arabi while recasting him.
| Part | Book chapter | Main question |
|---|---|---|
| Prologue and Introduction | Prologue, Introduction | What is a universalist map, and whose interests does it serve? |
| Part 1 | Tracking the Camels of Love | Do the famous lines about a heart of every form teach that all religions are valid? |
| Part 2 | Return of the Solar King | How does Ibn Arabi treat abrogation, the earlier laws, and Jews and Christians? |
| Part 3 | Competing Fields of Universal Validity | How did Guenon and Schuon turn Ibn Arabi's single sun into many? |
| Part 4 | Ibn Arabi and the Metaphysics of Race | What role does the Aryan and Semitic typology play in Schuon's reading? |
| Part 5 | Conclusion | What lies behind the claim to see religion from zero degrees? |
Read the Introduction's two cartographies (Figure 1) before the chapters; the image of map and territory returns at every stage. Parts 1 and 2 are the closest readings of Ibn Arabi himself and can be read on their own. Parts 3 and 4 depend on them, since they show what the Perennialists did with the same passages. The Conclusion draws the threads together through Kant and the idea of autonomy, and is best read last.
Prologue and Introduction. The Cartography of Universalism
Lipton opens with a map. Every universal claim, he argues, is drawn by a cartographer standing somewhere, and the book's task is to show where two very different cartographers stood: Ibn Arabi in the medieval Islamic world, and Frithjof Schuon and his circle in modern Europe.
Prologue: maps and territory
The prologue begins with Borges's fable of the Cartographers Guilds who drew a map of the Empire as large as the Empire itself, a map that later generations found useless and left to the weather. Lipton states his concern at once. His ostensive subject is how particular ideas of Ibn Arabi have been translated within a contemporary field of interpretation; his meta-subject is religious universalism.
He declines to settle whether religion is a thing "of its own kind" (sui generis). With Talal Asad he doubts that any universal definition of religion is possible, and he professes a methodological quietism: in Wittgenstein's phrase, to take account of "language-games, describe them, and sometimes wonder at them." The concern is with how ideas we call religious are conceived, received and naturalized, and specifically how Ibn Arabi's metaphysics has been read within Traditionalism or the Perennial Philosophy, above all in the field connected to Frithjof Schuon.
J. Z. Smith's essay "Map Is Not Territory" supplies the governing image, together with Smith's reply to Korzybski: "'Map is not territory'—but maps are all we possess." Following Peter Wright, Lipton stresses that the scholar of religion and the practitioner are engaged in the same family of activities, reading, interpreting and criticizing, so the difference between them is one of degree rather than of kind. When scholars treat their own scholarship as a vehicle for gnosis, as Eliade did, the distance vanishes altogether. Lipton cites Nasr's claim, in his introduction to Schuon's essential writings, that "ideally speaking, only saintly men and women possessing wisdom should and can engage in a serious manner in that enterprise which has come to be known as comparative religion."
Two further voices sharpen the point. Milton Sernett notes that religion has served both as a cross-cultural unifying principle and as a means by which insiders define themselves against outsiders. Ernesto Laclau puts it more starkly: "the universal is no more than a particular that has become dominant." Lipton does not conclude that universals are therefore worthless. Universalizing religions such as Christianity and Islam are built in part out of historical particulars, and a particular may become universally applicable without ceasing to be particular. The trouble lies in discourses that forget the tension between the two.
His example, revisited in Chapter 4, is James Cutsinger's claim that objective scholars "must entertain the possibility" that Schuon had direct access to the Truth in ways not explicable by natural causes, through a power of intuitive discernment "unaffected by the limitations of historical circumstance." Taking that claim at face value, Lipton states the thread that runs through the whole book: "all universal claims inevitably carry the burden of their own socio-historical genealogies. That is to say, every map bears the situated perspective of its cartographer."
The double bind of universality
The introduction takes its epigraph from Naoki Sakai: what we call universalism "is a particularism thinking itself as universalism." Lipton then sets out his plan: to show how Ibn Arabi imperially mapped the religious Other, and how his ideas have in turn been mapped within the interpretive field of Schuon (d. 1998). That reception, he argues, projects European concepts of religion onto the Andalusian Sufi in the guise of transhistorical continuity.
Walter Mignolo, in The Darker Side of the Renaissance, says that "maps are and are not territory." They are not, as Korzybski said; yet they are, because once accepted they become a tool for controlling territories and colonizing the mind. Lipton approaches his subject through this double sense of cartography.
The word "universalism" itself carries a double bind. It names both exclusivist and inclusivist positions:
| Sense | What it means | Examples in the book |
|---|---|---|
| Exclusivist universalism | One tradition's truth claims are valid for all people and all times; earlier dispensations are superseded | The "universalizing religions" of Leon Marillier's phrase; medieval Christian and Islamic supersessionism; Ibn Arabi |
| Inclusivist or pluralist universalism | Many religions are valid as plural expressions of one underlying or transcendent truth | Schuon's religio perennis, "the underlying universality in every great spiritual patrimony of humanity" |
The disturbing paradox is that the tolerant form shares the structure of the triumphalist one. Every map claims to be intelligible to anyone who reads it, and so claims an inclusive validity; yet every map is two-dimensional and flattens its reader to its own horizon. Lipton compares this with Levinas's anxiety, after the Shoah, about "the tyranny of the universal and of the impersonal" and the "imperialism of the same." Ulrich Beck states the result: in any universalism, "the other's voice is permitted entry only as the voice of sameness."
Premodern supersessionism was, in a sense, aware of its own exclusivism. Modern universalism claims to include all worldviews equally, while orders of exclusion lie just below its surface. Hence the book's core argument: "all modalities of universalism—both premodern, overtly imperial forms and modern, ostensibly tolerant forms—are particular instantiations of power."
Lipton reads Ibn Arabi's maps as inscribed by medieval Islamic imperialism, and Schuonian Perennialism as inscribed by European imperialism and its colonization of knowledge. In both, in Mignolo's words, "a universal knowing subject is presupposed," and universal knowledge goes with a cache of power that is assumed in Ibn Arabi's case and unspoken in Schuon's.
Perennialism, Ibn Arabi and the universal
Tomoko Masuzawa observes that liberal universalism, the idea of the fundamental unity of religions, has marked comparative study since the nineteenth century, though many scholars now contest it. Lipton notes that it still plays a large part in the academic study of Sufism among scholars sympathetic to Perennialism. Nasr called Schuon a "master of the discipline of comparative religion," and James Morris has acknowledged Schuon's influence in transmitting Ibn Arabi's thought to academic specialists. Schuon's corpus of over thirty works is little read, yet his framework commands one of the most dominant knowledge regimes in the Western reception of Ibn Arabi.
The link runs through the Unity of Being (wahdat al-wujud), a phrase Ibn Arabi never used but which has come to stand for his unitive metaphysics. Because of it, he is associated with Schuon's "Transcendent Unity of Religions," the title of Schuon's first major work (1948). Schuon led the first organized traditionalist European Sufi order and, after Rene Guenon's death in 1951, became the foremost proponent of the Perennial Philosophy. His book argues that a transhistorical religious essence unites all religions beyond the limits of exoteric absolutism.
Ibn Arabi is often claimed as a proto-Perennialist. William Stoddart names him among the "forerunners of the perennial philosophy in the East." The usual evidence is the famous lines in The Interpreter of Desires (Tarjuman al-ashwaq) about a heart "capable of every form" and "the religion of Love," which Schuon himself repeatedly cites. In one passage Schuon writes that the religio perennis is fundamentally this: "the Real entered into the illusory so that the illusory might be able to return into the Real," and that this is "what Ibn Arabi called the 'religion of Love.'"
Coomaraswamy had already used the phrase "Philosophia Perennis et Universalis," explaining that this philosophy "has been the common inheritance of all mankind without exception." Nasr in 1972 tied the Interpreter verses to the transcendent unity of religions, calling Sufism "the most universal affirmation of that perennial wisdom which stands at the heart of Islam and in fact of all religion as such." Reza Shah-Kazemi likewise describes his approach as Schuonian and universalist and connects it with the "universal capacity of the heart."
What "universalism" means in Ibn Arabi
Mohammad Khalil's Islam and the Fate of Others classifies Islamic universalism by the duration of Hell. Universalists hold that all will reach Paradise; damnationists that some endure the Fire forever. Khalil has to call Ibn Arabi only a "quasi-universalist," because for him some remain in Hell forever even though their punishment ceases and becomes blissful. Chastisement, for Ibn Arabi, is "therapeutic," and in one of his best-known inversions the punishment ('adhab) of Hell turns into "sweetness" ('udhuba). Khalil adds the categories of limited and liberal inclusivism and finally classes Ibn Arabi as a "liberal inclusivist," a proliferation of labels that, Lipton says, soon reaches diminishing returns.
The deeper problem is that Khalil works on a strictly soteriological basis and leaves aside Ibn Arabi's views on the validity of other scriptures. Hence the interim, the severe punishment before final bliss, goes unexamined. Khalil himself concedes, quoting Chittick, that the righteous are spared the "deserts, perils, vicious predators, and harmful serpents" found along the other path. Chittick qualifies the vision of all paths leading to God by the "prescriptive command" (al-amr al-taklifi), the origin of revealed law, and quotes Ibn Arabi: "It is incumbent upon you to practice the worship of God brought by the Shariah and tradition [al-samʿ]."
Because Ibn Arabi treats wrath as an eternal divine attribute, its consequence, chastisement, is eternal too. So between every path and its destination lies reward or chastisement, and the criterion that distinguishes them is the sharia. Even careful studies, Lipton concludes, can fail to separate the final universal salvation from "the interim implications of his supersessionism."
- Ibn Arabi holds that "the abrogation (naskh) of all of the (previously) revealed laws (jamīʿ al-sharāʾiʿ) by Muhammad's revealed law (sharīʿa)" is divinely decreed (Chapter 2).
- The People of the Book may keep their laws only if they submit to Qur'an 9:29 and pay the indemnity tax (jizya) "in a state of humiliation" (Chapter 2).
- They are guilty of "corruption of the text" (tahrif al-nass), not merely of its meaning (Chapter 3).
On this reading the spiritual efficacy of Judaism and Christianity depends on obedience to the revelation of Muhammad, not on any validity granted to the Torah or Gospel. The comfort of hearing that all will be saved should give pause to those who, like Sayafaatun Almirzanah, present Ibn Arabi as the key to interfaith acceptance.
The popular claim that Ibn Arabi's "divinity of beliefs" (al-ilah fi al-i'tiqadat) is simply Schuon's transcendent unity of religions rests, Lipton says, on the modern idea of religions as "systems of belief." Ibn Arabi held that all creation worships, but that the one who associates partners with God (al-mushrik) is "wretched" (shaqi) for going against revelation, and he repeatedly castigates Jews and Christians for blasphemy and unbelief. Following Hugh Nicholson's rejection of "a nonrelational and nonpolitical core of religious experience," Lipton insists that Ibn Arabi's religio-political absolutism cannot be separated from his metaphysics.
Mapping Ibn Arabi and the political
Lipton gives the essential outline of the life, which Ibn Arabi's own works, over 300 of them by current estimate, scatter like an autohagiography.
| Date as printed | Event |
|---|---|
| 1165 CE | Born in Murcia; his father probably served its independent emir Ibn Mardanish (r. 1147-1172) |
| 1172 | Murcia falls to the Almohads; the family moves to Seville, where the father serves the caliph Abu Ya'qub Yusuf (r. 1163-1184). Ibn Arabi is trained as a soldier |
| about age 14 or 15 | A formative spiritual awakening; study of Qur'an and hadith follows |
| age 19 | Leaves the army, his wealth and his friends for the mystical path; frequents the mystics of Andalusia and North Africa (recorded in The Spirit of Holiness) |
| around 1200 | Leaves Andalusia for good, amid Christian advances |
| 1202 | Begins The Meccan Openings after meeting a theophanic youth (fata) on the Hajj; completed 1238 |
| 1211-1220 | Reign of the Seljuk sultan 'Izz al-Din Kayka'us I, whom he advised to impose discriminatory rules on his Christian subjects |
| 1223 | Settles in Damascus under the protection of the Banu Zaki; writes The Ring Stones of Wisdom (Fusus al-hikam) |
| 1240 | Death |
Biographies, Lipton says with Hayden White, are maps too. Euro-American retellings give the life the shape of an epic quest from the Occident to the Orient. Nasr, discussing Ibn Sina's visionary recitals, explains that the gnostic's journey "takes him from matter to pure form, from the Occident of darkness to the Orient of light." Henry Corbin (d. 1978) made Ibn Arabi a "pilgrim to the Orient" who passed "through and beyond the darkness of the Law and of the exoteric religion." Such claims echo nineteenth-century European ideals of authenticity marked by an anti-Judaic tradition of deprecating "legalism."
Stephen Schwartz takes an almost opposite Eurocentric line: Ibn Arabi's so-called Spanish Sufism "inaugurated a truly European Islam," a model for moderate Muslims in Christian Europe. Claude Addas, the most erudite biographer, is more nuanced but still separates a Western period "resolutely aloof from political life" from the later role of "advisor to princes," and treats the politics as circumstantial to the spiritual mission. All of these, Lipton argues, are universalist maps that try to show the purity of the metaphysics apart from time and place.
Here he brings in Carl Schmitt's account of modern depoliticization, in which theology was abandoned "because it was controversial, in favor of another—neutral—domain," and Grace Jantzen's account of mysticism as a private inner state, "domesticated" and "rendered unthreatening to the public political realm." Wilfred Cantwell Smith's 1963 essay shows the move clearly: it sets a "universalist Ṣūfi interpretation of the Islamic order" against "closed-system" Islam and argues that "to believe in the ultimate unity of the world and the universe is to believe also in the unity of humankind."
The perennial religion in a hierarchical universe
Thirteenth-century Muslim maps, built on Ptolemy, placed the Arab world at the centre, just as Christian maps ignored Islam and al-Idrisi (d. 1166) ignored Europe. Muslim theo-cosmology likewise took the Dar al-Islam as its basic unit, and the classical caliph presided over a religion presented as the consummation of all earlier revelation. Medieval Sufism, Margaret Malamud shows, replicated these "dyadic and hierarchical relationships of authority and dependence."
Ibn Arabi did not simply wish to restore the caliphal hierarchy; he saw himself as standing in for it. Marshall Hodgson's observation captures this: when the caliph lost real power, "there remained a true spiritual caliph, the immediate representative of God." Ibn Arabi claimed the Muhammadan Station and the title of Seal of Muhammadan Sainthood (khatam al-walaya al-muhammadiyya). Yet his whole cosmology rests on the superiority of Muhammad, given the station of "lordship (siyāda) . . . when Adam was between water and clay," and the source of support for every Perfect Human Being.
The Qur'anic "religion of Abraham" is itself adversarial: Abraham was neither Jew, Christian nor polytheist, and, as Uri Rubin notes, the idea brings out "the particularistic aspect of Islam as a religion set apart from Judaism and Christianity." Chodkiewicz uses religio perennis in this hierarchical sense: the successive manifestation of the Muhammadan Reality "from Adam to Muhammad," periodically restored and confirmed until the sharia of Muhammad, which "when it finally appears, abrogates all earlier laws." Jacques Waardenburg describes the same medieval frame as "the history of the one religion which has been revealed intermittently." In Mignolo's idiom, Ibn Arabi was where he thought.
Universalist regimes of particularism
Mystical texts with authoritarian views unsettle the modern assumption that the core of religion is a private, experiential, nonpolitical spirituality. Sherman Jackson warns against romanticizing classical Islam as pluralistic and egalitarian; extreme views are not the preserve of modern interlopers. Christianity offers parallels: Augustine (d. 430) justified wars on heretics, Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) and Catherine of Siena (d. 1380) backed the Crusades, and Teresa of Avila (d. 1582) supported the Inquisition.
