Insight Editions · No. 160
The Self-Disclosure of God
Principles of Ibn al-'Arabi's Cosmology
William C. Chittick
William C. Chittick presents Ibn al-'Arabi's cosmology, explaining how divine self-disclosure structures the cosmos, human nature, imagination, spiritual knowledge, and the return to God.
A study guide to The Self-Disclosure of God by William C. Chittick. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
Overview
Chittick (State University of New York Press, 1998) into a study guide. It follows the book's order: the Introduction, ten chapters in three parts and Appendix I on certain Sufis. Appendix II (the term list) feeds the Glossary; the notes are drawn on only for context, and the bibliography and indexes are left out.
What the book is
Chittick maps Ibn al-'Arabi's cosmology from the Self-Disclosure of God: how the Real shows itself as worlds, words, and the Perfect Man. The book is a companion to The Sufi Path of Knowledge, focused on cosmos rather than knowledge alone.
Chapter Map
Introduction and ten chapters move from the ontology of disclosure through the imaginal barzakh to anthropology and the return. The appendix gathers supporting texts. Diagrams mark mechanisms; they do not invent claims beyond Chittick's exposition.
Argument Map
The map reads downward. The Introduction asks where the knower stands and answers that he is inside the picture, so cosmology needs a guide. Part I lays out the relation of God and cosmos: wujud and the entities, perpetual self-disclosure, God's face and the veils. Part II shows how the divine names produce order: unity and manyness, pairs of names, and the worlds they produce. Part III turns to the human microcosm: spirits and bodies, nature and constitution, and finally the imaginal barzakh through which spirit meets body, here and after death.
Chapter Map
- Read the Introduction first: it gives the method and the twenty-eight-letter cosmology the later chapters assume.
- Part I (Ch 1-4) is the metaphysical core; Part II (Ch 5-7) the structure of the cosmos; Part III (Ch 8-10) the human being and the afterlife. Each chapter ends with a takeaways box.
- Chapter 10 pulls the threads together; read it after Ch 7 and Ch 8.
- The Synthesis gives takeaways, frameworks, a closer look and a who's who; the Glossary gives the Arabic with Chittick's English.
Relation to Alone with the Alone and Essential Nasr
Chittick's cosmology volume is the companion to The Sufi Path of Knowledge; readers of Corbin's Creative Imagination will recognize tajalli, himma and barzakh in a different key, with Futuhat citations as the spine.
Introduction: Cosmology Without a Disembodied Observer
This book is the sequel to The Sufi Path of Knowledge. It adds few new terms, but almost every passage is translated for the first time, and the method changes: Chittick now quotes whole chapters and sections, poetry included, so that Ibn al-'Arabi cannot be made to say what a reader wants. His motto for the book: "My point is not to make the point."
Why Long Passages: Against Getting to the Point
Ibn al-'Arabi shifts perspective constantly. Quote one standpoint and you have quoted him correctly, but you have also misrepresented him, because he holds many others. Critics and devotees have been doing this for centuries. Chittick's answer is to keep context: no ellipses in mid-passage, and the verses that open each chapter stay in, since the Shaykh said they hold "what is not found in the text of that chapter" (IV 21.22).
He is equally frank about the translator's problem. The Futuhat is too long for one lifetime, and its poetic passages are sometimes opaque even to him. The real obstacle is not Arabic but knowing the teachings well enough to understand what is being said.
Knowledge of the Cosmos: Where Is the Knower Standing?
Modern cosmology, in Hetherington's definition, studies "the universe as an orderly system" and is a branch of astronomy. Ibn al-'Arabi's cosmology is not astronomy. The deepest difference is the position of the cosmologist.
| Modern scientific | Ibn al-'Arabi |
|---|---|
| Pretends to be a disembodied spirit outside the cosmos | The knowing subject is the first object of inquiry |
| "Objectivity"; the observer ignored | "He who knows himself knows his Lord" |
| Significance = what can be quantified | Significance set by Koran and Hadith |
| Verification by those with years of training | Verification by realization after discipline |
| Knowledge as a tool of manipulation | Knowledge as preparation for the next world |
Eddington said the mesh of the net decides which fish come up. Chittick goes further: the investigator himself is the net. "You can't get there from here," as they say in Boston, and where you start decides where you can go. The claim to "objective knowledge" is "one of the most impenetrable of veils", because it lets a subject who does not know what he is dismiss everyone else as "subjective". Walker Percy's Lost in the Cosmos gets a cheerful mention: you can learn more in ten minutes about the Crab Nebula than you know about yourself. The Shaykh says people are "seized by terror when they are alone with themselves" (II 541.20).
Three Routes to Knowledge
| Rank | Route | Islamic school that stresses it |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Transmission (reports, authority) | Jurisprudence, Kalam (with reason) |
| 2 | Direct experience (unveiling, kashf) | Theoretical Sufism |
| 3 | Rational investigation | Philosophy |
Those who verify the prophetic knowledge in themselves are the Folk of God or Realizers. Without realization people are "simply transmitters or arm-chair theorizers or dreamers". Abu Yazid told his critics: "You take your knowledge dead from the dead, but we take our knowledge from the Living who does not die." The standpoint embracing all standpoints is the Station of No Station, and its vision the "Vision of No Vision".
Why He Was Feared, and Two Dangers for Students
He challenged the ulama's claim to have codified Islamic knowledge with finality, so defenders of the status quo attacked his authority in turn. Some Sufi teachers also barred disciples from his books.
- Loss of center. Believers do not like to hear that the God they worship is the God of their belief. Many of his statements "seem designed to throw the naive and the dogmatically minded into a tizzy".
- Intoxication of discovery. Wahdat al-wujud, not his phrase but pinned on him within a century, was read as an elite knowledge exempting its owners from the Law. That reading, especially in India, drew the attacks of Ahmad Sirhindi.
His claim to be the Seal of the Saints did not mean he was the last friend of God, but the last plenary heir of Muhammad before Jesus returns. Later saints inherit through Moses, Jesus, Abraham or another of the 124,000 prophets.
The Basic Themes in Brief
Chittick recaps the six conceptual sets of SPK: divine names, existence and nonexistence, tanzih and tashbih, modes of knowing, human perfection, the barzakh.
Names of God. "God" means the Essence, unknowable, or the Level, God in relation to the cosmos. Names, attributes and relations are three words for the same thing. The names apply to both sides, but the Shahadah sorts them: "There is none real but the Real." Human attributes look like projections onto God, but in fact they are theomorphic: we were made in His form, not He in ours. There are as many names as creatures, though courtesy limits us to the names He gave Himself. "His mercy takes precedence over His wrath."
Order (called "hierarchy" in SPK) is built into the attributes, so it is built into the cosmos. The things of the world are the properties or traces of their roots and supports in the names, ranked in degrees of excellence.
Existence and nonexistence. Wujud literally means "finding": that which finds and is found. Strictly it belongs only to God. Things in themselves are nonexistent objects of God's knowledge, the fixed entities, which never leave His knowledge, like fixed stars that leave traces on earth without moving. A thing has a "thingness of fixity" and, if God gives it existence, a "thingness of wujud". The philosophers' terms fit: Necessary, possible, impossible; God as Preponderator; quiddity asks "What it?" and wujud asks "Whether it?" (Arabic has no copula). From kun, "Be!", comes kawn, engendered existence. The engendering command makes things; the prescriptive command sends messengers and laws.
Tanzih and tashbih. Begin with incomparability out of courtesy, which grounds servanthood. Then similarity: "God created Adam in His form", both the great Adam (cosmos) and the small Adam (human). Names of majesty and beauty are the two hands; since mercy precedes wrath, God's presence finally outweighs His absence. Wujud is unbounded, "not bound by unboundedness", so it binds itself in every possible mode, and those modes are the things.
Modes of knowing. Reports, weighed by scales; reason, whose job is to accept God's rulings and restrain caprice, and which naturally sees what God is not; and unveiling, which works through imagination. Rational temperaments find God distant; unveilers find Him present. Perfect knowledge needs two eyes and a heart that fluctuates between the two views.
Human perfection. Humans are the form of the whole, other creatures are parts. Every divine attribute lies latent in the fitra, and only prophetic guidance brings them out. The path is assuming the character traits of God.
His most quoted verse, closing most of his chapters, is 33:4. Chittick renders it "God speaks the haqq, and He guides on the path": not truth in a logical sense, but what is exactly appropriate to our situation.
The barzakh. Perfect humans have two roles: they guide, and they complete wujud's manifestation, because mercy, compassion, wisdom and love mean nothing as abstractions. The world exists for their sake. Their single archetype is the Muhammadan Reality, also called the Reality of Realities and the Breath of the All-Merciful. God says "Be!" and His one word is articulated as things within His Breath; each word is He/not He. That affirmation and negation, renewed at every instant, is the new creation. Imagination, the faculty that fluctuates, sees things as He while reason sees them as not He. The Breath itself is the Supreme Barzakh, neither identical with God nor different from Him.
Plan of the Book and of the Unwritten Sequel
| Part | Theme | Chapters |
|---|---|---|
| 1. God and the Cosmos | Wujud, self-disclosure; cosmos and self as face and veil | 1-4 |
| 2. Order of the Worlds | Absent and witnessed, with imagination as the barzakh between | 5-7 |
| 3. Structure of the Microcosm | Spirit, body, "rationally speaking soul", constitution, appetite | 8-10 |
God's name al-Khabir is best rendered "the Experienced" in both senses: He experiences things as they are, and we experience Him. Ibn al-'Arabi's cosmology is therefore, in its own way, empirical.
The promised sequel, The Breath of the All-Merciful, would treat Futuhat chapter 198: the cosmos as twenty-eight letters articulated from the deepest point of the throat outward, each paired with a level and a divine name. He says he verified many of these levels in his ascents following Muhammad. Burckhardt drew the diagram; the Futuhat has none.
| Group | Degrees (divine name) |
|---|---|
| A. Intellective | 1 First Intellect/Pen (Innovator); 2 Universal Soul/Tablet (Upraiser); 3 Nature (Nonmanifest); 4 Dust Substance, prime matter (Last) |
| B. Body to Footstool | 5 All Body (Manifest); 6 Shape (Wise); 7 Throne (All-Encompassing); 8 Footstool (Grateful) |
| C. Spheres | 9 starless sphere (Independent); 10 fixed stars (Determiner); 11-17 the seven heavens: Saturn/Abraham to Moon/Adam |
| D. Elements | 18 fire (Gripper); 19 air (Alive); 20 water (Life-giver); 21 earth (Death-giver) |
| E. Progeny | 22 minerals (Exalted); 23 plants (All-Provider); 24 animals (Abaser) |
| F. Spirituals | 25 angels, of light (Strong); 26 jinn, of fire (Subtle) |
| G. Humans | 27 humans (All-Comprehensive = God); 28 levels and stations (Uplifter of degrees) |
Some details matter later. Only the Intellect is "innovated" without an intermediary. The Pen and Tablet are the prototypes of all activity and receptivity. Nature is the Mother who rules everything except her parents. Everything dissolves back into the Dust at each instant and is re-created. The Footstool is where God's two feet, mercy and mercy mixed with wrath, come down, so commands and prohibitions start there. Twelve zodiac towers set against 28 lunar mansions never divide evenly, and that imbalance drives change below. The minerals, plants and animals are children of the "high fathers" and "low mothers". Angels and jinn come after them because the receptacle must exist before the spirit is blown in. All the Shaykh's writings, Chittick says, are really about letter 28: the degrees of the human ascent.
Cosmic Language
Language is breath articulated, and breath (nafas) is the life of the self (nafs). So speech is a barzakh: intelligible and sensory, it reveals and veils. Postmodern theorists are right to place reality in language, but wrong to find its origin in the human self. God reveals three books: the cosmos, the self, and, because humans forget, the Koran as Reminder, "in the tongue of his people" (14:4). Those who never forget stay fixed at the Center. Those who forget can move toward it, away from it, or waver, the three paths of the Fatiha. "God's Speech is His knowledge, and God's knowledge is His Essence."
The Translator's Dilemmas
English learned vocabulary, built from Latin and Greek, is abstract, and abstraction pushes meaning toward tanzih. Arabic always keeps a concrete side; the Orientalists' joke says every Arabic word means itself, its opposite, something about sex, and something about a camel. Reason abstracts and keeps pushing God away, the Shaykh's main complaint against Kalam and philosophy, and why scientific rationality "will never find God". Imagination embodies and finds Him present. With a symbol, reason separates it from the thing symbolized; imagination sees they are the same, as in tasting food, music or falling in love. Either eye alone leads to delusion.
| Arabic | SPK | This book |
|---|---|---|
| athar | effect | trace (not paired with "cause") |
| tawajjuh | attentiveness | face-turning |
| 'ayn thabita | immutable entity | fixed entity (keeps the fixed-star image) |
| mutlaq / muqayyad | nondelimited / delimited | unbounded / bound |
| maratib | hierarchy | order |
He prefers the literal pole of translation. One test: a reader should be able to work back to the Arabic term from the English, which requires consistency and economy. Paraphrase is like smoothing the "jargon" out of a physics treatise, and it often hides that the translator did not understand. He refuses to sprinkle "spiritual" and "mystical" like salt and pepper. Koran quotations appear in italics, as they would stand out to a traditional reader.
The Twenty-Eight Degrees as Cosmic Speech
Chittick's introduction does not treat the twenty-eight letters as ornament. They are the ordered articulation of the Breath of the All-Merciful, realized by Ibn al-'Arabi in mi'raj ascents and summarized from Futuhat chapter 198. Four ways of ordering meet: letters, temporal, spatial, qualitative. The Insight map keeps the seven groups Chittick lists, because later chapters on worlds and microcosm assume this ladder.
Prophetic Cosmology against the Disembodied Net
Eddington's net and Walker Percy's lost cosmos are Chittick's way of saying what Ibn al-'Arabi already knew: the knower is inside the known. Modern cosmology pretends an objective spirit outside the universe; the Shaykh's highest knowledge is the station of bewilderment, and people are "seized by terror when alone with themselves" (II 541.20). Escape from self-binding configurations is not more theory but external objective standards: God as Guide through prophets. Hence a prophetic cosmology.
Haqq, Tahqiq and the Station of No Station
Haqq is real, true, right, proper, due and responsibility at once. The hadith "Your self has a haqq upon you... give each its haqq" makes ontology ethical. Tahqiq is realization: giving things their rightful due; tahaqquq is finding haqq in oneself. Creation of each thing is its haqq (20:50). The perfect human form, because wujud is unbounded, is the "form of no form": freed from limits by return to fitra. That is the Station of No Station, and Muhammadan friends give each possessor of haqq its haqq. The most-quoted verse ending chapters is 33:4: God speaks the haqq and guides on the path, existential appropriateness rather than bare logical "truth".
Barzakh Themes Already in the Introduction
Before Part III, Chittick plants the barzakh: perfect humans guide and also ontologically complete manifestation of the All-Comprehensive Name. The Muhammadan Reality = Reality of Realities = Breath of the All-Merciful. Each word is He/not He. New creation affirms then negates each instant. Imagination fluctuates: faculty sees He while reason sees not He; cosmic imagination is the Supreme Barzakh. The Reality of Realities is neither identical with nor different from God or cosmos. Principles belong in this volume; articulations of the Breath were promised for the sequel.
| Earlier rendering | This book |
|---|---|
| Immutable entity | Fixed entity (fixed stars analogy) |
| Effect | Trace (athar) |
| Nondelimited / delimited | Unbounded / bound |
| Hierarchy | Order |
| Attentiveness | Face-turning (tawajjuh) |
| Folk of Allah | Folk of God |
Preparedness, Profitable Knowledge and the Seal
Preparedness is everything: nature and nurture. Truncated knowledge becomes a tool of manipulation, which is its modern attraction. "The self is an ocean without shore" (IV 68.9). Escape from self-binding configurations needs external standards: God as Guide through prophets. Profitable knowledge is two (I 581.29): Shariah rulings like food, take only the measure of need; knowledge of God and resurrection homesteads has no limit.
The Seal of the Saints is the last plenary heir of Muhammad before Jesus' return; later saints inherit via other prophets. Schools: jurisprudence/Kalam = transmission+reason; philosophy = reason; theoretical Sufism = unveiling (kashf). Realizers / Folk of God stand with Abu Yazid against dead transmission alone.
Cosmic Language and Translator's Task
Moderns are right to put reality in language, wrong to locate its origin in the human self. Breath (nafas) / self (nafs); language is a barzakh between meaning and form. Three books: cosmos, self, Koran. 'A'isha: his character was the Koran. English abstraction pushes to tanzih; imagination embodies toward tashbih. Favorite formula 1 x 1 = 1. Literal pole preferred; paraphrase hides ignorance.
Part I: God and the Cosmos
Chapter 1. Wujud and the Entities
The first chapter lays the floor for everything that follows. Only God has wujud; everything else is an entity that is nonexistent in itself, fixed in God's knowledge, and "draped" in borrowed being. The cosmos is therefore He / not He: a sign that points to God and a veil that hides Him, in the same breath.
The Cosmos as a Book of Signs
The Arabic word for cosmos, 'alam, shares a root with 'alama (mark), 'alam (signpost) and 'ilm (knowledge). The derivation is the argument: the cosmos is a source of knowledge and a mark pointing beyond itself (II 473.33). The Koran calls all things ayat, "signs", and also calls its own verses by that word. So cosmology, for Ibn al-'Arabi, is a science of signs: reading the marks and understanding what they signify. His working definition of the cosmos is "everything other than God, whether high or low, spirit or body, meaning or sensory thing, manifest or nonmanifest" (III 197.31). Its main synonym is khalq, creation, usually paired with al-Haqq, the Real.
He prefers a third word, dalil: pointer, signifier, evidence, proof. Here he draws a sharp line.
| Sign (aya) | Proof (dalil, rational sense) |
|---|---|
| Belongs to the folk of unveiling and finding | Belongs to the rational thinkers, the "sages" of falsafa |
| "Accepts no obfuscation" (III 240.31) | Always open to counterproofs and shubha, misgivings |
| Works like faith: a "watchful, divine light" that never sets | Like "a solar or stellar light that rises and sets", then darkness of doubt |
| How God knows: through Himself | God "does not know things through proofs" (III 218.23) |
He goes so far as to call the companion of the proof "devoid of faith", since his assent can be undone by the next clever objection. The perfect human, made in God's form, knows God through light and unveiling and so describes Him with attributes that proofs reject; those whose faith rests on proofs interpret those attributes away, and their faith shrinks accordingly.
Everything is a sign, and every sign carries a message. "Nothing walks in the cosmos without walking as a messenger with a message. Even worms in their movements are rushing with a message to those who understand it" (III 210.2). The cosmos as a whole is a word whose meaning is God, so "the meaning always remains intertied with the word, and God remains always with the cosmos" (III 148.10). It is "a divine book inscribed" (52:2), and the sage reads it by inspiration, not demonstration: the sage "does what is proper for what is proper as is proper" (II 163.26).
Horizons and Selves
The governing verse is 41:53: "We shall show them Our signs upon the horizons and in themselves, until it is clear to them that it/He is the Real." The pronoun can mean "everything" or "God", and the Shaykh uses both. Horizons and selves line up with macrocosm and microcosm: "Your signifier of the Real is yourself and the cosmos" (IV 307.1).
Signs come in two kinds. Habitual signs (day and night, rain, ships at sea, the diversity of tongues and colors, sleep) fill the Koran, but only the Folk of God notice them. Non-habitual signs, the "breaking of habit" (kharq al-'ada) such as eclipses, talking animals, walking on water and reading thoughts, impress the common people. A miracle that does not rest on uprightness, or does not turn people back to God, is "a leading on step by step from whence they know not" (7:182), God's guile (II 372.10).
The gnostics see everything as entering into God's name Aeon (dahr). Hence Abu Bakr: "I see nothing without seeing God before it." The Real is "the house of all existent things", and the believer's heart is the house of the Real, the only thing that "embraces" Him (IV 7.30).
Which comes first, self or cosmos? For knowledge, the self. "There is nothing outside of you... You are the signifier of you and of Him, but there is nothing that signifies you" (III 319.23). The macrocosm is too scattered in time and space to be known whole. The self signifies God in two ways at once: through similarity (same attributes, vicegerency) and through poverty and need (servanthood). This is tashbih and tanzih in the first person.
So why does the verse mention horizons at all? So that you do not imagine the horizons hold some knowledge the self lacks. Look outward, then inward, and you find the same knowledge. In the spiritual retreat (khalwa), the order is fixed: the signs of the cosmos are unveiled first, then the same signs in oneself, "lest he imagine that his self is seen in the cosmos". The cosmos is prior to the human being: "It is his father" (II 150.33).
