Insight Editions · No. 94
Sufism and Deconstruction
A Comparative Study of Derrida and Ibn 'Arabi
Ian Almond
Ian Almond compares Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction with Ibn ʿArabi’s Sufi metaphysics, tracing their shared critiques of reason and textual meaning and their contrasting accounts of presence and absence.
A study guide to Sufism and Deconstruction by Ian Almond. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book in Brief
The argument in brief
- Shared enemy. Ibn 'Arabi's "people of reflection" and Derrida's logocentrism both chain an unthinkable subject to concepts; reason ('aql) is a fetter ('iqal).
- Shared tactics. Both affirm bewilderment, read texts as infinitely meaningful, locate a secret in plain view and dissolve the self.
- Deep difference. The Real is a presence beyond binaries; différance is a play with no Player. Ibn 'Arabi's text is full, Derrida's infinitely poor.
- Eckhart as barometer. Derrida's rejection of Christian negative theology, and his silence on Islam, test whether the charge of "hyperessentiality" fits the Shaykh.
About this book
Sufism and Deconstruction: A Comparative Study of Derrida and Ibn 'Arabi by Ian Almond, 2004. 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
Reading order tip
Start with the Introduction for the vase method and the Islam silence, then read chapters as paired case studies (reason, confusion, book, secret). Keep the Conclusion for last: Blanchot, Benjamin and Foucault are evidence of provenance, not a third comparison partner.
Five shared moves, one split at the root.
| Ch | Chapter | In one line |
|---|---|---|
| I | Introduction | Fragments of one vase; Derrida's silence on Islam; Eckhart as third term |
| 1 | The Shackles of Reason | Both free God or text from reason; presence versus absence |
| 2 | The Honesty of the Perplexed | Babel and Noah: confusion as divine gift and honest truth |
| 3 | Sages of the Book | Infinite Koran, infinite text: rabbi, poet and hybrid |
| 4 | Mystery-Tasting and Abyssality | The secret in plain view; return to the market or tremble |
| C | Conclusion | Neoplatonic echoes in Blanchot, Benjamin, Foucault; God under erasure |
Fragments of the Same Vase
Why Ibn 'Arabi, why now
The epigraph comes from Orhan Pamuk's The Black Book, where a character claims Ibn 'Arabi was "the existentialist of all time", robbed blind by the West. Pamuk is mocking the habit of claiming whole centuries of thought for one's own culture, as with Asín Palacios's thesis that Ibn 'Arabi shaped Dante. Still, the Shaykh is "hot": 150 years after his first European printing he has a Society, a journal, two chapters in Routledge's History of Islamic Philosophy, and has been linked to quantum mechanics, Taoism, Aquinas, Swedenborg, Kant and chaos theory. Orthodox scholars push back: Mahmoud al-Ghorab insists he was a Sunni traditionalist (salafi), and William Chittick distrusts links to theorists who think language determines reality.
Comparative theologists have found deconstructive precedents in Pseudo-Dionysius, Eckhart, Sankara, Lao-Tzu and 'Ayn al-Qudat Hamadani. Almond's questions are sharper: how far can a saint's vocabulary match that of a thinker who "rightly pass(es) for an atheist", and can each teach us to read the other?
Derrida's silence on Islam
Derrida, raised in Algeria and self-described as "a very Arab little Jew" (Circumfession), wrote almost nothing on Islam. In "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials" (1987) he deconstructs Greek and Christian negative theology (Dionysius, Eckhart) as still guarding "a hyperessentiality, a being beyond Being", but declines to discuss Jewish or Islamic apophasis, calling that silence "the most consistent possible apophasis".
Eckhart as barometer
Meister Eckhart (1260-1327) is the Western figure most often paired with Ibn 'Arabi ("the Meister Eckhart of the Islamic tradition") and the one Derrida discusses most, from a 1964 article to "Denials". The parallels are striking: both fused mysticism and philosophy, faced persecution, travelled for years (Seville to Damascus; Erfurt to Avignon), gathered commentators (Suso, Tauler; al-Qaysari, al-Qashani), and drew the same charges of pantheism and incoherence. Eckhart is no synonym for Ibn 'Arabi, but he measures Derrida's sympathy and hostility toward mysticism.
Pamuk's joke and the territorial instinct
Orhan Pamuk's The Black Book mocks the habit of claiming whole centuries for one's own culture. A character calls Ibn 'Arabi "the existentialist of all time", "robbed blind" by the West; Pamuk never names Asín Palacios, whose thesis that the Shaykh shaped Dante's Commedia is the classic instance of such wishful hermeneutics. Almond takes the joke seriously as a warning: this study will not make the Shaykh a medieval post-structuralist, nor produce Caputo's "Jacques of El-Biar" as a Sufi.
After 150 years of European printings, Ibn 'Arabi has a Society, a quarterly Journal, and two central chapters in Routledge's History of Islamic Philosophy. Popular links run to quantum mechanics, Taoism, Aquinas, Swedenborg, New Age, Kant and chaos theory. Orthodox pushback is sharp: Mahmoud al-Ghorab spends twenty pages denying he was Shi'ite, Isma'ili, philosopher or esotericist, insisting on a Sunni traditionalist (salafi); William Chittick distrusts theorists who "claim that language determines all of reality". Context, Derrida's "indispensable guardrail", is hard to fix once and for all.
Comparative theology's deconstructive saints
Over about fifteen years before Almond's book, comparative religion and theology departments rediscovered deconstructive precedents in Pseudo-Dionysius, Eckhart, Sankara, Lao-Tzu and 'Ayn al-Qudat Hamadani. Almond's sharper questions: how far can a saint's vocabulary match a thinker who "rightly pass(es) for an atheist", and can each teach us to read the other? Metaphors and strategies of deconstruction may change meaning when set beside Sufism; the comparison is a point of departure, not a destination that serves up a "postmodern Futuhat".
Introduction: against territorial hermeneutics.
Why Islam is the unspeakable Other
In "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials" (1987) Derrida deconstructs Greek and Christian apophasis (Dionysius, Eckhart) as still guarding "a hyperessentiality, a being beyond Being", while leaving Jewish and Islamic negativity empty: "to remain thus on the threshold, was this not the most consistent possible apophasis?" He alludes to Wittgenstein's Tractatus line on what one cannot speak. Almond presses: why is an Algerian Jew "at home" with a Syrian monk, a German Dominican and a Bavarian phenomenologist, yet silent on Gerona Kabbalah, the Bahir, Ibn Masarrah, Ibn Rushd, Rumi or Suhrawardi, traditions based in part in the Moorish Spain of the "Christian Europe" Derrida critiques elsewhere?
Possible plain reasons: limited knowledge, no Arabic or Aramaic, attraction to the neat genealogy Dionysius-Eckhart-Heidegger, or a preference for deconstructing Euro-Christian logocentrisms. The rhetorical effect remains: Islam becomes "the unspeakable Other once again", dressed as consistent apophasis.
Eckhart as phantom third: parallels and limits
Critics call Ibn 'Arabi "the Meister Eckhart of the Islamic tradition"; Dom Sylvester Houédard and Ralph Austin note "striking resemblances". Shared pattern: fusion of mysticism and philosophy; persecution; long travel (Seville to Damascus; Erfurt to Avignon); disciple networks (Suso, Tauler; Davud al-Qaysari, al-Qashani); charges of pantheism and incoherence (Denifle / Affifi); Far-Eastern comparisons (Suzuki, Ueda / Izutsu); debates over orthodoxy (Shi'ite or Sunni? Catholic or proto-Reformation?). Almond has argued elsewhere that the two start alike and diverge; here Eckhart is a barometer of Derrida's hostility and sympathy toward mysticism, not a Christian synonym for the Shaykh.
Derrida's 1987 silence dressed as consistent apophasis.
Benjamin's shattered vase as method image
Method image: fragments of one vessel, not a new idol.
Almond borrows Walter Benjamin's image of a shattered vase: fragments that once belonged to one vessel. The method is not to force the shards into a single idol (a "postmodern Futuhat") but to hold them so each edge teaches. Comparative theology's recent "deconstructive saints" (Dionysius, Eckhart, Sankara, Lao-Tzu, 'Ayn al-Qudat) supply company; Almond's sharper test is whether a saint's vocabulary can still speak beside a thinker who "rightly pass(es) for an atheist", and whether each can teach us to read the other without stealing the other's century.
Eckhart as barometer between Sufi and deconstructionist.