Perennialist readings, by denying or ignoring Ibn Arabi's absolutist frameworks, cast an iconic universalist image of him. Lipton calls this, with Wendy Brown, a "buried order of politics," and compares it to a "politics of nostalgia." He traces it to a post-Kantian dichotomy between an autonomous subject and a heteronomous Other, visible in Titus Burckhardt's remark that the faith of "simple folk" is enclosed "in an emotional realm attached to one particular translation of transcendent Truth," while "those whose outlook is esoteric recognize the essential unity of all religions." Schuon goes further: "esoterism alone is absolutely monotheistic, it alone recognizing only one religion under diverse forms." Mignolo calls such a single frame a "monotopic hermeneutics."
Behind this lies a racial hierarchy, the subject of Chapter 4. For Schuon, the spectrum runs from a passive Semitic theology that merely receives revelation up to an Aryan gnosis that perceives truth directly. He faults Ibn Arabi for "his at least partial solidarity with ordinary theology," and Sufism for being "fundamentally more moral than intellectual." Olav Hammer names the cost: "any true divergence between traditions must be silenced." Etienne Balibar's essay "Racism as Universalism" shows the same double helix of inclusion and exclusion.
Plan of the book
| Chapter | Title | Thesis |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tracking the Camels of Love | The heart "capable of every form" claims every belief, not the validity of every religion; the verses profess inheritance of Muhammad's perfection |
| 2 | Return of the Solar King | Ibn Arabi held abrogation (naskh); the People of the Book are subsumed under Muhammad's cosmic rule through jizya |
| 3 | Competing Fields of Universal Validity | Schuon's Copernican turn from a Muhammadan cosmology to a Schleiermacherian "religion as such"; Ibn Arabi's Andalusian polemic echoes Ibn Hazm (d. 1064) on textual corruption |
| 4 | Ibn Arabi and the Metaphysics of Race | Schuon's universalism rests on an Aryanist hierarchy that ranks the Semitic below the Indo-European |
| Conclusion | Mapping Ibn Arabi at Zero Degrees | Schuonian essentialism echoes Kant's autonomy and conceals a supersessionism like Ibn Arabi's own |
The first part offers revised readings that challenge what Lipton calls, in Harold Bloom's sense, a tradition of "strong misreadings"; the second traces the emerging contours back to older European knowledge regimes.
How the five chapters answer one thesis
Lipton's thesis is that the modern "universalist" Ibn Arabi is a product of European categories (belief, religion, mysticism, race, autonomy) projected onto selective passages. Each chapter removes one prop of that projection. The plan is therefore cumulative: once "religion of love" and "heart of every form" are restored to their ontological and legal frames, the solar cosmology of abrogation and the letter to Kayka'us cannot be waved away as early intolerance. Guenon and Schuon's many suns then look like a different metaphysics wearing the Shaykh's name. The Aryan myth chapter shows why that metaphysics was never innocent. The conclusion names the hubris of claiming a view from nowhere ("zero degrees") as the price of the whole project.
Part 1. Tracking the Camels of Love
The most quoted lines Ibn Arabi ever wrote, the heart "capable of every form" and "the religion of Love," have become a modern emblem of Sufi tolerance. Chapter 1 argues that they say something quite different: that their author has inherited the comprehensive perfection of the Prophet Muhammad, in whom every earlier revelation is subsumed.
1.1 A century of universalist readings
The chapter's two epigraphs set its tone. Donald Lopez observes that we still speak of the "world view" of a religion, "demonstrating that, even though we may no longer believe in God, we still believe in belief." Abraham Joshua Heschel adds: "Our imagination tends to mold all concepts in its image."
Then come the verses themselves, in Reynold Nicholson's 1911 translation of The Interpreter of Desires:
Michael Sells notes that they "are among the more widely quoted passages in Sufi literature." The Interpreter was the first full work of Ibn Arabi to be translated into a Western language, and its verses remain a standard proof text for a premodern religious universalism. Nicholson placed them on the first page of his preface, saying that "they express the Ṣúfí doctrine that all ways lead to the One God."
Lipton traces how the reading spread:
| Reader | Date | Reading of the verses |
|---|---|---|
| Ignaz Goldziher | 1910 | A tendency toward the highest tolerance; denominations "are not sources of truth" |
| Reynold Nicholson | 1911, 1914 | "Love is the essence of all creeds: the true mystic welcomes it whatever guise it may assume" |
| Annemarie Schimmel | several works | Dissenting: "not tolerance" but a "statement about the author's own lofty spiritual rank" and a "glowing tribute to Islam" |
| Michael Sells | 1984 and later | A "call for universality" achieved through inner transformation; a heart receptive to "the different systems of belief" |
| Chris Lowney | popular history | Ibn Arabi as emblem of the Spanish convivencia, where "the polarizing distinctions that set Christian against Muslim against Jew faded into insignificance" |
Sells, Lipton notes, translates the twice-appearing word din first as "religion" and then as "belief," linking the two English terms. Against this whole line, the chapter's thesis is that modern assumptions about world religions as "systems of belief" shape how the verses are received. A heart capable of every form is arguably capable of every belief (i'tiqad); that is not the same as accepting the Perennialist "universal validity" of every religion. The verses instead profess to follow the comprehensive perfection of Muhammad as God's beloved, and they reflect "a subsumptive cosmology of power" that readings equating religion with belief have almost wholly hidden.
1.2 "Religion" and the discourse on belief
Much has been written on how "religion" shifted, in the post-Enlightenment West, from a premodern modality of social and political power tied to disciplined knowledge, into a matter of personal belief. Lipton dates the turn to Herbert of Cherbury (d. 1648), "the Father of Deism," who treated religion as "a mental phenomenon." Wilfred Cantwell Smith observes that it was this shift "that emphasized belief . . . as a basic religious category, and envisaged believing as what religious people primarily do." Talal Asad speaks of "a universal function in belief." In premodern settings, Asad argues, religion was mainly about producing knowledge for practice and discipline, with belief as the outcome of such knowledge rather than its precondition.
The English word "belief" usually renders the Arabic root '-q-d, whose meanings (to tie, knit, knot, conclude, contract) share the sense of knotting carried by the verbal noun 'aqd. Edward Lane's lexicon gives 'aqada as "he knit his heart to it." So it is easy to map religion's "universal function in belief" onto Ibn Arabi's discourse on "the god created in the beliefs" (al-haqq al-makhluq fi al-i'tiqadat) or "the divinity of beliefs."
- When "God lifts the veil from between Himself and His servant," the servant "sees Him in the form of his belief (ṣūrat muʿtaqadihi)."
- "The one who contemplates (al-nāẓir) God creates in himself, through his contemplation, what he believes (yaʿtaqiduhu). For he has only worshiped a god he created by his contemplation; he said to it 'Be!,' so it was." (The Meccan Openings)
- In the Fusus he links this to the divine saying: "I am as the thought My servant has of Me."
- The projected form is limited but not unreal, since through it God discloses Himself: "divine self-manifestation in the forms of beliefs."
Rumi (d. 1273) expounds the same hadith in the voice of God: "Whatever each of them imagines Me to be, that I am."
1.3 How "belief" became "religion"
Nicholson himself first set the equation. In his 1911 preface he grouped Ibn Arabi's "principal theories" under three headings: God and the World, God and Man, and Religion. Under Religion he wrote that "no form of positive religion contains more than a portion of the truth," and quoted, without reference, a passage from the Fusus: "Do not attach yourself," Ibn al-ʿArabī says, "to any particular creed exclusively, so that you disbelieve in all the rest." He added that "It is vain to quarrel about religion," and quoted again: "Everyone praises what he believes; his god is his own creature, and in praising it he praises himself."
From there the slide from beliefs to religions passed easily onto Schuon's "transcendent unity of religions." Eric Geoffroy wrote in 2010 that "all beliefs, and therefore all religions, are true because each is a response to the manifestation of a divine Name." Guenon in 1945 saw in the heart "capable of every form" an adept who has "penetrated to the principal unity of all the traditions."
Three earlier scholars did the decisive work:
- A. E. Affifi (1939), Nicholson's doctoral student, wrote that Ibn Arabi's "universal religion" includes "all religions," that his monism, which he (mistakenly, in Affifi's view) "calls Islam," is "the embodiment of all religions and beliefs," and that the line "People have formed different beliefs about God, / And I behold all that they believe" sums it up.
- Henry Corbin (1958) rendered i'tiqadat as croyances, a word closer to historical faiths than to conceptual beliefs: "to the gnostic all faiths [croyances] are theophanic visions in which he contemplates the Divine Being."
- Toshihiko Izutsu, in Sufism and Taoism, openly declares his debt to Corbin's "dialogue dans la métahistorire" and his hope for a philosophia perennis, since "the philosophical drive of the human Mind is, regardless of ages, places and nations, ultimately and fundamentally one."
Izutsu explores Ibn Arabi's recurring claim that "it is only God who is worshipped in every worshiped object." Lipton calls Ibn Arabi's position "theomonistic," which he defines as "the comprehension of the divine through the nondual prism of a universal being that is self-manifesting within both creation and human consciousness." For Ibn Arabi this unity of worship rests on his inspired reading of Qur'an 17:23, Your Lord has decreed that you worship none but Him, as God's predetermined will, obeyed by all regardless of intention, a reading he admits runs against its normal sense as a command. The Fusus puts it this way: "Every worshiper dubs their object of worship a 'god,' although its particular name might be 'stone,' 'wood,' 'animal,' 'human,' 'star,' or 'angel.'" In reality, the passage continues, the object is "only a particular self-manifestation of the Real (al-ḥaqq) to the consciousness of the worshiper."
Izutsu goes further: it is Ibn Arabi's "unshakeable conviction that all religions are ultimately one because every religion worships the Absolute in a very particular and limited way." Lipton's reply: Ibn Arabi may have held that there is one "eternal Religion," but it does not follow that he held all historical religions to be constitutive of it, nor that he equated God with religion. Izutsu reaches his conclusion by translation. He renders 'aqida as "religion" with the gloss "religion as a system of dogmas," and i'tiqadat, which in Ibn Arabi always means beliefs, as "religions," and so smuggles in the modern idea that religion is defined by privately held beliefs.
1.4 Din as obedience, law and recompense
Ibn Arabi does not present din, the nearest Arabic word to "religion," as a set of beliefs. He defines it, in line with premodern usage, as obedience (inqiyad). The chapter on Jacob in the Fusus opens:
What is unusual is his account of the ontology of obedience. "The divine command (al-amr) demands obedience." Since God's command is absolute, both obedience and transgression are islam, submission. Lipton lays out three levels:
| Level | Who determines the outcome |
|---|---|
| Outward (zahir) | God responds to the servant's act by rewarding, pardoning or punishing, so in a sense God "obeys" the act |
| Secret or inward (sirr, batin) | The essences (dhawat) of human beings determine whether they obey or transgress; God is passive |
| "The secret that is even beyond this" | Since contingent beings come from nonexistence, "there is no existence except the existence of the Real (al-ḥaqq)": only God obeys, transgresses, rewards and punishes |
What keeps these shifting relations in play on earth is the sharia, the nexus of divine rulings for each prophetic dispensation. "The servant institutes religion (al-dīn), while the Real (al-ḥaqq) establishes the rulings (al-aḥkām)." And religion "is recompense (al-jazāʾ)." Some forms of obedience bring the reward of happiness and some do not, so only paths of worship prescribed by revelation are salvific. The Meccan Openings states it directly: everyone in the end aims at God, but "The one who associates partners with God (al-mushrik) is only mistaken because he has set up for himself a particular way that was not prescribed to him from a revealed portion of the Divine Truth (al-ḥaqq). So, he is wretched (shaqī) on account of that."
Ibn Arabi's own commentary on The Interpreter says the same: every community seeks salvation, and "all condemnation that occurs between different religious communities and sects is because of the way that leads to salvation but not regarding it itself." Communities on the wrong path are not to blame, since their deviance comes from a predetermined ignorance, but their paths are not equally valid. This is why Ibn Arabi prefers to speak of religion in the plural as "revealed laws" (shara'i') rather than "religions" (adyan): the rulings that change with each dispensation are the criterion of obedience.
1.5 The hadith of transmutation and its omitted opening
Ibn Arabi's scriptural proof text for the divine "transmutation in form" is a hadith in Sahih Muslim. On the Day of Resurrection God appears to those who worshipped Him in a form they do not recognize, and they deny Him until "He has transmuted into His form within which they saw Him the first time." Of the two main narrations, by Abu Hurayra and by Abu Sa'id al-Khudri, only al-Khudri's contains this phrase.
Lipton points to what is "conspicuously left out of every discussion" he has seen. Al-Khudri's narration opens by recapitulating Qur'an 9:30. The Jews and the Christians are summoned and asked what they worshipped; they answer 'Uzayr and the Messiah, each as "son of God"; they are branded liars and fall into the Fire. Only those who "worshiped God, the righteous and the wicked" remain to witness the theophanies. Ibn Arabi quotes this narration in The Meccan Openings without comment on its consignment of the People of the Book to Hell. His tacit acceptance shows his discourse "comfortably circumscribed within the theological boundaries of its foundational tradition."
Elsewhere he says the "words of disbelief" return to afflict those who spoke them, and that "such is the case with the disbelief (al-kufr) and blasphemy (al-sabb) spoken by the Jews and Christians with respect to God." He also defines disbelief as particularization:
The preceding verse, Qur'an 5:17, calls the deification of Jesus disbelief, and the Fusus cites it in rejecting the doctrine of incarnation (hulul): those who made Jesus God "conceal God who (in reality) gives life to the dead in the human form of Jesus." Ibn Arabi's position on the Trinity is more ambivalent, but such polemic led Tim Winter to say that the idea of a pluralism "acceptable in late modern Europe seems to ignore both the nature of religion in the medieval world and the specific teachings of the Shaykh himself."
1.6 The attainment passage and Qur'an 3:84
Reza Shah-Kazemi is Lipton's main example of the universalist reading today. In Paths to Transcendence he reads the verses as showing the religions as "so many forms of the supra-formal," and in The Spirit of Tolerance in Islam he says Ibn Arabi "is simply transcribing, in poetic and mystical mode, the essential message of the Qur'ān as regards the religious Other." He links this to Qur'an 3:84, which Lipton translates: "Say: we have faith in God and what has been sent down upon us, and in what was sent down upon Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, and the tribes (of Israel), and in what was given to Moses, Jesus, and the prophets from their Lord; we do not distinguish between any of them, and to Him we are of those who submit (muslimūn)."
Shah-Kazemi is right that Ibn Arabi received this verse as the culmination of his journey. In one of his two ascension narratives in The Meccan Openings, after retracing Muhammad's night journey and ascension through the seven heavens to "the lote tree of the furthest boundary," he claims God "sent down" the verse upon him: "So in this verse, He gave me all of the verses and brought the affair home to me, and He made this verse the key to all knowledge for me." Shah-Kazemi concludes that Ibn Arabi "understood that there is no distinction between the prophets at the highest level of religion, and also that the respective revelations vouchsafed them are consequently all to be accepted as valid." That claim, Lipton notes, carries much of the Perennialist case. But what Ibn Arabi says next overturns it:
Lipton reads it in what Norman O. Brown called "the apocalyptic style," the whole in every part. The relative pronoun man, "those who," shows that Ibn Arabi claims to be the sum of the prophets named in 3:84, not to validate their revelations one by one. "Instead of asserting any kind of interreligious validity, Ibn 'Arabi here clearly describes a rather forceful vision of subsumption."
1.7 Comprehensiveness and the Logos
The phrase "comprehensive words" comes from hadith narrated by Abu Hurayra; its usual sense, from a parallel hadith, is that God combined for the Prophet in one saying or two the many sayings written in earlier books. In Ibn Arabi it becomes cosmic: the words of God are not exhausted, "so Muhammad was given knowledge of that which does not end," a divine attribute, so that "he is the tongue of the Real, His hearing, and His sight, and this is the highest of divine ranks." The comprehensive words signify the knowledge of Muhammad as the human embodiment of the Muhammadan Reality, the "Light of Muhammad."