Names, Waymarks and Intimacy
The Shahadah sorts the signs. "No god" negates the indefinite noun, because every thing lays claim to some share of divinity; "but God" affirms the definite one, who owns all the shares. Each share is one of His names, so "to Him belong all the names of the cosmos, and the whole cosmos has the most beautiful level" (IV 89.16).
It follows that nothing in the cosmos deserves contempt. The Koran asks the godwary to "magnify God's waymarks" (22:32), and every entity is a waymark. "Those who have contempt or disdain for it have had contempt and disdain for its Creator... There is nothing uglier than ignorance" (III 527.17). The only thing to condemn is ignorance of what a thing signifies. Even deeds blamed by the Shariah are, as affairs of wujud, light, so "nothing can be blamed in an absolute sense" (II 203.17). He adds a practical warning: people overcome by states behave like madmen and lose the good of the Law, "that is why none of the great ones ever seek states. They seek only stations".
Wujud Belongs to the Real Alone
"The Real is identical with wujud" (I 328.25). A thing in the cosmos can be called mawjud, "found", but its wujud is on loan. "Inasmuch as the cosmos is found, it is wujud, but inasmuch as it is considered in and of itself, it is nonexistence." The old formula "There is nothing in wujud but God", used by Ghazali and traced to Ma'ruf al-Karkhi, is true; yet "it should not be said", because "the possible things and the creatures are manifest" (III 299.28). Both sentences stand, from two standpoints.
Asking when the cosmos began is "absurd". Time is created with place and belongs to the world of relations, so God was not "before" the cosmos, nor is it "after" or "with" Him. There is "a sheer, pure wujud not following upon a nonexistence", the Real, and "a wujud following upon the nonexistence of the entity", the cosmos, with "no in-betweenness" except in fantasy: "Let not these grammatical particles veil you" (I 90.13).
Reason cannot see wujud's omnipresence; that comes by unveiling. Rational thought ties a "knot" ('aqd, the root of 'aqida, creed) and then rejects whatever does not fit it. That is why the chosen friends, like the prophets, are preserved from rational knowledge of God before their opening, kept busy if need be with crafts or "preparatory sciences" like arithmetic and medicine. A rational thinker may reach felicity, but "will never achieve the level of the one who is unobstructed" (III 402.13). Ibn al-'Arabi, opened young before any study, clearly has himself in view.
Nobody Seeks God
Since wujud is everywhere and unknowable, the Folk of God do not seek God. "God is not reached through seeking... the gnostic seeks his own felicity, not God." Point at any form and say "He is this", and another form, equally He, veils it. "No proof of Him can ever be safe from obfuscation, because He is the Greatest Proof, and we are His obfuscation" (IV 442.31). Elsewhere: "no one is more ignorant than he who seeks God", because He is "with you wherever you are" (57:4); people only seek relief from pain (IV 424.15).
| Position | What they see |
|---|---|
| Distinguishers | God is other than creation |
| Identifiers | God is identical with creation |
| The bewildered | Cannot tell if He is identical or distinct |
| Abu Yazid's kind | Know there is a distinction, not what it is |
The Mirror and the Loincloth
His favorite image is the funhouse mirror. "There is nothing in the mirror except the one who discloses himself to it" is true, yet nothing is really in the mirror and the viewer is unchanged. "The mirror is the Presence of Possibility, the Real is the one who looks within it, and the form is you in keeping with the mode of your possibility. You may be an angel, a celestial sphere, a human being, a horse." The mirror shapes the image by its own height, breadth and curvature, but possibility "does not leave its own reality" (III 80.14).
Why can we not see how the entities receive wujud? Answering one of al-Hakim al-Tirmidhi's 157 questions, which only the Seal of the Friends was supposed to answer, he reads the hadith "Exaltation is My loincloth and magnificence My mantle; whoever contends with Me in either, I shatter him." A loincloth serves for adornment, protection and curtaining; here it means protection. Exaltation is "forbidden through its unreachability". So "nothing apart from God knows the form of His giving existence or its reception", how a "nonexistent thing" comes to be called an "existent thing" (II 102.33). The mechanism of creation is curtained.
Against Causality
Philosophers called God the cause ('illa) of the world; the Shaykh calls them "the Companions of the Causes" and rejects the term for God.
- Correlatives. A cause demands its effect; "the cause seeks its effect... but the Independent is not qualified by seeking" (II 57.26).
- Equality. "The cause is equal to its effect in wujud", so "O Cause of causes" is absurd ('Abadila 163).
- Coeternity. A cause would make the cosmos eternal with Him, against the names Prior and Posterior.
- Ex nihilo, not ex One. He rejects Avicenna's "Nothing proceeds from the One but one".
- Pun. 'Illa also means infirmity: "The root of the cosmos is infirm, so illness clings to it forever" ('Abadila 67).
Ibn Barrajan's term "the Real Through Which Creation Occurs", the Shaykh's synonym for the Breath, was misread by some Sufis as a second existent through which God creates. That is shirk, two wujuds. Read bi ("through") as li, "for the sake of": the Real for whose sake creation occurs is God's wisdom. Creation is "a gratuitous favor... and a beginning of bounty" (III 355.30). Some Realizers preferred to call God the condition (shart) of the cosmos. In the end he is relaxed about words: say "cause" or "condition", provided you keep courtesy and the Shariah does not forbid it. "God was and nothing was with Him, and He is now as He was" holds for essential necessity, not for wujud, since the things are manifest (IV 413.28).
God's Knowledge and the Love That Creates
What God has is knowledge: the presence of every entity to wujud. Wujud means not only being found but finding, so God finds all possibilities in Himself. Only He knows any thing "in every respect" (III 382.21), which grounds the Shaykh's radical agnosticism about things:
Because God knows the cosmos by knowing Himself, it emerges in His form. 'Ilm comes from 'alama: He is a mark of the cosmos to Himself, as the cosmos is a mark of Him to us (II 479.3).
Why create at all? The Hidden Treasure: "I was a Treasure but was not known, so I loved to be known." But the object of love is always nonexistent. You wanted an embrace, you got it, and love did not end: now you want its continuance, which does not yet exist. The Koran puts love in the third person and future tense, "He will love them and they will love Him" (5:54) (II 327.8). God's love, like His knowledge, has no first point; it "drapes" each entity "in the robe of wujud", one after another, with no last existent thing, because possible things have no end (II 329.5).
You Are the Root of His Knowledge of You
Chapter 475 belongs to the Pole whose verse is "whoever magnifies God's waymarks". Abu Yazid, hearing 19:85, "the day when We shall muster the godwary to the All-Merciful", wept blood: "How can he who is sitting with Him be mustered?" The pilgrim's sacrificial camels are "marked", so what is given to God cannot be taken back.
"You are the root in His knowledge of you, and He discloses Himself to you only in the form of His knowledge of you."At the resurrection God appears in forms, and people deny Him when the form is one they will have but do not yet have. The gnostic, knowing "He discloses Himself to the created thing only in the form of the created thing", recognizes Him even "in the homestead of denial". Moses heard "Thou shalt not see Me" (7:143) in the
future tense: whoever is ignorant of Him now will meet Him later in an unfamiliar form. "God remains forever manifest to the
Possessor of Two Eyes. As for the possessor of one eye, he is a one-eyed
Dajjal" (90:8; IV 109.11).
The Precedent Book
So look not at what people see of you but at "what is woven into your breast", which is your conclusion already written. "Leave what disquiets you for that which does not disquiet you"; "Seek a pronouncement from your heart, even if the pronouncers make pronouncements for you."
God's Form and the Beauty of Everything
"God created Adam in His form." In Sufism form (sura) usually pairs with meaning; for the Shaykh it pairs with the entity: "The entity is forever absent, the forms are forever witnessed" (III 161.34). The chain runs: "Be is His command, His command His speech, His speech His knowledge, and His knowledge His Essence. Hence the cosmos became manifest in His form" (II 403.11). Still, "not every part of the cosmos is in the form of the Real" (IV 8.1): only the perfect human and the cosmos taken as a whole carry the full divine form, the small and the great Adam.
"God is beautiful and He loves beauty." Since the cosmos is His form, "there is nothing but beauty"; Ghazali was right that "nothing remains in possibility more wondrous than this cosmos" (II 345.21). Whoever loves the cosmos for this loves God's beauty, since the beauty of artisanry belongs to the artisan. What of the scandalous attributes, God's hunger, thirst, illness, wonder, foot and hand? Theologians call them true of creatures and metaphorical of God. The Realizers reverse it: they belong to the Real, and creation acquired them "through jostling the Real" (III 538.9).
The Nonexistent Entities
The things acquire or receive wujud; they are "draped" in it but never "qualified" by it as God is. They are entities "by their own essences, not by a necessitating factor or a cause", just as wujud belongs to God by His Essence: absolute independence on one side, absolute poverty on the other (II 57.15). Labid's line, "Is not everything other than God unreal?", is "the truest verse spoken by the Arabs" (I 716.16).
| Kind | Status | Who knows it |
|---|---|---|
| Absolute | No mode of existence at all; "not there" | Signifies absolute wujud by contrast |
| Relative, mode 1 | Fixed entity in God's knowledge only | God alone |
| Relative, mode 2 | Entity also found in the cosmos (metaphorical wujud) | God and other entities |
Because God loves only what does not yet exist, He turns at each moment to the next moment of a thing and brings it into being: the new creation. "Self-disclosure never repeats itself." The heart, qalb, is named for this fluctuation, taqallub. Absolute nonexistence even has its own eminence: by refusing wujud "out of jealousy", lest it share an attribute with God, it teaches tanzih better than anything else, since tanzih is "a description by nonexistence" (37:180). God's word "I created you aforetime, when you were not a thing" (19:9) invites us to return to nonexistence in property, not in entity: to be with Him now as we were then, without protest. Godwariness "of the hearts" means wariness in every fluctuation, breath by breath, and the waymarks (sha'a'ir) give "awareness" (shu'ur) only to the aware (II 672.13).
Ice, Flint and Lamp
Chapter 493 explains "at-ness" ('indiyya): things present "at God" before they exist, as against withness (ma'iyya), His being with them afterward. The Koran is eternal with God yet "newly arrived" (26:5) with us; for the Shaykh that is the situation of every thing. God's "storehouses" (15:21) are fixity; wujud is what arrives at us from them.
| Image | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Ice and water (IV 129.17) | Water is "intelligible in ice". Melted, it is called water again. "The cosmos is the Real in one respect and creation in another." |
| Flint and fire (III 391.35) | Fire hides in stone; strike creation with reflection and light appears. "We are many and the Guardian is one": many flints, one fire, so doctrines differ but the sought is one. |
| Lamp (24:35) | God likened His light to an earthly lamp: earthly through descent, heavenly through vision. Near through the likeness, Distant through the form. |
| Magnet and iron (IV 65.21) | Intertied, yet only the magnet attracts. Poverty (35:15) versus independence (3:97). |
Created things are "a light within a darkness" while nonexistent and "a light upon a light" once they exist. The "striker" also strikes out against God, because you only ever see Him as bound by your own consideration. On the hajj, the night of 'Arafa is the one night that follows its day, and the nearness of the goal itself veils it: "Yearning distresses most on the day when you approach the abode." The human being is "the manifester / the curtainer, the sharp / the blunt sword"; God is the shell and we the pearls, the metal and we the rust (III 393.5).
Names Are Relations, and Relations Are Nothing
"The cosmos is restricted to entities and relations. The entities pertain to wujud, while the relations are intelligible and pertain to nonexistence" (III 66.2). The divine names are relations, so a nonexistence leaves traces everywhere. God's greatness is "in the heavens and the earth" (45:37), not "in Himself": the servant, seeing his own smallness, names his Lord Great; seeing his poverty, names Him Independent. "The servant is the locus of the greatness" that belongs to God (III 537.22). In Kalam terms, the one Entity's connections are named knowledge, choice, will, desire and power, plural only because their objects are plural (I 44.21).
Chapter 406, "Nothing has become manifest", pushes this to the edge. God says there is no "other" to whom He could appear: "Say not, My servants, 'Surely you, surely I.'" The forms cannot see the Entity in which they exist, just as we cannot see air, "only because of excessive nearness". Traces are ascribed to the names but really belong to the entities; only independence and exaltation stay with the Essence (IV 8.29).
In Chapter 451, the "stairs" (70:3) turn out to be the points of articulation in the throat and mouth: the Breath descends the 28 levels like breath forming letters, and words climb back. Seekers on every path "find nothing but themselves" at the end. The interdependence is stated plainly: "He gives us assistance in wujud, and we give Him assistance in knowledge." Only relations leave traces, and they are "affairs of nonexistence that carry whiffs of wujud". "The leg is intertwined with the leg" (75:29): "we will never be untied from His knot" (IV 65.21).
Thingness and Homesteads
"Thing" is "the most indefinite of the indefinites" (III 289.12), yet it points to unity: God speaks "to a thing" (16:40), never "to two things". Were "O Thing!" a revealed name, it would be God's first; as it is, "One" holds that place (II 57.11). Since even the impossible is an intelligible "there", absolute nonexistence is not there at all (IV 410.30). "With God all things are possible" (Matthew 19:26), and all nothings are impossible: He is "powerful over each thing", not over what is no thing (II 171.15).
Between the thingness of fixity and the thingness of wujud stands not nonexistence but God, and the connection is love; otherwise we would pass through nothing and lose both (IV 108.9). Once in wujud, we see Him only as each homestead (mawtin) allows. In a dream you "will never see the Real except in a corporeous form"; in rational thought only as incomparable. "So the Real will remain unknown to you forever", known only through "the tawhid of the Level". The passage closes on the opening page of the next chapter: "What is at you runs out, but what is at God subsists" (16:96).
Deepening: Wujud, Entities and He / Not He
Chapter 1 is the floor of the whole cosmology. Chittick's long translations force a slow recognition: only the Real has wujud; what we call things are entities fixed in God's knowledge, nonexistent in themselves, draped in borrowed being. The cosmos is therefore He / not He in one breath: sign and veil.
Signs versus Proofs, Expanded
The Arabic for cosmos, 'alam, shares a root with mark, signpost and knowledge. Cosmology is a science of signs. Ibn al-'Arabi prefers dalil as pointer, but draws a sharp line between aya (sign for the folk of unveiling) and rational proof. Signs "accept no obfuscation" (III 240.31); proofs invite shubha. God "does not know things through proofs" (III 218.23). Even worms rush with a message (III 210.2). The cosmos as a whole is a word whose meaning is God (III 148.10).
Horizons, Selves and the Hearing Hadith
Verse 41:53 governs: signs upon the horizons and in themselves until it is clear that it/He is the Real. For knowledge, the self comes first: "You are the signifier of you and of Him, but there is nothing that signifies you" (III 319.23). The self signifies by similarity (tashbih, vicegerency) and by poverty (tanzih, servanthood). The hadith of love's faculties ("I am his hearing...") means: only inasmuch as God becomes eyesight does the servant see. "None knows God but God."
Against Causality and the Love That Creates
God is not a cause in the philosophers' sense. Creation is love and gratuitous favor; its mechanism is curtained. Knowledge follows the known: the Precedent Book records what we are, so blame yourself, not the Book. You are the root of His knowledge of you in the sense that the fixed entity is the known; He does not invent what you are after the fact.
- Ice and water (IV 129.17): water intelligible in ice; cosmos Real in one respect, creation in another.
- Flint and fire (III 391.35): many flints, one fire; doctrines differ, the sought is one.
- Lamp (24:35): earthly through descent, heavenly through vision.
- Magnet and iron (IV 65.21): intertied yet only the magnet attracts; poverty vs independence.
Names as Relations; Thingness and Homesteads
"The cosmos is restricted to entities and relations" (III 66.2). Names are relations: a nonexistence that leaves traces. Greatness is "in the heavens and the earth" (45:37), not "in Himself": the servant is the locus of greatness. Stairs (70:3) are points of articulation: the Breath descends twenty-eight levels. "He gives us assistance in wujud, and we give Him assistance in knowledge." Between thingness of fixity and thingness of wujud stands not nonexistence but God, and the connection is love (IV 108.9). Each homestead (mawtin) colors vision; the Essence stays unknown. "What is at you runs out, but what is at God subsists" (16:96).
Twelve Poles and At-ness
Chapter 463's twelve Poles on hearts of prophets (zodiac analogues) teach that poverty toward God through God means names need entities more than entities need wujud. Chapter 493's at-ness ('indiyya) vs withness (ma'iyya): things at God before existence; with Him after. The Koran eternal with God, newly arrived with us (26:5), is the situation of every thing. Fixity = storehouses (15:21); wujud = what arrives.
Nobody Seeks God; Mirror and Loincloth Revisited
Chittick's chapter insists that seeking is already structured by the sought. "Nobody seeks God" in the sense that the seeker's configuration is the Lord's face toward him. The mirror shows the looker's form; the loincloth image teaches covering and disclosure together. Beauty of everything follows from Adam in His form: ugliness is accidental relation, not a second wujud.
Twelve Poles, Stairs and Air's Nearness
Chapter 463's twelve Poles (hearts of prophets as zodiac analogues) teach poverty of names toward entities. Stairs as points of articulation: Breath becomes letters. Air not seen through excessive nearness (Ch 406): forms cannot see the Entity in which they exist. Magnet and iron remain distinct while intertied. Thing is "most indefinite of the indefinites" yet points to unity: "to a thing", never "to two things" (16:40).
Chapter 2. Perpetual Self-Disclosure
Chapter 1 set out wujud and the entities. Chapter 2 looks at the relation between them, which Ibn al-'Arabi calls self-disclosure (tajalli). To create is to disclose oneself; the disclosure never repeats; so the cosmos is a new creation at every instant, infinite in its unfolding and one in its root. The fitting response of the knower is not certainty but bewilderment.
Two Meanings of Creation
The Arabic khalq has two senses: to determine (taqdir, to give something its measure, qadar) and to give existence (ijad). "'Creator' has two meanings, the one who determines, and the one who gives existence" (II 430.9). When Jesus says "I will create for you from clay the guise of a bird" (3:49), he gives shape to clay that already exists. So when God is "the most beautiful of creators" (23:14), He is compared with others who determine; when the Koran asks "Is He who creates like him who does not create?" (16:17), it means the existence-giving that is God's alone.
The line is not absolute: a hadith gives the people of paradise the power to say "Be!", and some friends have it now through Aspiration (himma). Then only poverty separates servant from Lord, and here "feet slip". The servant says "Be!" out of appetite, which is need; God does not create out of need. The entities ask for their own wujud and He answers "for the sake of their request". Those who missed this said "Surely God is poor" (3:181) (I 733.35).
Two verses give two kinds of thingness: "Our only word to a thing" (16:40) addresses what does not yet exist; "when you were not a thing" (19:67) denies it the thingness of wujud.
In Chapter 558, determination belongs to the name Creator, existence-giving to the name Author (bari'). "His are the creation and the command" (7:54): God's "Be!" and the thing's being are one event, the so of outcome; only imagination pictures a stream of separate commands.
| School | View |
|---|---|
| Ash'arites | A possible thing has no entity until God brings it into existence |
| Mu'tazilites | Possible things have entities of fixity that later exist; the impossible has none |
| Realizers (Folk of God) | Fixed entities with fixed properties. Either the entity is seen in the mirror of the Real's wujud while staying fixed, or the Real is manifest in the entities as loci. "The perfect unveiling" sees both respects |
Self-Disclosure
What sets the Shaykh apart is not the word creation but his gloss on it: to create is for God to disclose Himself in the forms called creatures. Long before he was labeled the spokesman of wahdat al-wujud, he was counted among the Companions of Self-Disclosure (ashab al-tajalli). The term has two faces: the actual situation (everything is as it is because God showed Himself in that form) and the witnessing (shuhud) of it, which belongs to the Folk of God.
The Koranic root is Moses at the mountain: "Thou shalt not see Me; but behold the mountain... when his Lord disclosed Himself to the mountain, He made it crumble to dust, and Moses fell down thunderstruck" (7:143). Moses, a friend of God as well as a prophet, already saw God as the friends see Him; he asked for the form reserved to prophets (III 541.12). The highest stages of the friends are the beginning stages of the prophets.
Self-disclosure pairs with curtaining (satr). The Essence stays curtained (tanzih); the forms disclose (tashbih); these are the "two eyes" of reason and imagination. Two names never disclose themselves: the One (al-ahad) and God (Allah) as the all-comprehending Essence (III 180.23).