The Shackles of Reason
"He who claims to know that God is his Creator / While not being perplexed, this is the evidence of his ignorance" (Futuhat). A chronology of anti-rationalists from al-Ghazali and Eckhart to Rousseau, Blake, Nietzsche and Levinas would share metaphors of wind, breath and openness (futuh / ouvert, a key word for both).
Two solitary critics
Neither thinker joins a school (madhahib). In Shajarat al-Kawn Ibn 'Arabi has God foretell how Jews, Christians, idolaters, corporealists (Mujassima), Mushabbiha, Mu'attila and Mu'tazilites will misunderstand Him, putting his critique in the mouth of the Divine. He steers between ta'til (stripping God of attributes) and tashbih (overloading Him with them). Derrida blends praise and critique: Levinas "resigned to betraying his own intentions", Lévi-Strauss guilty of "nostalgia for origins", negative theology a language testing "the very limits of language" that still "belongs... to the onto-theological promise it seems to break". Even Nietzsche, Freud and Heidegger stay "trapped in a kind of circle".
Ibn 'Arabi against the people of reflection
The Shaykh notes that 'aql (reason) shares a root with 'iqal (fetter): reason narrows a "Divine Vastness" without limit. He targets both sides of the Kalam debate. The Ash'arites (al-Ash'ari, 873-935) confess that God has hands, eyes and a face "without asking how"; the Mu'tazilites say "He is no body, nor object... He is a being, but not as other beings", like Dionysius. Kalam ("speech") needed an adversary and aimed, in definitions from al-Farabi, al-Iji, Ibn Khaldun and Muhammad 'Abduh, to justify belief and police heresy. Ibn 'Arabi called it meddlesome: "I hear the grinding, but I don't see any flour."
His Neoplatonic system of stations, names and emanations, the Breath of mercy annihilating and recreating each instant, is linked with wahdat al-wujud (unity of Being), a term his followers (al-Qunawi, al-Qashani, al-Qaysari) systematised. It is not pantheism, and not a "grand totalising master narrative" (Hamid Dabashi): the system is a Wittgensteinian ladder, climbed to be kicked away.
Almond stresses what the Shaykh shares with the theologians he attacks: he does not reject reason outright, but its claim to the last word. Knowledge of God comes by tasting (dhawq) and unveiling (kashf), not by proof; the intellect is honoured when it knows its own playing field. The same holds for Derrida, who never abandons argument but shows how every argument rests on an unexamined centre.
Four reasons reason fails
Ibn 'Arabi's chain: to know God is to own Him.
- The preface as reduction. Derrida's Dissemination reads Hegel's preface as an attempt to fix a text's future meaning ("This is what you are going to read"); in Ibn 'Arabi's terms it cuts the inner (batin) down to one outer (zahir). But Derrida's objection rests on uncontrollable play, not an inexhaustible God.
- The chain of ownership. "Were It known, it would be encompassed. Were it encompassed, It would be limited... confined... owned." Theology risks a will to power, the fear Maimonides voiced about sophists and Eckhart about those who love God "for the milk and the cheese".
- Two kinds of unrepeatability. Derrida's comes from a "fold" in the text and from contexts without any centre, not from superabundance; he distrusts "infinitist theology" and prefers "non-finite". Yet Ibn 'Arabi's God as "perplexity... perturbation and flux, and flux is life" (Moses chapter) resembles Derrida's text as a play of forces, and both use the image of overflow (fayd / déborder).
Both Kalam halves fail; paradox points to a presence.
Ibn 'Arabi attacks Mu'tazilites and Ash'arites together because each holds one half of a binary: "If you insist only on His transcendence, you restrict Him, / And if you insist only on His immanence you limit Him." Like Derrida he sees binaries as hierarchies serving ideology. But Derrida rejects binaries because they veil an absence; Ibn 'Arabi rejects them because they veil a presence, the paradoxical Oneness of God.
To affirm both at once is, by al-Ghazali's rule in the Tahafut al-Falasifah, a breach of the law of contradiction ("A is both black and white"). For Ibn 'Arabi that impossibility is the point: God is an experience of the impossible, and reason committed to "Is God X or Y?" can only roam "its own specific playing field (maydan), which is one of many fields". The Ash'arites privilege immanence to justify their God, just as Derrida finds one term of every pair (spirit/flesh, nature/culture, speech/writing) privileged.
Derrida: freeing the letter
In "Force and Signification" (1963), on Jean Rousset's study of Corneille, Derrida charges structuralism with "a relaxation, if not a lapse, of the attention given to force": structure becomes the critic's fetish ("ultrastructuralism"), form eclipses play, and the wish for totality is a wish to "forget différance". The text is never present. Of Grammatology then exposes the West's subordination of writing as "nothing but the representation of speech" (Rousseau). Saussure's "tyranny of writing" and Lévi-Strauss's claim that writing exists "to facilitate the enslavement" of humans invert the emancipation; Derrida answers that writing befalls no innocent language: "language is first... writing."
Différance and al-haqq share a list of (non)attributes: no name ("not even that of différance"); unthinkable, never present; neither sensible nor intelligible (cf. "Nothing is like Him", Q 42:11); spoken of only by negation (salb); outside time (al-qidam, al-azal); productive, generating forms without appearing. Difference: Ibn 'Arabi admits "Someone who cannot be known"; différance is a play with no Someone, "a bottomless chessboard" with no Chess Player.
When Brice Parain called différance "the God of negative theology" after the lecture, Derrida objected that negative theologies always rescue "a superessentiality". Almond notes that Alan Bass translates parfois à s'y méprendre as "indistinguishable", amplifying the echo Derrida denies; John Caputo sides with Derrida ("différance is especially not a hidden God").
Différance, point by point
- Unnamable, but not ineffable. Différance has "no name in our language", not because the name is still to be found but because it is "the play which makes possible nominal effects", "older than Being itself" (a jab at Heidegger). The Real too has no attributes (sifa) or names (asma), against the Ash'arites' attributes "unlike any human attribute".
- Never present. Reason cannot delimit the Real, "since He destroys that delimitation by the next self-disclosure"; the "a" of différance "cannot be exposed" because it makes presentation possible. One is a hidden entity in Heraclitean flux, the other a play with nothing to think.
- Only by indirection. Irene Harvey lists twenty-six things deconstruction is not, from "(a) metaphysics" to "(z) the celebration of a Wake, as per Joyce"; Derrida can speak of it "only through a very indirect discourse". Ibn 'Arabi: God "can only be known through negative descriptions", the Real is "not a slave" rather than "free", and even "incomparable" delimits (he is "absolutely incomparable with every declaration of incomparability").
- Outside time. Derrida denies différance is an origin prior to differences, lest it become a Neoplatonic First Cause, and severs it from the "living present" (lebendige Gegenwart) on which, in "Genesis and Structure", he says Husserl built his phenomenology.
- Differential meaning. Behind it lies Saussure: signs mean only through their differences from other signs, with no positive terms. Ibn 'Arabi makes no such critique of meaning: his opposites are real and are dissolved only in the Real.
Rationalisms named and refused
Ibn 'Arabi's Shajarat al-Kawn (Tree of Being) lists those who "limit" God: Mujassima (corporealists), Mushabbiha (anthropomorphists), Mu'attila (those who strip God of attributes). Elsewhere he attacks Kalam for treating divine attributes as if they were creatures of definition. M.A.S. Abdel Haleem notes that kalam itself means speech or discussion that tries to prove the Creator; for the Shaykh such proof already shrinks what it claims to secure. Derrida's parallel is the chain of logocentric figures: Plato's eidos, Aristotle's ousia, Descartes' cogito, Hegel's Absolute, Husserl's living present. Each promises a centre that would still meaning; each is the thing deconstruction unsettles.
The meeting with Averroes (Ibn Rushd) in Cordoba is Almond's emblem: the philosopher asks whether mystical unveiling and demonstration agree; the young Andalusian answers yes and no, then "yes" again, leaving Averroes pale. Fatima of Cordoba, an elderly woman saint, is among his early teachers; Spain until about age thirty-six, then Mecca, Anatolia and Damascus. The Fusus al-Hikam is a short, dense "summa" of prophets as wisdom-stations; the Futuhat al-Makkiyya sprawls across 560 chapters. Form mirrors method: system always incomplete.
Biography as method: yes/no and unfinished system.