The Fusus makes the same point early on: "Every single prophet from Adam to the Final Prophet takes only from the niche of the Seal of the Prophets (khātam al-nabiyyīn), even though his physical existence comes last." Each of its twenty-seven chapters is named for a divine wisdom tied to a "word" manifested by a prophet who is himself a manifestation of the Muhammadan Reality. When God taught Adam the names (Qur'an 2:31), "Muhammad already had knowledge of the comprehensive words—and all of the names (of God) are from the words." Muhammad is thus the archetype of the Perfect Human Being and the cosmic pole (qutb).
Affifi called this "the first Muslim Logos-doctrine" and distinguished the Muhammadan Reality from the historical Prophet. Ibn Arabi blurs that line. He combines 'A'isha's report that Muhammad "was the character of the Qur'an," the Qur'anic description of both as "tremendous," and the Hanbali tenet that the Qur'an is God's attribute, and exclaims: "It is as though the Qur'an assumed the bodily form called Muhammad." Cyrus Zargar shows that the "religion of love" parallels the Persian School of Passionate Love and its witnessing of the human form; for Ibn Arabi "the greatest witnessing of existence is that which is most comprehensive," and the human being is the supreme mirror in which God sees Himself. Muhammad, the perfect locus of the names, is the most comprehensive of all.
1.8 Reinterpreting The Interpreter
The Interpreter was written in the erotic style of the Arabic love lyric (nasib) in honour of Nizam, apparently the learned daughter of a scholar Ibn Arabi befriended in Mecca. When eyebrows rose, he wrote a metaphysical commentary, The Treasury of Lovers (Dhakha'ir al-a'laq), to show its hidden allusions. Nicholson translated only "the interesting and important passages," dismissing the commentary's "far-fetched verbal analogies" and adding that Arabs were "apt to exaggerate details at the expense of the whole," a typical Orientalist racialism.
Chittick's article "The Religion of Love Revisited" re-examined the commentary and concluded that the Religion of Love "is not quite what most people imagine it to be": "more than anything else it is a program of action, that of putting the Sunna into practice." Lipton accepts this as an account of Sufi praxis, but looks at another level, the discourse of power: the verses "pay tribute to the creative power of Muhammad and the ontological triumph of his reality."
What the commentary says, image by image:
| Image in the verse | Ibn Arabi's gloss in The Treasury of Lovers |
|---|---|
| convent for Christian monks | The heart is like a convent where monks worship |
| temple for idols | "the realities (al-ḥaqāʾiq) sought by humanity, who exist internally, and through whom God is worshiped"; the poetic topos of "infidelity" (kufriyyat) going back to al-Hallaj (d. 922) |
| the pilgrim's Ka'ba | The heart encircled by "celestial spirits," given angelic insight |
| Tables of the Tora | A heart inscribed with the Hebraic sciences of Moses |
| book of the Koran | "Since his heart inherited the perfected Muhammadan knowledges (al-maʿārif al-muḥammadiyya al-kamāliyya), he made them into a book, and he established them within the station of the Qur'an because Muhammad attained the station of 'I was given the comprehensive words' (ūtītu jawāmiʿ al-kalim)." |
The temple for idols invokes the god created in the beliefs: people "only worship what they believe (iʿtaqadū) pertaining to the Truth (al-ḥaqq), worshiping merely a creation (makhlūq)," and so "there is none but the worshiper of idols (fa-mā thamma illā ʿābid wuthun)." Chittick explains that the god of my belief keeps me in my station; "Progress on the path to God demands negating the gods of all beliefs while recognizing their limited utility." The Qur'an, significantly, comes last in the list and stands for the perfected comprehensiveness of Muhammad.
"I follow the religion of Love"
Ibn Arabi ties this line to Qur'an 3:31, "Say: If you love God, follow me, then God will love you," traditionally read as Muhammad inviting idolaters, Jews or Christians to Islam. He explains that the lover meets the burdens of the beloved with contentment, and that there is no religion higher "than a religion founded upon love and longing." Then comes the passage Nicholson neglected:
Nicholson had rendered "Muhammadans" as "Moslems." Chittick explains that the Muhammadans are "the perfect human beings par excellence," who stand in "the station of no station" (maqam la maqam). Sells took this to mean those who "refuse to bind themselves to any one prophetic wisdom," and faulted Schimmel for identifying the religion of the verses with Islam. Lipton answers that the three epithets, chosen, confidant and friend, are the traditional attributes of Adam, Moses and Abraham. Muhammad's "perfect love" embodies all the meanings of the earlier prophets. So rather than refusing every prophetic wisdom, the station of perfect love "subsumes all prophetic wisdom in the name of Muhammad himself." If Sells is to be read generously, one must add: except the wisdom of Muhammad, which in Ibn Arabi's language-game is the revelation of Islam as the final dispensation of the religion of Abraham.
The phrase "his heirs are on his way" parallels the inheritance claims in the commentary on the Koran line and in the attainment passage. Right after calling Muhammad "the niche" of all prophetic knowledge, the Fusus says the Seal of the Saints was likewise "a saint while Adam was between water and clay," one who "takes from the Origin and is the witness (al-mushāhid) of all degrees (of reality)." In Chittick's words, the Muhammadan "passes from station to station, never losing a positive attribute after having gained it," and "Having reached the highest station, he owns all stations."
1.9 A heart capable of every form
The commentary on the opening line says the heart, qalb, is so called "because of its constant transformation (taqallub)," and continues: "the heart diversifies (yatanawwuʿ) according to the diverse inrushes (tanawwuʿ wāridāt) upon it," which follow its states, which follow "the diversity of divine self-manifestations (al-tajalliyāt al-ilāhiyya) in accord with its secret (sirr)." The Meccan Openings uses the image of a glass cup: as God is "every day upon some affair" (Q. 55:29), the lover changes with the Beloved, "just as the polished and transparent glass cup is diversified according to the diversity of the liquid in it. So, the color of the lover is the color of his Beloved." The commentary ends by saying the revealed tradition calls this diversification "transmutation (al-taḥawwul) and continual change (al-tabaddul) in the forms," a direct reference to al-Khudri's hadith.
The Shu'ayb chapter of the Fusus completes the picture: "Neither the heart nor the eye witnesses anything of the Real (al-ḥaqq) except the form of its own belief." Then: "the one who releases Him from limitation will never deny Him, and thus affirms Him in every form He Himself transmutes (yataḥawwalu) into." Elsewhere: "there are only beliefs and all are correct (muṣīb)," and whoever truly understood Junayd's saying "the color of water is the color of its vessel" would "grant every believer their belief and perceive God in every form and every belief." Hence the famous warning, in Lipton's translation:
Izutsu: "Beware of being bound up by a particular religion [ʿaqd] and rejecting all others as unbelief!" ... "God is wider and greater than to be confined to one particular religion [ʿaqd] to the exclusion of others."
Izutsu's rendering is "severely misleading," since 'aqd means knotting God in a conceptual form, not the modern Protestant idea of religion as a system of beliefs. "The theomonistic prohibition of not limiting God to a particular conceptual form is very different than the contemporary universalist prohibition of not limiting salvation to a particular religious form." To merge them is to deify every religion as a manifestation of God, a basic Schuonian axiom; Nasr summarizes Schuon: "Each religion comes from the Absolute and possesses an archetype which determines its earthly reality." Shah-Kazemi once replaced Izutsu's "religion" with "creed," but still concluded that for Ibn Arabi "there is but one religion, which comprises diverse modes of revelation and different rulings," echoing Schuon's claim that "what determines the difference among forms of Truth is the difference among human receptacles."
1.10 An ontology of God, not of religion
So when Ibn Arabi claims a heart "capable of every form," he is claiming, as Seal of the Saints, Muhammad's comprehensive capacity to witness all the names, meanings and forms that make up the divine "form." Corbin calls this "the passage from the dogmatic religion of the 'God created in the faiths' to the religion of the gnostic," projecting the modern conflation. Schimmel saw instead the "highest self-praise."
The hadith "God created Adam upon His own form" underlies a parallel poem in Revelations in Mosul:
He goes on, "I am everything with Him!" and "When I claim that I am a lord (rabb), God lets down (asdala) his veils (sutūrahu) over my face!" but immediately: "Yet, His law (sharʿuhu) comes and addresses my very essence (dhātī)." Ibn Arabi, Lipton says, "is no al-Hallaj." Carl Ernst shows that Hallajian infidelity insisted on the full legal consequences, hence Hallaj's self-blame and desire for martyrdom. Ibn Arabi instead holds the two in tension, and even claims that for one like him there is no tension: "If someone like me says 'I am a lord,' / Oh my friend—is that a major sin (kabīra)? / No, it is my right, for He and I are one!"
In the Fusus, the Seal of the Saints as "Saint-Heir" (al-wali al-warith) holds only one of the perfections of Muhammad, the "Saint-Messenger-Prophet." The outward law, with its absolutism, is integral to Ibn Arabi's hierarchy. His claim to a heart "capable of every form" is a claim "to inherit the unique comprehensive perfection of the Prophet Muhammad as God's singular beloved," a subsumption of all revealed knowledge and an assertion of "the spiritual sovereignty of Muhammad."
- The verses are usually read with "belief" silently replaced by "religion."
- For Ibn Arabi, din is obedience, law and recompense; only prescribed paths bring felicity.
- The divinity of beliefs targets rival theologies, and its proof text consigns Jews and Christians to the Fire.
- Qur'an 3:84 leads Ibn Arabi not to parity among revelations but to the claim that he is "the sum total" of the prophets, heir to Muhammad's comprehensiveness.
- "There are only beliefs and all are correct," yet no single belief holds the whole of God; only one of "perfect composition" encompasses all beliefs, the Muhammadan heart.
The chapter's conclusion asks whether we are reading The Interpreter of Desires or "the Desires of the Interpreter." Ibn Arabi wrote these passages "not to celebrate the religions of Others, but to enunciate God's absolute sovereignty." The conflation of God as the only worshipped with religion as the process of worship has produced the "strong misreading" that he claimed the unity of all religions. That encompassment, moreover, "plays out within a particular political cosmography," and it is toward this, Lipton writes, "that our camels now must turn."
Part 2. Return of the Solar King
Chapter 2 takes up the most contested question in modern readings of Ibn Arabi and other religions: did he hold that Islam abrogated Judaism and Christianity? Lipton argues that he did, and that the famous image of the sun and the stars, often quoted to prove the opposite, belongs to a poem about a conquering king.
2.1 The letter to Kayka'us
The epigraph is from Ernst Kantorowicz: "Political mysticism . . . is exposed to the danger of losing its spell or becoming quite meaningless when taken out of its native surroundings, its time and its space."
In 1212 Ibn Arabi wrote to the newly enthroned Seljuk sultan of Anatolia, 'Izz al-Din Kayka'us I (r. 1211-20), advising him not to allow his Christian subjects more freedom than the sharia grants the "Protected People" (ahl al-dhimma). He urged the king to "take care lest some day I find you among the most debased of Muslim leaders," rebuked him for violating divine limits, and warned him not to mistake God's "respite" (imhal) for "inattention" (ihmal). Then he turned to the kingdom:
Ibn Arabi then repeats a version of the Pact of 'Umar, a document of debated authenticity that grants protection in exchange for restrictions marking the subordinate status of non-Muslims. His list includes:
- "the prohibition of establishing in the city or the surrounding area a church, convent, cell, or hermitage for monks";
- bans on imitating Muslim dress, using Muslim names, riding on saddles, bearing arms, displaying crosses and loud liturgy before Muslims;
- that they "should not manifest associationism";
- distinguishing marks (ghiyar): "they must trim their forelocks, keep their manner of dress the same wherever they are, and fasten girdles (zanānīr) around their waists";
- the warning that if any stipulation is broken, "there is no protection for them and it is permitted for the Muslims to deal with them as people of rebellion and sedition";
- and a disputed hadith: "In Islam, there is no building of churches and no repairing what has fallen into ruin from them."
How the letter has been handled
| Reader | Treatment |
|---|---|
| R. W. J. Austin | Shows "the nonmystical side of his character" |
| Claude Addas | Though he "did recognize the validity of all creeds," he was aware, in dark days, that Christianity threatened Islam |
| William Chittick | Never addresses it; holds that the Sufis "had to take into account the beliefs of their contemporaries," and that Ibn Arabi rejects abrogation |
| Miguel Asin Palacios (d. 1944) | "political hatred for the Christians" |
| Carl-A. Keller | The "tragedy" of his faithfulness to Islam |
| Giuseppe Scattolin | A "simplified and reductive" mysticism; the Pact underlies Islamist discourse today |
Apologists and critics, Lipton observes, share a presupposition: that a true mystic is a universalist who celebrates the Other and avoids worldly politics. The critics are all Christian clergy; the apologists explain the letter away. Lipton's thesis is that the letter is no comedown from a sublime spirituality. It belongs to a metaphysics that is itself political, with "the solar image of the Prophet Muhammad as cosmic king around whom the entire universe turns" at its centre. Ibn Arabi's universalism "is entirely dependent upon a specific political cosmography without which it ceases to be coherent."
A practical reason for the neglect is that The Meccan Openings, 560 chapters in thirty-seven volumes in Ibn Arabi's revised manuscript, has never been fully translated. Its order, Chodkiewicz says, was inspired but "an intangible order." As with the Qur'an, keys to a theme are scattered across the whole, and one chapter may show only the tip of the iceberg.
2.2 Hodgson, Smith and the Western idea of mysticism
Marshall Hodgson (d. 1968) resisted "the usual Westernistic image of world history" and gave the sharia its due in Ibn Arabi, well ahead of his time. Yet he carried a depoliticized, universalist idea of "mystical" experience. In The Venture of Islam he names two types of piety:
| Kerygmatic piety | Mystical piety | |
|---|---|---|
| Orientation | History, society, the proclamation of prophetic fulfilment | "subjective inward awarenesses emerging as the selfhood matured" |
| Attitude to others | "moral exclusivity": earlier revelations "all quite hopelessly corrupted" | The political role of the Umma plays "a minimal role" |
| Representatives | Traditional Muslim piety; Ghazali bridges both | Ibn Arabi and Suhrawardi (d. 1191): "neither was historically minded" |
Hodgson wrote that for Ibn Arabi and Suhrawardi "their universe was essentially timeless, as was their religion." Lipton traces this view of mysticism as inward experience to Augustine's "interior life," the Reformation's stress on the individual, and the early modern separation of religion from politics. William Cavanaugh shows that the "wars of religion" were fought by state-building elites, and that the myth of religious violence became a "creation myth for modernity," legitimating the state and making mysticism an internal refuge from the political. Wilfred Cantwell Smith's 1957 description of Sufism almost serves as a template: it "stresses the individual rather than society, the eternal rather than the historical, God's love rather than His power, and the state of man's heart rather than behavior."
2.3 The political moment of exclusion
Omid Safi has challenged this Protestant lens. Medieval Persian Sufis were "intimately involved in the task of using their sanctity to rearrange, improve, challenge, and remain responsible for the affairs of the visible universe," holding both wilaya (power) and walaya (intimacy with God). Lipton's argument, though, is not about Ibn Arabi's political influence as such. It is that the metaphysics cannot be decoupled from its medieval socio-political frame.
Addas holds that "in the corpus of Ibn ʿArabī's works we never find him adopting a political position," noting his silence on the surrender of Jerusalem to the Christians in 1229 by al-Kamil (d. 1238) and on the betrayal of al-Nasir Dawud (d. 1258) by al-Ashraf (d. 1237). Lipton replies that this defines the political too narrowly, as statecraft. Chantal Mouffe sees the political as "a dimension that is inherent to every human society and that determines our very ontological condition," since "the condition of existence of every identity is the affirmation of a difference." Unlike Schmitt, she does not need war's possibility to ground the friend and enemy distinction. Hugh Nicholson sums it up: social identity "presupposes, in other words, a political moment of exclusion." That moment, Lipton says, is nowhere clearer in Ibn Arabi than in abrogation.
2.4 The aporia of abrogation
Shah-Kazemi proposes Ibn Arabi as "a useful Sufi means of overcoming" the "traditional legal notion of the abrogation of other religions by Islam." Abrogation (naskh) usually means one Qur'anic ruling superseding another; here it means one dispensation cancelling another, as medieval Christians held Christianity superseded Judaism. John Burton: "To Muslim scholars, the abrogation of Judaism and Christianity by Islam was obvious."