Every disclosure is bound by its form. A dreamer applies to God whatever the dream form implies, and no one objects; some Men of God see such forms awake, in the same Presence of imagination (IV 200.23). Still, nobody grasps the Essence: "The incapacity to attain perception is itself perception", said Abu Bakr (III 371.13).
Since each disclosure is new, it cannot be earned: "Seeking is a striving, while vision is a gratuitous favor" (imtinan). He first appears in the form of the seeker's own knowledge, lest He be denied, then gives a knowledge "that had not occurred to their mind" (III 464.27).
Unending Renewal
The proof text is "they are uncertain of a new creation" (50:15), normally read of the resurrection, read by the Shaykh as the constant bestowal of wujud here and now. The Ash'arites had said accidents are recreated at every moment; Ibn al-'Arabi says everything other than God is. On the plane of time, He / not He becomes the affirmation of wujud followed at once by its negation. Nothing is ever idle: "the corruption of the forms is identical with other forms", not followed by them (II 682.20), and every form glorifies its Creator (17:44).
Renewal also explains human action. "You will not will unless God wills" (76:30); by unveiling, "the Real is identical with his desire". You say Zayd moved his hand, "but the mover is only God", and there is no stillness in the cosmos (III 303.19).
The never-fixed cosmos is therefore imagination: "the dream of the Real" (II 380.17), Unbounded Imagination, undergoing transmutation (istihala).
The renewed forms fill the Void (khala'), "an imagined extension that is not within a body" (II 310.25); since possible things come forever, the last world has no end (III 506.7).
Chapter 356 shows the worlds trading places: the Nile and Euphrates are rivers of the Garden transmuted, and Adam and Eve came from the last abode. Sleep is a daily transmutation. It works only because the substance stays one, or we would not remember what we were. Each thing moves from the thingness of fixity, manifest to its Lord, to the thingness of wujud, manifest to itself. Since the servant sees in the Real only his own form, "let him blame none but himself" when a prayer goes unanswered (III 253.9).
| Term | Ends at |
|---|---|
| Every instant | The second moment of a thing's wujud |
| This life | The last breath, transfer to the barzakh |
| Chastisement (for the folk of the Fire) | Mercy "that embraces everything" (7:156); they become blissful in the Fire |
| After that | Only "hidden, delicate terms": every thing forever between a precedent and a conclusion (III 512.7) |
Such novelty breeds bewilderment (hayra), "one of the highest stages of knowledge" (III 404.26). And God as He-Who-Brings-Back (al-mu'id) does not restore vanished things: substances never cease; He brings back His own act of giving existence (IV 288.33).
Infinity
The fixed entities are infinite; once an entity "enters into wujud" it is finite, bounded by its reality, yet it "has no end" because wujud keeps disclosing itself to it. "It is impossible for the infinite to enter into wujud" (II 282.35). "Each day He is upon some task" (55:29): the day is the indivisible instant, and the tasks are the states of the cosmos. The infinite can only enter in order, little by little; the entity "falls upon the light of self-disclosure, so it sees itself" (IV 425.7).
Chapter 190 makes this a journey without end. When the traveler, seeing God in each thing, wants to put down his staff, God tells him: "You will never cease being a traveler", through death, the barzakhs and the Uprising to the Garden and the Dune of White Musk, forever (II 383.10).
So how can the blessed be "well pleased with Him" (5:119)? Because the infinite enters bit by bit, good-pleasure attaches to the small, like the drop a bird's beak takes from the sea in Khadir's parable. Even the folk of the Fire keep the recompense of servanthood, and the primordial "Yes" (7:172) finally gives them felicity (II 212.31).
Words That Never Run Out
The plainest Koranic sign of endless disclosure is that God's words never run out (18:109, 31:27). In Chapter 198 the words are articulated in the Breath of the All-Merciful. "I was a Hidden Treasure and I loved to be known" (sound by unveiling, the Shaykh notes, not by transmission). Love attaches to what does not yet exist; the Breath relieves the Lover's distress by making the cosmos manifest. It is the Cloud, holding all the words undifferentiated, as Adam was taught "the names, all of them" (2:31). The All-Merciful's mention is undifferentiated; God's is differentiated (II 399.31).
Chapter 524 adds that the seas and pens are themselves words, so the sea as ink could write only itself; each existent is finite in entity yet unending under wujud's passage (murur).
The One Entity
Sometimes the Shaykh calls wujud itself the One Entity ('ayn wahida): "Although the cosmos is a multiplicity, it goes back to One Entity" (III 306.7). His nearest approach to the phrase wahdat al-wujud: "I and my peers see One Essence, not two... The Entity is one in wujud, but the relations pertain to nonexistence" (III 566.9). Change belongs to the entities: "Were it not for the Entity, no property would become manifest, and were it not for the possible thing, no change would become manifest" (III 211.27).
Since God's words in scripture and in the cosmos share one nature (III 247.3), His address descends to each listener's understanding and is true even when contradictory, as white and black meet in color: the root of the diversity of religions.
| Image | Point |
|---|---|
| Adam and Eve (III 503.6) | "Your Lord is one, just as your father is one." Eve is Adam's rib, as right and left hands are both Zayd. "He gives existence to an entity, and we give existence to a Lord" |
| Wood (II 415.18) | All forms are shaped from the Breath, "the Real Through Which Creation Occurs"; the forms multiply, the woodenness does not. "Where is He?" "In the distinction itself." |
| Sun and moon (III 395.20) | The moon's light is only the sun's, yet ascribed to the moon |
| Chameleon (IV 185.29) | The perfect one sees diverse disclosures in One Entity "like a chameleon" |
| Whirled spark (I 702.17) | A circle of fire that is not there: "a nonexistence within the entity of a wujud" |
Chapter 72 draws the ethical edge: shared attributes belong to God in reality and to us metaphorically, "for He was when we were not". To a protester: "I did not say that; He said it about Himself." Man is "a great wrongdoer, very ignorant" (33:72) when he usurps them; the cure is to "give back the trust to its Owner" (I 690.35).
The maxim "Nothing proceeds from the One but one" becomes: one cosmos from One Entity, many properties from many names. God is joined (He is the lover's hearing) and separate (He calls "O people!", we call "Our Lord!"), as 42:11 holds tanzih and tashbih in one verse (III 324.35).
Bewilderment in the Many and the One
The chapter closes with the gnostic vision. In Chapter 507 on shame (96:14), the key word is hadd: limit, statute, definition. The rememberer of this verse receives Moses' self-disclosure without crumbling; if annihilated, it is by beauty, renewed "beauty upon beauty". Limits are how anything is known: even Hallaj's "I am the one I love" still distinguishes lover from beloved (IV 145.27).
Chapter 542 reads "more misguided" (17:72) in a good sense: the thinker dies bewildered by misgivings, while the companion of self-disclosure, never shown a form twice, is bewildered already (IV 185.29). Chapter 391's "quick-flowing course" is "You did not throw when you threw, but God threw" (8:17): affirm, negate, affirm, like water that never stands (III 549.20).
| # | Way of knowing | What they say |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Reflective consideration | Negation (tanzih) |
| 2 | Self-disclosure | Affirmation and limits |
| 3 | Between witnessing and consideration | Neither stay with forms nor reach the Essence |
| 4 | Know that God receives every belief | Either the Real discloses Himself in the forms of possible things, or their properties are forms in the Real's wujud |
Chapter 369 reports a disagreement among three masters: Ibn al-'Arif, "the Real becomes clear when the tracing dissolves"; Abu Madyan, servanthood must remain so witnessing gives pleasure; al-Qasim ibn al-Qasim, witnessing is annihilation without pleasure. All are right, according to the kind of form in which the disclosure came: "The mounts are diverse, but the rider is one." For the Folk of God, "disagreement is agreement, because they shoot from a single bow" (III 395.20).
The last passage explains the trotting in three of the seven circuits of the Kaabah. "Our command is but one, like a glance of the eyesight" (54:50). Whirl a spark and a circle of fire appears that is not there. In a lightning flash, the light, the coloring of the air, the appearance of things and our seeing them happen in one time, though reason orders them. In the end "bewilderment is bewildered with itself", for "there is nothing but He and bewilderment", and "the essences, though not there, prostrate themselves to God through God" (I 702.17).
Deepening: Tajalli, New Creation and Bewilderment
Chapter 2 turns the ontology of Chapter 1 into time and disclosure. Creation (khalq) is determination (taqdir) plus existence-giving (ijad). Only the second is God's alone in the full sense; humans "create" as determiners (Jesus and the clay bird, 3:49). Friends engender via himma. The only difference of servant and Lord is poverty.
Self-Disclosure Never Repeats
Tajalli means both manifest reality and unveiling-witnessing. Companions of Self-Disclosure antedate the later label wahdat al-wujud. No disclosure in the names One (al-ahad) and Allah as Independent (III 180.23); disclosure belongs to ilah and Lord. "Never discloses Himself twice to one individual in one form, nor to two in one form." Always bound by form; Men of God see awake what dreamers see asleep (IV 200.23). Worship is of the witnessed; hulul is wrong because "the Real is identical with the forms, no container encloses Him."
Unending Renewal and the Dream of the Real
Verse 50:15 is read as constant bestowal here. Generation and corruption: every instant in everything other than God. He/not He on the temporal plane is affirmation then negation. The cosmos is a "dream of the Real" (II 380.17), Unbounded Imagination. Transmutation is speedy (spirits into forms) or slow (water to air). Shadow play: many forms, one entity; the screen is the separating limit (II 311.2). The named term of each thing is the second moment of its wujud. Void extends; last abode has no term.
Infinity, Breath and Words That Never Run Out
Fixed entities are infinite; existent entities finite in number yet each "has no end". "Impossible for the infinite to enter into wujud" except by order (II 282.35). The traveler's journey never ends: from "Am I not your Lord" (7:172) through death, barzakh, Uprising, Garden and Dune of White Musk (II 383.10). Hidden Treasure: love attaches to the nonexistent; Breath relieves the Lover's distress. Cloud undifferentiated; words infinite in differentiation. Seas as ink (18:109); seas and pens are themselves words. The rainbow: "There is there what is not there"; eyesight and insight neither lie; the bewildered stands between.
One Entity, Circular Trusteeship, Four Knowers
"Although the cosmos is a multiplicity it goes back to One Entity" (III 306.7). "Entity is one in wujud, relations pertain to nonexistence" (III 566.9), nearest to what others named wahdat al-wujud. Circular trusteeship (Ch 360): we are vicegerents; take Him as Trustee; "you are the vicegerent of your vicegerent." Four sorts of knowers (IV 42.34): reflection (negation); self-disclosure (affirmation/limits); between; those who know God receives every belief. "Whoever is bewildered arrives, whoever is guided stays apart." Chameleon: perfect one sees diversity of disclosures in One Entity (IV 185.29). Spark whirled = circle of fire not there; lightning flash colors air in one time. "Bewilderment is bewildered with itself... nothing but He and bewilderment" (I 702.17).
Ash'arites, Mu'tazilites and Realizers on Entities
Creation-and-command (7:54): determination prior, command between two creations. Three views of what is seen: entity transferred; mirror (entities stay fixed, perceive each other in the Real's mirror); Real manifest in loci. Perfect unveiling sees both. Ash'arites: no entity in nonexistence. Mu'tazilites: fixed entities, no impossible. Realizers: fixed entities with fixed properties (IV 210.13).
Shadow Play, Void and Named Term
Shadow play: many forms, one entity; screen = separating limit (II 311.2). Void (khala') imagined extension not within a body; plenum (mala'). This world / last world named because of us; last abode no term. Named term = second moment of each thing's wujud. Conclusions vs precedent; thing always between a precedent and a conclusion (III 512.7). Khadir and Moses: bird dipping beak = our knowledge vs God's. Good-pleasure attaches to the small because infinite enters little by little (II 482.25).
Chapter 3. The Face of God
Seen through tashbih, the cosmos is where God discloses Himself; in the end the world is God's presence. Two verses carry the chapter: "Wherever you turn, there is the face of God" (2:115) and "Each thing is perishing except His face" (28:88). Paired with the face is the veil, which hides it. The chapter ends with the mutual waystations where God and servant meet.
The Face
Wajh means face, but also front, aspect, direction, intention and sense. Ibn al-'Arabi prefers the literal sense; when he glosses it, the face is the thing's essence (dhat) or reality (haqiqa). A headless body has no recognizable identity; a bodiless head does. "A thing is known only through its face, that is, its reality" (I 83.29). The Prophet stopped a man beating his slave's face: "Beware of the face, for God created Adam in His form" (II 684.2). So the "radiant" and "scowling" faces of 75:22-25 are selves, not skin.
If the face is the reality, then God's face as Essence cannot be known. What we turn toward is His self-disclosure, the god of belief.
Perishment: His Face or Its Face
Verse 28:88 reads two ways, and the Shaykh uses both.
| Reading | Meaning |
|---|---|
| "except His face" | Only God has wujud; or every entity perishes at each instant and is given wujud again by the next self-disclosure |
| "except its face" (the nearer noun, so the more usual reading) | Forms perish, but realities, the fixed entities known to God, never do. "The human being is a rationally speaking animal" stays true when no human form exists (III 420.7) |
Only accidental relations perish. "There are nothing but realities, so there are nothing but non-perishing faces. And there are nothing but relations, so there is nothing but what perishes. Consider as you wish" (II 100.9).
Chapter 369 pushes the first reading to its end. Everything comes from a haqq and through a haqq. Good is wujud; evil is the nonexistence of good, a mere relation. So "no existent thing that we witness... is perishing, because everything is His face." The cosmos is the many, the Real One in Entity (III 373.26).
From tanzih the face is the thing's nonexistent entity, distinct from wujud; from tashbih it is God's face shown in the thing. Hence the bold line: "The face of God is you, so you are the kiblah wherever you may be." (IV 406.17)
Reason, Safety and Realization
Seeing the face in things is the work of imagination. Reason sees tanzih, though it can grasp that without the face nothing could exist. For those without insight the course is the path of safety (salama): accept God at His word and do not explain the text away (ta'wil). Reason "speaks the truth" within its own capacity, since it too was given its creation (20:50); "then guided" adds what no faculty supplies. The Folk of the Koran "tie the knot of every belief", because no face is empty of Him. This lifts absolute error from the cosmos, though relative error remains (II 299.13).
Chapter 165 names the station: realization (tahqiq). Under the engendering command nothing is wrong; under the prescriptive command people still err. The Realizer obeys the hadith "Give to each that has a haqq its haqq."
The Realizer may err by self-exertion, like the mujtahid, and still earn a wage; in everything called "error" he finds a face toward the Real, and "sees his Lord through every belief" (II 267.17).
Discerning the Face
A common error of seekers: God's face is in everything, so nothing is wrong and the Shariah is a veil. Later critics pinned this on Ibn al-'Arabi; in fact he spent many passages refuting it. The travelers must keep the scale (mizan, 55:7); without it they fall under divine deception (makr).
The same lesson comes in 18:28: "Be patient with those who call upon their Lord at morning and evening, desiring His face." Afterward the Prophet would greet them, "Welcome to those concerning whom my Lord scolded me!" (III 220.7).
Chapter 527 adds that those who keep this remembrance come to see the face in each thing, and the face binds the gaze: their eyes cannot pass it by (IV 169.35). The prophets see the face too but are not bound by it. They are bound by the means to wholesomeness (maslaha) of their people, and so can be scolded. "God taught me courtesy," and "I mean you, so listen, O neighbor": the lesson is ours too (IV 170.24-26).
The Veil
A veil (hijab) or curtain (sitr) prevents seeing the face. Everything is a veil, yet everything discloses wujud. Even "the names are veils over the Named, just as they are signifiers of Him." The cosmos is "a curtain, a curtained, and a curtainer" (IV 214.30). The likenesses that fill the world hide the new creation (IV 22.6).
Only humans and jinn are veiled. Every entity witnessed its Lord in its nonexistence; the veil of nature hides Him, so people worship the stars and elements they can see (III 308.20). Still, the veils are mercy: the blessings themselves are veils, self-disclosures draped over the Essence.
| Veil | Text |
|---|---|
| Between creatures | "Ask them from behind a veil" (33:53) |
| Creatures from God | "Our hearts are in shelters" (41:5) |
| God from creatures | "the mantle of greatness on His face" |
| Speech from behind a veil | Moses: fire, tree, bank, Mount, hollow (28:29-30); "until he hears the speech of God" (9:6), Muhammad being the veil |
| Greatest suprasensory | Ignorance |
| Densest sensory | You over yourself |
Messengers and scriptures can become thick veils when given absolute value; the jurists who denied direct knowledge "missed God because of the veil." A Mystery: veil-keepers test whether subjects look past them to the king (IV 412.22).
The Garden (janna, from "to conceal") holds "what no eye has seen" because it is a curtain. We make what we see into a curtain through tanzih; the prophets brought tashbih to lift the covering, as the dying see what bystanders do not (50:22; III 541.20). Even "direct" vision after death is still the vision of a self-disclosing veil, possible only when the Real is your eyesight (IV 19.12).
- The occasions are divine veils that "cannot be lifted save through themselves"; lifting them is letting them down.
- For common people the curtain is mercy over their disobedience.
- For the elect: "you are His curtain over you"; you are mortal by essence, so the curtain stays.
- Two motives: jealousy (ghayra, lest an "other", ghayr, encompass Him) and mercy (the glories of His face would burn).
- Boredom with one disclosure is irreverence born of not seeing the new creation. "There is no escape from the curtain, for there is no escape from you."
Revelation as Veil
To reveal (wahy) is to re-veil. Angels are thunderstruck by revelation "like a chain across pebbles"; the Prophet frothed and sweated; yet Moses, spoken to directly (4:164), carried on talking. Chittick's answer, from the Shaykh: everything follows the traces of the veils.
| Moses | Muhammad | |
|---|---|---|
| Readiness | Seeking fire for his family; God called "from his need itself" | Descent on the heart |
| Address | Differentiated, bound to the ears | Undifferentiated, the bell's clanging |
| Result | Heart still governs the body: firm | Heart absorbed, absent from the body: swoon |
Mutual Waystations
Critics said the Shaykh claimed prophethood. His reply rests on definitions: God "reveals" to bees and mountains too. Prophets bring rulings (ahkam); friends receive only reports (akhbar), an address (khitab) such as David's "differentiation of address" (38:20). It comes by specification, never by earning (78:37).
Chapter 384 opens Part Five of the Futuhat, 78 chapters of God's addresses to him. A munazala is a mutual descent: two travelers dismount to meet in a camp. The servant's rising is his Buraq ("To Him climb up the pleasant words", 35:10); the Lord "descends to the closest heaven every night." Its range runs from the Cloud to the earth. God speaks only "from behind the veil of the form," as a soul speaks through its body; such speech is elocution (fahwaniyya), "the address of the Real, by direct encounter, in the world of imagination" (III 523.18).
From the Presence of Grandiloquence, whose word is Be, come Moses' call in the form of his need, Muhammad's All-Comprehensive Words, David's wisdom, every scripture and the Pen's writing.
To the unveiled heart all forms speak to and hear one another; all mutual waystations are barzakhs between the First and the Last, the Manifest and the Nonmanifest. "Hear not the speech of God save through the hearing of God."
Mutual waystations also arise between names: the Forgiving and the Avenger contend over a sinner, as in "I never waver in anything as I waver in taking the soul of a man of faith." In an unveiling at the slaying of al-Dajjal the Shaykh saw that mercy "embraces everything" (7:156): accidents vanish at the second moment, so no one stays wretched forever, and "there is nothing but the divine gratuitous favor." In the heart the angel and the satan meet as two suggestions. A wavering between two good acts mirrors divine wavering and carries no fault.
Deepening: Face, Perishment and Mutual Waystations
Under tashbih the cosmos is the locus of God. Wajh is face, aspect, intention; the Shaykh prefers the literal. A thing is known only through its face (I 83.29). "Beware of the face, God created Adam in His form" (II 684.2): face is the locus of turning. The face of God we find is self-disclosure, the god of belief, not the Essence. Form-Giver (musawwir): Jesus creates the bird's guise; image-makers blamed for lacking sensory life-giving. Man is form-giver and configured; "as if you see Him"; God in the kiblah of the praying person.
Two Readings of 28:88
His face: only God has wujud / renewal. Its face (grammatically nearer): realities / fixed entities do not perish. "Nothing but realities, so nothing but non-perishing faces; nothing but relations, so nothing but what perishes. Consider as you wish" (II 100.9). Moon eclipse: light perishes, entity subsists. "The face of God is you, so you are the kiblah wherever you may be" (IV 406.17). Absolute error lifts; relative error remains; "every mujtahid correct."