Derrida's "non-finite" and the Irene Harvey inventory
In Of Grammatology Derrida distinguishes the infinitist theology that still thinks God as a being (even an infinite one) from a non-finite thinking that refuses closure. Irene Harvey, in Derrida and the Economy of Différance, lists twenty-six things deconstruction is not, from "(a) metaphysics" through Mallarmé's "un coup des Dés" to "(z) the celebration of a Wake, as per Joyce". The list teaches by indirection: Derrida can speak of différance "only through a very indirect discourse". Alan Bass's English can flatten French shifts around "God"; Almond flags where translation amplifies an echo Derrida denies. Rodolphe Gasché's tain of the mirror (the lustreless backing that makes reflection possible without taking part) names what neither theology nor philosophy can fully thematize without losing it.
Three objections in "Force and Signification"
Almond unpacks "Force and Signification" (1963), on Jean Rousset's Corneille study, as three linked charges against structuralism: (1) the concept of structure becomes "the critic's sole preoccupation" ("ultrastructuralism"), sacrificing the text to the grid; (2) attention to forme forgets the play and force "going on within it metaphorically"; (3) the wish to preserve each totality "at its own level" is a wish to "forget différance". Of Grammatology then exposes the West's demotion of writing to "nothing but the representation of speech" (Rousseau). When Brice Parain, after the 1968 "La différance" lecture, called différance "the God of negative theology", Derrida objected that negative theologies still rescue a "superessentiality"; Almond notes Caputo siding with that denial.
Unrepeatability: Qur'an 55:29 and the always-new Real
A favourite Akbarian proof-text is Q 55:29: "Every day He is upon some task." The Real is not a stock of attributes that repeats; each theophany is unrepeatable. Confusion (hayrah) is therefore not a failure of method but a correct response to a God who never appears twice the same way. Derrida's parallel is not theophany but iterability: a mark must be repeatable to mean, yet each repetition is a new context that alters what is repeated. Shared effect: the dream of a final, once-for-all reading dies. Different root: for Ibn 'Arabi the Real gives the new; for Derrida there is no giver behind the chain.
Zoography and the animal of writing
Of Grammatology's image of a zoography, writing as animal-track rather than transparent window, undercuts the dream of a meaning that would stand clear of mark and body. Almond links this to Ibn 'Arabi's sense that every creature is a letter in a cosmic text: the cosmos itself is a book, but one whose Author keeps rewriting the page. The difference remains: cosmic letters point to a Writer; Derridean tracks do not.
Unrepeatability: theophany versus iterability.
Counter-readings and Almond's wager
Orthodox critics read the Shaykh as a dangerous pantheist; analytic readers of Derrida (Habermas, Ellis) read him as a relativist who dissolves truth. Almond's wager is neither: each is a rigorous practice that keeps a discipline (Sufi path; textual vigilance) while refusing the comfort of a finished system. The chapter's conclusion is comparative, not synthetic: we learn how each unsettles reason, not that they say the same thing about what lies beyond it.
Prefaces, ladders and the empty construct
In Dissemination Derrida tracks the Hegelian preface (Vorwort): the author's hope to sum up a work so "unacceptable" readings never happen. Almond pairs that hope with Kalam's hope to fix the Real once. Both are fetters on an unstill subject. Ibn 'Arabi's hierarchies of names are ladders (Wittgenstein's image fits Almond's gloss): climb them toward "a station of no station", then let them drop. Hamid Dabashi's charge of a "grand totalising master narrator" misses that aim. The Ash'arite mistake, in the Shaykh's view, is to build theology on an empty construct felt sure to be "God"; Derrida's parallel is the thinker who treats a centre, experience or innocence as self-sufficient.
Someone versus play
After sounding like negative theology, Derrida insists différance is "not an ineffable Being which no name could approach" but "the play which makes possible nominal effects". Ibn 'Arabi can write "One comes to know that there is Someone who cannot be known". Almond refuses to collapse the lines: shared namelessness, otherness, atemporality and generative function; split on whether a Someone remains. Différance is "silent, secret and discreet as a tomb"; the Real still answers prayer. The next chapter's praise of confusion will show how each lives with the openness that follows.
Preface-fetter vs ladder; Someone vs play.
Liberation of écriture, liberation of the Real
Almond notes that the entire aim of Of Grammatology is the liberation of écriture from "the rank of an instrument enslaved to full and originarily spoken language". Ibn 'Arabi's parallel is spiritual: free the Real from schools that own it. Not identical gestures (semantic versus spiritual), yet both re-affirm something elusive that defeats exclusive talk. Context matters: Murcia in 1165, at a hinge where philosophy, Kalam and Sufism borrowed terms (emanation, unity, attribute, intelligence) that the Shaykh would re-mint; Derrida writing against structuralism's calm totals. References to al-Ghazali, Ibn Masarrah and Ibn Qasyi show the Shaykh knew his predecessors; Derrida's targets (Rousseau, Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Rousset) show his.
Binary tyranny and huwa la huwa
Whenever two terms oppose (spirit/flesh, nature/culture, speech/writing), Derrida says a hierarchy ensues for ideological ends. Ibn 'Arabi prefigures the worry: Ash'arites privilege immanence, Mu'tazilites transcendence, each to justify a version of God. "If you insist only on His transcendence, you restrict Him... If you maintain both aspects you are right." The formula huwa la huwa (He / not He) is not a shrug; it is a refusal of the half. Derrida rejects binaries because they veil an absence; Ibn 'Arabi because they veil a paradoxical presence. Same exit from dualism; opposite doors again.
The tain of the mirror in both thinkers.
The tain of the mirror
Différance's decisive trait is that it produces. Derrida writes dissemination "on the back, the tain, of that mirror", and Rodolphe Gasché glosses the tain as the lustreless backing that makes reflection possible without taking part. Ibn 'Arabi: "there is nothing but passage from veil to veil... the Real is behind all of that"; and in the Fusus, "Try, when you look at yourself in a mirror, to see the mirror itself, and you will find that you cannot". In both, the theologian mistakes his own reflection for the Real.
The Honesty of the Perplexed
Two epigraphs set the terms: Nietzsche's "The will to a system is a lack of integrity" and the hadith Ibn 'Arabi loves, "O Lord, increase my perplexity concerning Thee!" Western philosophy treats confusion as the problem to be cured (Wittgenstein's philosopher "screaming helplessly, until he gets to the heart of his confusion"; Descartes' war on doubt). In Islam, Ibn Taymiyya holds the Prophet came to explain clearly (tubayyin), and God is Guide (al-hadi) to the righteous but Misguider (al-mudill) of the wicked.
Lovers of clarity or confusion?
Ibn 'Arabi does more than praise confusion: he confuses. A. E. Affifi found no "appreciable degree of coherence", Mustafa Tahrali notes the Fusus ignores non-contradiction, and Alexander Knysh sees contradiction throughout. Against them, al-Ghorab blames the commentators and finds a "Muhammedan mirror of the utmost clarity".
Derrida's readers split the same way. Habermas (mystification), Mark C. Taylor ("unending play of surfaces"), John Ellis (mysticism, incoherence) and a delighted Richard Rorty (fantasising about predecessors) see confusion. Culler, Gasché and Norris see a serious philosopher "in the mainstream tradition from Kant to Husserl and Frege" who shows the fly the way out of the fly-bottle. Almond's reading sets him against both al-Ghorab's Ibn 'Arabi and Gasché's Derrida.
William Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge
For Tahrali the Fusus's paradoxes are a spiritual strategy, detaching the reader from logic as a first station toward hayrah (perplexity). Ibn 'Arabi treats bewilderment as a station, a gift, a divine name, a tool, a knowledge, and quotes Abu Bakr: "To realise that one cannot know [God] is to know." Asking God to increase perplexity means asking Him to break the cages we build for Him, by setting many Gods side by side, orthodox and heretical, near and aloof.
Dionysius had a precedent: calling God drunk or hungover is more fitting than "good" or "wise", since "incongruous dissimilarities" expose the gap. Derrida has a secular version: the "absolute openness towards the wholly other", in which the other's text "arrives in silence... to dislodge the language of translation".
Confusion as station or as goal?
Some passages present bewilderment as a prelude to clarity: "he who truly understands what we are discussing here is not confused"; the chapter on Lot closes "The Mystery is now clear to you". This matters for Derrida's charge that negative theologies defer rather than deconstruct, keeping "some hyperessentiality" in reserve. If God is perplexity itself, the charge fails; if perplexity is a step toward a hidden secret (sirr), Ibn 'Arabi only postpones God.
Jami's three bewilderments: a hierarchy of non-knowledge.
The fifteenth-century commentator 'Abd al-Rahman Jami distinguishes three bewilderments in the Fusus's last chapter. Almond draws three lessons: confusion comes in kinds, some to be overcome; it is elitist, a hierarchy in which the clearest minds rank lowest; and the true goal may be an attitude to confusion, close to Derrida's "Nietzschean... joyous affirmation of the play of the world" ("Structure, Sign and Play").