Ibn Arabi's milieu shared this view. Ghazali held abrogation to be divine will. Even the irenic al-Shahrastani (d. 1153) ended his Nihayat al-aqdam with a classic statement: "Each revealed law is abrogative (nāsikha) and clothes itself in another form until it ends at the perfection of all of the revealed laws, and they are all sealed by the Seal of the Prophets." Ibn Barrajan (d. 1141) of Seville was "a firm believer in the dogma of 'supersessionism'," for whom other religions "are devoid of salvific efficacy."
Chittick's reading and its proof text
Chittick argues from Qur'an 3:84 that "the universality of religious truth is an article of Islamic faith" and that Ibn Arabi "frequently affirms the validity of religions other than Islam." Ibn Arabi indeed writes that an earlier law "is a true revelation for those to whom it was addressed. We do not say that it is false (bāṭil)." But to read this as contemporaneous validity is, Lipton says, "a category mistake."
In Faith and Practice of Islam (1992) Chittick translated a Persian treatise from the earliest school of Ibn Arabi, by Sadr al-Din Qunawi (d. 1274) or, more likely in Chittick's view, Nasir al-Din Qunawi. It says plainly: "And now of those Shariahs, only the authority of our own Prophet's Shariah—which has abrogated the other Shariahs—remains on the face of the earth." Chittick set this aside as closer to the theologians, and argued that Islam's all-inclusiveness "proves that other religions have not been abrogated. If they were, how could they be part of Islam?" His proof text is from chapter 339 of The Meccan Openings:
Chittick reused this passage in Imaginal Worlds (1994) and elsewhere, glossing it: "Just as the stars remain when the sun rises, so also the other religions remain valid when Islam appears." Since 9/11 it has become a standard proof text. Yet it contains an aporia: it affirms abrogation and then denies that abrogation nullifies. Chittick's conclusions, Lipton says, "are merely instances of special pleading."
In 1996 the American Sufi shaykh Nuh Keller pointed out that Chittick had left out the passage's continuation:
This clearly implies supersession. But the aporia remains: why does the same passage say that earlier laws "did not turn into falsehood by being abrogated"?
2.5 Chapter 12: the cosmology of abrogation
The answer lies in chapter 12 of The Meccan Openings, whose title reads: "On Knowledge of the Rotation of the Celestial Sphere (dawrat falak) of our Master Muhammad, blessings and peace be upon him, which is the Rotation of Dominion (dawrat al-siyāda)." Its last clause, "Time has Returned (istadāra) to its Original Condition," comes from a hadith of the Farewell Pilgrimage, where Muhammad banned intercalation (al-nasi'), the pre-Islamic shifting of sacred months, and so restored the calendar to primordial time. Ibn Arabi takes this to a cosmic extreme. The reality of the Prophet becomes the axis around which the seven heavens turn, each with its command (Qur'an 41:12). Muhammad is "king (malik) and master (sayyid) while Adam was still between water and clay." The prologue concludes:
The decisive text concerns the fourth heaven, the sphere of the Sun: "And from the commanded revelation in the fourth heaven (al-samāʾ al-rābiʿa) is the abrogation (naskh) of all of the (previously) revealed laws (jamīʿ al-sharāʾiʿ) by Muhammad's revealed law (sharīʿa) and the triumph (ẓuhūr) of his religion (dīn) over all of the religions (adyān) of the messengers who preceded him and each revealed book." This is the only place in The Meccan Openings where Ibn Arabi uses the plural adyan, and he does so to express Islam's superiority. He continues:
And then: "So, the (previous ruling) is against the one who has followed it, not for him (fa huwa ʿalā man ittabaʿahu lā lahu)." This, says Ibn Arabi, is the triumph of Muhammad's religion, as the poet al-Nabigha said in his panegyric:
"Indeed, the light of the stars is subsumed (indaraja) within the light of the sun. So, the day is ours, but the People of the Book only have the night, that is, if 'they offer the indemnity tax (jizya) willingly, in a state of humiliation' [Qur'an 9:29]."
2.6 Qualified subjugation
Read with chapter 12, the chapter 339 image turns out to be an allusion to al-Nabigha al-Dhubyani, one of the six famous pre-Islamic poets. The "ur-passage" shows that all earlier dispensations are rendered invalid "from on high." Yet the legal category of protection (dhimma), made operative by the jizya and its humiliation, allows Jewish and Christian law to continue in an impeded fashion. That is why chapter 339 can say they "are not rendered null [bāṭil] by abrogation." The question is what kind of validity this is, if it functions only as subjugated within the sun of Muhammad's dispensation. Qur'an 9:29, which Ibn Arabi quotes, reads in Lipton's translation: "Fight from among those who were given the Book ... until they offer the indemnity tax willingly, in a state of humiliation (ṣāghirūn)."
Lipton calls this the doctrine of "qualified subjugation," and finds it in several places.
The Companions did not ask the monk which law he followed, Ibn Arabi says, but "the Prophet ... did not confirm anyone in their associationism (shirk)." The worry about shirk shows that he took the question seriously, the same charge he made against the Christians in Kayka'us's lands. Then he generalizes: "If he is one who pays the indemnity tax (al-jizya), we would say that the Muhammadan law (al-sharʿ al-muḥammadī) has confirmed his religion for him as long as he gives the indemnity tax." "Indeed, with Muhammad's appearance the only law that remained was his law, which confirms the People of the Book's law as long as they give the indemnity tax."
All earlier laws were Muhammad's law
In chapter 10, all "the prophets in the world were Muhammad's deputies (nuwwāb) from Adam to the last of the messengers." Muhammad's spiritual presence was with every prophet, so that each law is associated with its messenger, "Yet in reality, each is the revealed law of Muhammad (sharʿ muḥammad)." Abrogation is then explained:
The result, close to Shahrastani, is "a metaphysical tautology": all prophetic laws are in essence Muhammad's law, yet in the end they are abrogated by his final dispensation, except for the protected People of the Book, who keep their law as long as they pay the jizya. When Jesus descends, "he will rule by other than his own law," by "the Muhammadan Law (al-sharʿ al-muḥammadī) as established today."
2.7 The solar king
Ibn Arabi consistently describes Muhammad in the language of rule. Had he been sent in Adam's time, all humanity would be "under the ruling (ḥukm) of his revealed law (sharīʿa) until the Day of Resurrection." Other prophets were sent to particular peoples; only Muhammad was sent universally, because "he is the king (al-malik) and the master (al-sayyid)." "What emerges from all of this," Ibn Arabi concludes, "is that Muhammad is king (malik) and master (sayyid) of all the children of Adam, and that all of those who preceded him were under his dominion (mulk) and his followers (tabaʿ), and those who ruled previously were his deputies (nuwwāb)."
The trope of solar kingship is ancient in the Near East. Franz Cumont describes the Chaldean system in which "astrologers delighted to point to the Royal Sun advancing in the midst of his satellites." Ibn Arabi calls the fourth heaven the "heart of the world and heart of the heavens." In the Idris chapter of the Fusus: "The highest of places is the place around which the millstone (raḥā) of the world of the spheres rotates, and it is the Sphere of the Sun (falak al-shams)." While exaltedness of place belongs to the spiritual station of Idris, "as for exaltedness of the rank (ʿulū al-makāna), it belongs to us—that is, the Muhammadans." Chodkiewicz notes that the model par excellence of the Muhammadan is Ibn Arabi himself, so here he subtly places his own Muhammadan Station within the sphere of the Sun.
More broadly, the true pole is Muhammad: "As for the one (true) pole (al-quṭb al-wāhid), he is the spirit of Muhammad (rūḥ Muḥammad), blessings and peace be upon him, who is the spiritual support (al-mumidd) for all of the prophets and messengers." The sphere of the Sun, the cosmic pole, is aligned with Muhammad as its human fulcrum, which is what the title of chapter 12 means by the "Rotation of Dominion."
A synoptic passage completes the image: "since God made the waystation (manzil) of Muhammad—blessings and peace be upon him—that of lordship (siyāda), he is master (sayyid). He who is other than him is of (his) subjects." Through "a continuous succession of vicegerents" he supported every Perfect Human Being until his birth, when his spiritual reality and physical form met. "When he appeared, it was like the sun subsumed in its light all light." He confirmed from the earlier laws what he confirmed and abrogated what he abrogated; the whole human and fiery world is his community, but his own community is "the best community ever to be brought forth for humanity" (Qur'an 3:110). Muhammad's appearance, returning time to its primordial position, shows Ibn Arabi's view of history as "grounded simultaneously in political difference and ontological wholeness."
2.8 Conclusion: reading the whole corpus
Chittick's chapter 339 passage has founded a post-9/11 interpretive field. At a 2016 conference at George Washington University, Caner Dagli read it in a talk titled "The Quran and the Perennial Philosophy," and quoted Shah-Kazemi: other laws are not "intrinsically incapable of sustaining other communities," and to think abrogation means nullification is the view of "the 'ignorant,' as Ibn ʿArabī calls them." Dagli compared Schuon's many criticisms of Christian doctrines, which in isolation might make him look exclusivist, and concluded: "it's very difficult to turn Ibn 'Arabi into a strict abrogationist and exclusivist if we take his entire body of work into view."
Lipton agrees that the whole body of work must be considered, and that is his point. Taken as a whole, religion in Ibn Arabi is about law, and the religious Other is wholly subsumed within the authority of the Qur'an and the Prophet. The laws of the Protected People are technically invalidated, yet allowed to operate if they pay the jizya "in a state of humiliation." Elsewhere Ibn Arabi says "the Followers of the Books who pay the indemnity tax" (ashab al-kutub bi al-jizya) may reach eternal happiness, but that efficacy depends on obedience to Muhammad's revelation, not on any power of Judaism or Christianity themselves.
- The letter to Kayka'us is not an anomaly but an expression of a political cosmology.
- The sun and stars of chapter 339 echo al-Nabigha's panegyric of a king before whom lesser kings grovel.
- Chapter 12 locates in the fourth heaven the abrogation of all earlier laws and the triumph of Muhammad's religion.
- Earlier laws are not "null" only in the sense that the protected People of the Book may keep them under the jizya.
- This is a "grammar of universal monarchy": "the celebration of mastery over a multiplicity of lesser lords and subject populations."
Mark Cohen observes that medieval Muslims explained the Pact of 'Umar as an elaboration of the command in 9:29 to "humble" the People of the Book. The letter with which the chapter began uses the same triumphant grammar. Reading Ibn Arabi's metaphysics "as transhistorical because transcendent" produces interpretations with wide political implications of their own, and the next chapter examines the Western maps of transcendence behind them.
The chapter's lesson for method is plain. Any single passage of Ibn Arabi, whether a line of love poetry or a sentence about the lights of the revealed religions, has to be read against the whole corpus, including the cosmology of chapter 12 and the letter to Kayka'us. Read together, they show a thinker for whom the inclusion of every earlier law was also its subjugation to the law of Muhammad.
Part 3. Competing Fields of Universal Validity
Chapter 3 turns from Ibn Arabi to his modern readers. It places Schuonian Perennialism in a line of essentialist universalism that runs back to Schleiermacher, shows how it inverts Ibn Arabi's Muhammadan cosmology, and then tests the claim that Ibn Arabi granted other scriptures lasting validity against what he says about their corruption.
3.1 From Guenon to Schuon
Three epigraphs frame the chapter. Schleiermacher asks: "Is there not in all religions more or less of the true nature of religion . . .?" Schuon says that defending a single religion against all others is "a little like wishing to maintain the Ptolemaic system against the evidence of verified and verifiable astronomical data." Bruno Latour adds: "One is not born traditional; one chooses to become traditional by constant innovation."
Writing in 1909 as "Palingénius," Rene Guenon (d. 1951) dismissed the spiritualism of his day as "materialism transposed onto another plane" and proposed instead a quest for gnosis: "true gnosticism cannot be a particular school or system, but must above all be the search for the integral Truth." Its guide was "the orthodox Tradition contained in the sacred books of all peoples," the same everywhere "despite the various forms it takes to adapt to every race and era." This he came to call the Primordial Tradition, a term that later merged with philosophia perennis, sophia perennis and religio perennis.
| Rene Guenon | Frithjof Schuon | |
|---|---|---|
| Upbringing | Strict French Catholic | Lutheran in Basel; converted to Catholicism at fourteen at his dying father's request; read German romanticism |
| Role | "the pioneer" | "the fulfillment"; shaykh of the 'Alawiyya from the end of 1936, later the 'Alawiyya Maryamiyya |
| On Christianity | The church had lost its esoteric connection | Christian initiation valid; even Lutheranism "not intrinsically illegitimate" |
| Tone | Rejection of the "anti-traditional" West | Ecumenism: "the profound agreement between Eastern and Western traditions" |
Of Lutheranism Schuon wrote in 1982: "It cannot be pure heresy. . . . Its priorities are simplicity, inwardness and trust in God; nothing else touched me in my early childhood."
Ibn Arabi as Schuon's ally
Schuon's 1948 Transcendent Unity of Religions is often linked with Ibn Arabi; Eric Geoffroy even calls it an "allusive" presentation of his ideas. Nasr, an initiate of Schuon's order, uses the Interpreter verses to present Sufism as the path to Schuonian unity: "For him all forms become transparent, including religious forms, thus revealing to him their unique origin." In Understanding Islam Schuon himself cites the verses as evidence of "universal orthodoxy," arguing that "if the religions are true it is because each time it is God who has spoken, and if they are different, it is because God has spoken in different 'languages' in conformity with the diversity of the receptacles."
The academic route ran through Nasr's three Harvard books of the mid-1960s, which, as Chittick notes, proved "instrumental in bringing the traditionalist school to the notice of official academia." In Three Muslim Sages Nasr held that all Muslim rapprochement with other religions "can and should be based on the rich foundations prepared by Ibn 'Arabī and Rūmī." James Morris in 1986 named Schuon's essays the best illustration of sensitivity to the rhetorical side of Ibn Arabi's writing, and later noted the "profound effect" of Schuon "in applying the central ideas of Ibn 'Arabī to articulating (but in the long run also deeply shaping)" modern understandings of spiritual life, an influence "rarely mentioned publicly . . ., but is to be found virtually everywhere."
Lipton's charge is that Shah-Kazemi and others use Chittick's translations to present an image of Ibn Arabi that leaves out his polemical discourse. Perennialists will answer that his metaphysics transcends history; Lipton holds that this transhistorical approach "essentializes and depoliticizes" ideas that are "fully inscribed by the discursive locality of their historical origins."
3.2 The transcendent religious a priori
Nasr's 1972 essay "Islam and the Encounter of Religions" set the agenda: the "essential problem" is "how to preserve religious truth, traditional orthodoxy, the dogmatic theological structures of one's own religion and yet gain knowledge of other traditions and accept them as spiritually valid ways and roads to God." To validate "all religion as such," Nasr, following Schuon, must posit a transcendent a priori, perennial wisdom, which he identifies with Ibn Arabi's "religion of love."
Comparisons with John Hick tend to collapse into theology, since Perennialists cast their position as "traditional" against Hick's modern pluralism. Adnan Aslan, for instance, finds Nasr hard to place in Western philosophy and says that "the traditional point of view is not traditional in the sense that traditional people understood it." Lipton finds this circular. Schuon and Hick share a modern "Copernican revolution" from one true religion to many valid religious worlds. They differ in that Hick's Real is unknowable, so all religious claims are partly false human constructions, while Schuon's divine is knowable through gnosis, so each conflicting claim is "providential" and relatively true.