Scale, Blind Man and Desiring the Face
Seekers who conclude "no error exists" fall into antinomianism; the scale (mizan) / Shariah must stay. Surah 80: the Prophet magnified independence in a Quraysh noble and was corrected; he later welcomed those "concerning whom my Lord scolded me." Prophets see the face but are not bound by it: bound by maslaha. God is independent (3:97) and also seeking (51:56). Tribe that desires the Face (18:28): when they are seen, God is remembered (IV 170.17).
Revelation as Re-veiling; Mutual Waystations
To reveal is to re-veil. Angels thunderstruck "like a chain across pebbles"; Moses spoken directly (4:164); Muhammad's descent on the heart. Munazalat: mutual descent; servant's rising is his Buraq; God descends to closest heaven. God speaks only from behind a veil of form, as the soul speaks behind the body's form. Fahwaniyya: address by direct encounter in imagination; also the Word Be. Meeting = mutual waystation; Presence of Grandiloquence holds the Word "Be".
Realization, Mirage and Every Mujtahid
Chapter 165: no error in wujud (engendering command); errors concern the prescriptive command. "Give each that has a haqq its haqq." The realizer may err by self-exertion yet earns a wage like a mujtahid; the Real becomes hearing and sight. Mark: finds a face toward the Real in every "error", sees the Lord in every belief. Absolute error lifts; relative error remains.
Veil-Keepers and Translucent Veils
Messengers and scriptures are thick veils for jurists who stop at the keeper. High isnad can become a veil; Abu Yazid: "My heart narrated to me from my Lord." Veils dense, subtle, translucent (glass and wine); mirrors: forms a veil, double movement in waves. "Nothing in wujud but veils hung down." Janna as curtain: "what no eye has seen"; we make what we see a curtain through tanzih; prophets brought tashbih.
Chapter 4. Veils of Light
To know the cosmos you must read its signs, and to read the signs you must know yourself. Ibn al-'Arabi treats "objective" knowledge as an illusion that harms both the knower and the world he governs as vicegerent. The greatest veil is the self that knows, and yet the self is the face. The chapter moves from the veil of self to the occasions, the specific face that bypasses them, and finally the glories of the face that burn away and, by burning, affirm.
The Veil of Self
"God placed no veil over you save yourself" (III 215.3). The ignorance to be overcome is not a theory but woven into created nature: forgetfulness (nisyan) and heedlessness (ghafla). Only the "two eyes", reason seeing tanzih and imagination seeing tashbih, show things as they are.
Knowledge is felicity, but the folk of unveiling add a warning: knowledge is acquired, so God can take it away and leave only the knowledge that it was taken. That remainder is the pain; the ignorant who do not know they are ignorant are content (III 245.33). The Shaykh tells of a pain in his arm: he complained to God like Job, out of courtesy, rather than feign the "surrender" that brings together two ignorances. The deserts between you and unveiling are real, "but there is no wilderness and no desert save you... So withdraw, and the affair will be easy."
Occasions
An occasion (sabab, literally a rope) is a secondary cause. To explain a thing without the Real is to stay with occasions, and "Occasions are curtains and veils" (II 553.11). Seeing the Real in the thing is to deal with the Occasioner of the occasions. The first view is tanzih, an ordered chain; the second is tashbih, presence without intermediary.
So each thing has two faces: one looks at its occasion, the other at its Existence-Giver. In a letter to Fakhr al-Din Razi, the Shaykh says philosophers and scholars look at occasions; the Realizers look at God. "My heart narrated to me from my Lord" is good; the perfect say "My Lord narrated to me." Abu Yazid: "You take your knowledge dead from the dead, but we take ours from the Living who does not die." The names are God's faces; the Essence is His Face.
| Kind | Example |
|---|---|
| Creaturely | A thing whose wujud depends on another's prior wujud |
| Trace in the uncreated | "I respond to the call of the caller" (2:186): the asking occasions the answer |
| Suprasensory, on the receiver's side | Preparedness; even the impossible can be "supposed" |
| Suprasensory, on God's side | Entity, word and desire (16:40). God "is not a cause, but He is inescapably a condition" |
Chapter 207 plays on 'illa, which means both cause and illness. The sick lean on the physician "because he is the same kind as they." For the Sufis an 'illa is God's alerting: "The Physician has made me ill," said Abu Bakr; "I was ill, and you did not visit Me." Pains are the strongest alerting toward the return. "Any occasion that does not turn you back to God... is not an 'illa" (II 490.3).
Why then do some disobey? God speaks by the engendering command, which none can resist, and by "the elocution of likenesses", the messengers. Some envy the messengers as likenesses of themselves and refuse. "No one has opposed God, and no one but God has been opposed"; the blame falls on the occasions, which "shield the All-Merciful." For the veiled the subtle has become dense; for the gnostics the dense has become subtle (III 547.13).
| Group | Knows | Witnesses |
|---|---|---|
| Folk of God (gnostics) | Yes | Yes: receptive "like the womb" |
| The faithful | Yes | No |
| The rest | No | No |
Chapter 370, the Path of the Exalted (14:1), names five Koranic paths: of God, of the Lord, of the Blessing-Giver, of Muhammad, and of the Exalted. The last is God's own path of descent, on which no creature ascends. God brings us from the darkness of fixity into the light of wujud, then into the higher darkness of bewilderment. "He does not descend upon us save through us... we are identical with this path." Hamid means both Praiser and Praised: "Thou art as Thou hast lauded Thyself." Laud Him as bound and you bind Him; laud Him as unbound and you bind Him by unboundedness. We cannot know ourselves, so still less Him: "knowledge of Him / not knowledge" (III 411.27).
Chapter 514 on trust (65:3): "There is no target behind God." Veils lie only between you and Him, never behind Him. The occasions, relations and habits are His forms: "They are He" is true; "They are not He" is true too. A blind man still meets you face to face; he sees you as darkness. You are the barrier never pierced between nonexistence and wujud: "the known/the unknown" (IV 153.35).
The Specific Face
The face turned toward occasions runs through intermediaries, back through one's ancestors to Adam, or up through elements, heavens, Throne, Soul and Intellect. The other face is the specific face (al-wajh al-khass): God's face turned to the thing to give it existence, which is the thing's own face turned only toward wujud. It never perishes. "In each existent thing God has a specific face through which He casts to it... what does not belong to any of the other faces" (II 423.10). Only the First Intellect has no occasion.
| Face | Sees | Agrees with | Formula |
|---|---|---|---|
| Toward occasions | Manyness; high fathers (heavens), low mothers (elements) | The philosophers | Tanzih, "not He" |
| Specific face | Oneness of wujud, withness | The Ash'arites | Tashbih, "He" |
Because each person has a unique knowledge from this face, God told even the Prophet to consult (3:159), and Adam knew names the angels did not (III 423.1).
In Chapter 291 the "breast" (sadr) of each thing is its occasion, and the heart within is its specific face: "Blind are the hearts within the breasts" (22:46). The gnostics affirm occasions and give them their haqq but do not worship them; others worship them and rob them of their servanthood. People say "There is nothing but God" until a mishap, then run to the occasion; when it fails, they disbelieve in occasions. Neither stance knows what an occasion is (II 652.35).
Section 42 of Chapter 198 allows reliance on occasions "through a divine reliance". All fall short except the perfect human being. The "degree" of man over woman is not that Eve came from Adam (Mary and Jesus reverse it) but that she is the locus of receiving activity. Those who see the specific face say God acts "at" occasions; others say "through" them, as a carpenter works through his saw (II 471.19).
Prophecy comes by specification (ikhtisas, 2:105), not earning. Chapter 289: "The Folk of Specification possess divine revelation from the specific face. It is found in everyone, but understandings do not reach it"; everyone says "Such and such occurred to me" without knowing whence. Its type is Khadir, taught "knowledge from Us" (18:65), chief of the Solitaries (afrad), who stand outside the Pole's authority, like the Cherubim (IV 388.33). Through the "tenuities" (raqa'iq), lines from the names nearer than the jugular vein, every creature has tastings that cannot be passed on; hence a Garden of Specification beside the Gardens of Deeds and Inheritance (III 260.27).
Eminence is not innate, or everyone would be eminent; it comes from the level God gives. The highest is perpetual witnessing of one's servanthood: "Address me not save with 'O her servant!'". By the specific face, the Pen and the lowest thing are equal (III 32.1). Revelation ended with Muhammad; inspiration goes on, through an unseen angel (the shared face) or from the specific face, where messenger and friend meet (III 238.30).
Veils of Knowledge and Teaching
Chapter 396 carries God's saying: "When someone brings together the sciences and knowledges, they veil him from Me." Essences are known self-evidently; the relations are infinite and scatter whoever pursues them. Arithmetic, geometry, logic and natural science all signify God, yet veil when not read for that. The way: empty the heart, remember "God", knock at the door, and God teaches "from Us" as He taught Khadir. "I have a knowledge... that you do not know, and you have a knowledge... that I do not know." Every self-evident insight comes from the specific face. Abu Bakr: "I have never seen anything without seeing God before it." The Shaykh says this knowledge came to him suddenly; he denied it until God opened the door (III 558.5).
The mark of the specific face is Shari'ite courtesy.Its owner calls his own disobedience disobedience and holds that the Law binds him and the commoner alike. The Prophet would not forbid 'Ali a second marriage to Abu Jahl's daughter, "It is not for me to make unlawful what God has made lawful", though he said 'Ali would then have to divorce Fatima. The rulings of the mujtahids and
dream interpretation by native giftcome from this face, and so does the mercy that finally reaches all.
| Teacher | Student | Note |
|---|---|---|
| God | First Intellect (Pen) | "What shall I write?" "What has been and what will be until the resurrection"; it writes head down, by hearing, which suits tanzih better than sight |
| Intellect | Tablet (Universal Soul) | As Eve to Adam |
| Adam | Angels | He tells them the names (2:33); vicegerent of God, not of earlier earth-dwellers |
| Perfect humans | Muhammad | All-Comprehensive Words; mujtahids share law-giving; ulama mustered with the prophets |
| Jesus, General Seal | His last companions | They die together by a pleasant wind, "the honeydrop" |
The Glories of the Face
"God has seventy veils of light and darkness; were He to lift them, the glories (subuhat) of His face would burn away everything that the eyesight of His creatures perceives." Glory is tanzih and majesty; so "God never discloses Himself in His majesty... but in the majesty of His beauty" (II 542.3). The veils are mercy, letting us subsist so that the names can appear. The glories are rays of the Essence; when they spread, the entities appear, and "the possible things are the veil between us and the glories" (II 488.10).
Light and dark veils are the two faces of the possible thing, which is a middle. Lift them and possibility goes, and with it the Necessary and the impossible as its poles. Since the blessed see God without being burnt, vision is always through the veil (III 276.15). The glories burn relations, not entities (II 459.35). A nonexistent entity cannot burn; God sees the many in the mirror of His own Essence, the Hidden Treasure deployed (III 289.32). Every thing has a face of benefit and a face of harm: the same Koran increases one man's faith and another's abomination (9:124-25; III 174.25).
Chapter 458 pictures the burning as stars under the sun: their light still exists in them, but it is included in a greater light; wood burnt to coal keeps its substance under a new name. The luminous veils are reflective knowledges, the dark veils natural habits. When they lift for the knowers, they say "I am God" or "Glory be to me"; the rest dispute, while the gnostics "kept the discussion secret" (20:62). "Do not bestow wisdom on other than its folk... and do not hold it back from its folk," which makes the gnostics watchful over everyone. Watching through God's eye is ease; through one's own, weariness (IV 72.20).
Chapter 558 separates two lights: wujud itself, "the light of the heavens and the earth", and the light God assigns (ja'l), the light of knowledge and deeds, "a light whereby he walks among the people" (6:122). Together they make "light upon light" (24:35). The pair parallels mercy as free gift versus mercy as promise, and the engendering versus the prescriptive command. The glories make us say "This is the cosmos"; lift the veils and one says "This is the Real". That lasts only for the Cherubim; for mortals it comes at moments. The assigned light of the Shariah rules over the light of reason: explain it away and you will be "mustered in the darkness of your ignorance" (IV 312.12).
| Fear (II 184.7) | Abandoning fear (II 184.26) |
|---|---|
| Fear of the veil (ignorance) and of its lifting (the entity vanishes, delight ends): "I complain of the length as I complain of the shortness." A station of bewilderment | "Make me into a light." Light is not burnt by light but included: "You are the sun, and the kings are stars; when you rise, none of the stars appears" |
| The Mu'tazilites rightly deny vision, but their proofs spoil it: "You ruined it by citing the book" | Forbidden to the faithful as mercy; safe from deception only with the good news of the Garden |
Deepening: Veils of Light, Occasions and the Specific Face
Chapter 4 makes the epistemological cost of Chapter 3 practical. Knowing the cosmos depends on knowing that objective knowledge without a standpoint is impossible. The densest veil is the self; it is also the face, so self-knowledge is knowledge of the Lord.
Occasions as Conditions, Not Causes
Occasions (asbab) are veils that cannot be lifted; give them their haqq without worshiping them. God is a condition, not a cause. Every thing has two faces, which lets the Shaykh affirm causality with the philosophers and deny it with the Ash'arites in different respects. The occasion is where the Real's act meets the entity's preparedness.
| Face toward the Real | Face toward creation |
|---|---|
| Receives wujud / specific face | Appears as occasion among occasions |
| Known by unveiling | Known by habit and reason |
| He | Not He |
The Specific Face and Shari'ite Courtesy
The specific face (al-wajh al-khass) gives each creature unique knowledge and tasting. It is Khadir's source and the ground of consultation: why one friend's opening is not another's. Its mark is Shari'ite courtesy, not license. Gathering sciences for their own sake veils; reading them as signs leads to God.
Glories of the Face
The glories (subuhat) burn away claims and relations, not entities. Vision is always through a veil; only light knows light. Boredom with one disclosure is irreverence born of not seeing the new creation. Jealousy (ghayra) and mercy both keep curtains: lest an "other" (ghayr) encompass Him, and lest the glories burn.
Teaching as Veil; Glories and Light upon Light
Gathering sciences for their own sake veils; reading as signs leads to God. Teaching can thicken the veil-keeper role if the student stops at the teacher. The specific face keeps consultation alive among friends without rivalry of openings. Glories burn claims and relations; entities remain. Only light knows light: created things are light within darkness (nonexistence) and light upon light (wujud) (24:35).
Part II: The Order of the Worlds
Chapter 5. The Roots of Order
Wujud is one and infinite, yet everything in wujud is finite, bound by the fixed entities. Its self-disclosure follows an order whose roots lie in the divine names. The Shaykh offers no full system; from the Station of No Station every standpoint has its haqq. This chapter traces what makes order possible: two unities, duality, ranking, choice, and the levels.
The Unity of Manyness
Order needs many things, and many things must be rooted in the One. Ibn al-'Arabi works this out by splitting unity into two modes. God is called both ahad and wahid, two words for "one". Ahad names His unity in respect of tanzih: nothing is affirmed of it, it has no relation with the cosmos, and no self-disclosure ever comes through it. "Nondual" might be a better rendering. Wahid names His unity in respect of tashbih: through it every engendered thing receives its own oneness.
These are the Unity of the One and the Unity of Manyness, together the name One/Many. Reason reaches the first; faith accepts both (IV 176.8). "In each thing He has a sign signifying that He is one": the sign is the thing's own unity (II 289.25).
This corrects the philosophers' axiom "from the One only one proceeds": their plural "faces" are simply the divine names. "So why not let the manyness proceed from Him?!" (IV 231.31).
Unity and Totality
Another key term is jam', "bringing together", which means "sum" in arithmetic and "plural" in grammar. God is al-Jami', He-who-brings-together; Allah is the all-comprehensive name; the perfect human being is the all-comprehensive engendered thing. Bringing together presupposes at least two. The unity of manyness is also the unity of the totality (ahadiyyat al-majmu'), one sense of what later writers called wahdat al-wujud, a phrase the Shaykh never uses.
In Chapter 347 the names are "the divine storehouses, within which are the storehouses of the possibilities" (15:21). God discloses Himself to the rows of worshipers in the Totality of Unity, so each whispers with "that of the Real that is given by his own presence" and their requests differ (III 193.23).
The Even and the Odd
If God's unity is already two, duality is basic to everything. The divine names fall into pairs, loosely those of tanzih and tashbih. Adam was made with two hands (38:75), so the perfect human sees with two eyes, reason and imagination. God holds the earth in His grip (39:67); the pair Gripper and Outspreader yields the Sufi states of contraction and expansion, and "the 'two grips' are the two worlds, the world of felicity and the world of wretchedness" (III 75.14).
In the hadith of Adam's children: "These are for the Garden, and it is no concern of Mine. Those are for the Fire..." The lack of concern means "the final issue of both is at mercy" (III 463.14). Each heart has two faces, and "You are the abode, and around you is the circling" (IV 359.5).
| Pair | Source | Reading |
|---|---|---|
| Even and odd | 89:3; "He is odd and loves the odd" | Evenness is the servant's reality; oddness belongs to the Essence (I 489.32) |
| Couple (zawj) | 51:49 | Root of every relation: actor and acted upon, male and female (IV 132.17) |
| Majesty and beauty | Treatise on Majesty and Beauty | Absolute majesty is God's alone; we meet only the majesty of beauty |
| Word and desire | 16:40 | Masculine "word" and feminine "desire" engender the cosmos; the Entity is one |
The Koran itself is built in pairs: "There is no verse of the Koran comprising mercy that does not have a sister comprising vengeance", as Forgiver of sins against Terrible in retribution (40:3). Even grammatical gender carries meaning: things come in Him by the self's femininity, from Him by its masculinity, and in 42:49-50 the "barren" match the names of tanzih, which give no birth (III 289.1).
Bringing Together and Association
In Chapter 558 the name Jami' becomes the root of seeing two, which theology calls shirk. God set shirk up by creating others, so associators will find mercy in the midst of hell. He is "the fourth of three" (58:7), never "the third of three" (5:73).
Ranking in Excellence
When two things are compared, one may be judged better. The Koran speaks of God's fadl, bounty, over eighty times, and seventeen times uses tafdil, making one thing exceed another: God ranks some of you above others in excellence of provision (16:71). Chittick renders the Shaykh's tafadul as "ranking in excellence".
From God's side there is no ranking. Each thing is a word of the Breath, and "When you ascribe affairs to the Real, they do not become ranked... when you ascribe them to you, they are ranked" (I 699.20). God turns His face equally to the Highest Pen and to the lowest thing: "If you let down a rope, it will fall upon God" (I 506.15). Ranking arises from the receivers. Unboundedness belongs to wujud alone; each entity limits its radiance by its preparedness, so "diverse traces... are in respect of the receptacles, not its entity" (II 458.18).
Even the divine names are ranked, by compass: the Knowing embraces all things, the Desiring less, the Powerful less again (IV 99.4). Things rank only in respects: what leaves traces over what receives them, the inclusive over the specific (III 447.12).
| Case | Ranking? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Black and white | Yes | "Color brings the two together" (III 273.21) |
| Species of one genus (the cosmos) | Yes | Ibn Qasi denied it; right in his respect, wrong in ours (III 326.17) |
| Good and evil | No | Wujud and nonexistence share no measure (I 322.23) |
| Independence and poverty; God and creatures | No | "Nothing brings together the Real and creation" (II 654.26) |
| All things seen as faces of wujud | No | The view of the Folk of Bringing Together and Finding: Our affair is but one (54:50) |
Human "independence" (ghina, also wealth) is no exception: "your independence is the same as your poverty" (II 654.29). All things need God absolutely: O people, you are the poor toward God (35:15).
God's Choices
Why rank at all? Because God chooses (ikhtiyar), the theologians would say. The Shaykh agrees, with a twist. God's choices follow His knowledge, and knowledge follows the known, the fixed entities. So God is compelled by His own reality, His knowledge, wisdom and mercy. Human beings in His form are compelled even more: their choice is as illusory as their existence, yet their responsibility is as real as their freedom.
Thy Lord creates whatever He wills and chooses; they have not the choice (28:68). God's command is one, like a glance (54:50), the single word Be. He does not "make" (ja'l) things what they are; He only gives existence preponderance (tarjih) over nonexistence. If We had willed, We would have given every soul its guidance (32:13), with the grammarians' "if" of impossibility, points to the mystery of the measuring out: "Realities do not change," so God's argument is conclusive (I 162.35).
The happy result is an excuse: "The excuse of the whole cosmos is accepted... That is why God made the final issue of everyone at mercy" (III 433.4). If we feel "this extravagant mercy" for sinners, "God is nobler than that" everlasting chastisement (III 25.14).