Untying knots
Derrida's images for différance are bewildering in themselves: it "instigates the subversion of every kingdom", "disorganizes structure", "unsews" the text (Latin textus, cloth), opening "a snag that can no longer be mended". Ibn 'Arabi's word for belief, i'tiqad / 'aqida, has the root sense of tying a knot, so "every group has believed something about God" means every group has tied a knot. Deconstruction is revelatory, not stimulatory: texts are always already drifting, just as "God is the root of every diversity (khilaf) in beliefs".
Knots and stitches: two images of undoing.
Both thinkers thus begin from the same suspicion: a system's calm surface hides seething elements that were always there. The difference lies in what produces them. For Derrida it is the drift of writing itself; for Ibn 'Arabi it is a God whose self-disclosures never repeat, so that every school's knot is untied by the next disclosure.
Babel: the tyranny of clarity
"Des Tours de Babel" (1985), on Benjamin's "Task of the Translator", retells Genesis 11 like a medieval typologist, turning it into a deconstructive parable. The Shemites want to "make a name for themselves", founding a universal tongue that signifies both "a colonial violence... and a peaceful transparency". They are system-builders; Babel stands for "the impossibility of finishing, of totalising", the same futility Derrida finds in Husserl, Foucault's history of madness, and Levinas's "dream of a purely heterological thought".
God is the arch-deconstructor, and divided himself: "God deconstructs. Himself." Voltaire's quip that Ba-Bel means "city of God" (a swipe at Augustine's Jerusalem/Babylon) implies confusion is divine, not diabolical. Twenty years earlier, on Jabès, Derrida wrote that "there can be no simplicity of God". He also cites "the God of Boehme" whose Ungrund seethes into history. Later (Eckhart, Silesius, Patočka), God becomes a deferred secret, never again a synonym for confusion.
Derrida's Babel: a gain and a loss in one act.
The ambivalence is deliberate. Derrida, wary of Lévi-Strauss's tyrant/victim dualism, never calls confusion a pacific state, and he distrusts the word "community" ("as many threats as promises"), yet here he concedes that one tongue would make gestures "transparent". The most he claims is that the bewildered are less likely to impose a single image on the Other, much as Ibn 'Arabi's gnostic in full hayrah can no longer fix any image on the Real. Confusion falls hardest on those who refuse to be homeless: "true homelessness and confusion will only be inflicted on those who do not desire it".
Noah: sainthood as perplexity
Noah inverted: drowning as knowledge, shore as fall.
The Fusus's chapter on Noah (Sura 71) inverts the Koran: villains are treated sympathetically, condemnations become praise. Noah is faulted for preaching only transcendence, summoning "by night" (intellect) and "by day" (senses) but never uniting them as in "There is none like Him" (42:11). The idolaters, with their many idols (Wadd, Suwa', Yaghuth, Ya'uq, Nasr), "drowned in the seas of knowledge of God, which is what is meant by perplexity". Muhammad, by contrast, summoned "by night during the day, and by day during the night".
'Ayn al-Qudat and the sea without shores
Before the Shaykh's praise of hayrah can sound normal, Almond recalls how negative "confusion" usually is in Islamic speech. 'Ayn al-Qudat Hamadhani describes his heart before reading al-Ghazali as "a tumultuous sea with no shores, in it was drowned all the ends and all the beginnings". Ibn Taymiyya's Muqaddimat al-tafsir insists the Prophet was sent to explain clearly (tubayyin) everything needed. Against that background, asking God to increase perplexity is already a rupture. Almond's Ibn 'Arabi does not deny that some confusions are sins of refusal; he adds a higher confusion that is a gift of the Real's unrepeatability.
Jami's three bewilderments, spelled out
'Abd al-Rahman Jami (fifteenth century) reads the Fusus's last chapter as staging three hayrahs. Almond's three lessons follow:
- Kinds. Some bewilderment is a fog to be crossed toward clarity; some is the trackless desert where gnostics wander "from Him, through Him and in Him". Mixing the two makes readers think the Shaykh is incoherent when he is ranking stations.
- Hierarchy. The "clearest" dogmatic minds rank lowest, because they have tied the tightest knot ('aqida). The elect are those who can hold many images without choosing one as final.
- Attitude. The goal may be less a permanent fog than a calm toward fog, near the "Nietzschean... joyous affirmation of the play of the world" at the close of "Structure, Sign and Play". Almond leaves the nearness open: celebration of play is not yet celebration of the Real.
Three bewilderments: kinds, rank, attitude.
Babel, Freud, and the fear of a wandering name
Derrida's Shemites want a name that means one thing in every context. Almond pairs that fear with Freud's worry, in "Coming Into One's Own", that "psychoanalysis" might wander from his control once the science is handed on. The same desire for a propre name drives both. Richard Rorty glosses the tower as an attempt "to speak a word which has meaning even though it has no place in a social practice". Confusion, in this frame, is the price of relatedness; clarity purchased by freezing a name is a will to power.
Voltaire's calm etymology (Ba = father, Bel = God) undercuts Augustine's Civitas Dei map (Jerusalem = peace/unity; Babylon = noise/discord). Derrida needs that undercutting: if confusion is already divine, then God's strike at Babel is not order crushing chaos but one confusion birthing another. "God deconstructs. Himself." Almond stresses that this synonymy of God and confusion is rare in Derrida; after the Benjamin essay, God returns as deferred secret, never again as Babel's other name.
Four theses on actual situations
Almond's closing list, expanded:
| Thesis | Claim | Shared tool |
|---|---|---|
| Actual | Perplexity precedes tidy talk of God or text | Différance / al-haqq as prior unrest |
| Inevitable | No vocabulary stops the drift | "Essential drifting of the text" / unrepeatable theophanies |
| Honest | Clarity often covers (kafara) | Nietzschean integrity vs system |
| Desirable | Breakdown reveals what mastery hides | Heidegger's broken tool; free faith |
Derrida's aside on a "deconstructive theology movement" that would free the gospel from its "metaphysico-philosophical super ego" and allow "a faith lived in a venturous, dangerous, free way" is Almond's Western echo of hayrah. He does not baptize Derrida; he notes that the hope for a free faith already has an Islamic vocabulary of perplexity.
Dionysius's drunk God and the clarifying Other
Dionysius's strategy of "incongruous dissimilarities" (calling God drunk or hungover rather than "good") is Almond's bridge: shatter images by contiguity, not by silence alone. Derrida's secular cousin is the "absolute openness towards the wholly other", whose text "arrives in silence... to dislodge the language of translation". Both treat confusion as a way of receiving what tidy speech would falsify. The Enoch and Hud chapters of the Fusus, which can sound like clarity beyond bewilderment, stay in tension with Noah and Muhammad; Jami's ranking of hayrahs is Almond's tool for not collapsing that tension into incoherence.
Almond's four theses: actual, inevitable, honest, desirable.
Ibn 'Arabi's Noah: the flood as divine perplexity.
| Babel (Derrida) | Flood (Ibn 'Arabi) |
|---|---|
| Divine catastrophe read as gift | Drowning read as ascent |
| Shemites seek one name | Noah preaches one aspect |
| Multiplicity without origin | Many idols point to the One |
| Confusion foils empire | Confusion makes servants Lords |
- Multiplicity as means. One idol breeds false clarity; many make the believer ask where the holy lies. Both use infinity: Derrida's "bottomless chessboard", Ibn 'Arabi's shoreless ocean. But the text's infinity leaves it semantically vacuous, while the beliefs' infinity reveals "Something which cannot be known".
- Oceans over arks. Returning to shore would lower them "from an eminent stage". In the Futuhat the "deaf, dumb, blind" of 2:17, who "will never return to the right path", become the elect, a reading hard to square with al-sirat al-mustaqim and the Shariah. The perplexed stays "ceaselessly centred on the Pole" and needs no journey.
- Servants become Lords. Noah fears the perplexed "will confuse your servants... so that they will consider themselves as Lords". Almond compares Ernst Bloch's Marxist Eckhart, but warns the Shaykh's chains are purely metaphysical.
Actual situations
Almond closes with four theses. Perplexity is an actual situation that precedes God or text; it is inevitable, since no hermeneutics stops "the essential drifting of the text"; it is honest and difficult, since kafir derives from a root meaning to cover, and "We forbid reflection totally... since it makes the possessor heir to deceit"; and it is desirable. Derrida's hope for a theology freed of its "metaphysico-philosophical super ego", "a faith lived in a venturous, dangerous, free way", finds an Islamic precedent in hayrah. As in Heidegger's broken tool, which reveals "the worldhood of the world", breakdown lets us see: we begin to see only when we desire confusion.