Schleiermacher and Schuon
The nearest modern precursor, Lipton argues, is Friedrich Schleiermacher (d. 1834), despite the antipathy of Guenon and Schuon to liberal Protestantism. Wilfred Cantwell Smith called Schleiermacher's On Religion (1799) "the first book ever written on religion as such." Rejecting Kant's reduction of religion to reason and morality, Schleiermacher refused the idea of a single "natural religion" and held that "the positive religions are just the definite forms in which religion must exhibit itself." For him "every particular, positive religion was ultimately founded upon the Religion of the infinite."
| Element | Schleiermacher | Schuon |
|---|---|---|
| The essence | "religion as such," the religious a priori | "religion as such," the religio perennis |
| Why many religions | One truth "apprehended" differently: "no one will have his own true and right religion, if it is the same for all" | "what determines the difference among forms of Truth is the difference among human receptacles" |
| Mode of knowing | "Intuition" (Anschauung), later "feeling" (Gefuhl): "to have religion is to have an intuition of the Universe" | "gnosis," a "supra-rational 'heart-knowledge'"; "supraformal intuition" |
| Status of doctrine | Symbols that give coherence; two systems "can both be valid expressions of the experience of ultimate mystery" | "the absoluteness of the Revelation is absolute in itself, but relative in its form" |
| Contradiction | Transcended by differing apprehension | Transcended by differing receptacles; Christianity orthodox in itself yet heterodox for Judaism |
Nasr states the Schuonian position openly: Schuon "defends Christianity as orthodox in itself while being heterodox from the point of view of Jewish orthodoxy." This runs against the law of noncontradiction, that "the same thing cannot be both x and not-x at the same time and in the same way," which normative theology assumes. Schleiermacher's version reads: "The whole of religion is nothing but the sum of all relations of man to God, apprehended in all the possible ways in which any man can be immediately conscious in his life." The structure of the argument, Lipton concludes, "is identical."
George Lindbeck calls such models "experiential-expressivism": religions as diverse expressions of "a common core experience," which Lonergan describes as "the dynamic state of being in love without restrictions." Nasr's "love" as "the realized aspect of gnosis" fits the pattern. And for the model to hold, symbols must be at once valid and contradictory. Schuon: "with God, truth lies above all in the symbol's effective power of enlightenment and not in its literalness," and "for God truth is above all in the efficacy of the symbol and not in the 'bare fact.'"
3.3 Many suns: a Copernican turn
After his chapter 339 gloss, that "Just as the stars remain when the sun rises, so also the other religions remain valid," Chittick adds in Imaginal Worlds: "One can add a point that perhaps Ibn 'Arabī would also accept: What appears as a sun from one point of view may be seen as a star from another point of view." This apparently small coda proposes a paradigm shift that would invert Ibn Arabi's cosmology: from one triumphant Muhammadan Sun to a pluralist universe of many prophetic suns. Its closest early modern echo is the cosmic pluralism of Giordano Bruno (d. 1600).
Nasr wrote in 1986 that Schuon "has written over and over again on . . . how the sun of each religious cosmos is for that cosmos the sun while being a star in that spiritual firmament which symbolizes the Divine Infinity." Schuon's Gnosis: Divine Wisdom gives the image:
Whether Chittick's remark alludes to Schuon or Nasr or merely echoes them matters little; the symmetry shows him reading Ibn Arabi "within the same Schuonian interpretive field."
Shah-Kazemi builds on Chittick's reading in most of his publications. For him, Islam's abrogation of other religions means only that Islam "takes precedence over them, it 'supersedes' them, in the literal sense of 'sitting above' them," so that Ibn Arabi "transforms the whole doctrine of abrogation from being a basis for the rejection of other religions into a decisive argument for the validity of the other religions." Following one's own law, he says, can coexist with "accepting the intrinsic validity of another 'way' which permits those same things." This, Lipton observes, grafts Schuon's model onto Ibn Arabi: the "spiritual efficacy" of each religion, symbols as relative "points of reference," and God who "always commits Himself to a given form sufficiently but never exclusively." Shah-Kazemi even describes Ibn Arabi enacting "the external prescriptions of the Law . . . as symbols," which relativizes Islamic law and lets all laws, however conflicting, be equally valid.
3.4 The question of scriptural corruption
Additional evidence, not presented by Chittick or Shah-Kazemi, shows this position "to be clearly untenable." Shah-Kazemi says that the knowledge that all religions are united in essence was "crystallized" in Ibn Arabi's consciousness by Qur'an 3:84, and that "the universal validity of religion as such was established for Ibn Arabi in his spiritual ascent." As Chapter 1 showed, the ascent ends instead in a vision of subsumption: Ibn Arabi as "the sum total" of the prophets.
In the medieval frame, continuity of revelation means a continual renewal of the one true religion. Norman O. Brown describes it: "the one true prophet, from age to age, from the beginning of the world; Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Christ, Muhammad." The tradition "gets de-formed and has to be re-formed." Jane McAuliffe notes that classical exegetes understood "true" Christians as those who saw in their scripture "a prefiguration of the final Prophet." All the books come from one heavenly source, the "mother of the book" (umm al-kitab), but the Qur'an says some Jews were guilty of tahrif (corruption, alteration) and tabdil (substitution).
| Position on tahrif | Meaning | Who holds it in the book's account |
|---|---|---|
| Corruption of meaning (tahrif al-ma'ani) | The text survives intact; its interpretation was distorted, so the meaning can be recovered | Most scholars before Ibn Hazm; implied by Shah-Kazemi and Chittick |
| Corruption of the text (tahrif al-nass) | The text itself was altered and the original lost | Ibn Hazm (d. 1064); al-Tabari (d. 923) in a version; Ibn Arabi, on Lipton's reading; al-Jili |
| Both | Ibn Barrajan (d. 1141) |
Shah-Kazemi argues that the Qur'an gives only one instance of actual alteration (4:46), and that its criticism of the People of the Book "does not extend to the sources of their tradition, sources which retain their value." Chittick, less transparent about the debate, writes that "Since all revealed religions are true in principle, the particular circumstances that lead one to suspect that they have been corrupted may change," which only makes sense if the corruption is of meaning. Huston Smith goes further: the great religions "have survived for millennia, which is what we would expect if they are divinely powered," a circular proof.
The rivers at the lote tree
Ibn Arabi can sound like a Perennialist. In his allegorical first ascension, at the lote tree of the furthest boundary, he sees a great river, the Qur'an, from which issue three lesser rivers, the Torah, Psalms and Gospel, and then the lesser revealed pages. Whoever drinks from any river inherits its prophet, for "all are true, since they are the words of God." But he continues:
The hadith shows he means the Muslim ulama. In the Fusus, the inheritance "is none other than the ulama's use of legal reasoning to arrive at rulings and thus legislate them." As with Ibn Barthamla, an heir of an earlier prophet still follows Muhammad's law. Morris calls this Ibn Arabi's "spiritual literalism," his insistence on the coincidence between the literal revealed formulations and their spiritual truth; Itzchak Weismann describes his thought as "a meticulous, though unbound by reason, literal interpretation of the scriptures." Nowhere, Lipton says, is this literalism clearer than on naskh and tahrif.
3.5 The shadow of Ibn Hazm
In an early dream Ibn Arabi saw Ibn Hazm (d. 1064) embracing the Prophet in a cloud of light, and he went on to study and copy his works. Their jurisprudence differs, but where Ibn Arabi adopted Zahiri method he did so to give Muslims ease by preserving their freedom within divine prescription. For Ibn Hazm the literal meaning holds unless there is clear indication otherwise, and, as Adam Sabra puts it, "when a word has more than one meaning, one must not restrict it to one meaning. All possible meanings are valid, provided they do not result in a logical absurdity." Chodkiewicz says of Ibn Arabi that "rigorous fidelity to the letter of Revelation does not exclude but, on the contrary, it implies a multiplicity of interpretations." Lipton remarks that Ibn Arabi's method often shows "more of a promiscuity than a 'fidelity'" to the Arabic, but the claim to fidelity in a polysemic context closely resembles Ibn Hazm.
Gerald Elmore describes an "avant-garde" movement of "Ḥazmism" in Seville, where Zahirism "became the official law of the land" under the Almohad caliph Abu Yusuf Ya'qub al-Mansur (r. 1184-99) against the Maliki school. Camilla Adang shows that Ibn Hazm's case for the abrogation of Mosaic law was aimed less at Jews than at fellow Muslims, Malikis with "Judaizing" tendencies: "the only valid canonical law is the Islamic sharīʿa." Since Ibn Arabi wrote for an intellectual Muslim elite "composed mainly of religious scholars," his polemics were not addressed to non-Muslims either.
Against the Tales of the Prophets
The end of chapter 257 attacks the "Tales of the Prophets" and Isra'iliyyat. Such material, Gordon Newby notes, circulated from Muhammad's lifetime; early figures like al-Muhasibi (d. 857), Abu Nu'aym (d. 1038) and Ghazali used it, while Sufis like Abu Talib al-Makki (d. 996) were among the first to criticize storytellers, long before Ibn Kathir (d. 1373). Ibn Arabi tells the preacher "to avoid rubbish in his lesson," and not to take narrations "on the authority of the Jews, about the (imagined) transgressions of those whom God praised and selected" as commentary on the Qur'an. Then the tone rises: "By God, the prophets are far from what has been ascribed to them by the Jews, God curse them (laʿanahum allāh)!" The exegetes who rely on such sources earn the same: "God forsake them (khadhalahum allāh)!"
The curses echo Ibn Hazm, whose "most impassioned charge," Theodore Pulcini notes, was that the Jewish scriptures violate the sinlessness of the prophets ('isma). His Kitab al-fisal says: "God's curse and His wrath be upon everyone who gives credence to any of these lies!" It was Ibn Hazm's systematic attack that changed how Muslims approached the earlier scriptures: not only was Mosaic law abrogated, but the text of the Torah had been "irretrievably corrupted."
3.6 The first heaven and the altered Torah
Ibn Arabi repeatedly says that the Qur'an, unlike "the other revealed books," is protected from alteration. His definitive statement is again in chapter 12. As abrogation of the other dispensations issues from the fourth heaven, the preservation of the Qur'an and Muhammad's sharia issues from the first:
This does not specify which kind of alteration. But a passage in the second ascension (chapter 367), in the visions that follow his attainment of the Muhammadan Station, each beginning "And I saw," settles it. Morris notes that this list "contains a number of Ibn 'Arabî's most fundamental metaphysical theses," but neither he nor any universalist scholar Lipton knows of mentions this passage:
"So, do not be astonished by the Jews changing the Torah, since the Torah was not changed in its pure form, but rather change has befallen it by their writing it and their verbalizing it." ... "They only changed it when they copied it from the original, while knowledge of the original remained for those scribes and their scholars."
The Word of God was preserved "because it is a (divine) ruling (ḥukm). And the ruling is inviolable (maʿṣūm), but its abode is with the scholars. So what was with the scholars was changed." Adam is not a ruling, so his preservation is required only in what he conveyed as a messenger. Ibn Arabi calls this "noble knowledge (ʿilm sharīf)."
Al-Tabari (d. 923) was perhaps the first to argue that the genuine Torah was burned, lost and miraculously restored by Ezra, while the Jews of his day used a rabbinic text. Ibn Hazm held that Ezra turned the Torah into an invalid forgery, and answered those who cited "guidance and light" (Qur'an 5:44) by saying that the true Torah, with the Gospel, was taken up by Jesus at his ascension. Ibn Arabi does not tell this story, but holds the same idea: the Torah is intact "in its pure form," while the written form was changed. The unspoken subtext is Muhammad's superiority, since his revelation alone is preserved in both heaven and earth.
3.7 The efficacy of subjugation
Returning to the People of the Indemnity Tax, Lipton cites the passage on "the Followers of the Books who pay the indemnity tax":
Despite his charges of unbelief and shirk, Ibn Arabi here allows that Jews and Christians may be spared Hell. But the efficacy is "solely determined by obedience to the revelation of Muhammad rather than any particular 'truth sufficient unto salvation'" in the Torah or Gospel. They are "coercively subsumed within the cosmographical sovereignty of Muhammad," a "fully heteronomous process of forceful obedience," in which, as Asad says of premodern Christianity, truth is expressed through "practical rules attached to specific processes of power and knowledge."
| Question | Schuonian Perennialism | Ibn Arabi, as Lipton reads him |
|---|---|---|
| Source of validity | Autonomous gnosis of the transcendent essence | Heteronomous obedience to Muhammad's law |
| Earlier scriptures | Valid symbolic forms; at most misread | Textually altered; only the Qur'an preserved |
| Earlier laws | Intrinsically valid | Abrogated; tolerated under jizya as part of Muhammadan law |
| Cosmology | Many suns | One Sun |
| Contradiction | Transcended | Resolved by hierarchy |
3.8 Conclusion: an interpretive field revealed
The Schuonian strategy rests on two ideas: a mode of religious experience beyond reason ("gnosis") and religious symbols that are true but relative. To read Ibn Arabi this way, it must invert his hierarchical cosmology into cosmic pluralism. Jacques Waardenburg names the three issues on which Muslim theologians built their polemics against Judaism and Christianity: "The three issues of naskh, tahrīf, and prophethood." Ibn Arabi's conception of the religious Other, Lipton concludes, rests on exactly these three.
The discrepancies have long been visible. Shah-Kazemi, like Chittick, never mentions the letter to Kayka'us, which Asin Palacios noted in 1931 in El Islam cristianizado. Nicholson's 1921 study of 'Abd al-Karim al-Jili (d. after 1408) observed that Ibn Arabi "is more critical and orthodox than Jílí," and that Jili accepts textual corruption: "Because they have altered God's Word and substituted something of their own."
Schuon's Copernican turn opposed Agueli's absolutist reading. Schuon called exclusive absolutism "dogmatism," a "limitative" manifestation of "divine subjectivity"; the saying that the Prophet is "the best of men" becomes a "dogmatic assertion." Esoterism must "surmount dogmatist disequilibriums," and Ibn Arabi's failure to do so made his thought "discontinuous, isolating, and over-accentuating." Schuon's turn was really away from normative Sufism as a whole: "Our starting point is Advaita Vedânta, and not a voluntarist, individualist, and moralist anthropology, with which ordinary Sufism is unquestionably identified."
- Schuon's universalism shares its structure with Schleiermacher's: a transcendent religious a priori, intuitive knowledge and relative symbols.
- Chittick's "sun from one point of view" coda converts Ibn Arabi's one Sun into Schuon's many suns.
- Ibn Arabi held, with Ibn Hazm, that the Torah's text was altered; only the Qur'an is preserved, from the first heaven.
- The People of the Book attain felicity only by obeying Qur'an 9:29: validity by heteronomous subjugation.
- Contemporary Perennialism has detached itself from Schuon's own ambivalence about Ibn Arabi, while keeping his disdain for "Arabo-Semitic" heteronomy.
The irony is that beneath Schuon's cosmic pluralism lies "a buried order of exclusivist absolutism," not so different from Ibn Arabi's, but "additionally burdened by the discursive practices of nineteenth-century Aryanism." That is the subject of the next chapter.
Part 4. Ibn Arabi and the Metaphysics of Race
Chapter 4 digs beneath Schuon's cosmic pluralism and finds a hierarchy. Schuon praised Ibn Arabi as "the great enunciator of gnosis in Islam," yet faulted him for a "Semitic" subjectivism, and in doing so drew on the discourse of nineteenth-century Aryanism. Lipton's word for the result is that Schuon "de-Semitizes" Ibn Arabi.
4.1 Schuon, his reputation and his readers
The epigraph is from Daniel Dubuisson: "The notions that we so willingly see as transcendental, aprioristic, or original are almost always those that are most deeply buried in our own cultural memory." A second is from Schuon's Songs without Names.
Schuon is often compared with Ibn Arabi: both had a mystical vocation, and both left a large body of metaphysical writing. For more than sixty years Schuon expounded his universalism while discreetly guiding communities in Europe and America. In 1991 the American community in Bloomington, Indiana, came under strain when a disgruntled disciple alleged "thought control" and "sexual rites"; the resulting indictment was dropped for insufficient evidence, but the publicity harmed his reputation. Since his death in 1998 his thought has enjoyed a renaissance, aided by World Wisdom, the Perennialist publisher in Bloomington, and after 9/11 Perennialists have promoted his "transcendent universalism," often linked with Ibn Arabi, as a resource for tolerance. Shah-Kazemi calls it "the most eloquent and compelling contemporary expression" of universalism.