Chapter 90 lists God's choices category by category (II 169.5):
| Among | He chose | Among | He chose |
|---|---|---|---|
| names | God | months | Ramadan |
| wherenesses | the Cloud | days | Friday |
| spheres | the Throne | nights | the Night of Power |
| elements | water | verses | the Footstool Verse |
| colours | white | stones | the Black Stone |
| women | Mary and Asiya | stars | the sun |
| remembrance | "No god but God" | acts of salat | prostration |
Asked by al-Tirmidhi "Where are the storehouses of favors?" (Chapter 73), the Shaykh answers: in the imagined choice; He is the favor, so "we are a where for Him" (II 74.28). And since absolute constraint never lifts, "be with the Real through His attributes between perpetual compulsion and choice!" (I 687.23).
Order
Ranking yields levels (rutba), and the same root gives tartib, order. The Essence has no level and stays unknown; "God" is known through the Level, and "the cosmos knows nothing of the Real save the Level" (II 67.22). Order shows most plainly in time, priority and posteriority (III 351.23). The fixed entities have no order in eternity; they gain it on entering wujud under the names, which are more or less inclusive. The Preserver keeps them in fixity "lest impossibility strip them of thingness" (III 280.26).
Order displays Not He. Gnostics who see only wahdat al-wujud use only the eye of tashbih. So God warns such a gnostic: "Do not mix affairs. Place each thing where its reality places it. Do not say, 'There is nothing but God,' even if that is the case, and it is the case." You flee pain and seek pleasure, so affirm your own entity. A body feels pain throughout; the cosmos does not, for one suffers while another rejoices, "so the affair is not as you imagine it" (III 231.3).
Only revelation gives the scales to tell levels apart: we name God only by His own names, "so that we do not judge Him save through Him" (III 166.8).
Chapter 360, on the perfect human's sixth deputyship, finds order in speech. Words need priority and posteriority, and the deputy, God speaking in his breath, sets each word apart from the last. A listener hearing an unknown tongue gets only the order of the letters; "in the same way, the whole world knows nothing of the existent things, which are the words of God, save the wujud of their entities." Be adds nothing to what it engenders; we halt at its traces, so things are many, and God stays "Ever-Creating perpetually" (III 283.15).
Deepening: Unity of Manyness and the Roots of Order
Part II opens where Part I left the One Entity: wujud is one and infinite, things are finite, and order is rooted in relations and names. Chapter 558 treats the names at length; Chittick gives the standpoint-dependent summary. The Station of No Station refuses a single frozen ranking.
Ahad and Wahid; We in the Koran
Unity has two modes: ahad (no relation, no disclosure) and wahid (the oneness each thing shares). God is the One/Many. "We" in the Koran expresses the manyness of the names, not royal grandeur. Perfection is stability in variegation: the Shaykh's favorite formula is 1 x 1 = 1. Duality runs through everything: two hands, two grips, even and odd, couples, majesty and beauty.
Choice, Compulsion and Order as Not He
Choice is real for God only as the demand of His own knowledge; the servant is compelled in his choosing, which is his excuse. Order displays "Not He": "do not mix" the levels, and do not boast of them. Bringing together (jam') and association are not the same: gathering under tawhid is not affirming partners. The even and the odd, the two hands of the clay of Adam (38:75), and the compass of names that ranks without insulting the Essence: these are the roots Chittick maps before the First/Last and Manifest/Nonmanifest of Chapter 6.
Even/Odd, Couples and the Compass
Everything other than the Essence enters duality. The Koran pairs night/day, heaven/earth, male/female; the Shaykh reads these as ontological grammar, not decoration. The even needs the odd as its root; the odd needs the even as its locus. Couples (zawj) are how the Breath becomes audible as words. Majesty and beauty are two hands; mercy's precedence means beauty's claim is never finally cancelled. When ranking appears (prophets, friends, heavens), it is always within a genus: you do not rank a mineral against an angel without naming the scale.
- Level of Essence: no names, no disclosure, ahad.
- Level of Divinity: names as relations, wahid.
- Level of cosmos: entities and traces, association.
- Level of prescription: scale, courtesy, "do not mix."
God as One/Many and the Excuse of Compelled Choice
The One/Many is not a slogan. It is why "We" speaks, why ranking needs a genus, and why association is the cosmos's taste while tawhid is the prescription. The servant compelled in choosing finds an excuse that is not a license: the scale still weighs the prescribed form. Order says "do not mix" levels: unveiling is not Essence; association in tasting is not association in worship.
Chapter 6. Divine and Cosmic Relations
Most divine names (Living, Knowing, Merciful) name qualities we know in ourselves, and they explain why some loci rank above others. None of them, though, suggests the structure of the cosmos. Four names do: He is the First and the Last and the Manifest and the Nonmanifest (57:3). First and Last set up a horizontal, temporal order; Manifest and Nonmanifest a vertical one, running from what meets the eye up to the Essence behind seventy thousand veils. "This is the division of wujud" (IV 70.5). The chapter follows these names into the image the Shaykh loves best, wujud as a circle.
The First and the Last
God is First because His wujud cannot not be, and Last because all things return to Him: "the First through necessity and the Last through the return of the whole affair to Him" (IV 326.4). Surah 112 opens with God as One (ahad) and closes with the creatures' one: nor is His equal any one. "The engendered things are intertied with Him as the Last is intertied with the First... for the Last seeks the First, but the First does not seek the Last" (II 172.11).
These names are not idle (mu'attal) between the beginning and end of time. Every divine name shows its traces always. In the new creation, the First gives the entity its wujud at each moment and the Last sets its named term. "So there is nothing but perpetual beginnings and ends... engendered existence is new perpetually, and there is everlasting subsistence in engendering" (II 675.12).
| Domain | First |
|---|---|
| Humans / Gardens | Adam / the Garden of Eden |
| Spirits / bodies | First Intellect / the Throne |
| Pillars / shapes | Water / the circle |
| Houses of worship / divine names | The Kaaba / the Living |
| Wrongful slaying | Cain, who "set down the sunnah", so he shares the load of every murder |
The Presence of Lastness turns to khilafa, succession. The caliph comes after. The Shaykh offers a striking reading of the first four caliphs: each was fit for the office, and their order followed the order of their deaths, not their worth. God knew Abu Bakr would die before 'Umar, and since there cannot be two caliphs, deposing another to make way for him would have dishonored that man. "None of those who were prior was prior because he had more of a haqq" (IV 298.20).
Since God is First, the perfect human being is last: second in level as vicegerent, and last in creation, since God readied the cosmos as "an abiding empire" before blowing His spirit into Adam. When the human departs, the heaven will spin dizzily and the sun be darkened (81:1), and habitation moves to the last abode. The last is better for thee than the first (93:4), because "there is no target beyond the Last".
The Manifest and the Nonmanifest
The Shaykh speaks far more of these two names. History interests him less than the present moment, where cosmos and self are signs, the manifest Real pointing to the nonmanifest Real. The questions multiply: is God nonmanifest to Himself? What exactly is manifest to us, wujud or the entities? "The more Ibn al-'Arabi meditates upon questions such as these, the more bewildered the reader is likely to become. And this, of course, is precisely the goal."
The cosmos mirrors this. What He discloses is the disclosed, what He curtains is the hidden, and all is disclosed to Him. The Prophet prayed by names God "taught to any of Thy creatures" and those "kept to Thyself in the knowledge of Thy absent". Brought-forth possible things are disclosed, the rest hidden, and "the cosmos is an increase, emerging from hiddenness to disclosure never-endingly". "The Manifest is the veil-keeper of the Nonmanifest... just as awareness is the veil-keeper of knowledge" (II 321.21).
At the resurrection the hidden becomes manifest. When all have interceded, "there will remain the Most Merciful of the merciful", and "the last form into which He will transmute Himself... is the form of good-pleasure" (III 440.2).
The Presence of Nonmanifestation plays on butun, "bellies": "we were within Him as nonmanifest things", to be taken rationally, not as an image (112:3). "His 'love to be known' is the fact that He is not known." He is also nonmanifest as our faculties: Eyesights perceive Him not, but He perceives the eyesights (6:103), and since He is the eyesight, He perceives Himself. "If you are not, you will see Him." The hearts of the heedless are "the burying grounds of the Real", as in the Shaykh's dream of the Prophet as a corpse on an illegally seized spot in the Seville mosque (IV 300.34).
Seeing Both Faces
Can the Nonmanifest be witnessed? In vision, yes, but realities do not change. "The highest of curtains is the divine name Manifest, for it curtains the divine name Nonmanifest"; when the Nonmanifest is witnessed, it in turn curtains the Manifest and stays nonmanifest, giving meanings veiled by forms (IV 214.12). At the resurrection people will see God say "I am your Lord" and deny Him until He takes their mark. The veil was neither wujud nor nonexistence. God is "Manifest" to the gnostics who see Him in the forms of possible things and "Nonmanifest" to "the ulama of the tracings" (III 540.34).
Perfect vision uses both the eye of furqan (discrimination) and of qur'an (bringing together). The outgoing breath goes to the Manifest and the horizons, the incoming breath to the Nonmanifest and the self, so "he acquires benefits in every breath" (II 403.31).
| "He is seen" | "He is not seen" |
|---|---|
| "You shall see your Lord" (hadith) | "He is a light. How should I see Him?" (the Prophet on the mi'raj) |
| The name Manifest: the veil, the shell | The name Nonmanifest: the kernel (39:18) |
| "He who has seen the form of Zayd has seen Zayd" | Death shows the governing power was behind the form |
Chapter 400 takes its title from a divine saying: "When someone becomes manifest to Me, I become nonmanifest to him." Speaking for creation, the Shaykh writes: "I give Him knowledge, and He gives me wujud." When the Prophet cursed the tribes of Ri'l and Dhakwan, Gabriel came: "I have not sent thee as an imprecator and a curser. I have sent thee as a mercy." He then spent a night reciting Jesus's words, If Thou chastisest them, they are Thy servants (5:118) (III 567.2).
The Center and the Circumference
Put the four names together and wujud becomes a circle. The center point answers to the First and the Nonmanifest, dimensionless and hidden; the circumference (muhit, also the divine name Encompassing) to the Last and the Manifest. "If you let down a rope, it will fall upon God": the top and the bottom are His alike (III 136.25).
Things do not leave God in a straight line and turn back; they go out on a line that "inclines" until it curves round to its source. "It is because He created the cosmos in His form that His creation is circular" (III 119.31). "In his end the human being longs for his beginning" (I 255.14). "There is no divine name that is not between two divine names, for the divine affair is circular"; the first shape the All Body took was the sphere, and nothing lacks some curve toward the circle (I 662.35). A Mystery draws the moral: God placed the innate disposition in wujud, not in tawhid, so the end, curving back to the beginning, is mercy, and "wrath is an accident, and accidents disappear" (IV 405.6).
Chapter 360 draws the picture. The center is sheer light (the Necessary), the outside sheer darkness (the impossible, nonexistence), and the space between is the possible, light mixed with darkness, "an all-embracing ocean... that has no shore save its two sides." Every radius from the point ends at a point on the circumference: He is the First and the Last. Like the Ash'arites' attributes, such things are "neither He, nor other than He." Since the least body has eight points, the Shaykh likens it to the Essence plus seven attributes, and the body stands on triplicity, as wujud gives existence through He-ness, face-turning and word (III 275.9).
The center is the contrary of every point on the circumference by its one essence, so "manyness has become manifest from the one in entity without the one becoming many", against "nothing proceeds from the One but one". Each radius is a thing's specific face, the divine "desire" of 16:40. The first circle holds the genera (spatially confined substances, unconfined substances, engendered qualities, colours); from semicircles at its edge come the circles of species and individuals. No perfect circle comes from the possible alone, which marks its lack before the Necessary (I 260.1).
The Two Arcs
He was two bows' length away, or closer (53:9). Qaws, bow, is also an arc: the two bows are the halves of the circle, Real and creation, cut by a line. The journey's goal is "or closer", where the line vanishes but its trace remains. This end is not the undifferentiated state before creation. The perfect human both erases and keeps the distinction. In Chapter 389 God tells the Shaykh, "My ill is your engendered existence and your ill is My engendered existence", where ill means "God" or "covenant". The servant asks in the salat only that the division be removed: "We drew apart and came together; we are a splendid couple." "My divinity became manifest only through you"; were the cosmos lifted from the mind, the Entity would remain "without property". God takes from us even until We know (47:31); we take from Him Nothing is as His likeness (III 543.19).
Chapter 427: rising and falling are the same for Him, so Jonah in the fish and Muhammad on the Night Journey were equally near. You are the imagined line; "or closer" is its removal, when center meets circumference in "the disappearance of the cosmos in the wujud of the Real" (IV 39.24).
Modalities of Wujud
The philosophers ordered the cosmos by the modalities of wujud, Avicenna's Necessary, possible, impossible, and the Shaykh uses them too: a possible thing once existent is "necessary through the Other". Each has its placement (makana), a level that is itself a relation of nonexistence (III 419.18). A Mystery reads the firmest handle (2:256) as the circle of Lord and servant: the handle of the Shariah's salat will break, but "the salat of the essential configuration" never does, for "He is He, and you are you" (IV 438.3). Uplifting belongs to the eternal by essence, putting down to the newly arrived (IV 227.18).
| Level | What has it |
|---|---|
| 1. Entified (in itself) | Existent things. God is neither inside nor outside the cosmos; souls and the Intellect are inside it but not in bodies |
| 2. Mental | What is formed in the soul as it really is |
| 3. Verbal | Every object of knowledge, even the impossible |
| 4. Written | Every object of knowledge, in script or figure |
The Shaykh also sorts things by how they appear: what abides through itself (substances, spatially confined or not, atoms and bodies) and what abides in a substrate (accidents and attributes) (II 174.30, II 454.1). That sorting leads to the Watchful (al-raqib). Substances subsist only through accidents, and accidents vanish in the moment after they appear, so God creates their likes at every moment. "So He is Ever-Creating perpetually, while the cosmos... is perpetually poor toward Him." These are the "tasks" of Each day He is upon some task (55:29) (II 208.24).
Deepening: First/Last, Manifest/Nonmanifest, Circle and Arcs
Chapter 6 is Chittick's "division of wujud". The names First/Last order time; Manifest/Nonmanifest order the vertical. Together they are not four decorations but the skeleton of cosmos and path.
Perpetual Beginnings and Named Terms
First and Last act at every instant: perpetual beginnings and named terms. Priority may rest on time alone: Chittick notes the caliphs' order followed their deaths. The named term (ajal musamma) of Chapter 2 returns as the Last's work: each thing's second moment is already its term.
Circle, Wall and Walking Backwards
Wujud is a circle: center (First, Nonmanifest), circumference (Last, Manifest); all things return, and the end is mercy. We walk backwards toward the Encompassing; the wall's inner side is mercy. The image prevents a linear escapism that would treat the Manifest as a mistake.
Two Arcs and Four Modalities
The two bows (53:9) are Real and creation; the servant is the imagined line whose trace remains. Wujud has four levels and is relational; the Watchful re-creates the cosmos each instant. Seeing both faces is courtesy: not collapsing Manifest into Nonmanifest, not freezing Nonmanifest as absence.
Seeing Both Faces as Courtesy
Courtesy (adab) here is not etiquette alone. It is the refusal to let one eye cancel the other. Reason's tanzih without imagination's tashbih yields a God who never arrives; imagination without reason yields a God trapped in one form. The Manifest keeps the Nonmanifest from being treated as empty; the Nonmanifest keeps the Manifest from being worshiped as independent. Chittick's "most beautiful saying" is the formula that holds both: vision affirmed and denied in the respects that belong to each.
Circle of Mercy and the Wall
Chapter 410: God behind us encompassing (85:20); faces toward center, walk backwards to circumference; no target behind God but sheer nonexistence. Fire folk between center and wall's manifest side; wall itself mercy, inside mercy, so mercy prevails. Garden folk climb the wall to view the Fire and taste salvation; Fire folk praise that they are not elsewhere still worse. Possible domain: ocean with no shore but its two sides. Line = specific face = desire (16:40). Two arcs: circle bisected; "or closer" removes the line; trace remains.
Chapter 7. The Worlds of the Cosmos
So far the subject has been God and the cosmos. From here on, the focus moves to the things inside the cosmos and their relations. God does not drop out of the picture: the cosmos is God's form, so every intradivine relation shows up in it. First and Last give the horizontal pair, this world and the last world; Manifest and Nonmanifest give the vertical pair, the bodily and the spiritual. Between each pair stands a third, the barzakh.
Pairs That Have No Meaning Alone
The Shaykh names the two sides with many pairs: command and creation, heaven and earth, sovereignty and kingdom, spirit and body, meaning and form, high and low, subtle and dense, absent and witnessed, intelligible and sensory. All are correlatives: "It makes no sense to speak of heaven without earth." So none names a discrete object, and what is body from one view may be spirit from another. Imagination shows this best: spiritual next to bodies, bodily next to spirits. Since every entity is He/not He, every attribute holds only "in the respect in which the attribute makes sense".
Absent and Witnessed
Tashbih gives the other picture: every duality in the cosmos is prefigured in the names. The Koranic ghayb, the absent, appears in some fifty verses and sums up the objects of faith (who have faith in the Absent, 2:3). Its opposite is shahada, the witnessed, which also names the testimony of faith, because faith lets the heart witness what the eye cannot.
| Kind | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Absolute absence | The Essence, the He-ness. "This absent domain is forever impossible and unknown" (IV 128.17), but only to creatures, never to God |
| Relative absence | "What is in wujud but is made absent from some people's eyesights and insights" (III 350.34). Nothing is absent from everyone: at least the thing witnesses itself |
At Him are the keys to the absent (6:59). In Chapter 382 the Shaykh reads the key as the receptacle's preparedness. "There is a key, an opening, and something opened": the key is your readiness to learn, the opening is the teaching, the door is where you halt. "If you do not halt and you travel on, you will see with every step what you had not been seeing." Preparedness is not earned, which is why "none knows it but God". In the end "there is no absent domain, nor is there any witnessing... there are infinite objects of knowledge" (III 542.28).
The Storehouse of Nature
The eighteenth section of Chapter 369 makes a striking claim: "it is no wonder when an existent thing leaves traces, it is only a wonder when a nonexistent thing leaves traces." Nature has no entity in wujud or in fixity, yet forms appear from it, so it is "the realized world of the absent". Its keys are the divine names and the will, relations with no entity of their own. The absent is "the brilliant, all-inclusive light through which all of wujud becomes manifest, but it has no manifestation in its own entity" (III 397.3).
Theologians each saw part of this (renewed accidents, the Husbaniyya's renewed cosmos, al-Baqillani's relations); the folk of unveiling excuse every position and trace it to its site. Only the perfect human knows the whole: a barzakh between Real and cosmos, "a raised-up mirror" in which the Real sees His form and creation sees its own. The perfect "give to each thing that has a haqq its haqq", which is equitable balance. Exceeding the limit is imperfection, as when Christians, magnifying their messenger, were excessive in their religion (4:171).
Command and Creation
His are the creation and the command (7:54). Amr first means "affair" or "situation", as in al-amr 'ala ma huwa 'alayh, "the actual situation". As "command" it divides in two: the engendering command Be, which cannot be disobeyed, and the prescriptive command, the shariahs, where choice belongs.
| Powerful (qadir) | Potent (muqtadir) | |
|---|---|---|
| Creates | Without occasions or instruments | Through occasions, what Our hands worked (36:71) |
| World | Command | Creation |
| Faces | One face, the specific face: "sheer light" | Two faces: toward the occasion (veil, darkness) and toward God (light) |
| Knower type | The knower ('alim), who witnesses Divinity and Essence | The gnostic ('arif), whose locus of witnessing is the Lord |
The engendering command is one (Our command is but one, 54:50); the prescriptive splits into commands and prohibitions. Angels and disengaged intellects have one face and receive only commands (66:6). Humans, meeting many faces through occasions, receive both. Hence a lovely reading of the fast in Chapter 73: complete the fast until the night (2:187). Daytime is the witnessed, where prohibited things lie; night is the absent, "a command without any prohibition". When the faster passes from his mortal nature to his intellect, "the sun has gone down from the world of the witnessed and risen up in the world of his intellect, so the fasting person has broken his fast." (II 30.2).
Heaven and Earth
"Heaven" and "earth" mean highness and lowness: every high world and every low one. Heaven belongs to wholesomeness, earth to corruption, so the woodworm (arada) takes its name from earth (II 285.10). Height is not spatial. "The one that bestows benefits is always the higher, and the one that acquires benefits is always the lower" (III 197.7).