Sages of the Book
Against the slide from Word to void
Stanley Rosen (Hermeneutics as Politics) tells the story as decline: hermeneutics began by explaining God's word, then Hegel and Nietzsche killed God, Kojève and Foucault killed man, leaving "nothing but our own garrulity". Mark C. Taylor calls deconstruction "the 'hermeneutic' of the death of God", the coup de grâce to author's intention. Almond answers with Borges on Kabbalists: a text dictated by the Holy Spirit is "a mechanism of infinite purposes", so they permuted words, counted letters and sought anagrams, since "nothing can be contingent in the work of an infinite mind".
Ibn 'Arabi does the same, reading the date of the Almohad victory of 1194 mystically and deriving the Perfect Man (al-insan al-kamil) from the letters of Muhammad's name. Derrida's "contexts without any centre of absolute anchoring" makes the text a meaning-machine in the same way. Derrida has not freed the text from theology; he restored an originary infinity already there for Bonaventure, Moses de León and al-Ghazali.
Two routes to the same open text.
Livre and kitab
"Every existent thing finds in the Koran what it desires" (Futuhat III.94). The idea was not new: al-Ghazali quotes 'Ali, "I could load seventy camels with the exegesis of the opening surah", and calls exoteric-only reading a veil of ignorance. Ibn 'Arabi's hermeneutics concern almost only the Koran, unlike Derrida's, yet his God writes every book: gnostics "never hear a verse, a riddle, a panegyric, or a love poem that is not about Him", though poets think they write of Zaynab, Su'ad, Hind, Layla.
The key passage: "We say concerning the senses of a verse that all are intended by God... when someone understands a sense from the verse, that sense is intended by God in the case of the person who finds it." The Koran carries messages gauged to each reader, like Isaac Luria's 600,000 faces of the Torah or the 77,200 sciences one scholar found in the Koran. God has already foreseen every reading, as if Shakespeare began Macbeth knowing the 30,000 studies to come.
A sea without a shore
"For the Koran is the shoreless ocean", since its Author intends every meaning; "We have missed nothing in the Book" (6:38); it "comprises all that has come to pass and all that has not". Qur'an itself suggests "gathering together". Derrida extends this to every text: writing is "a machine that is in turn productive", which "my future disappearance... will not prevent from functioning", and the mark always carries "the structural possibility of being severed from its referent" ("Signature, Event, Context"). Unlike God, we cannot anticipate how our texts will be read.
| Ibn 'Arabi's kitab | Derrida's texte |
|---|---|
| Inexhaustible reservoir; plenitude | Infinitely poor, parasitic |
| Readings express unity | Readings disrupt unity |
| Author intends all meanings | No author governs meaning |
| Book made to stand up again | Sign wanders like a vagrant |
| Reader engulfed by the text | Reader adopts the text |
Derrida's text is no treasure chest. Warning against confusing dissemination with polysemy, he describes the written sign as a ghost that "signifies little, and always the same thing", "an outlaw, a pervert, a bad seed, a vagrant", "at everyone's disposal". Its flexibility stems from amnesia. Ibn 'Arabi goes the other way: the learned make the Book "lie down", and the successful reader "makes the Book stand up... he declares it incomparable with his own interpretation". Applying tanzih to the Koran implies absolute unreadability, the Book a one-way radio its Author switches on and off. Eckhart agrees: every scripture "contains another hidden sense", and like Origen he calls it a sea.
Author, text and reader collapse
Ibn 'Arabi uses one vocabulary for God, the Perfect Man and the Koran: "The soul is an ocean without a shore"; the Koran is the "tremendous totality... comprising all things"; "all the infinite objects of knowledge that God knows are within man". If "He who knows his self, knows his Lord", reading is not transfer between separate parties but recollection, "a recollection and a renewal (tajdid) of what he had forgotten". To understand the Koran is to take part in its expansion.
Affirmative hermeneutics
Neither thinker fears infinite meaning. For Ibn 'Arabi creation is perpetual motion ("bringing to be does not take place from stillness... inexhaustible words"), so reading turns the batin of a verse into a zahir for one's own life: "the situation is new forever". In Aristotelian (perhaps Avicennan) fashion actuality outranks possibility: God's mercy (rahma) relieves possibles of non-existence's "misery", so interpreting a verse is mercy upon it. Arabic script itself enacts this: consonants (mhmd) mean nothing until breathed (muhammad).
Derrida affirms out of Nietzschean absence. He mocks "paleonymy" and asks: "Can one not affirm the nonreferral to the centre, rather than bemoan the absence of the centre?" The text's freedom rests on "the inexhaustible... absence which founds it". When does God's ungraspability start to mean the same as His absence?
Presence and absence yield one hermeneutic freedom.
Rabbis and poets
Derrida writes in two registers. "Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book" (1964) is near-midrash, drawing on Abulafia, Luria and Moses de León, signed "Reb Derissa": "God separated himself from himself in order to let us speak". "Signature, Event, Context" (1971) sounds like Austin and Ryle: "the absence of the sender... belongs to the structure of all writing". Thomas Altizer maps the removal of origins onto the Kabbalistic tsimtsum; Caputo finds deconstruction "more prophetic than apophatic".
That gives three reasons for an infinite text: no Author (Derrida); an Author who withdrew (Kabbalah); an Author who intends every meaning (Ibn 'Arabi). "Structure, Sign and Play" pits the rabbi, who "dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin" and lives interpretation "as an exile", against the poet, who "affirms play" in "the seminal adventure of the trace". Derrida calls the two "absolutely irreconcilable".
Ibn 'Arabi as hybrid of Derrida's two interpreters.
The dream-chapter of the Futuhat roots ta'bir (interpretation) and 'ibara (expression) in 'ubur, "crossing over": the speaker "transfers his words from imagination to imagination". Like Rousseau, Ibn 'Arabi comes "disturbingly close" to the deconstructive moment (signs lead only to signs) without making it. Derrida's text forges "its actual infinite way through the desolate swamp" (on Lautréamont); chance and contexts replace the Real.
Weber's disenchantment reversed
Almond opens against a Weberesque story: modernity as Entzauberung, the Holy Word emptied until only chatter remains (Rosen, Taylor). Borges on the Kabbalists reverses the arrow: an infinite Author makes the text more elastic, not less. Ibn 'Arabi reading 1194 (Almohad victory) into letters, or drawing the Perfect Man from Muhammad's name, is the same habit. Derrida's "contexts without any centre of absolute anchoring" does not invent textual infinity; it secularises an infinity medieval readers already practised.
Corbin versus Chittick on ta'wil
Henry Corbin ties Ibn 'Arabi to Shi'ite esoteric ta'wil. William Chittick replies that most Futuhat mentions of ta'wil are negative, and that the Shaykh shows "tremendous reverence for the literal text". Almond finds that hard to square with the Fusus's praise of Pharaoh and other inversions. The dispute matters for the chapter: if the Shaykh is a careful literalist, his "infinite Koran" is a pious exaggeration; if he is a bold ta'wil practitioner, the parallel with dissemination sharpens, then splits on Authorial intention.
Corbin vs Chittick: how free is Akbarian reading?
Al-Ghazali's seventy camels and Luria's faces
"Every existent thing finds in the Koran what it desires" (Futuhat III.94). Al-Ghazali's Kitab adab tilawat quotes 'Ali: the opening surah alone could load seventy camels with exegesis; reading only the outer sense is a veil of ignorance. Isaac Luria's 600,000 faces of the Torah (one per Israelite soul) and a reported 77,200 sciences drawn from the Koran push the same logic. Almond's Shakespeare joke: imagine the Bard starting Macbeth already knowing the 30,000 studies to come. For Ibn 'Arabi that foresight belongs to God; for Derrida, no one sits in that seat, so the machine keeps producing after the writer's "future disappearance".
Dissemination is not polysemy
Derrida warns against treating dissemination as rich polysemy (many meanings stored in a full sign). The written mark is often "an outlaw, a pervert, a bad seed, a vagrant", signifying "little, and always the same thing", flexible by amnesia. Ibn 'Arabi goes the opposite way: successful reading "makes the Book stand up" and declares it incomparable with one's own gloss. Applying tanzih to the Koran implies a Book that can withdraw, a one-way radio. Shared effect: no final reading. Opposite engines: poverty of the mark versus plenitude of the Author.