The relationship is more fraught than this suggests. Schuon had to acknowledge Ibn Arabi's genius, but his own avowal of "the relativity of forms" led him to censure the Andalusian's Islamic absolutism. In a 1989 letter he set his own perspective, "Advaita Vedânta," above "ordinary Sufism," which he linked to "an Arabo-Semitic mentality." James Cutsinger, the foremost academic expert on Schuon, defends such statements as showing that his message "refuses to be domesticated in the interest of any sectarian aim." Lipton argues the reverse: the message "arrived already domesticated in a sectarianism particular to the formal enclosure of his own Eurocentrism."
Hagiographic authority
Huston Smith called Schuon "the spiritual prophet of our time par excellence." In his 2013 reader Splendor of the True, Cutsinger presents himself as a committed Schuonian and asks scholars to "entertain the possibility" that Schuon apprehended "the Truth" in ways beyond natural explanation, through "a faculty that Schuon calls the Intellect," a power of discernment "unaffected by the limitations of historical circumstance." Nasr wrote that "Schuon seems like the cosmic intellect itself impregnated by the energy of divine grace." To read Schuon "as if his insights were tied to certain formulations of language," Cutsinger says, "is to misinterpret the evident authority of his work."
Lipton accepts Cutsinger's invitation to bring a methodology "to the table." He leaves aside Schuon's personal ethics and political alliances and stays at the level of discourse: how Aryanist practices in Schuon's writings authorize authentic religious subjects and exclude Others. Such strategies are political in Russell McCutcheon's sense, though not necessarily a "totalized political program." But "the danger inherent within arguments for a transhistorical authenticity based on Aryan racio-spiritual typologies should be obvious," above all in a discourse that claims divine authority.
4.2 Universal metaphysics and its exclusions
In The Transcendent Unity of Religions (1948), Schuon argues that "it is metaphysically impossible" for any religious form to "possess a unique value to the exclusion of other forms; for a form, by definition, cannot be unique and exclusive." The exoteric claim to exclusive truth meets "the axiomatic objection that there is no such thing in existence as a unique fact." So "pure and absolute Truth can only be found beyond all its possible expressions." Yet that truth can be expressed, through a doctrine "metaphysical in the most precise meaning of the word," proceeding "exclusively from the Intellect." Hence: "intellectual intuition is a direct and active participation in divine Knowledge and not an indirect and passive participation, as is faith."
Nearly ten years later, Castes and Races (1957) stated that "if the white race can claim a sort of pre-eminence, it can do so only through the Hindu group," which "perpetuates the primordial state of the Indo-Europeans," since the Hindus "surpass every other human group by their contemplativity and the metaphysical genius resulting from this." Schuon wrote this more than twenty years after taking leadership, as 'Isa Nur al-Din Ahmad al-Shadhili al-'Alawi, of the European branch of the 'Alawiyya. In Sufism: Veil and Quintessence (1980) he faulted "Sufi metaphysics" for its link to "anti-metaphysical and moralizing creationism," and the inner motive of Muslim mysticism as "fundamentally more moral than intellectual . . . in the sense that Arab or Muslim, or Semitic, sensibility always remains more or less volitive, hence subjectivist." And: "We do not believe we are over-stylizing things in taking the view that the Aryan tends to be a philosopher whereas the Semite is above all a moralist."
| Schuon's "Aryan" pole | Schuon's "Semitic" pole |
|---|---|
| Metaphysics, the Intellect, intellectual intuition, contemplativity | Moralism, volition, subjectivism |
| "direct and active participation in divine Knowledge" | "indirect and passive participation, as is faith" |
| Intellection: a "permanent and 'naturally supernatural' capacity" | Inspirationism: "derived from a particular grace" |
| Tends "a priori to unveil the truth" | "tends toward the veiling of the divine Majesty" |
| Dialectic, "objectivity" | Dogmatic certitude, logic that "is not impartial" |
| Vedanta, the Upanishads, Plato | The Bible, Talmudic speculation, Ash'arism |
Lipton traces this vocabulary to what Leon Poliakov named the nineteenth-century "Aryan myth," as elaborated by Ernest Renan (d. 1892), Christian Lassen (d. 1876), Arthur de Gobineau (d. 1882) and Houston Stewart Chamberlain (d. 1927), with roots in German Romanticism and Friedrich Schlegel (d. 1829). He does not claim direct influence of any one author, only that Schuon uses a particular set of discursive practices developed within that tradition.
4.3 The nineteenth-century Aryan myth
"Aryan," from Sanskrit arya, "noble," was first used by speakers of Sanskrit and Persian of themselves. Early nineteenth-century philologists applied it to the Indo-European language group, and by mid-century it named a race opposed to its "Semitic" Other.
- Schlegel, in 1808, hypothesized (wrongly) that Greek, Latin, Persian and German derived from Sanskrit, called Sanskrit "almost entirely a philosophical or rather a religious language," and added: "We find nothing in Arabic, or Hebrew, agreeing with the Indian grammar." George Mosse says he "set down the maxims of an Aryan superiority exemplified by linguistic roots."
- Gobineau paired the richness of Sanskrit and Greek with the genius of their speakers, "while the lack of precision in the Semitic tongues is exactly paralleled by the character of the Semitic peoples."
- Renan spoke of "linguistic races," in which "Language, religion, laws, and customs, came to constitute the race far more than blood." The Aryan intellect "contained in the germ all the metaphysics," while the Semitic spirit showed a "fearful shallowness."
- Chamberlain, citing Lassen, said "the Aryan Indian . . . unquestionably possesses the greatest talent for metaphysics of any people that ever lived" and "The most perfect expression of absolutely mystical religion is found among the Aryan Indians."
Schuon echoes each move. In Castes and Races race is not "devoid of meaning apart from physical characteristics"; Semites and Aryans form "a psychological group and even a racial group"; "the Aryan spirit . . . tends a priori to unveil the truth whereas the Semitic spirit, whose realism is more moral than intellectual, tends toward the veiling of the divine Majesty." With Chamberlain: "The most direct doctrinal expression of the sophia perennis is undoubtedly Advaita Vedānta." The Veda "does not give orders to the intelligence" but "awakens it." Above all: "A revelation always conforms to a racial genius."
Avatars, Christ and Muhammad
Like Renan, Schuon uses "avatar" for prophet, distinguishing "major and minor Avatāras." "Christ, who identifies the divine Message with himself, belongs to the first of these two categories whereas the Prophet, who passively receives the Message that God 'causes to descend,' belongs to the second." Maurice Olender's comment on Renan applies: the Hebrew's monotheism "was in no sense a product of his mind."
Schuon goes further. Muhammad "could, like them, remain wholly Semitic in style, a style which attaches itself meticulously to human things," whereas Christ has "an element that brings him closer to the Aryan world." In a footnote he writes that Christ, "destined to be an 'Aryan god'," has "a certain Aryan quality, which shows itself in his independence—seemingly 'Greek' or 'Hindu'—toward forms." The idea of an Aryan Jesus was a commonplace by 1900, later adopted by National Socialists. Renan's Life of Jesus (1863), in Olender's words, "saved Jesus from Judaism"; Chamberlain's chapter "Christ not a Jew" held that Jesus's "advent is not the perfecting of the Jewish religion but its negation." Schuon too places Jesus's spiritual home in India: his acceptance by Israel "presupposed a spiritual suppleness more fitting of India than Judea."
4.4 Ibn Arabi and esoteric "objectivity"
As Renan and Chamberlain had to appropriate Jesus, Schuon could not ignore Ibn Arabi. Guenon identified the primordial tradition with Vedanta, yet granted that Ibn Arabi expressed it "in almost identical terms." Guenon met Islam through Ibn Arabi as read by Agueli, and Mark Sedgwick notes that "the real significance of this encounter was the transfer into Traditionalism of the central position taken by Ibn al-Arabi in Damascus." Martin Lings (d. 2005) called Ibn Arabi's thought "basically identical with the Sufi perspective in general."
So Schuon praised Ibn Arabi in the highest terms, and also faulted his "divergent interpretations—one esoteric and the other exoteric," and the "unevenness and contradictions" of his thought "owing above all to his at least partial solidarity with ordinary theology."
- On Ibn Arabi ranking Muhammad above Joseph: "one has a right to expect a more nuanced and objective perspective in an esoteric context."
- On the religion of love as "the prerogative of Muslims": an "abrupt and unintelligible denominationalism." An esoterist should "take into account the relativity of forms . . . and to do so in an objective and concrete, and not merely metaphorical, manner—or else remain silent, for pity's sake."
- On Ibn Arabi and Shankara: "Shankara is altogether clear and unambiguous; Ibn 'Arabī, on the contrary, is uneven, tortuous, obscure and ambiguous, despite all his merits."
To explain the lapse, Schuon distinguishes "two esoterisms." The first is the counterpart of exoterism. The second is autonomous: "esoterism as such is metaphysics," "the total truth as such," unlike the esoterism of a particular religion, which enters "theological, psychological and legalistic meanders foreign to its nature." Vedanta is "an intrinsic esoterism"; Sufism is "an esoterism-complement," tied to "the Semitic spiritualities." In Sufism, Schuon says, two tendencies meet, Platonism and Ash'arism; it approaches pure gnosis "to the extent it is Platonic . . . and it departs from it to the extent it capitulates to Asharism." Even the Unity of Being is tainted, since in it everything is good "because it is 'willed by God'": "Here the most vertiginous metaphysics is combined with the most summary Asharism."
Ash'arite voluntarism and occasionalism, for Schuon, are traits of "all Semitic theologians," while Plato "belonged intellectually to the Aryan world, and his doctrine is like a distant modality of Brahmanism." "Greeks and especially Hindus have long possessed the instrument of dialectic, for it corresponds to their sense of objectivity, whereas it was missing among the early Semites, as well as for nascent Islam." Chamberlain had written that "religion is for the Semite the idolization of his will," while "In nature he observes everywhere the rule of law."
Objectivity becomes the human prerogative itself: "Objectivity is none other than the truth, in which the subject and the object coincide." Schuon contrasts "Platonists and Vedantists," concerned with "a metaphysical description of the Real," with Semites, for whom "the Real is enclosed in a dogma." Castes and Races repeats Chamberlain's "the white man is essentially a poet" and, following Gobineau's tripartite typology, assigns other races "existential rather than mental" natures. Lipton quotes these passages at length to show the stereotypes involved; the editor reports them here only in outline.
4.5 Finding Vedanta through the naked Virgin
Schuon insisted on traditional form, but chiefly as a means to recognize and transcend its relativity. In a 1983 letter: "the more conscious one is of the supra formal nature of spiritual Truth and Reality, the more conscious one must be also of the relativity of the traditional form." Earlier he wrote that the "Religio perennis is the body," while "the Religio formalis is the garment," and that the goal of the work "is not the Islamic form as such, but precisely esoterism."
The Virgin Mary came to him as an answer to how "esoterism as such could manifest and assert itself anew." In the mid-1960s, after repeated visions, he renamed his order the 'Alawiyya Maryamiyya. The Virgin "in a new form" corresponds directly to esoterism, "a form that in a certain way includes India in it and at the same time belongs to the proto-Semitic world," equated with the "Supreme Shakti." In 1980 he described himself as "the human instrument for the manifestation of the Religio perennis at the end of time," and "more a proto-Aryan than a European." A 1981 letter lists the marks of his "Aryanism":
He also began to paint the Virgin partly or wholly naked, a genre he called "sacred nudity": "In an altogether general way, nudity expresses—and virtually actualizes—a return to the essence, the origin, the archetype, thus to the celestial state." "For dress is form, or particularity." The metaphor of body and garment thus becomes explicit, and the nostalgia is for a "Golden Age" before the Semitic religions had to "clothe [the truth] in an argument efficacious for certain mentalities."
4.6 The racialism of the underlying religion
Sedgwick argues that Schuon's universalism grew over time out of a more "orthodox" Islam; Renaud Fabbri contends that it was consistent from the start. Schuon's 1981 letter divides his order's history into three phases:
| Phase | Dates as printed | Schuon's description |
|---|---|---|
| First | until 1942 | "the spell of Guénon and also the psychic atmosphere of exoteric Islam" |
| Second | after 1942 | The spell "was broken"; liberation from being seen as "the tool of Guénon and the commentator of Ibn 'Arabī" |
| Third | from 1965 | "the coming of the Holy Virgin"; paintings and Arabic prayers to her |
Yet a 1932 letter, before his conversion, already asks: "How could you think that I would wish to come to God 'through Mecca,' and thereby betray Christ and the Vedanta?" His first article, written in Mostaganem after his 1933 visit to Shaykh al-'Alawi, evoked "the 'essential and transcendent unity'" of the three monotheisms and became a chapter of The Transcendent Unity of Religions.
Strong misreading of the prophets
In that book Schuon rejected the argument that Ibn Arabi denied universality "when he wrote that Islam was the pivot of the other religions." Rather, "every religious form is superior to the others in a particular respect," and he claimed Ibn Arabi read Qur'an 2:253 and 17:55 to mean "that each Prophet is superior to the others by reason of a particularity that is peculiar to him." Lipton cannot find the text behind this, and calls it a strong misreading that turns each prophetic tradition into an independent solar system.
The Ezra chapter of the Fusus, in Caner Dagli's translation, is plainly hierarchical: "The communities are ranked in excellence, some excelling others. In terms of the knowledge proper to messengerhood, the messengers are ranked in excellence in accordance with the rank of their communities." Dagli's first footnote follows this, but his second echoes Schuon, saying the prophets are each strong "in relation to the other prophets," which, Lipton notes, contradicts his own translation. The Fusus chapter on Muhammad sums up the real frame: "His wisdom is that of singularity because he is the most complete creation of the human species (al-nawʿ al-insānī)." And The Meccan Openings: Muhammad "has a universal composition that encompasses the composition of every prophet and messenger," so "adhere to faith, follow him, and make him your leader!"
Receptacles, races and the absence of contradiction
Schuon answers that "the best" "can be said of every other Messenger within the framework of his own Message," and that Ibn Arabi's exclusivism came from his belonging to "the Islamic form of religion." But his own grounds for rejecting a single universal religion are partly ethno-racial. Humanity is divided into "several fundamentally different branches," which "demands a differentiated refraction of the one Truth," though "this is not always a question of race, but more often of human groups." Hence "the diverse Revelations do not really contradict one another since they do not apply to the same receptacle," for "a contradiction can arise only between things situated on the same level," and "diversity in the world is a result of its remoteness from the divine Principle."
Schuon finds in the Gospel a tendency that "responds with particular force to the needs of the Germanic soul," toward "simplicity and inwardness." He relativizes Muhammad's status as synthesis of the prophets as "entirely in line with henotheist logic," the way Vishnu or Shiva in turn become the supreme God, valid only in Islam's "cosmic sector." Then he reorders the hierarchy: the Virgin, by inverse reflection, "is the virginal Mother of all the Prophets; she is thus identified with divine Femininity or the Wisdom that was 'in the beginning.'" Replacing "the Arab Prophet" as Logos with the mother of all prophets places her, and Schuon with her, above the limits of race, as "the ultimate arbiter and interpreter of religious 'Truth.'"
The divinity of beliefs, once more
Schuon calls the Fusus passage on the god of belief "the one most directly in conformity with the esoteric perspective," and applies "the 'believer who praises himself'" above all to "a given collectivity." That repeats the modern slide from belief to religion criticized in Chapter 1. His conclusion: "God is the same for all the religions only in the divine 'stratosphere,' not in the human 'atmosphere'; in this 'atmosphere' each religion has its own God for all practical purposes, and there are as many Gods as there are religions. In this sense it could be said that esoterism alone is absolutely monotheistic, it alone recognizing only one religion under diverse forms."
Two things stand out. The statement is openly absolutist: esoterism alone. And it replaces belief in one God with belief in one religion, a reification that Wilfred Cantwell Smith traced in The Meaning and End of Religion (1962) and that Carl Ernst describes as a shift in which "people speak of believing in Christianity or in Islam, as opposed to believing in God."