God is Separator (fatir) of the heavens and the earth (35:1), and fitra, innate disposition, is "the light through which the darkness of the possible things is cleft." So 35:1 equals 24:35, God is the light of the heavens and the earth. The servants "are servants in respect of their entities, but they are the Real in respect of their wujud"; the fitra is what distinguishes the two. "Its unveiling is difficult, but its time is short" (II 70.7).
Two Worlds and Three
The absent world is nearer God in light, knowledge and life, and every movement in the witnessed starts there, since motion follows desire, "a deed of the heart". The witnessed is seen by eyesight, the absent by insight (II 240.32). Often the Shaykh adds a third: intellect, imagination, sensation, or light, fire and dust (angels, jinn, bodies).
Imagination shows knowledge as milk, religion as a fetter, faith as a handle, and Gabriel as Dihya al-Kalbi, just as ink's blackness appears only when gallnut and vitriol meet; so it is "the most all-embracing of Presences" (III 42.5). It mirrors the Breath, the Highest Barzakh between wujud and nonexistence, and is "the centerpiece of the necklace": meaning descends to it and the sensory rises to it (II 390.4). Meanings stay themselves in each Presence, "like a chameleon that accepts the colors it stands upon".
Of mulk (kingdom), malakut (sovereignty) and jabarut (domination), some Sufis made jabarut the highest. The Shaykh, perhaps after al-Ghazali, gives it to the barzakh, because imagination is stronger than sensation: it leaves traces in the body (a frightening dream makes one sweat or cry out), but sensation cannot turn a sensory thing into an imaginal one (II 609.17).
The Night Salat and the Three Worlds
Even the prayer times follow the three worlds (Chapter 69, I 394.33). The Shaykh holds that the night salat lasts until dawn, with Ibn 'Abbas. Then he "crosses over" (i'tibar) into its hidden sense:
- Daytime salat = the witnessed: God speaks through the servant's tongue, "God hears him who praises Him."
- Night salat = the absent and reason: the prayer of lovers and the Folk of the Night, when God descends to the nearest heaven.
- Sunset and morning = two barzakhs, since night and day wrap each other like a turban (39:5). The odd-numbered sunset prayer subtilizes forms toward the absent; the morning prayer densifies meanings toward sensation.
The night has three thirds as the human has three worlds: sensation, imagination and meaning. In the last third God descends, matching "God looks not at your forms, nor at your deeds, but He looks at your hearts."
Deepening: Worlds, Absent/Witnessed and Imagination as Jabarut
Chapter 7 builds worlds from the pairs of Chapter 6. The cosmos is God's form: First/Last give this world and the next; Manifest/Nonmanifest give spirit and body; the barzakh stands between. All cosmic pairs are correlatives; nothing is body or spirit absolutely.
Absent, Keys and Vanishing Accidents
Absence is only relative to creatures; God knows the absent, and its keys are our unearned preparednesses. Nonexistent limits leave traces: nature and the definition of the atom show the cosmos as vanishing accidents. The perfect human is a raised-up mirror who gives each thing its haqq.
| Command | Creation |
|---|---|
| One face (light) | Two faces (occasion and God) |
| Powerful | Potent |
| Be! without secondary means | Means and natures |
High/Low, Two or Three Worlds, Prayer Times
High and low mean giving and receiving, not place; nothing is debased. Imagination is the strongest world: meanings appear in sensory molds; it is jabarut. Things pass from the possible absent to the impossible absent; relations form a "sound absent". Prayer times map the three worlds and the three thirds of the human night.
Storehouse of Nature and the Raised Mirror
Nature as storehouse is not dead matter. It holds the limits that are nonexistent in themselves yet leave traces: the atom's definition, the vanishing of accidents, the preparedness that is a key to the absent. The perfect human does not float above nature; he is the raised mirror in which each thing finds its haqq. Command things (angels of the pure command, lights that face one way) differ from creation things that always show occasion and God together. Confusing the two produces either a magic that ignores means or a materialism that ignores the face toward the Real.
- No body without a spirit-face; no spirit without a body-face in some world.
- No absent without a knower for whom it is absent; God has no absent.
- No high without a receiving low; high means giving.
- Imagination is strongest because it alone can hold meaning in a sensory mold without reducing either side.
Sound Absent and the Night's Thirds
Relations form a "sound absent": not nothing, but what is absent to a witness while present to God. Prayer times map absent, barzakh and witnessed onto the night's thirds. Imagination as jabarut is strongest because it alone molds meaning in sensory form without erasing either side. High means giving; low means receiving; nothing is debased by place.
Part III: The Structure of the Microcosm
Chapter 8. Spirits and Bodies
Each world is a homestead that marks whatever lives in it, so general things can be said of spirits, bodies and the imaginal things between. Spirit and body are among the most basic categories of Islamic thought, and the Shaykh uses them before mapping the microcosm in detail. Ruh, spirit, means "wind"; nafs, soul, shares a root with nafas, breath. Both are unseen in themselves and seen in their traces, like wind in leaves: "The soul is nonmanifest in entity, manifest in property" (II 563.22).
Self and Soul
Nafs is also the reflexive "self", so "He who knows himself knows his Lord" means equally "he who knows his soul". The Koran uses nafs of God (God warns you about Himself, 3:28), but as a technical term the Shaykh keeps al-dhat, the Essence, for God, and al-nafs always means the human side, never a capital-S Self. Sufis often use it negatively, as ego; philosophers neutrally, for the rationally speaking soul.
The Divine Spirit
Every spirit goes back to the Divine Spirit, the "ascribed spirit", because God speaks of it as My spirit (I have blown into him of My spirit, 15:29). The Shaykh calls it "the ya' spirit", after the "My", and identifies it with the one soul from which humanity was made (4:1). It is the All Spirit; the spirits blown into bodies are partial spirits, differing by the preparedness of each body.
A Mystery turns this into an image of death. The soul is a sun that shone from God's spirit and set in the body, so "Night has come." Its death is being inside the body; one sign of the Last Day is the sun rising in the west, and the soul too must "rise in its own setting place", which is the body's death and the soul's life. "So in the soul's death is its life and in its life is its death" (IV 434.13).
Governance
The spirit's basic attribute is life, and the Divine Spirit, as the Breath, is "the sphere of life". But "the spirit is alive, no doubt, but not every living thing is a spirit" (III 346.22). Here "spirit" means the governing force: every body lives, but only some are governed.
| The mountain | Moses | |
|---|---|---|
| Under self-disclosure | Crumbled to dust (7:143) | Fell down thunderstruck |
| Spirit | Only life, no governing spirit | A spirit "maintaining the form as it is" |
| Afterwards | The name "mountain" disappeared | He regained consciousness; "Moses" remained |
Chapter 447 makes governance essential. Sufis and philosophers call the goal of discipline disengagement (tajrid), stripping the spirit from the body. The Shaykh says total disengagement is impossible: after death the spirit governs an imaginal body, "in each abode according to the configurations that are appropriate to it." The root is God, "forever a Governor in eternity without beginning", governing the fixed entities, which is "the mystery of the measuring out". So the governor appears in the form of the governed: "'the Real' is nothing but the situation of creation." Hence whatever ugly thing strikes you is from your soul (4:79): "I bestow upon you only in the measure of your receptivity." That measure is "your 'Lord' whom you serve", the mark in which He will appear at the resurrection. He is with you wherever you are (57:4), but you are not with Him. "Be wherever you will, for as you are, I will be" (IV 62.2).
The Spirit from the Command
Beside the ascribed spirit, the Koran mentions the spirit from His command, which God casts upon whomever He will of His servants (40:15; 42:52; 16:2). The ascribed spirit is blown into all bodies; the command spirit carries messages and confirmation (ta'yid) to prophets and friends. Because hearts live by knowledge as bodies live by spirit, knowledge too is a "spirit". Its receiver is "the companion of witnessing and finding, not the companion of reflection" (III 356.2). When God casts it directly, "this spirit is not the same as the 'angel' [malak], but it is the same as the 'message' [ma'laka]." Angels, finding in themselves a revelation that does not suit their station, recognize the form of the human it is meant for and descend to him (II 638.2).
| Receiver | What he perceives |
|---|---|
| Soothsayers, augurs, the merely inspired | Knowledge in the heart, but not who brought it |
| Friends of God | The angel, or the casting known as angelic, never both |
| Prophets and messengers | The angel and its casting together |
Reception depends on correspondence and on preparedness, which is not earned. Seekers walk to the door and halt; when it opens, each receives "in the measure of his preparedness". So the philosophers err who think prophethood is earned by a soul's limpidness: a limpid soul may mirror the whole Preserved Tablet, yet in it is written who is a messenger.
Bodies
To mention spirit is to imply a locus: body (jism, jasad, badan), frame, apparition, mount, mold. The body is the spirit's form, as the spirit is the body's meaning; it is the spirit's "matter" only as the field of its traces. Traces run both ways, as between God and the cosmos: body gives spirit "knowledges of tastings", and the cosmos leaves traces in God, for our calling evokes His responding and our obedience His good-pleasure (III 315.9).
Are angels better than humans? Ibn Qasi held that ranking applies only within a genus: one asks which jewel is best, not whether ruby beats silk. The Shaykh replies that all governing spirits are one genus; reason favors the angels, the all-comprehensiveness of the human configuration favors man, and neither proves nearness to God, so "nothing remains but the divine report-giving" (Wasa'il 50-51). Meanwhile everything except these governing spirits, even our own limbs and skin, is unveiled to the absent and glorifies God unceasingly (II 682.25).
The Shaykh sometimes separates jism, corporeal body (the visible world), from jasad, corporeous body (the imaginal): a spirit or meaning appearing in a luminous or fiery form, like Gabriel as a bedouin, or the forms of dreams (III 186.28). "There is nothing but the worlds of corporeal bodies, corporeous bodies, and spirits" (II 335.8). All labels are relative: corporeous bodies are spiritual next to corporeal ones; even the elements rise in subtlety from earth to water to air to fire. From one view "there is nothing but a body", since every compound (murakkab) is a mount (markab) (IV 389.18); from another, "all things other than God are pure spirits" (III 91.35).
Everything Speaks
All forms are alive and possess rationally speaking souls, plants and stones included, even artifacts: God "clothes it in a spirit from His command and makes Himself known to it at once" (III 437.27). Hence rational speech is not humanity's specific difference; only creation in the divine form is. There is nothing that does not glorify Him in praise, but you do not understand their glorification (17:44). On the day of judgment the skins will say, God gave us rational speech, as He gave rational speech to everything (41:21); "the skins made this speech all-inclusive, so they have a better knowledge of the affair" than the logicians (III 393.23).
That raises a puzzle. The rational soul is pure by root, the body glorifies by nature, the animal soul just follows its constitution. "So who is it that opposes and disobeys?" Only the human being born of their coming together, the mature, rational person to whom the Law is addressed (III 402.26).
Rider and Beast
The soul has three levels, each with its faculties (II 459.25):
| Soul | Faculties |
|---|---|
| Vegetal | Growth, nutrition, attraction, expulsion, digestion, retention |
| Animal | The six above + five senses, appetite, wrath, imagination, memory |
| Human | All the above + reason, reflection, form-giving |
The beast does not mean to disobey; it has no knowledge of the Shariah and simply follows its nature. So punishment, in this world (the penalties for theft or slander) and the next, falls on the
animal soul, which feels pain as all animals do. The Prophet stood for the coffin of a Jew: "
Is it not a soul?" "God's mercy takes precedence over His wrath" (III 262.34). Likewise
God has bought from those who have faith their selves and their possessions(9:111): the sellers are the rational souls, the goods the animal souls. The faithful fight on
borrowed beasts, feeling only natural pity for them (II 147.2).
| Cosmos | Human analogue |
|---|---|
| Muhammad | The rationally speaking soul |
| Other prophets | Spiritual faculties (reflection, memory, imagination) |
| Inheritors | Sensory faculties |
| Others in human shape | The animal spirit |
| Angels and jinn | Forms in the imagination |
The Subtlety
Chapter 216: the Sufis use "subtlety" (latifa) for the human reality, the meaning that rides the body, and for any allusion "that shines forth in the understanding but is not embraced by expression", like the knowledge of tastings. The divine name Subtle provides from whence he never reckoned (65:3). The instruments are meanings, "hearing, eyesight, and smelling, not ears, eyes, and nose", and they never leave the subtlety. Some Folk of God expect disengagement at death; the folk of the Real know the subtlety always governs a frame, in this world, the barzakh and the next, and so affirm bodily resurrection. Wretchedness is accidental, like illness from unbalanced humors (II 503.5).
Inheritors, Wisdom and the Soul's Ascent
In Chapter 373 the partial spirits sit in the All Spirit like letters in ink; the folk of unveiling see the forms in the inkwell before they are written. The cosmos is a book inscribed on a parchment unrolled (52:2-3), spread out for mercy. True wisdom is to see "differentiation in undifferentiation" and give each thing its haqq; the philosophers' wisdom is borrowed. The Shaykh insists, "I have not written a letter without a divine dictation", yet disclaims prophecy: "the lock is secured with the bolt of faith." (III 455.14)
| Awareness (shu'ur) | Knowledge ('ilm) |
|---|---|
| The door is shut: you sense "another meaning" behind the body | The door opens: its two leaves, form and soul, separate |
| Inference, open to doubt | Unveiling, free of doubt |
| Kin to shi'r, poetry: We have not taught him poetry (36:69) | Knowing yourself and so your Lord |
Chapter 397 closes the cycle. God made the body a house and the soul its householder. Seeing that only God rules through God's ruling, the soul emigrates from the city of its body on a Buraq formed from its own deeds, is received as God's guest, and sees Him in the Muhammadan form. Some who stop short appear as kings, like 'Abd al-Qadir al-Jili, and fall into unruly utterances (shatahat). Said of God, these are true, since He receives every form; aimed at His friends, they are discourtesy. "Presumptuousness before God is in no way correct for the Folk of God" (III 559.35).
Deepening: Spirits, Bodies, Governance and Speech
Part III turns the macrocosm inward. Spirit and soul are unseen in entity, seen in property; the soul is a barzakh between the inblowing and the proportioned body. One All Spirit, many partial spirits: bodies divide it as windows divide sunlight.
Governance, Receptivity and Command Spirit
Every body lives; only some are governed. Spirits rule like appointed governors: present, absent (sleep), dismissed (death). Disengagement is impossible: the spirit always governs some body, in every world. God gives only in the measure of your receptivity; that measure is your "Lord". The command spirit brings knowledge; preparedness and prophethood are not earned.
Everything Speaks; Rider and Beast
All things are alive and rationally speaking; speech is not man's specific difference. The rational soul never disobeys; the animal mount bears punishment, and mercy prevails. Muhammad is the soul of the great human being; sensation is the most eminent faculty. Awareness sees a closed door; knowledge opens it.
Subtlety, Inheritors and Ascent
Subtlety (latafa) is not thinness alone; it is the capacity of a spirit to govern without being trapped by the density of its mount. Inheritors of prophets inherit governance patterns as well as words: how a spirit sits with a body in waking, sleep and death. The soul's ascent is not escape from body but passage through bodies: elemental, barzakhi, last-world. Sensation remains eminent because the hadith of love's faculties ends in eyesight and hand: the Real's nearness is not a concept.
Muhammad as Soul of the Great Human; Sensation's Eminence
Muhammad is the soul of the great human being (macrocosm). Sensation is the most eminent faculty because the hadith of love ends in hearing, eyesight, hand and foot. Awareness sees a closed door; knowledge opens it. Inheritors inherit governance patterns: how spirit sits with body in waking, sleep and death. Subtlety is capacity to govern without drowning in the mount's density.
Chapter 9. The Natural Constitution
The body belongs to nature (tabi'a), from a root that today means "printing": nature is the domain of imprints. In the broad sense it is the Breath of the All-Merciful, which takes the imprint of all God's words; in the narrow sense, the lower worlds, imaginal and corporeal, that bear the spirit's stamp. "That which leaves the trace is spiritual, and that which receives the trace is natural. There is nothing that has a natural form in the cosmos that does not also have a holy spirit" (II 305.8). God proportions and balances the clay, and the resulting constitution shapes how the inblown spirit appears.
Spirit and Nature
Nature is made of four natures: heat and cold, which act, and dryness and wetness, which are acted upon. Mixed, they yield the four pillars, and the pillars combine into the three progeny: minerals, plants and animals.
| Level | Members | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Four natures | Heat, cold (active); dryness, wetness (receptive) | Relations, not things |
| Four pillars | Earth (cold, dry), water (cold, wet), air (hot, wet), fire (hot, dry) | Natural, noncompound |
| Three progeny | Minerals, plants, animals | Elemental, compound |
Spirit and nature relate as father and mother: "The partial soul is born from nature, which is its mother, but the Divine Spirit is its father" (II 189.25). The marriage act (nikah) runs through every atom. The Shaykh names three: divine (wujud marries the fixed entities and the cosmos is born), spiritual (the All Spirit marries a form and the partial spirit is born, which then "travels and plunges into dangers" to provide for its wife, while the faculties hold the wedding feast) and natural (animals and plants, and sometimes a mule from a horse and a donkey) (III 516.29).
The pairing goes back to God's two hands: majesty and beauty, wrath and mercy, tanzih and tashbih, He/not He. Nothing is as His likeness (42:11) reads both ways. "Had He not described Himself by our descriptions, we would not have known Him, and had He not declared Himself incomparable with our descriptions, we would not have known Him." So of each thing He created a couple (51:49), and everything but God is rider and mount, each poor toward the other. Governor and governed can do without each other's entity but not without governance, so neither is absolutely independent. "No thing is as the likeness of creation in its poverty", and none is like the Real in His independence (III 534.32).
Four Birds and Increases
In Chapter 225, "increases" are increases of faith and certainty. Abraham asked how Thou shalt give life to the dead (2:260) because creatures come to be in many ways: through Be, one hand, two hands, or another creature. God answered with four birds, the four natures.
- The birds = the four natures: the next world's bodies are natural, against those who say souls merge into the Universal Soul. The felicitous get natural bodies; the folk of the Fire, elemental ones, for the gates of heaven shall not be opened to them (7:40).
- On the divine side, the four are Alive, Knowing, Desiring, Powerful: quaternity belongs to wujud itself.
- Twist them = join after separation; the mountains = the four attributes, lofty and fixed as pegs.
- Call them = the word Be (16:40), addressed to a fixed entity that hears.
Light Born from Darkness
Nature is darkness, though open to light. The three darknesses (39:6) are the land of nature, the sea of reflective thought, and the rationally speaking soul, born "between unadulterated light and sheer... elemental nature" (III 141.31).
| Root light | Born light |
|---|---|
| Unveiled, but nothing is unveiled through it: it overpowers the eye | Born of darkness: We pull out from it the daytime (36:37); Breaker of dawn (6:96) |
| Kept hidden in self-disclosures | Matches our created spirits, which break from the body as dawn breaks from night |
| For the prophet, preservation from error ('isma); for the friend, protection; it gives shame (haya') and full unveiling |
The soul is like an orphan: its father, the Divine Spirit, is unseen, and its mother, the body, raises it. A balanced body's faculties feed the soul knowledge, as a widow spends on her fatherless sons; the Prophet told Umm Salama she would be rewarded for it (I 575.26). But whoever refuses to be God's servant "will be a servant of his nature, which is Gehenna". Whoever calls on God gets free rein in nature, "her master... though she had been his mother" (IV 20.16).
Good Is a Habit
Din, religion, means obedience, requital and custom. Hence the hadith, "Good is a habit, and evil is an obstinate persistence." The soul is good in essence: its father is the Holy Spirit, and its mother is a body whose opposed humors were balanced without aversion. Evil comes from the obstinate pressing of the Comrade, Satan, and the coerced are not held to account. God shows the frightened soul the Presence of Changing, God will change their ugly deeds into beautiful deeds (25:70), and Despair not of God's mercy; surely God forgives all sins (39:53). Opposition is compelled by contrary names (All We assist, these and those, 17:20). "Good is essential in the human being... Evil is accidental, so it disappears, even if after a while" (III 182.23).