Collapse of Perfect Man, Koran and God
One Akbarian vocabulary covers three: "The soul is an ocean without a shore"; the Koran is the "tremendous totality... comprising all things"; "all the infinite objects of knowledge that God knows are within man". "He who knows his self, knows his Lord" turns reading into recollection (tajdid of what was forgotten). Arabic script enacts the metaphysics: bare consonants mhmd wait for breath to become muhammad. Interpretation is mercy (rahma) upon a verse, relieving a possible meaning of the "misery" of non-existence.
Collapse: Perfect Man, Koran and God share one lexicon.
Rabbi, poet, and the Shaykh who is both
Rabbi vs poet: the Shaykh occupies both seats.
"Structure, Sign and Play" splits the rabbi (dreams of origin, lives interpretation as exile) from the poet (affirms play in "the seminal adventure of the trace"). Derrida calls them "absolutely irreconcilable". Almond's wager: Ibn 'Arabi is both. He rejects a single authentic meaning (poet) yet keeps a Sender whose intention varies by person and moment (rabbi). Ta'bir / 'ibara / 'ubur ("crossing over") make interpretation a transfer "from imagination to imagination", near Rousseau's sign-to-sign chain, without Derrida's final denial of a Real beyond the chain.
Policed infinities and Benjamin's watcher
Borges's Tlön wants every book to "contain its counterbook". Both thinkers police their own openness. Ibn 'Arabi condemns ta'wil ba'id (far-fetched) when flatterers serve kings or when munasaba (correspondence) dies, yet he can pause Baqara 14-15 in the Kitab al-Jalal to release "secrets", and rewrite "Fear your Lord" (4:1) much as Heidegger rewrote Anaximander. Derrida writes at least three essays denying he is a negative theologian, and is "disagreeably surprised" by uses of "deconstruction". Why call every text "contaminated" with negative theology unless a purity is being guarded?
Benjamin's translatability that holds "even if men should prove unable to translate", fulfilled in "God's remembrance", sits between kitab and texte. De Man heard language's inhumanity there. Almond's line: in Derrida, no-one is watching; in Ibn 'Arabi, the Author always watches. Harry Zohn (not Almond's "Zorn") renders Gebilde as "creations"; "images" would be less theological. Berkeley's God, eyes closed, would annihilate the world: magnitude differs, but the ethical weight of reading under a gaze remains the Shaykh's mark.
Inconsistency: each thinker polices his own infinity.
Inconsistencies
Borges's Tlön demands that every book "contain its counterbook". Both thinkers contradict their open hermeneutics. Ibn 'Arabi insists nothing is impossible for God ("How wide is the Presence of Imagination!") yet condemns readings as "far-fetched" (ta'wil ba'id) when court scholars flatter kings, or when no correspondence (munasaba) remains between word and meaning. But he reads "Fear your Lord" (4:1) as "make your outer selves a protection for your Lord", much as Heidegger rewrote Anaximander. He reads David's separate letters and Muhammad's joined-and-separate letters as signs, and in the Kitab al-Jalal recites Baqara 14-15 with strategic pauses to release "secrets". Can an all-comprehensive Book ever be misquoted?
Benjamin's unread text
Benjamin's "Task of the Translator" speaks of a translatability that holds "even if men should prove unable to translate", a claim fulfilled in "God's remembrance"; de Man read this as language's inhumanity. Kitab and texte sit on either side of that passage. In Derrida, no-one is watching; in Ibn 'Arabi, the Author always watches. Derrida's reader adopts and rears the text, while Ibn 'Arabi's reader is engulfed, adding one reading to an inexhaustible store. Derrida treats the origin like an early childhood memory: formative but lost.
Almond notes that Harry Zohn renders Gebilde as "creations" where "images" would be less theological, and compares Benjamin's God to Berkeley's, whose closed eyes would annihilate the world. The difference is one of magnitude: to interpret the Koran is to add one modest response to an inexhaustible store, while for Derrida to read a text is to change it, making it part of the reader. The ethical weight of reading under a watching Author remains the Shaykh's distinguishing mark.
Mystery-Tasting and Abyssality
Kundera supplies the epigraph: "The goals we pursue are always veiled." Both writers sense that the secret may lead only "from veil to veil", and both put it at the heart of their work.
Derrida: the secret of the non-secret
Literature loves the empty secret: Robbe-Grillet's locked drawer that opens "impeccably... and the drawer is empty"; Eco's Belbo in Foucault's Pendulum, killed rather than admit the conspiracy is a hoax; the Maltese Falcon, never really there. A secret need not be real to exert power. Commentators agree on Derrida's: Carl Raschke (all discourse "signif[ies] nothing"), Morny Joy, David Loy, Mark C. Taylor ("The secret is that there is no secret") and Caputo (a secret "sans savoir", with "no semantic content").
"There is no secret as such; I deny it. And this is what I confide in secret."
- It recedes. The secret is "that in speech which is foreign to speech"; telling it pushes it away, like Augustine's God.
- No full or empty signifiers. Nietzsche's notebook line "I have forgotten my umbrella" is "at once hermetic and totally open": anything might be a secret, as readers of Kafka and Pinter know.
- Medieval readers left the Author "inside" and readers "outside"; Derrida collapses that line. Nothing is hidden not because there is nothing to hide, but because there is No-one to hide it.
That darkness is the abyss (l'abîme): "the bottomlessness of infinite redoubling" ("Ellipsis"); "the desire of presence is... born from the abyss... of representation". Readers split into the uninitiated still hunting Real Meaning and the enlightened who carry on anyway, with a smile, like Sartre: "I never gave or took a command in my life without laughing".
Ibn 'Arabi: the secret of idolatry
"In Lordship there is a mystery, that mystery being you" (Sahl al-Tustari, quoted in the Fusus). The model is Poe's "Purloined Letter", hidden by being left on the table, the story read by Lacan, Derrida and Barbara Johnson. Ibn 'Arabi has ordinary secrets (the mystery of destiny, sirr al-qadar), but the "secret of secrets" (sirr al-sirr) lies in plain view, and most people ('amma) never suspect it.
On "Your god is One God" the Kitab al-Jalal wa-l-Jamal says the verse applies "to everything deified and worshipped": every worshipper finds the divine in his idol, "the secret of whose divinity itself belongs to Allah... it is a remarkable secret". God is the secret of all idolatry. Ignorant pagans still "end up with mercy"; the gnostic who sees "with two eyes" worships consciously. God "speaks from every form, but not in every form".
Ibn 'Arabi's secret of secrets lies in plain view.
The secret of the self
If God is the secret of idolatry, He is also the secret of the self: "We are nearer to him than his jugular vein" (50:16), a theme from al-Ghazali, al-Biruni and the Ikhwan al-Safa. "He prevented the real secret from being known, namely that He is the essential Self of things. He conceals it by otherness, which is you." The secret is heimlich, homely and uncanny. If holiness (quddus) means separation, this teaching would end the sacred as a separate zone. Knowing the secret is remembering an actual situation: in Affifi's words, union is "a 'state' in which an already existing union is being realised".
Ibn 'Arabi wavers. The careful Shaykh grants the soul everything except self-subsistence; the bold one writes in the Abraham chapter, "Where then is His Self-sufficiency, / Since I help Him and grant Him Bliss?" Some Futuhat passages call the stationless "the divine ones... since the Real is identical with them", close to Eckhart's Ground.
Tasting and annihilation
The secret leads to self-annihilation. Derrida's "historical man" will not admit "the abyss that undermines his own historicity"; Ibn 'Arabi's gnostic learns that "All roots are unseen (ghayb)". Once tasted (dhawq), the mystery cannot be spoken, by incapacity, not prohibition: "no gnostic is able to convey to another gnostic what he witnesses... for conveying knowledge can only take place through likenesses". It is like a letter meaning every letter at once.
Kierkegaard's Abraham falls silent too, in "an absolute relation with the absolute", but his secret keeps his self. Ibn 'Arabi's fana' dissolves it: "man is annihilated from himself. Then the Real becomes manifest so that He is his hearing and his sight". As Derrida might say, the secret of the self is that there is no self. The Real is "not a corpus", so fana' is dissolution, not incorporation. Abu Yazid al-Bistami: "I have no morning and no evening... I have no attributes." Ibn 'Arabi at the station of light: "I was like a sphere."
After the secret: fear or return
Some flee unveiling: the companion Ahmad al-Assad al-Hariri returned "shaking and trembling... lest I lose myself". Others return to tradition with new understanding: keep praying toward Mecca, knowing God is in every direction. Ibn 'Arabi condemns the gnostic who keeps only the outward rule because he "knows its secret", calling it "throwing away the scale of the Law". Adab (right conduct) "requires the Other"; the secret must never cancel adab.