4.7 Conclusion: the Seal of Marian Sainthood
Ibn Arabi, as Seal of Muhammadan Sainthood, took the superiority of the Prophet as seriously as "the purity of his own Arab pedigree." Schuon understood that prophetology and openly rejected it. By painting the "shaktic" Mary naked, since "dress is form," and placing Ibn Arabi's religion of love under the Supreme Shakti, he strips away the religio formalis and seeks the Vedanta within. Under Schuon's gaze Ibn Arabi becomes "the Seal of Marian Sainthood."
- Schuon's universalism ranks an "Aryan" intellection above a "Semitic" inspirationism, using the vocabulary of nineteenth-century Aryanism.
- He faults Ibn Arabi for "solidarity with ordinary theology" and accepts him only where he finds Vedanta.
- Through the Virgin as Supreme Shakti and "sacred nudity," Schuon separates Ibn Arabi from his Muhammadan identity.
- His denial of contradiction between revelations implies a hierarchy of human groups.
- "Esoterism alone is absolutely monotheistic": Perennialism emerges as "hegemonically supersessionist."
Hugh Nicholson observes that inclusive universalism "declares a radical break with religious exclusivism, but does so only through an act of exclusion that it fails to acknowledge." Schuon's reading of Ibn Arabi, Lipton concludes, is a lucid case of what McCutcheon calls the "cosmogonic" art of hermeneutics, universalizing "a very particular present" through appeals to "mythic time": "an exclusivist universalism that in the end fails to go beyond the religious particularism it claims to transcend."
Part 5. Conclusion: Mapping Ibn Arabi at Zero Degrees
The conclusion widens the lens. Schuon's universalism, Lipton argues, belongs to a longer European line running through Kant, whose "universal" religion of autonomous reason was defined against a "heteronomous" Judaism. Both discourses, he concludes, hide a supersessionism much like the one Ibn Arabi states openly.
5.1 From Schleiermacher back to Kant
Three epigraphs frame the argument. Kant: "The mark of the true church is its universality." Schuon: "Profane thought is always the portrait of an individual." Derrida: metaphysics is "the white mythology which reassembles and reflects the culture of the West."
Schleiermacher's romantic appeal to intuition and feeling was a response to Kant, who held that certain knowledge of the noumenal, the divine "as such," was impossible, though the idea of God was practically necessary. Grace Jantzen notes that Schleiermacher and the Romantics sought "to experience God in pure preconceptual consciousness," but that Kant, too, believed in an essence of religion, located in moral reason; the debate was over "in what it could be said to consist."
Kant and Schuon stand at opposite ends on whether humans can know the divine. Lipton sets that aside and compares their "metaphorical thought" in the sense of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Both share the metaphors of Platonic idealism within a common Euro-Christian tradition, and Schuon's religio perennis functionally echoes Kant's "universal" religion, defined by the primacy of inner autonomy over "heteronomy," which Kant's late writings symbolize by Judaism. This is all the more striking because Schuon "roundly disavowed Kant's philosophy in shrill terms."
5.2 The hubris of zero degrees
Santiago Castro-Gomez calls the modern European search for a perspective "independent of its ethnic and cultural center of observation" "the hubris of zero degrees." The phrase alludes to the 1884 International Meridian Conference in Washington, DC, which agreed on a common zero of longitude at Greenwich. Building on Enrique Dussel and Walter Mignolo, Castro-Gomez traces this positionality to the Spanish conquest of America. As Copernicus transcended geocentric cosmology, sixteenth-century cartographers stopped drawing the world around an ethnic centre:
From this arose the conceit of "a sovereign gaze external to the representation," what Slavoj Zizek calls "the privileged empty point of universality," in which acknowledging "the Other's specificity is the very form of asserting one's own superiority." Mignolo calls it "knowledge that hides its own geopolitical grounding."
Kant, a self-described heir of Copernicus, broke with innate ideas but kept a universal a priori knowledge grounded in autonomous reason, replacing, in David Pacini's words, the traditional "idea that the world constitutes me with the idea that I constitute the world." Schuon made a parallel turn, as Chapter 3 showed, and said so himself: defending one religion against all others "is a little like wishing to maintain the Ptolemaic system." In imperial mapmaking the cartographer moves from an ethnic location to "a universal Archimedean metaposition," and from there naturalizes hierarchies "in Euro- and Christocentric terms." As Mignolo puts it, "the regional could be universalized and taken as a yardstick to evaluate the degree of development of the rest of the human race."
Cartesian mind and body dualism added the next layer. James Byrne observes that it privileged "the rational, intellectual and abstract over the physical, sensuous and practical," reinforcing a Christian tendency "to view the body as the locus of error, weakness and sin." Kant sought a double freedom, from metaphysical illusion and from all empirical sources, which framed his Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason (1793). That book, Lipton insists, should be read as Kant meant it, as "philosophical theology," in its own political and Christian context.
5.3 Kant's Religion and the Jewish question
Ian Hunter shows that Kant's north German Protestant university metaphysics was steeped in Christian Platonic anthropology. Kant kept its epistemic divide but put human reason, the pure rational being (homo noumenon), in place of the indwelling divinity. In Religion he invokes the Logos as the archetype of moral perfection, "God's only begotten Son," and declares that "to elevate ourselves to this ideal of moral perfection, i.e., to the archetype of the moral attitude in all its purity, is a universal human duty."
Religion is also a "history of reason." Starting from a Hellenized Judaism, religion evolves into a Christianity that sheds external law and becomes "pure rational religion." Religion must "finally to be detached gradually from all empirical determining bases, from all statutes that rest on history," so that pure rational religion may "ultimately to rule over all, 'so that God may be all in all.'" God is approached through moral sense: "We are concerned to know not so much what God is in himself (what his nature is) as what he is for us as moral beings." Stephen Palmquist calls this Kant's "Copernican" stance toward religion.
- The universal true faith, in a triune God as "holy legislator," "benign governor" and "just judge," is "found in the religion of most civilized peoples"; "even the Jews seem to have pursued these ideas in the last time periods of their hierarchical constitution."
- Christianity arose from Judaism only after "this otherwise ignorant people had already been reached by much foreign (Greek) wisdom," which "shocked the slavish mind."
- "Judaism is properly not a religion at all," but "a sum of merely statutory laws, on which a state constitution was based."
- "the Jewish faith stands in no essential connection whatsoever, i.e., in no unity according to concepts, with this . . . history we want to examine."
Jesus, by contrast, founds "the first true church" with "pure teachings of reason": "only the pure moral attitude of the heart shall be able to make a human being pleasing to God." To make statutory faith essential to God's service "is a religious delusion the pursuit of which is a pseudoservice." The iconic passage reads: "The cloaks under which the embryo first formed itself into the human being must be cast off if he is now to step into the light of day." The "leading string of holy tradition" becomes "in the end a fetter."
Galatians and the Enlightenment
Commentators see in that passage 1 Corinthians 13:11. Lipton points instead to Galatians 4:1-11, where heirs who are minors "are no better than slaves" and Paul rebukes followers for "observing special days, and months, and seasons, and years," that is, Jewish law. Ursula Goldenbaum notes that Paul calls the Jews "immature," the law a "pedagogue" no longer needed. She traces Kant's opening line in "What Is Enlightenment?" (1784), "Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity," to German Lutheran readings of Galatians in the debate over Jewish emancipation.
| Date as printed | Context of Kant's essay |
|---|---|
| 1750 | Frederick the Great's General-Privilegium further limits Jewish property and trade rights in Prussia |
| 1782 | Joseph II's Edict of Tolerance grants Austrian Jews unprecedented freedom; heated debate in Prussia |
| 1783 | Moses Mendelssohn's Jerusalem presents "the Jews as capable of morals, and thus ready to become citizens" |
| 1784 | Kant, "An Answer to the Question: 'What Is Enlightenment?'" |
| 1793 | Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason |
| 1795 | To Perpetual Peace |
| 1798 | The Conflict of the Faculties: "The euthanasia of Judaism is pure moral religion" |
The theologian Johann Salomo Semler had contrasted a universal, moral Christianity with a "particular and political" Judaism that "remained essentially static," and foresaw history creating "one universal religion of humankind, making all human beings Christians." Goldenbaum finds the congruence with Kant "almost literal." Kant's Critique of Practical Reason supplies the binary: sensible nature "is thus, for reason, heteronomy," while the supersensible belongs "to the autonomy of pure reason." Positive religions, conditioned by history, are heteronomous; their adherents, Jews first, are to progress to autonomy until "everyone obeys the (nonstatutory) law that he prescribes to himself." Susan Meld Shell shows how Kantian autonomy came to ground liberal ideas of freedom and equality.
5.4 The metaphysics of nudity
Mario Perniola contrasts a Greek "metaphysics of nudity" with a Hebrew "metaphysics of clothing." In the ancient Near East nakedness meant shame and clothing divine splendour; for Plato, truth is unveiling: "the entire process of knowledge becomes an unveiling of the object, a laying it entirely bare." Its final object is the soul freed of the body, "psuchē gumnē tou sōmatos," echoed in Colossians: "you have stripped off the old self with its practices."
Kant's "cloaks" and "fetter" belong to this metaphorics, joined with Lutheran anti-Jewish polemic: the subjects of the Jewish theocracy "were attuned to no incentives other than the goods of this world." Michael Mack shows that this Kantian discourse essentialized "the Jewish as the 'heteronomous,'" preparing the nineteenth-century stigmatization of Jews as nonmodern. In 1798 Kant hoped Jews would "throw off the garb of the ancient cult." It was "partly on the basis of its own Kantian premises that German nationalism emerged as a specifically anti-Jewish movement."
| Metaphor | Kant | Schuon |
|---|---|---|
| Clothing | "cloaks," "the garb of the ancient cult," statutes and observances | "dress is form, or particularity"; the religio formalis as "the garment" |
| Nakedness | "Bare reason"; stepping "into the light of day" | "sacred nudity": "a return to the essence"; the religio perennis as "the body" |
| Direction of history | Forward, melioristic, a "metamorphosis" | Backward, decline from a "Golden Age," hope of return |
| Source of pure truth | "foreign (Greek) wisdom" | "Platonism," Vedanta |
| The heteronomous Other | Judaism, "that slavish faith" | Semitic subjectivity, enslaved by revelation |
Opposite as their views of history are, Kant and Schuon share a grammar in which Semitic religious subjectivity stands for heteronomy.
5.5 Autonomy and the discourse of relativity
For Kant, historical faiths can have "different and equally good forms," but their statutes "are chosen and contingent." To Perpetual Peace (1795) puts it famously: "Differences in religion: an odd expression! Just as if one spoke of different moralities." There is "only a single religion, valid for all men in all times," and the faiths and books "can thus be nothing more than the accidental vehicles of religion." Talal Asad calls this "the missionary's standpoint": people must be persuaded "that the formal ways they live their life are accidental to their being, channels for which other channels can be substituted without loss."
In Religion: "There is only one (true) religion; but there can be many kinds of faith." One should say a person is of "this or that (Jewish, Mohammedan, Christian, Catholic, Lutheran) faith," not religion, since "The common man understands by it always his church faith, which strikes his senses, whereas religion is hidden inwardly and depends on moral attitudes." Schuon's "Revelation is absolute in itself, but relative in its form" and his "only pure metaphysics and pure prayer are absolute and therefore universal" are, at the level of function, identical.
Schuon writes that for the Semite "everything begins with Revelation and therefore with faith and submission," and "intelligence itself takes on the color of obedience," while for the Aryan, Revelation is not a commandment "enslaving it" but "the objectification of the one Intellect." Lipton clarifies that Schuon's "subjectivity" is the everyday sense, being absorbed in personal feeling, the opposite of Kant's transcendental subject; in Kantian terms Schuon's Semitic subjectivity is merely empirical, a "need for external activities." Chamberlain, who wrote a whole book on Kant, joined the two: "Wherever the Semitic spirit has breathed, we shall meet with . . . materialism."
5.6 Exclusive inclusivity
The same pattern appears in Ibn Arabi scholarship. Chittick writes that "to make absolute claims for a revelation that by nature can only be one of many brings about a certain imbalance and distortion that modern-day observers quickly sense." Lipton notes the incongruity of an anti-modern tradition deferring to "modern-day observers," and the logic: by denying absolute validity to any revelation, the argument excludes the very laws it claims to include. A universalist insider will find it valid; a committed adherent of a particular revelation, in most cases, will not. Hugh Nicholson: the effort ends up "merely transposing the act of exclusion to a meta-level."
Shah-Kazemi is the fuller case. He holds that "the universalism expounded here upholds as irreducible the differences of outward religious forms," but also that these forms are "'accidental' in relation to the 'necessary' import of the supra-formal substance," "religion as such" as against "such and such a religion." That is Kant's "one (true) religion" and many faiths, a hierarchy in which forms are husks and the religio perennis the kernel. He invokes Ibn Arabi: to ignore formal differences "violates the divine intentionality," and "the religion ordained through the last Prophet is nothing other than the one religion that was ordained through all previous prophets."
Shah-Kazemi even writes that "to exclude the exclusivist reading is in turn to fall into a mode of exclusivism," and that an inclusivist perspective must recognize the exclusivist one, yet must "uphold as more compelling, more convincing, and even more 'true,' the universalist understanding of Islam." The attempt fails on its own terms. As Kant's religion of bare reason becomes "the true, sole religion," so the religio perennis becomes "the total truth." Wouter Hanegraaff notes that such Perennialism treats exclusivist theologies as "'lower' levels in a hierarchy," and asks how this differs from other exclusivisms. Wendy Brown: "The universal tolerates the particular in its particularity, in which the putative universal therefore always appears superior to that unassimilated particular."
5.7 Conclusion: the looking-glass
Schuon's cartography, far from the "cosmic intellect" Cutsinger describes, bears its own genealogy, a hermeneutics of autonomy that found full form in Kant. It is not unique to Schuon or Perennialism, but goes back to the beginnings of Sufi studies. Lt. James William Graham of the British East India Company, in "A Treatise on Sufiism" (written 1811, published 1819), described the Sufi as "a person of any religion or sect," marked by "an entire throwing off . . . of the practical mode of worship, ceremonies, &c. laid down in every religion," which he also called the "pharisaical mode of worship." Carl Ernst has shown that "Sufi-ism" was coined as an appropriation of what Europeans found attractive in "Oriental" culture. Pacini calls the result a "looking glass religion," in which the modern subject transforms the world "into an image of itself."
Kant and Schuon each imagined their universalism free of exclusivism. Yet Schuon held his message the only truly "monotheistic" way and set the Virgin above the Muhammadan Logos, and Kant expected "pure rational religion ultimately to rule over all." Kant's "euthanasia of Judaism," Paul Rose says, was "in effect nothing more than a secularization of the old Christian idea that the Old Testament and the Jewish religion had been superseded."
| Ibn Arabi | Kant and Schuon | |
|---|---|---|
| Supersessionism | Open: abrogation of all earlier laws by Muhammad's | Concealed: all forms "accidental" beneath one essence |
| Racialism | Not in these terms | Additionally racialist "in particularly modern terms" |
| Self-description | Absolutist, hierarchical | Inclusive, universal, objective |
Where Ibn Arabi is open about his exclusivism, Kant and Schuon hide theirs inside discourses that claim to include all true religions. Such claims "can only be construed as ideological," and the incongruity calls into question "the entire premise of religious universalism and the possibility of nonexclusivist religious identity." Exclusivism, Lipton concludes, is inherent in any claim to truth; as Nicholson says, all religious discourse seems "implicated, either directly or indirectly, in relations of religious rivalry." Kant's universalism, in Hunter's words, pertains "to a particular regional way of acceding to truth as 'universal.'"
The last sentences return to the map. Ibn Arabi's mysticism was heteronomously constituted by his tradition and lineage; the modern conceit of religion as a universal transcendent essence "cannot exist in vacuo." The European tradition of autonomy claims an empty universal space, but "not only nature but also the nature of human discursivity abhors such emptiness." In the end, "it is none other than the self-image of Western subjectivity that so often fills the void left by the transcendence it claims to have attained."