Fasting works against nature. Nature wants heat and wetness; fasting brings cold and dryness, humbling a soul grown conceited because the bodily world depends on it. Holding back for health alone is "zeal" (hamiyya), not fasting, though it earns reward if meant for worship. (I 647.8)
Why People Do Not Understand
| Veil | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Rust | Forms in the heart's mirror; polished by remembrance and the Koran |
| Shelter | The heart "in the house of nature, busy with its mother", with no news of its father |
| Heaviness, deafness | The weight of this world's occasions |
| Lock | "We found the locks upon them." 'Umar ibn al-Khattab was such a man until God opened his lock |
Weakness
God is He that created you of weakness, then appointed after weakness strength, then after strength weakness and gray hairs (30:54). The body is the weakest of the weak, in the fifth degree of subjugation (Intellect, Soul, spheres, pillars, body), and humans are more anxious than any animal "except the cockroach". A man claims he can face great horrors, but "the bite of a flea or a gnat disgraces him." Hence Thee alone we ask for help (1:4) in every cycle of prayer.
Spirits take on the qualities of their bodies, as wind carries stench or perfume and sunlight takes the color of green or red glass. If spirits were stripped of matter, their root strength from the Breath would make them insufferably arrogant, so God keeps them in bodies forever, in this world, the barzakh and the next. Unguarded, they say "I am God", like Pharaoh. So the Mu'tazilites (acts belong to servants) and their opponents (all acts belong to God) are both right, each in one respect: Jesus "created" a bird from clay, by the leave of God (3:49).
Constitution
Constitution (mizaj) is the nature by which an element exists: water cold and wet, fire hot and dry. Commingling (imtizaj) is different: earth and water make clay; indigo and ceruse a new color; fresh and salt water a new taste. Drugs steeped in one water give a third, in-between state (II 456.3). The rational soul has a "growingness": the body is the earth it grows from (III 138.26). Souls rank as constitutions rank, as sunlight shows differently on dense and polished bodies; even forgetfulness is natural ("Adam forgot, so his offspring forgot") (I 663.11). Few souls rule their constitution. Nature itself is unqualified, seeking food or marriage in general; specification comes from the constitution, "the caprice of the soul", so "the great ones repent of the constitution, while others repent of their great sins" (Wasa'il 2-3).
Different constitutions mean different reflection and so different doctrines. The Lord judges among the faithful by the Shariah, and among the faithless only by self-disclosure in the next world (IV 198.19). Senses differ too. The fasting man's breath is "sweeter to God than musk". In Mecca the Shaykh meant to tell Musa al-Qabbab to take his foul-smelling food out of the mosque, until God told him in a dream, "its odor with Us is not like its odor with you." Hearing this, Musa wept, then removed it anyway: "courtesy toward the Shariah is to be preferred!" (I 603.14).
Yet the constitution does not decide which spirit comes: in whatever form He willed He mounted you (82:8). After the stages of embryo comes another creature (23:14). The constitution is a set of tools: it calls for an artisan but not for Zayd in particular, and poor tools limit good work (I 331.26). Finally the All-Embracing (Chapter 558): God gives only good; harm lies in the receptacle. Honey failed to cure a man's loose belly twice; the Prophet said, "God has spoken the truth and your brother's belly has lied," and the third dose cured him. To a tongue full of yellow bile, honey tastes bitter (IV 256.21).
Deepening: Nature, Four Birds, Habit and Constitution
Nature is the domain of imprints; nothing natural lacks a holy spirit. Four natures to four pillars to three progeny; imaginal bodies are natural but not elemental. Spirit is father, nature mother; marriage runs through every level, rooted in God's two hands. Opposition is natural, even among angels; nothing is unbounded.
Abraham's Birds and Born Light
Abraham's four birds teach natural resurrection bodies and four divine attributes. Born light (preservation, shame) is what guides us; root light blinds. Good is a habit, evil an obstinate persistence: evil is accidental, mercy final. Rust, shelter, deafness and locks block understanding. Human weakness keeps spirits humble; enter as a servant, not with lordship. Constitution shapes reception, belief and perception, but God chooses the form; harm lies in the receptacle, not the gift.
Marriage of Spirit and Nature
Every level repeats the marriage: Pen and Tablet, spirit and nature, male and female, meaning and form. The two hands of God in Adam's clay are not a mythic leftover; they are why opposition remains inside holiness. Angels disagree; natures clash; yet nothing natural lacks a holy spirit. Imaginal bodies prove the point: they take imprint (so they are natural) without being fire-air-water-earth (so they are not elemental). Resurrection bodies are natural in this sense.
Why People Do Not Understand
Rust on the heart, shelters over hearing, locks on doors: Chittick's chapter gathers the Koranic images for blocked understanding. Weakness is medicinal: it keeps the servant from entering with lordship. The constitution that shapes belief is also why consultation among the Folk of God matters: no one friend's tasting cancels another's specific face, and no constitution excuses dropping the scale.
Good as Habit; Rust and Locks
Good is a habit; evil an obstinate persistence. Evil accidental, mercy final. Rust, shelter, deafness and locks block understanding. Weakness keeps spirits humble: enter as servant, not with lordship. Constitution shapes reception but God chooses the form; harm lies in the receptacle. Four birds of Abraham: natural resurrection bodies and four attributes (life, knowledge, desire, power). Born light guides; root light blinds.
Chapter 10. The Imaginal Barzakh
"Spirit" and "body" name two extremes, and both are relative: spirits are subtle next to bodies but dense next to God; the earth is low next to heaven but high next to nonexistence. To think about what lies between, Ibn al-'Arabi uses imagination (khayal), which he treats as a synonym of barzakh, the isthmus. In the widest sense the whole cosmos is Unbounded Imagination, the Highest Barzakh between wujud and nonexistence. More often he means the domain between spirits and bodies, which in the microcosm is the soul. This last chapter follows imagination through cognition, appetite, death, the Trumpet and the resurrection, and closes on the Shaykh's own "eloquent exposition" of the whole picture.
Imagination
"The form of imagination is between intellect and sensation, and imagination has no locus save the soul" (IV 393.10). As a faculty it does two jobs: it embodies meanings, putting them into concepts and images, and it spiritualizes the sensory, carrying images of outer things into the soul. Its defining mark is intermediacy. "It is a sensation that is nonmanifest" (III 377.11); it brings "intelligible meanings down into sensory molds, like knowledge in the form of milk, the Koran in the form of a cord, and religion in the form of a fetter" (Razi 3). No spirit governs a body without it. Luminous bodies such as angels "have no imagination. Or rather, they are identical with imagination" (III 22.6).
Bound imagination comes in two kinds, and Chittick admits that the Shaykh rarely says which he means:
| Contiguous (muttasil) | Discontiguous (munfasil) |
|---|---|
| Depends on the soul's own perception | Relatively independent of the soul |
| Most ordinary dreams | Visions of prophets; angels and jinn in forms |
| Ties God down in images, sometimes confirmed by the Shariah (the kiblah) | One "face" of Unbounded Imagination, the All-Comprehensive Presence |
Knowledge of imagination is "a magnificent pillar among the pillars of true knowledge", second only to knowledge of the names and of self-disclosure. It covers the Market of the Garden, God's self-disclosure "in forms" at the resurrection, death brought as a ram, dreams, the dwelling of the dead before the Uprising and images in mirrors. "It is the centerpiece of the necklace: the senses ascend to it and meanings descend to it, but it never leaves its homestead." It "bewilders demonstrations and rational faculties" (II 309.13).
The cosmos itself is a barzakh between eternity without beginning (azal) and eternity without end (abad), as the present is between past and future, "the tie between the two premises" (III 108.10).
The True Barzakh
In Chapter 382 the Shaykh tightens the definition. People call anything between two things a barzakh, but on the model of the two seas with between them a barzakh they do not overpass (55:19), "the reality of the barzakh is that within it there be no barzakh". If it met one side with one face and the other with another, a further barzakh would be needed between its faces. So it meets both with one and the same face.
Even the ruling that "nothing makes water impure" rests on this: a preventing barzakh keeps impurity from truly meeting water. The Market of the Garden gives a further example. Its forms are barzakhs: whoever has an appetite for a form "becomes clothed by it" and takes it home to his family, while the form stays in the Market. Only someone who knows the barzakh understands how God transmutes Himself from form to form while the Entity is one: eyesight witnesses the change, reason knows there is none, and both are truthful. Even the associator, punished for worshiping Him in forms, meets "mercy all-enveloping after the punishment" (III 518.1).
All-Embracing and Constricted
Imagination is "the most all-embracing and the most constricted thing". It has "an all-inclusive free acting in the necessary, the impossible, and the permissible", yet it can give only sensory forms: a griffin is a new whole, but every part was taken from sensation (III 470.5). As the soul's "client", it rules its master by giving it whatever form it wills.
On the cosmic scale, the Cloud is "realized imagination", in which God "opened up the forms of everything", and it is the Manifest in He is the First and the Last and the Manifest and the Nonmanifest (57:3) (II 310.8). Receptivity is the key, and it links imagination to the name Subtle:
| Receptacle | What it can take |
|---|---|
| Wood | Chairs, doors, but not shirts |
| Cloth | Shirts, mantles, but not swords |
| Water | The color of its cup (Junayd) |
| Spirits | Most receptive of created things |
| Imagination | Receives forms and gives form to the formless |
| Divine names | Each receives infinite forms in self-disclosure |
| The Real | Beyond all: the Subtle, the Experienced (6:103) |
Dreams and the Two Deaths
Dreams give the easiest view of imagination. Each sense has two faces, one toward the witnessed world, one toward the Presence of Imagination, which houses form-giving, reflection, memory and fantasy. In sleep the eye looks through its inner face: the man beside you sees himself as a king or in torment, cries out, may even move or have an emission, because imagination has overcome the animal spirit (III 38.12). Sleep is the lesser death and physical death the greater. In both, a person meets as sensory things what his reason declared impossible. Since what is truly impossible could exist at no level, "the rational thinker cannot rely on what his reason proves to him in anything" (IV 99.8).
Appetite and Desire
The human soul fills the imaginal domain between spirit's light and body's darkness, and its opposing pulls "wear the same imaginal garment"; only the Shariah and reason can sort them. One pull is appetite (shahwa).
| Appetite | Desire (irada) |
|---|---|
| Natural, qualified desire | Divine, spiritual and natural attribute |
| Attaches only to natural things and to imaginalized forms | Attaches to anything nonexistent, including disengaged meanings |
| Locus: animal soul | Locus: rational soul |
Appetite is not base: the felicitous get everything for which your souls have appetite (41:31), so the next world is natural too. Pleasure needs correspondence, and nothing corresponds to us save through the divine form, so our most intense pleasure is in Him in whose form we are. (II 189.24)
In Chapter 378 the dumb beasts are communities like you (6:38), each with its own prayer and glorification (24:41). Reason was given to restrain appetite in this world, not to acquire knowledge: knowledge comes by innate disposition, self-evidence and inspiration, and "sound reflection adds nothing to possibility" (II 487.32). The spiritualized ones (mutarawhinun) free themselves from appetite without ignoring it. Following their father, the Divine Spirit of My spirit (15:29), they "bestow appetite on appetite", giving it its due out of kindness, gazing on nature "with the gaze of a loving child toward its mother" (III 125.12).
| Soul | Work | Fate |
|---|---|---|
| Vegetal | Nourishment through four "guards": attractive, retentive, digestive, expulsive. Digestion (hadim) "wrongs" food, but wisely. Death comes when the expulsive gains over the attractive | Disappears in the Garden |
| Appetitive | Seeks what looks beautiful, not what helps: "an enemy in the clothing of a sincere friend." Only humans eat by appetite; animals by need | Remains: the folk of bliss enjoy through it |
| Wrathful | Seeks subjugation; the soul's mark is subjugating, not "wrongdoing", which only someone under a law commits. Wrath for God is praised | Disappears in the Garden |
Imagination and Understanding
Here the Shaykh gives one of his own contributions to Islamic thought. Philosophers and theologians saw imagination's power over forms but denied it any role in knowledge, which for them had to come by reason. Yet reason can only declare God incomparable, saying what He is not. At the angelic level imagination is possibility itself: every possible thing is halfway between wujud and nothingness, "an image of both".
Knowledge of imagination is "the first of the stations of prophethood", which is why the Prophet asked his companions each morning, "Has any of you seen a dream-vision?" God forms you in the wombs as He will (3:6), and imagination is one of the wombs. In it Islam appears as a dome, the Koran as butter and honey and religion as a shirt, long or short, clean or dirty. Ornamented for the people is the love of appetites (3:14): imagination is a branch that rules its root, nature. Yet they seek disengagement from matter, which "is rationally conceivable, but not witnessed" and will never happen in this world or the next (III 508.10).
Bodies Forever
The soul, born of a lowly mother, will put on its father's traits. The more exalted will expel the more abased (63:8): God will move the soul to "a province more beautiful than this city", the last configuration (IV 422.21). Until then the body is God's all-embracing earth (29:56). "Neither My heaven nor My earth embraces Me, but the heart of My servant with faith does": the heart is the Kaabah in the earth of the body. Was not God's earth all-embracing, that you might have emigrated in it (4:97): you move in the body, from its caprice to its reason. Worship "as if you see Him": eyesight is veiled while the eye of insight witnesses, so the faithful bring together worship in imagination and outside it, of God as both bound and unbounded. Of all creatures only the perfect human with faith worships Him as witnessed (III 247.13).
"When someone dies, his resurrection has come": the barzakh is to the next life what pregnancy is to birth.In it the dead live in
corporeous, imaginal bodieslike those of sleep, being shaped stage by stage until they are born on the Day of Resurrection.
Chapter 343 explains why. Through the names Governor and Differentiator (13:2), God's compound mercy has three stations: it joins body parts, mounts meanings in the souls, and joins rational souls to bodies. That last joining is "a compounding of choice", not a right; otherwise death could not part them. Still, the body has the right of birth over the soul born from it: the soul must move it only in obedience, and be thankful to Me and to your parents (31:14).
| Portion | Use |
|---|---|
| 600 parts | Given to Gabriel, for the folk of the Garden |
| 19 parts | Against the 19 angels of chastisement (74:30) |
| 1 of 100 | In this world: all tenderness, even among wrongdoers and animals |
| 99 stored | Joined to the one at the resurrection; one per name of enumeration |
The Tenth Deputyship
The perfect human's tenth deputyship (Chapter 360) is "the tawhid of the dead". At death your covering is unveiled (50:22) for everyone. The knower moves from knowledge to eye, the folk of unveiling from eye to haqq (truth of certainty), others from blindness to sight. The contrast is with Pharaoh's sorcerers: through certain names (simiya, "marks") they transformed the viewing, so the ropes only seemed to slide; Moses, acting by command, had the viewed thing transformed. What people call "breaking habits" is just bringing new things into being, for "there are no habits, since there is no repetition" (50:15). The deputyship is reached through death by choice: whoever slays his soul in the Greater Jihad is "slain/not dead" like a martyr (III 287.24).
The Trumpet and the Earth of Reality
Seraphiel's Trumpet (sur), blown twice (39:68, 36:51), also reads as "forms" (plural of sura): when the forms are blown into. The Prophet called it a horn of light.
Chapter 8's earth made from the leftover ferment of Adam's clay, the "earth of reality", is this world of imagination, vastly wider than ours. There "whatever reason's proofs have declared impossible we have found possible": a body in two places, an accident subsisting by itself. (I 130.26)
In the Horn (Chapter 63) the dead see by its light; prophets and martyrs move freely, others are bound. "All dream-visions are truthful... When the dream-vision errs, it is no error, but the interpreter errs" (I 307.7). When the Garden was imaginalized to the Prophet in a wall, he stepped forward to pick fruit, so he saw it with the eye of sensation. In the barzakh everyone is "imprisoned in the forms of their deeds" (I 307.16).
The Spirit's Subsistence
Chapter 302 maps Aristotle's ten categories onto God, so the cosmos, from the Absent, is "the form of the Knower", and "there is nothing in possibility more wondrous than this cosmos". Adam is its epitome: the small cosmos.
The spirits existed in God's knowledge like letters in ink; when the Pen wrote on the Tablet, they became distinct. In whatever form He willed He mounted you (82:8) a spirit can be a donkey's, a dog's or a lion's; "so-and-so is a donkey". The Shaykh lists three views among his companions:
| View | Image |
|---|---|
| Spirits return to the root, undistinguished | Broken pots, water back to the river |
| Spirits keep the guises they earned | Water keeps the color, smell, taste of the pot (some philosophers agree) |
| Spirits always govern bodies: barzakhi, then natural | The Trumpet; the Shaykh's own view |
The Garden is here now in its locus, not its form. "Between my grave and my pulpit is one of the gardenplots of the Garden"; the folk of unveiling see the Nile and Euphrates as rivers of the Garden, while the veiled are "like a blind man in a rosegarden". "Were it not for the excess in your speaking... you would see what I see" (III 10.26).
The Final Issue
Chapter 369: repentance helps until death is actually "made present" (ihtidar), and at death everyone has an unveiling and inclines to tawhid. The lesser resurrection is the move to the barzakh in the imaginal body; the greater is the general mustering,. "God created the cosmos only for felicity in essence"; evil comes from possibility, not from the Sheer Good: "The evil does not go back to Thee." Bodies are the spirits' tombs, left by annihilation, not separation. (III 388.33)
Angels took human form only after Adam existed, since spirits copy only forms they have seen (19:17). All the cosmos came from nonexistence to wujud; humans alone came from wujud to wujud, from scattered realities to gathering. At the resurrection people scatter like moths (101:4) in search of mercy. Rational souls are "contiguous through governance and separate through essence" and govern bodies forever. Only animal souls feel pain or pleasure: of two people in pain, the one whose rational soul refers it to the First Occasion enjoys it (III 390.6).
An Eloquent Exposition
Chapter 198 closes the book with a preview of the promised sequel, The Breath of the All-Merciful. There is sheer wujud (God), sheer nonexistence (the impossible) and sheer possibility (the cosmos) between them. The cosmos is carrier (form, body) and carried (spirit, meaning). God proportions each form by word, hand, two hands or hands ("wujud stands on quaternity"), then turns the Breath toward it, and each form receives according to its preparedness:
| Form | Response | Name |
|---|---|---|
| Elemental | Wick ignites / only moves / neither | Animal / plant / mineral |
| Moved by spheres | Four levels; seven layers | Pillars; heavens (stars where they ignite) |
| From the Soul's movement | Ignites or moves | Throne, Footstool, spheres, stars |
| Intellective | Knowledge-light and practice | Soul; Intellect carries all engendered knowledge |
| Divine, all-comprehensive | Made with two hands; carries all the names | Human being, in the form of the Real |
"If you consider the cosmos in terms of the Breath... you will say, 'It is nothing but God.' If you consider it in respect of its being proportioned and balanced, you will say, 'the created things'." You did not throw when you threw, but God threw (8:17). The Real's nonmanifest is creation's manifest and the other way round, and "creation is new in each breath".
Deepening: Imaginal Barzakh, Appetite, Trumpet and Final Mercy
Chapter 10 is the knot of the book. Imagination is the barzakh: the soul in the microcosm, the Cloud in the macrocosm, the cosmos itself as Unbounded Imagination. The true barzakh meets both sides with one face, like whiteness in white things.
All-Embracing and Constricted; Dreams; Appetite
Imagination embraces even the impossible yet gives only sensory forms. Appetite is natural desire; it stays in paradise, which is also natural. Knowledge of imagination is the first station of prophethood; the Prophet asked "any dream-vision?"; interpretation needs God, not reflection alone. "All dream-visions are truthful; the interpreter errs."
Bodies Forever; Trumpet; Final Issue
Spirits never shed bodies: barzakhi forms after death, natural bodies after resurrection. The barzakh is a horn of light; the dead dwell in the forms of their deeds. Lesser resurrection (barzakh) vs greater; questioning and easy reckoning. Mercy has the last word: felicity is essential, wretchedness accidental. "Evil does not go back to Thee." Bodies are tombs of spirits; knowledge, eye and haqq certainty mark the path. Pearl in shell from sweet water in brine (III 388.33).
Pool, Sorcery and Eloquent Exposition
Chapter 276's pool: turbid water = imagination's forms; ta'bir is crossing over; remembrance not reflection. Sorcerers transform viewing; Moses transforms the viewed (simiya vs real change). Trumpet (sur) = forms; horn of light from Cloud to constricted earth. Sheer wujud / sheer possibility / sheer nonexistence; Breath ignites the wick through animal, plant, mineral, pillars, heavens, Throne, Soul, Intellect. "You did not throw when you threw but God threw" (8:17) closes the exposition (II 426.27).
Three Views of Spirits after Death
Companions differed: return to a river undistinguished; keep earned guises; govern barzakhi bodies then natural bodies. Ibn al-'Arabi's line is the third, with the Trumpet as the store of forms. The Garden is witnessed now in locus not form (grave/pulpit garden-plot; Nile and Euphrates as rivers of the Garden). The blind man in a rose garden and Batn al-Muhassir of the Fire teach that configuration, not bare place, is the homestead. Storehouse of humanity: angels took human form only after Adam; spirits above nature do not assume forms; shariah addresses forms; scattered moths (101:4) seek mercy; animal souls as mounts; only animal souls feel pleasure and pain while the rational soul holds disengaged knowledge (III 390.6).