Three responses to the secret, and Derrida's fourth.
The highest gnostics are the malamiyya (People of Blame): "They walk in the markets, they speak to the people... [yet] they are alone with God", unlike the visibly pious worshippers or miracle-working Sufis. Kierkegaard's knight of faith looks like a townsman strolling to Frederiksberg, yet "the wavering shows they are nevertheless strangers to the world". Both keep their secret and leave the everyday intact. Almond sums it up as "deconstructing the cur, but leaving the quid intact": the secret changes one's attitude to life, not its outward form. The People of Blame are in effect a secret society hidden in plain sight, the social counterpart of the purloined letter.
Both thinkers face the same charge of immorality and give the same defence, as Heidegger did in the Letter on Humanism: "because 'humanism' is argued against, one fears a defence of the inhuman". Ibn 'Arabi insists the secret yields a richer adab, not none; Derrida that exposing the logocentric secret of moral and political values means re-opening them, not destroying them. Almond doubts the parallel holds: it is hard to see how a socialist or feminist who accepts the groundlessness of "utopia" or "woman" can carry on as if nothing had happened.
Illusion and two abysses
Hume would burn metaphysics as "sophistry and illusion". For both thinkers, empiricism is as illusory as dogma. Ibn 'Arabi (in Izutsu's reading) holds "The world is an illusion... the whole of existence is imagination within imagination", where illusion means "being a symbol"; the hadith runs "All men are asleep... when they die they wake up". Derrida speaks of mirage, dream, illusion wherever thinkers chase presence, and closes Of Grammatology with Rousseau: "I give my dreams as dreams". Izutsu's "Abysmal Darkness" ('ama, used more by al-Qashani) names the Real's unknowability.
Literature's empty drawer and Derrida's dossier
Almond stacks literary empty secrets: Robbe-Grillet's impeccably empty drawer; Eco's Belbo, killed rather than admit the Plan is a hoax; the Maltese Falcon that was never there. Power does not require a real content. Commentators converge: Raschke (discourse "signif[ies] nothing"), Joy, Loy, Taylor ("The secret is that there is no secret"), Caputo (sans savoir). Almond's dossier across the oeuvre: "topolitology of the secret" in negative-theology essays; "Passions" Formula: "There is no secret as such; I deny it. And this is what I confide in secret."
Demystify and re-mystify
Schlick ("There is no unfathomable mystery in the world"), Ayer and Carnap dissolve mysteries as language misuse. Derrida's stated aim is the reverse: "To make enigmatic what one thinks one understands by the words 'proximity', 'immediacy', 'presence'". Explaining yields more signs. Ainigma means "to darken": deconstruction restores an originary darkness in which nothing is hidden, a secret de Polichinelle. The abyss (l'abîme) is "bottomlessness of infinite redoubling" ("Ellipsis"); "the desire of presence is... born from the abyss... of representation".
Secret dossier: empty power, then darkness restored.
Purloined God and the secret of the self
Poe's letter, read by Lacan, Derrida and Barbara Johnson, is Almond's model for the sirr al-sirr: hidden by being left in plain sight. Sahl al-Tustari: "In Lordship there is a mystery, that mystery being you." On "Your god is One God" the Kitab al-Jalal wa-l-Jamal extends the verse to "everything deified and worshipped": God is the secret of all idolatry. Pagans "end up with mercy"; the gnostic sees with "two eyes". Parallel move on the self: "We are nearer to him than his jugular vein" (50:16), a theme from al-Ghazali, al-Biruni and the Ikhwan al-Safa. "He conceals it by otherness, which is you." Heimlich: homely and uncanny. If quddus means separation, this teaching would end the sacred as a fenced zone. Affifi: union realises "an already existing union". Almond rejects Affifi's "thoroughgoing pantheist" label while using his formulations - a debt he flags by practice if not by apology.
Kierkegaard's Abraham versus fana'
Kierkegaard's Abraham is silent in "an absolute relation with the absolute", but keeps a self. Ibn 'Arabi's fana' dissolves it: the Real becomes "his hearing and his sight". "As Derrida might say, the secret of the self is that there is no self." The Real is "not a corpus", so annihilation is dissolution, not incorporation. Abu Yazid: "I have no morning and no evening... I have no attributes." The Shaykh at the station of light: "I was like a sphere." Relativist-sounding lines ("The root of all things is difference (tafriqa)"; "'Evil' is failure to reach one's individual desire"; "crookedness is straightness, like the crookedness of a bow") must be read inside that dissolution, not as modern nihilism.
After unveiling: al-Hariri, Law and malamiyya
Ahmad al-Assad al-Hariri fled unveiling "shaking and trembling... lest I lose myself". Others return: still face Mecca, knowing God is in every direction. "Throwing away the scale of the Law" is condemned; adab "requires the Other". The malamiyya (People of Blame) "walk in the markets... [yet] are alone with God". Kierkegaard's knight of faith looks like a townsman walking to Frederiksberg, yet "the wavering shows they are nevertheless strangers to the world". Almond's tag: "deconstructing the cur, but leaving the quid intact".
Return path: People of Blame and knight of faith.
Immorality charge and the two-abyss split
Two abysses: Almond's conceded disparity.
Both face the charge Heidegger answered in the Letter on Humanism: argue against "humanism" and one is accused of defending the inhuman. Ibn 'Arabi insists on richer adab; Derrida on re-opening values, not destroying them. Almond doubts a socialist or feminist can accept the groundlessness of "utopia" or "woman" and carry on as if nothing happened. Hume would burn metaphysics as "sophistry and illusion"; both thinkers call empiricism as illusory as dogma. Izutsu: "The world is an illusion... imagination within imagination" (symbol, not void); hadith: "All men are asleep... when they die they wake up". Derrida closes Of Grammatology thanking Rousseau: "I give my dreams as dreams".
The two-abyss concession that closes the original section still stands: shared vocabulary, divergent answers to what the darkness is.
Derrida's 'two abysses' and the Real.
Derrida anticipates the comparison in an essay separating deconstruction from negative theology: "In fact, two abysses": a "profound" one "accessible to the teleo-eschatological narrative", and "an abyss without bottom or surface", "neither life nor death". The first is the mystics' Abgrund; the second, différance, is all zahir with no batin. Here Almond concedes a real disparity.
Conclusion: The Post-Structuralist Dissolution of the Subject
The findings so far: a shared mistrust of reason's claims on God or meaning; the ungraspability of the Real and of writing; a positive view of confusion; texts with infinite, reader-tuned meanings; a secret abyss at the root of identities; and disbelief in an autonomous self.
Two dangers need naming. No one is calling Foucault or Blanchot "Neoplatonic": the tradition runs from Plotinus through Augustine, Dionysius, Eckhart, Cusanus and Ficino, with Islamic (Ikhwan al-Safa, the "Theology of Aristotle") and Jewish (Maimonides) branches, and its return to the One is usually what post-structuralism attacks. Nor is this Habermas's polemic against Heidegger's "mysticism of the New Paganism", driven by fear of an-archy. Almond is closer to Bataille, who found in Angela of Foligno (and echoes of Mechtild) a "dazzling dissolution into totality". Naming Blanchot, Benjamin and Foucault is not a claim that they are Neoplatonists; it is a claim that de-theologised metaphors of echo, robe, eddy and unveiling still organise their prose.
Three Neoplatonic moments in Derrida's canon.
Blanchot: writing as breakthrough
For Blanchot, writing is "a vocation pursued with religious intensity" (Timothy Clark). "The Essential Solitude" speaks of "that neutral force, formless and bereft of any destiny, which is behind everything that gets written": "To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking", which recalls Plotinus, "thought in the soul is an echo from elsewhere". Writing is renunciation, "to withdraw language from the world"; Valéry failed by writing on everything. It is surrender: the writer "loses the power to say 'I'", like Eckhart's soul "empty and bare" (ledic und vrî). The closing lines read like a mystic's breakthrough, Plotinus's "alone with the Alone": the image becomes "an allusion to the featureless... the formless presence of this absence".
Blanchot's breakthrough: echo, lost I, featureless.
Benjamin: translation as return to the One
Benjamin read Origen, Boehme and Ficino. In "The Task of the Translator" (1923) "the great motif of integrating many tongues into one true language is at work". Neoplatonic motifs recur: origin as "an eddy in the stream of becoming", memory weighing like a fisherman's net, the collector's harmonious whole. In the Moscow diary and the essay on toys the State and community replace the One, a politicised Neoplatonism.