Who's Who
The people who matter for following the book, grouped by the role they play in Lipton's argument. Dates are given only where the book prints them; names without dates appear without them. Descriptions say what part each figure plays in the book, not who they were in general.
Ibn Arabi and his world
| Name | Dates as printed | Role in the book |
|---|---|---|
| Ibn Arabi (Muhyi al-Din) | d. 1240 | The subject. Andalusian mystic whose Meccan Openings, Interpreter of Desires and Treasury of Lovers are reread against the universalist reading. |
| Kayka'us I | r. 1211-1220 | Seljuk sultan of Anatolia to whom Ibn Arabi wrote urging enforcement of the conditions on Christians. |
| Kaykhusraw | r. 1192-96 and 1205-11 | Earlier Seljuk ruler, father of Kayka'us, in the setting of Ibn Arabi's Anatolian years. |
| Abu Ya'qub Yusuf | r. 1163-1184 | Cited in the book's text or notes. |
| al-Mansur | r. 1184-99 | Cited in the book's text or notes. |
| Ibn Mardanish | r. 1147-1172 | Cited in the book's text or notes. |
| al-Kamil | d. 1238 | Ayyubid sultan of Egypt who surrendered Jerusalem to the Christians in 1229, an event the book notes Ibn Arabi passed over in silence. |
| al-Ashraf | d. 1237 | Uncle who betrayed al-Nasir Dawud, another political event of the time. |
| al-Nasir Dawud | d. 1258 | Ayyubid sultan of Damascus, betrayed by his uncle al-Ashraf. |
| Umar ibn al-Khattab | r. 634-44 | Caliph to whom the Pact of Umar, setting conditions on protected peoples, is ascribed. |
| Sadr al-Din Qunawi | d. 1274 | Ibn Arabi's stepson and leading disciple. |
| Abd al-Razzaq al-Qashani | d. 1329 | Cited in the book's text or notes. |
| Abd al-Karim al-Jili | d. after 1408 | Cited in the book's text or notes. |
| Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi | d. 1731 | Ibn Arabi's Syrian commentator, cited on a passage of the Interpreter. |
| Muhammad al-Idrisi | d. 1166 | Muslim cartographer who, as European mapmakers ignored the Islamic world, ignored Europe; an example of the centred map. |
Earlier Muslim authorities cited
| Name | Dates as printed | Role in the book |
|---|---|---|
| Ibn Hazm | d. 1064 | Andalusian scholar whose charge that the earlier scriptures were textually altered forms the background to Chapter 3. |
| al-Tabari | d. 923 | Cited in the book's text or notes. |
| Ibn Kathir | d. 1373 | Cited in the book's text or notes. |
| al-Wahidi | d. 1075 | Cited in the book's text or notes. |
| Fakhr al-Din al-Razi | d. 1209 | Exegete and philosopher cited as sharing a view on idolatry. |
| al-Ghazali | d. 1111 | Cited in the book's text or notes. |
| Ahmad Ghazali | d. 1126 | Sufi whose school Kirmani followed. |
| al-Shahrastani | d. 1153 | Cited in the book's text or notes. |
| Ibn Barrajan | d. 1141 | Cited in the book's text or notes. |
| Ibn Sina | d. 1037 | Cited in the book's text or notes. |
| al-Muhasibi | d. 857 | Cited in the book's text or notes. |
| Abu Talib al-Makki | d. 996 | Cited in the book's text or notes. |
| Abu Nu'aym al-Isfahani | d. 1038 | Cited in the book's text or notes. |
| al-Niffari | d. 977 | Arab Sufi praised by Schuon as a pure adept of gnosis. |
| Mansur al-Hallaj | d. 922 | Mystic to whom the poetic trope of praising non-Islamic traditions is traced. |
| Ibn al-Jawzi | d. 1200 | Scholar who includes a disputed hadith in one of his collections. |
| Ibn Khallikan | d. 1282 | Cited in the book's text or notes. |
| Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi | d. 1191 | Cited in the book's text or notes. |
| Jalal al-Din Rumi | d. 1273 | Persian poet whose spiritual equal, in Corbin's account, Ibn Arabi becomes. |
| Shabistari | d. 1340 | Cited in the book's text or notes. |
| Awhad al-Din Kirmani | d. 1238 | Sufi of the school of Ahmad Ghazali to whom Ibn Arabi entrusted part of Qunawi's advanced spiritual education. |
| Awhad al-Din Balyani | d. 1287 | Author of Risalat al-ahadiyya, a work often attributed to Ibn Arabi, on which Guenon based an opinion. |
| Ibn Ata' Allah | d. 1309 | Arab Sufi whom Schuon praises. |
| Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza'iri | d. 1883 | Amir and leader of resistance, in Damascus an associate of 'Illaysh. |
| Abd al-Rahman 'Illaysh | d. 1921 | Shadhili shaykh in Cairo who initiated Agueli; for a time an associate of Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza'iri. |
| Abd al-Rahman al-Shaghouri | d. 2004 | Shadhili master and public defender of Ibn Arabi, cited for a modern lineage. |
The modern West
| Name | Dates as printed | Role in the book |
|---|---|---|
| Frithjof Schuon | d. 1998 | Swiss-German metaphysician; the central modern figure, whose transcendent unity of religions and racial typology are examined in Chapters 3 and 4. |
| Rene Guenon | d. 1951 | Founder of the Traditionalist school whose idea of the primordial Tradition Schuon developed. |
| Ivan Agueli | d. 1917 | Swedish painter, anarchist and esotericist through whose interpretation Guenon first met Ibn Arabi's thought. |
| Martin Lings | d. 2005 | Arabist and Perennialist who took Ibn Arabi's thought to be identical with the Sufi perspective in general. |
| Henry Corbin | d. 1978 | French scholar whose Ibn Arabi is a figure of creative imagination and esoteric universality. |
| Marshall Hodgson | d. 1968 | Historian of Islam whose account of Sufi tolerance is examined in Chapter 2. |
| Reynold Nicholson | d. 1945 | British Orientalist who first translated The Interpreter of Desires into English in 1911. |
| Miguel Asin Palacios | d. 1944 | Spanish Catholic priest and Islamicist who commented on the letter to Kayka'us. |
| Thomas Walker Arnold | d. 1930 | Orientalist who, with Muir, rejected the attribution of the Pact to Umar. |
| Arthur Stanley Tritton | d. 1973 | Orientalist who argued most forcefully against the Pact's attribution to Umar. |
| William Muir | d. 1905 | Orientalist who rejected the attribution of the Pact to Umar. |
| Friedrich Schleiermacher | d. 1834 | Theologian whose idea of religion as feeling underlies the modern category of religion. |
| Friedrich Schlegel | d. 1829 | Cited in the book's text or notes. |
| Friedrich Schelling | d. 1854 | First to use the term henotheism, in his study of mythology. |
| Hegel | d. 1831 | Cited in the book's text or notes. |
| Ernest Renan | d. 1892 | The best-known elaborator of the nineteenth-century Aryan myth. |
| Christian Lassen | d. 1876 | Contemporary of Renan in the elaboration of the Aryan myth. |
| Arthur de Gobineau | d. 1882 | Another contemporary in the same Aryan myth. |
| Houston Stewart Chamberlain | d. 1927 | Racial theorist in the line traced in Chapter 4. |
| Guido von List | d. 1919 | Austrian mystagogue influenced by Blavatsky, founder of Armanism. |
| Lanz von Liebenfels | d. 1954 | Developer of List's ideas and popularizer of Aryan supremacism. |
| Lord Herbert of Cherbury | d. 1648 | The Father of Deism, whose attempt to distill the universal features of religion marks an early stage of the modern category. |
| Agostino Steuco | d. 1548 | First to introduce the idea of a perennial philosophy, in De perenni philosophia (1540). |
| Giordano Bruno | d. 1600 | Cited in the book's text or notes. |
| Meister Eckhart | d. 1327 | Dominican theologian whom Schuon pairs with Ibn Arabi. |
| Shankara | d. 820 | Indian philosopher of Vedanta, the model of Schuon's esoterism. |
| Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, Catherine of Siena | d. 430, d. 1153, d. 1380 | Cited in the book's text or notes. |
| Sa'adya Gaon | d. 942 | Jewish theologian whose use of the term for rationally acquired convictions is cited on the meaning of belief. |
| Aristarchus of Samos, Philolaus of Croton | d. c. 230 bce, d. c. 385 bce | Cited in the book's text or notes. |
Synthesis
This closing section steps back from the chapters. It collects the book's main lessons, sets out the frameworks that recur from one chapter to the next, weighs the method, and shows how the parts connect. Everything here restates the book; the editor adds arrangement, not facts.
Ten takeaways
- The map is not the territory. The universalist Ibn Arabi is a modern map. Lipton does not deny that maps are needed; he asks that the map be checked against the texts it claims to describe.
- Belief is not religion. The famous lines about a heart capable of every form, and the teaching on the god created in belief, concern the many forms in which God is known. Reading them as a statement about the parity of religious communities depends on a modern idea of religion as inner belief.
- Din means obedience and recompense. In Ibn Arabi's usage the word for religion carries the sense of submission to a law and its reward, which ties it to the revealed law rather than to private feeling.
- Comprehensiveness is subsumption. When Ibn Arabi affirms all the prophets, he gathers them into the Muhammadan Reality. The earlier messengers are facets of one light whose source is Muhammad, not independent equals.
- The commentary governs the poems. Ibn Arabi wrote The Treasury of Lovers to explain The Interpreter of Desires. Reading the poems without it, as the English translation of 1911 allowed, cut them loose from his own account of what they mean.
- Abrogation is solar. Chapter 12 of The Meccan Openings presents Muhammad as a sun whose rising hides the stars of earlier prophets: they still exist, but their light is no longer seen by day. Earlier laws keep a qualified standing only as Muhammad's law permits.
- The politics are not incidental. The letter to Kayka'us, urging that Christians be held to the conditions of the Pact of Umar, belongs with this cosmology. It is not a lapse from a tolerant mysticism but an expression of the same view.
- Schuon reverses the sky. Where Ibn Arabi had one Muhammadan sun, Schuon's transcendent unity of religions posits many suns, each valid in its own world. Lipton calls this a Copernican turn that uses Ibn Arabi's images to say the opposite of what he said.
- The universal has a race. Schuon's metaphysics carries a typology in which the Aryan is more intellectual and the Semitic more bound to will and law. Lipton traces this to the nineteenth-century Aryan myth and shows how it lets Schuon split Ibn Arabi's esoterism from his law.
- No one sees from zero degrees. Claims to survey all religions from above, without standpoint, hide a standpoint. Through Kant and the pairing of autonomy and heteronomy, Lipton shows that the view from nowhere carries a particular Protestant and Romantic inheritance, and with it an old disdain for the Jewish and the legal.
What to carry after the argument
The portable result is not that Ibn Arabi was a bigot, nor that he was a modern pluralist. It is that his mercy and his hierarchy belong together. Readers who want only the poem of the heart without the letter to Kayka'us, or only the Perfect Man without the solar king, are repeating the method Lipton diagnoses.
Recurring frameworks
| Framework | What it does in the book | Where it appears |
|---|---|---|
| Map and territory | Separates the scholar's model from the texts and asks whose interests the model serves | Prologue, Introduction, Conclusion |
| Belief versus religion | Shows how a teaching on forms of belief was read as a teaching on religions | Chapter 1 |
| Supersession and subsumption | Reads affirmation of earlier prophets as inclusion within Muhammad's law, not parity | Chapters 1, 2, 3 |
| The solar image | Gives the cosmology behind abrogation and its later Perennialist inversion | Chapters 2, 3 |
| Esoteric and exoteric | Explains how Perennialists kept the inner Ibn Arabi and set aside the law | Chapters 3, 4 |
| Aryan and Semitic | Uncovers the racial hierarchy carried inside a universal metaphysics | Chapter 4, Conclusion |
| Autonomy and heteronomy | Links Kant's critique of law to the Perennialist ideal of a religion above law | Conclusion |
A closer look
The book reads Ibn Arabi in Arabic and across his corpus rather than through anthologies, and it repeatedly sets a famous passage back in its chapter, its commentary or its political moment. Its second strand, the genealogy of the modern idea of religion, explains why the universalist reading felt natural without accusing its authors of bad faith. The two strands support each other: the textual readings show the gap, and the genealogy shows why the gap went unnoticed.
Lipton is clear that his own reading is also a map, made from a standpoint. A reader may ask how far the hierarchical Ibn Arabi he reconstructs is itself shaped by the book's critical aim. The weight placed on a single letter and a single cosmological chapter can also be weighed against the many other passages that universalist readers cite; Lipton answers that those passages must be read with these, not that they can be ignored. Finally, the chapter on race rests on Schuon's own writings; readers should keep apart Lipton's claim of a shared discursive genealogy from any claim of direct borrowing, a distinction he draws himself.
It does not argue that interfaith respect is wrong, or that modern readers may not draw on Ibn Arabi for their own purposes. Its claim is narrower: such uses should not be presented as Ibn Arabi's own teaching, and a universalism that claims to rise above all traditions should be examined for the particular tradition hidden inside it.
How the parts connect
Parts 1 and 2 establish what Ibn Arabi wrote: a theory of the forms of belief in Chapter 1, and a solar cosmology of abrogation with its political application in Chapter 2. Part 3 shows how Guenon and Schuon took the same images and redrew them into a plural sky, against the background of the debate on scriptural alteration that Ibn Arabi had inherited from Andalusia. Part 4 asks what made that redrawing seem right, and finds a racialized hierarchy in the Perennialist idea of pure intellect. Part 5 widens the frame to Kant and the modern claim to stand outside every tradition. The Prologue's question about maps returns at the end as a looking-glass: the universalist who looks at Ibn Arabi sees, in the end, his own face.
Whenever Ibn Arabi is quoted as saying that all religions are true, ask which passage is meant, read the chapter around it and his own commentary on it, and ask who is drawing the map. Lipton's book is a model of doing exactly that.
Glossary
Terms as the book uses them, written without diacritics in the editor's text. The meanings given are those the book gives or the sense in which it uses the term; they are not wider dictionary definitions, and the list is limited to words that matter for following the argument.
| Term | Meaning in the book |
|---|---|
| din | Religion, in Ibn Arabi's usage tied to obedience, law and recompense rather than to private belief |
| i'tiqad | Belief; the knot of conviction in which each person knows God in a particular form |
| ilah al-mu'taqad | The god of belief, the form in which God appears to a given believer |
| din al-hubb | Religion of love, the phrase from The Interpreter of Desires taken by universalists as a creed above religions |
| haqiqa muhammadiyya | The Muhammadan Reality, in which all prophets are gathered as facets |
| khatam | Seal; Muhammad as Seal of the Prophets, and the heir who seals sainthood |
| naskh | Abrogation, the setting aside of earlier laws by the law of Muhammad |
| tahrif | Alteration of scripture, whether in its text or its interpretation |
| ahl al-kitab | People of the Book, chiefly Jews and Christians |
| ahl al-dhimma | Protected peoples living under Muslim rule on set conditions |
| jizya | The poll tax paid by protected peoples, the sign of their submission |
| qutb | The Pole, the highest spiritual axis of an age |
| Supersession | The view that a later revelation replaces or includes the earlier ones |
| Perennialism | The school of Guenon, Schuon and their followers holding that one primordial truth underlies all traditions |
| religio perennis, sophia perennis | The perennial religion and wisdom said to lie beneath every revealed form |
| Transcendent unity of religions | Schuon's thesis that religions are diverse in form but one at their esoteric summit |
| Esoteric and exoteric | The inner, metaphysical side of a tradition and its outer, legal and dogmatic side |
| Aryan myth | The nineteenth-century racial theory setting Aryan intellect above Semitic will and law |
| Autonomy and heteronomy | Self-given law versus law imposed from outside; Kant's pair, which Lipton finds behind the Perennialist view of law |
| Zero degrees | The claimed view from no standpoint, which Lipton argues conceals a standpoint |
About this book
Rethinking Ibn Arabi by Gregory A. Lipton, 2018. 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