Of his ten metaphors for translation (flower, ghost, ripening, window, shattered vase, echo, royal robe and others), two stand out. The echo: translation calls into the forest "without entering", aiming at the spot where the echo returns the original. The translator's own voice is the book; the original becomes an engine returning a voice to its owner. The royal robe: content and language form a unity in the original "like a fruit and its skin", while translation "envelops its content like a royal robe with ample folds", "overpowering and alien".
One royal-robe image, two verdicts on the outer form.
Royal robe: reveal the King or cut from origin.
Ibn 'Arabi uses the same image for prophetic speech: the discerning say "This is the outer garment of a King" and learn from the cloth the worth of its wearer. For the medieval exegete, interpretation was translation from batin to zahir. But the Shaykh's robe tells you about the King; Benjamin's Königsmantel cuts the translation off from the original. Eckhart's parallel: the garment of goodness that is not the Good itself.
Foucault: the author dissolved
"Do not ask me who I am and do not ask me to remain the same" (The Archaeology of Knowledge). Christian Jambet links Foucault's "care of the self" to Suhrawardi's identical phrase (ishtighal bi nafsihi), reading Foucault's work as "release from the self", spurred by Foucault's interest in the Iranian revolution. "What is an Author?" is no Sufi fana' but a political analysis of the author-function. Yet it leaves a question: if there is no Author, who writes? The Order of Things lets Mallarmé answer: "the word itself... in its enigmatic and precarious being". Foucault's verbs, writing "unfolds" and a phenomenon "unveils itself", carry Neoplatonic echoes. For the mystic, selfhood appropriates what belongs to God; for Foucault, authorship appropriates écriture.
Derrida, "Structure, Sign and Play"
The centre is not the centre
Ash'arites and Mu'tazilites each took their centre for the Real; structuralists missed that they shared empiricism's centre. Both thinkers speak of chains and knots, see truth in confusion, find texts uncontrollable and selves rooted in an abyss: consequences of one genuine suspicion of rational metaphysics, not a patchwork of coincidences. Both have been compared to Taoism. Izutsu (1967) maps the Tao's production of the "ten thousand things" onto the Real's self-disclosure; Michelle Yeh pairs Derrida with Chuang Tzu; Donald Wesling calls Derrida "an incomplete Taoism"; Hongchu Fu marks differences (Derrida's "active attitude" vs Taoist "transcendence"). Almond treats the Tao pairings as cousins of his own: one dissatisfaction with essentialism, divergent exits (trembling versus return).
Izutsu's Taoist mapping of Ibn 'Arabi's emanation.
Sous rature fork: presence kept vs absence of presence.
Gayatri Spivak marks the limit: Heidegger's crossed-out Being points to an "inarticulable presence"; Derrida's trace to "the absence of a presence". Ibn 'Arabi's Real falls on Heidegger's side. Derrida erases words because of play within finite parameters, not a signified "out there".
Erasure: Ibn 'Arabi sides with Heidegger, not Derrida.
Consequences for Derrida
- Theological provenance. Kevin Hart shows deconstruction arrived in secular or atheistic contexts, and suggests reading Derrida with Jabès, Levinas and Celan. Parallel work (Coward's Sankara, Loy's Nagarjuna, Dabashi's 'Ayn al-Qudat, Caputo's Eckhart, Yeh's Lao-Tzu) will revise labels like "antitheological scepticism" (Goodheart).
- Against the clarifiers. Norris, Gasché and Culler see deconstruction as explication. Derrida's own aim was "to make enigmatic". Hugo Rahner describes Greek enlightenment breeding nostalgia for the mystery cults, ("what man now seeks is the bizarre... as against the Olympian calm"), so the deconstructive gesture belongs to "a very metaphysical history of rebellions against the metaphysical".
- Terms that echo God. Infinity, play, the unnamable, a trace "older than Being itself" cannot shake the ghost of the divine. Derrida's protests resemble those of an author who wants his text to wander one way.
Openness
Both thinkers disconcert: what we take for granted may be radically unthinkable. Like Eckhart's gelâzenheit, Derrida asks for "an absolute openness towards what is coming", and Ibn 'Arabi asks us to free the locus (tafrigh al-mahall) and sanctify the heart "from the stains of reflective thoughts". Shared demand: do not clutch the name. Split: one openness waits on play; the other waits on the Real. What we call "God" may not always be God; what we call "Truth" may not always be true.
Main Points
Main Points
- Reason is a fetter. 'Aql and 'iqal share a root; Kalam's rival schools each hold half a binary and so limit God.
- Absence versus presence. Derrida rejects binaries because they veil an absence, Ibn 'Arabi because they veil a paradoxical presence.
- The Real is unrepeatable. God never shows Himself "in a single form twice", so every fixed theology is idolatry.
- Perplexity is honest. For both, confusion precedes order; clarity rests on ignoring the "actual situation".
- Confusion disarms empire. The Shemites' one tongue is colonial violence; God's scattering foils it (Babel).
- Drowning can be ascent. Noah's idolaters "drowned in the seas of knowledge of God", and servants become Lords.
- The medieval text was already infinite. Deconstruction restores, not invents, an open text.
- Two reasons for infinity. The Koran overflows with an Author's intent; Derrida's text with no author at all.
- Rabbi and poet. Ibn 'Arabi keeps a Sender while multiplying meanings, a hybrid Derrida calls impossible.
- Both police their infinities. "Far-fetched" readings (Ibn 'Arabi) and "contaminated" readings (Derrida) betray a wish for purity.
- The secret lies in plain view. God is the secret of idolatry and of the self; Derrida's secret is that no-one hides anything.
- After the secret, the market. The malamiyya return to ordinary practice; Derrida's structure trembles and opens.
- Two abysses. Derrida separates the mystics' "profound" abyss from différance's bottomless, surfaceless one; the Real belongs to the first.
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God under erasure. Ibn 'Arabi's provisional system works like sous rature, but on Heidegger's side: an inarticulable presence.
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Mysticism echoes in theory. Blanchot's echo, Benjamin's one true language and Foucault's unveiling show that Neoplatonic metaphors survive, de-theologised, in Derrida's own canon.
Frameworks and mental models
| Name | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Chain of ownership | Known → encompassed → limited → owned | A doctrine claims to grasp its object |
| He / not He | Hold transcendence and immanence together | A debate splits into two half-truths |
| Jami's three bewilderments | Beginner, factional, final | Telling productive from idle confusion |
| Three infinite texts | No author, withdrawn author, all-intending author | Asking why a text stays open |
| Purloined letter | The best secret is in plain view | Looking for what everyone overlooks |
| Two abysses | Profound ground vs bottomless play | Testing if "groundless" hides a ground |
The Derrida cluster in this series
| Name | Link to this book |
|---|---|
| No. 21 Writing and Difference | Primary source for "Force and Signification", "Edmond Jabès", "Genesis and Structure", "Ellipsis" and "Structure, Sign and Play" |
| No. 22 Stocker, Derrida on Deconstruction | Guide to the grammatology and différance Almond sets against the Real |
| No. 23 Norris, Deconstruction | The "serious philosopher" Derrida (Kant to Frege) Almond argues against |
| No. 14 A Companion to Derrida | Wider essays on religion, negative theology and the secret |
| No. 24-26 Nancy volumes | A later deconstruction of Christianity and of sense; Nancy also writes in No. 26 |
Coverage checklist (DEPTH)
Synthesis hub: five shared moves under one fork.
How to misread the pairing (and how not to)
- Do not treat Ibn 'Arabi as "Derrida in a turban" or Derrida as a crypto-Sufi. Almond's method is shard by shard.
- Do not erase the presence / absence fork to keep the comparison tidy.
- Do use Eckhart as Almond does: a Western gauge of what Derrida grants and withholds from mysticism.
- Do keep Critical-lens boxes in view: dated slips, translation limits, and the book's status as provocation, not final Akbarian philology.
One critique, two foundations, Eckhart between.
Further takeaways
How to use Almond after 2004 without overclaiming.
- Pamuk's warning stands. Claiming Ibn 'Arabi for postmodernism (or Derrida for Sufism) repeats Asín Palacios-style territorial hermeneutics.
- "Denials" empties Islam. The 1987 essay's silence, dressed as consistent apophasis, remakes Islam as the unspeakable Other.
- Ladders, not cages. Akbarian "system" aims at freedom from system; Dabashi's master-narrator charge misses the station of no station.
- Someone vs play. Shared generative namelessness; only the Shaykh keeps a Someone who cannot be known.