Ch10 Notes: Doctrine and Images
# Ch10 notes (skipped Ch9 tail on line 1) Chunk1 (l1-10): spirit/body relative
Unbounded Imagination/Highest Barzakh. Imagination between intellect and sensation, locus=soul (IV 393.10)
Razi 3). Luminous bodies identical w/ imagination (III 22.6). Contiguous vs discontiguous imagination (dreams vs prophetic visions
Unclear lines). II 309.13 pillar of knowledge: centerpiece of necklace
Market of Garden, death as ram, elixir. Ch559 mysteries: corporeous bodies (IV 328.26) Gabriel
Towering station (IV 337.29): between-between, present moment, indifferent ruling. Cosmos barzakh between azal/abad, present between past/future (III 108.10). Ch382 true barzakh: one face meets both
Market of Garden forms (appetite clothes you, form stays)
Worship in forms, associator punished then mercy (III 518.1). Imagination most all-embracing and most constricted (III 470.5) client hadith
Cloud = realized imagination (II 310.8), kiblah. Subtle: receptivity ladder wood/cloth/water/elements/hyle/spirits/imagination/names/God Subtle (I 285.11), Junayd water cup. Dreams: senses two faces, faculties (III 38.12). Lesser/greater death
Reason's impossibles seen in barzakh (IV 99.8). Appetite vs desire (II 192.29)
Pleasure in own likeness, love of man/woman (II 189.24). Ch378 community of dumb beasts. Chunk2 (l11-20): Ch378 beasts: communities w/ glorification & salat (24:41, bees 16:68)
Reason given to deter appetite in this abode only
Knowledge only by innate disposition/self-evidence/inspiration, reflection adds nothing (III 487.32). Spiritualized ones (mutarawhinun): give appetite its haqq, ya' spirit (15:29) vs command spirit
Bestow appetite on appetite, Ever-Creating (III 125.12). Ch353 three talismanic souls: vegetal (4 guards attractive/retentive/digestive/expulsive
Death as expulsive wins), appetitive (enemy in friend's clothing
Only humans eat via appetite), wrathful (subjugating not wrongdoing
In Garden only appetitive remains. IV 343.2 cosmos barzakh. Imagination & understanding: philosophers/ulama ignore
First station of prophethood, Prophet "any dream-vision?"
Imagination as womb (3:6): Islam dome, Koran butter & honey, religion shirt
- # Ch10 notes (skipped Ch9 tail on line 1) Chunk1 (l1-10): spirit/body relative
- Unbounded Imagination/Highest Barzakh. Imagination between intellect and sensation, locus=soul (IV 393.10)
- Razi 3). Luminous bodies identical w/ imagination (III 22.6). Contiguous vs discontiguous imagination (dreams vs prophetic visions
- Unclear lines). II 309.13 pillar of knowledge: centerpiece of necklace
- Market of Garden, death as ram, elixir. Ch559 mysteries: corporeous bodies (IV 328.26) Gabriel
Ch10 Notes: Mechanisms
Philosophers seek disengagement from matter, impossible
Possibility = imagination in angels (III 508.10). Ch276 pool: turbid water = imagination's forms
Abu Bakr dream interpretation partly correct (II 594.22). Bodies forever: more exalted expel more abased 63:8 (IV 422.21). Ch355 all-embracing earth = body (29:56, 4:97 emigrate in it from caprice to reason), heart embraces Me
Spirit created from body. Chunk3 (l21-30): death=barzakhi state
Spirits in corporeous bodies born from earthy ones. "When someone dies his resurrection has come" partial resurrection
Barzakh = pregnancy before birth on resurrection day
Essential vs prescribed worship. Heart=Kaabah
Worship "as if you see Him": eyesight veiled, insight witnesses
Perfect human worships Him as witnessed (III 247.13). Ch346 Ibn Arabi made light (591/1195): river/containers
Barzakhi then last-world corporeal bodies forever (III 187.31). Ch343 Governor & Differentiator (13:2, 11:1)
Three waystations of compound mercy (joining parts, mounting meanings, joining soul to body = compounding of choice)
Skin witnesses. Mercies arithmetic: 600 to Gabriel for Garden, 19 for Fire vs 19 angels (74:30), 100 mercies (1 in world), total 719
Gehenna prison as kindness (constant easier than renewed
Angels of chastisement intercede (III 171.2). Ch360 tenth deputyship: tawhid of the dead
Sorcerers transform viewing vs Moses transforms viewed (simiya)
Death by choice, martyr slain/not dead, Greater Jihad (III 287.24). Trumpet sur=forms
Horn of light: top Cloud all-embracing, bottom earth constricted (I 149.5)
Nourishment all suprasensory. Ch8 earth of leftover clay = imagination
Eyelashes/lamp lines image (I 130.26). Ch63 barzakh in Horn
- Philosophers seek disengagement from matter, impossible
- Possibility = imagination in angels (III 508.10). Ch276 pool: turbid water = imagination's forms
- Abu Bakr dream interpretation partly correct (II 594.22). Bodies forever: more exalted expel more abased 63:8 (IV 422.21). Ch355 all-embracing earth = body (29:56, 4:97 emigrate in it from caprice to ...
- Spirit created from body. Chunk3 (l21-30): death=barzakhi state
- Spirits in corporeous bodies born from earthy ones. "When someone dies his resurrection has come" partial resurrection
Ch10 Notes: Consequences
Garden imaginalized in wall, stepped forward
Pawns to deeds (I 307.16). Ch302: absent container
Substances never sent back, accidents are
Adam epitome, small/great human. Chunk4 (l31-40): cosmos one degree over human (born from it)
Jesus son of Mary, perfection of Mary & Asiya (66:11 "at Thee") vs Mary 19:23 shame. Cosmos from Absent like day pulled from night (36:37): emerges in form of Knower
Spirit of macrocosm = Absent (25:45 shadow). Spirits like letters in ink
82:8 spirit of donkey/dog/lion. Companions' 3 views on spirits after death: return to river undistinguished
Govern barzakhi bodies (Trumpet) then natural bodies (Ibn Arabi's). Garden witnessed now in locus not form: grave/pulpit gardenplot
"excess in speaking" hadith (III 10.26). Ch369 storehouse of final issue: repentance before death made present (ihtidar)
Lesser resurrection (barzakh, imaginal body) vs greater
Cosmos created for felicity in essence, evil accidental from possibility
Pearl in shell from sweet water in brine (III 388.33). Storehouse of humanity: angels took human form only after Adam (19:17)
Spirits above nature (Intellect, Soul, enraptured) don't assume forms
Shariah addresses forms, indifferent pertains to entity
Souls contiguous through governance, separate in essence
Pain enjoyed by one whose rational soul refers it to First Occasion
Rational soul disengaged knowledge (III 390.6). Ch198 Eloquent Exposition: sheer wujud / sheer possibility / sheer nonexistence
Word, hand, two hands, hands (quaternity)
Breath ignites wick: animal (ignites), plant (moves), mineral, pillars (4), heavens (7), stars, All Body/Throne/Footstool, Soul (knowledge light & practice), Intellect vs human (names, two hands)
8:17 You did not throw (II 426.27). Ends chapter (page 370).
- Garden imaginalized in wall, stepped forward
- Pawns to deeds (I 307.16). Ch302: absent container
- Substances never sent back, accidents are
- Adam epitome, small/great human. Chunk4 (l31-40): cosmos one degree over human (born from it)
- Jesus son of Mary, perfection of Mary & Asiya (66:11 "at Thee") vs Mary 19:23 shame. Cosmos from Absent like day pulled from night (36:37): emerges in form of Knower
Mercies Arithmetic and the Horn of Light
Two mercies, noncompound and compound; three waystations of compound mercy (joining parts, mounting meanings, joining soul to body). Mercies counted toward Garden and Fire; Gehenna as kindness (constant easier than renewed); angels of chastisement intercede. Horn of light: top Cloud all-embracing, bottom earth constricted. All dream-visions true; interpreter errs. Sorcerers change viewing; Moses changes the viewed. Tawhid of the dead: knowledge to eye to haqq certainty.
Appendix I. Ibn al-'Arabi on Certain Sufis
Chittick gathers what the Futuhat says about three famous figures: Abu'l-'Abbas al-Sabti, patron saint of Marrakech; Rabi'a al-'Adawiyya, the early woman lover of God; and 'Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, eponym of the most widespread Sufi order. In each case Ibn al-'Arabi agrees with tradition's high regard, yet adds criticisms, because realization (tahqiq) means giving everything its due.
Abu'l-'Abbas al-Sabti (d. 601/1205)
The Shaykh met "the companion of charitable acts" in Marrakech. Al-Sabti advised the dying to bequeath the one-third the Law lets them own, so they meet God poor, as they came from Him (I 577.8). To a man who complained of poverty he said "Take a spouse", four times over, until "God has enriched him" (III 292.16). But al-Sabti had asked God to hurry his reward into this world, and it came: he healed and made ill, appointed and dismissed, all through charity, keeping back only "one-quarter dirham" for the next world. Had he known himself, "he would have won both affairs in the two abodes" (IV 121.22).
Rabi'a al-'Adawiyya
Ibn al-'Arabi cites her with approval. She struck her head on a pillar and felt nothing, being occupied with God's desire. She already had in this world the essential worship everyone will have in the next (IV 432.21). "If He had created neither Garden nor Fire, would He not still be worthy of worship?" points to "the pure religion" (IV 57.31). A great Kalam theologian called worship without thought of reward unbelief; the Shaykh dismisses him as one of "the folk of consideration", not of tasting (I 418.27).
- One worships God "inasmuch as He is a God, not in respect of His Essence, contrary to the words of Rabi'a" (I 454.22).
- Hearing that the folk of the Garden are in an occupation rejoicing (36:55), a woman, probably Rabi'a, sighed, "The poor folk of the Garden, occupied with their spouses!" Who told her they were occupied with other than God? The Prophet took 'A'isha to a dinner and carried Hasan and Husayn up the pulpit mid-sermon, "occupied only with God". By judging others, she showed that she herself was occupied with other than God (I 743.8).
'Abd al-Qadir and His Circle
'Abd al-Qadir (d. 561/1166) puzzled Trimingham and Schimmel: how did a sober Hanbali preacher become the saint of the Muslim world? Ibn al-'Arabi accepts the wonder stories. His 'Abd al-Qadir is a Pole, one of the Blameworthy, who displayed free activity (tasarruf) through Aspiration. He knew people by sniffing them, and "the year comes to me when it begins, and it reports to me what will be" (II 637.3). He held with Ibn al-'Arabi that letting the "others" subsist appropriately is higher than annihilating them (II 201.16).
| Figure | Free activity | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| 'Abd al-Qadir | Commanded to show it | Excused; had the state of truthfulness, with unruly utterances |
| Abu'l-Su'ud ibn al-Shibl | Given the choice, abandoned it: "We have let the Real exercise free activity for us" | Higher: the station of truthfulness, a "sheer servant", unknown in the world |
| Ibn Qa'id al-Awani | Not commanded, used it anyway | "So he was afflicted", deficient in knowledge |
The friends share vicegerency with the prophets, but not prophecy. When a divine command is linked to ruling control, as with David (38:26), it must be shown; otherwise "the abandonment of manifestation is more appropriate" (II 307.35). 'Abd al-Qadir was at times "presumptuous", yet at death "he placed his face on the earth", confessing servanthood, which Abu'l-Su'ud kept every breath (I 233.22). Abu'l-Su'ud's sayings are spare: "There is nothing but the five salats and waiting for death"; listening to music "is forbidden for beginners, and those at the end have no need for it"; the rational among the Folk of God are more comely than the "rational madmen" (II 370.29, 368.26, I 248.15).
Deepening: Tahqiq Applied to Saints
Appendix I shows the same scale used on cosmos and self applied to famous friends. Ibn al-'Arabi agrees with tradition and still weighs by tahqiq.
Al-Sabti: Hurried Reward
Abu'l-'Abbas al-Sabti (d. 601/1205), companion of charitable acts and scales, bequeathed to die poor, used marriage to remove poverty, asked God to hurry reward, healed and killed via charity, kept a quarter dirham for the next world. Chittick's Ibn al-'Arabi: he should have stayed silent (IV 121.22). Predacious Men on the heart of Abraham see only good (II 10.25). The lesson is cosmological: asking for the fruit now can forfeit what patience would win in both worlds.
Rabi'a: Worship God as God
Rabi'a's cut-me-limb-from-limb and head-against-pillar stories mark essential worship. Servants of wage vs those who hold God worthy without Garden or Fire. Criticized: worship God as God, not as Essence (I 454.22); "poor folk of Garden occupied with spouses" implies she was occupied with other than God when she scorned that. Prophet with Aisha, Hasan and Husayn on the pulpit: the Muhammadan model does not cancel human loves (I 743.8). Kalam that called reward-less worship unbelief is "of no account" (I 418.27), yet the Shaykh still corrects Rabi'a's excess toward Essence-talk.
'Abd al-Qadir, Abu'l-Su'ud and Ibn Qa'id
Free activity through Aspiration; Pole and Blameworthy; year reports; abandoning trust. 'Abd al-Qadir commanded; Abu'l-Su'ud given choice and abandoned it ("we have let the Real act for us"); Awani not commanded so afflicted (I 201.27). Vicegerency of David (38:26); presumptuousness risk; state vs station of truthfulness. Su'ud rebuked praise of 'Abd al-Qadir knowing his grave state (II 627.17). Shatterers' mi'raj and the question whether Su'ud was a sheer servant (II 624.16). Concealed power and servanthood every breath can outrank displayed power unless the latter is commanded.
App I Notes: Doctrine and Images
Ibn Arabi agrees with tradition but criticizes per tahqiq. Sabti (d.601/1205) companion of charitable acts, companions of the scales
Marriage that removes poverty, four wives (III 292.16)
Asked God to hurry reward, healing/killing via charity, kept quarter dirham for next world
Predacious Men on heart of Abraham, seven who see only good (II 10.25). Rabi'a: cut me limb from limb
Essential worship in this world (IV 432.21)
- Ibn Arabi agrees with tradition but criticizes per tahqiq. Sabti (d.601/1205) companion of charitable acts, companions of the scales
- Marriage that removes poverty, four wives (III 292.16)
- Asked God to hurry reward, healing/killing via charity, kept quarter dirham for next world
- Predacious Men on heart of Abraham, seven who see only good (II 10.25). Rabi'a: cut me limb from limb
- Essential worship in this world (IV 432.21)
App I Notes: Mechanisms
Worthy of worship without Garden/Fire (IV 57.31)
Kalam scholar who called reward-less worship unbelief, of no account (I 418.27)
Criticized: worship God as God not Essence (I 454.22)
"poor folk of Garden occupied with spouses" -> she was occupied with other than God
Prophet with Aisha, Hasan/Husayn on pulpit (I 743.8). Abd al-Qadir (d.561/1166) vs Abu'l-Su'ud ibn al-Shibl and Ibn Qa'id al-Awani
- Worthy of worship without Garden/Fire (IV 57.31)
- Kalam scholar who called reward-less worship unbelief, of no account (I 418.27)
- Criticized: worship God as God not Essence (I 454.22)
- "poor folk of Garden occupied with spouses" -> she was occupied with other than God
- Prophet with Aisha, Hasan/Husayn on pulpit (I 743.8). Abd al-Qadir (d.561/1166) vs Abu'l-Su'ud ibn al-Shibl and Ibn Qa'id al-Awani
App I Notes: Consequences
Abd al-Qadir commanded, Su'ud given choice abandoned it ("we have let the Real act for us"), Awani not commanded so afflicted (I 201.27)
Abd al-Qadir face on earth at death (I 233.22)
State vs station of truthfulness (II 223.3)
Su'ud rebuked praise of Abd al-Qadir, knows his grave state (II 627.17)
Ch283 Shatterers mi'raj, transmutation paths
- Abd al-Qadir commanded, Su'ud given choice abandoned it ("we have let the Real act for us"), Awani not commanded so afflicted (I 201.27)
- Abd al-Qadir face on earth at death (I 233.22)
- State vs station of truthfulness (II 223.3)
- Su'ud rebuked praise of Abd al-Qadir, knows his grave state (II 627.17)
- Ch283 Shatterers mi'raj, transmutation paths
Scale on Persons: Silence, Wage and Sheer Servanthood
Al-Sabti's hurried reward teaches silence's fruit. Rabi'a's essential worship is honored and corrected: worship God as God, not Essence; Muhammadan love of family is not a fall. 'Abd al-Qadir's commanded power and Abu'l-Su'ud's chosen abandonment are two valid paths when each matches what was given; Awani's affliction marks acting without command. Tahqiq neither flattens saints into equal sentiment nor exempts them from the scale.
Synthesis
The whole book in takeaways, frameworks, a critical reading, the main figures and the places where its ideas touch present-day work.
Key Takeaways
- There is no disembodied observer. Ibn al-'Arabi's cosmology starts with the knower: what we see depends on our preparedness, so knowing the cosmos and knowing the self are one task.
- Three sources of knowledge. Transmission (the prophets) comes first, then unveiling, then reason. Reason is one of two eyes, good at saying what God is not.
- Tahqiq means giving each thing its haqq. Realization is existential, not just logical: every thing has a right, and "God speaks the haqq" (33:4).
- Wujud is the Real alone. Things are fixed entities "draped" in borrowed existence: He/not He.
- God is not a cause. Cause and effect need each other; God is independent. At most He is a "condition", and creation is gratuitous love.
- Creation never repeats. Each instant is a new self-disclosure; there are no "habits", so miracles are only new creation seen.
- The cosmos is God's face and His veil. A thing's face is its reality; the densest veil is the self, which is also the face.
- Occasions are veils that cannot be lifted. Give secondary causes their due without worshiping them.
- Every creature has a specific face toward God, the source of its unique knowledge and tasting.
- Unity has two modes. Ahad admits no relation; wahid is the oneness every thing shares. God is the One/Many.
- Ranking in excellence comes from preparedness, never from the Essence; "do not mix" the levels, and do not boast of them.
- Wujud is a circle. All things return to the center, and the inner side of the wall is mercy.
- Worlds are relative. Absent and witnessed, command and creation, heaven and earth are correlatives; the third world is the barzakh.
- The soul is a barzakh between the inblown spirit and the proportioned body.
- Disengagement is impossible. Spirits always govern some body: earthly, barzakhi or resurrected.
- Nature is the domain of imprints. Spirit is father, nature mother; the constitution shapes how spirit appears.
- Evil is accidental, good essential. "Good is a habit"; wretchedness arises from possibility, not from the Real.
- Imagination is the true barzakh: it meets both sides with one face and gives sensory form to meanings.
- Reason cannot rule on the possible. Dreams and death show as sensory what reason calls impossible.
- Appetite has its rights. It is natural desire; paradise is natural too, and appetite remains there.
- Interpretation needs God. Even Abu Bakr was "correct in some and mistaken in some"; the gnostics prefer remembrance to reflection.
- Death begins the resurrection. The barzakh is a pregnancy, the Trumpet a horn of light, and the dead dwell in the forms of their deeds.
- The human is the epitome of the cosmos, carrying all the names; the cosmos still has the degree of being his mother.
- Mercy has the last word. It precedes wrath, embraces the angels of chastisement, and makes them intercede.
- Saints are weighed too. Concealed power held in servanthood ranks above displayed power, unless display is commanded.
Frameworks at a Glance
A closer look
- An anthology still chosen by one hand. Long passages reduce distortion, but the order and the selection are Chittick's. Readers meet a Futuhat more coherent than the original.
- Half a book. The promised sequel on the Breath of the All-Merciful never appeared as planned, so the twenty-eight-letter cosmology sketched in the Introduction is never fully worked out.
- Premodern science. Four natures, humors, spheres and the claim that a parent's mental image shapes a child's character are medieval science. Chittick reads them as symbols of relations; readers must decide how much of the cosmology survives without them.
- Apologetic edge. The Introduction contrasts traditional and modern cosmology sharply, in Nasr's line. The critique of the "disembodied observer" is strong, but modern science receives less credit than it deserves.
- Hard claims softened. Eternal punishment, the ranking of men over women (2:228) and the status of non-Muslims are presented with the Shaykh's mercy-centred reading, which is real but not the only one in the text.
- Sources taken on trust. Saints' miracles and hadith "sound by unveiling" but weak by transmission are accepted on Ibn al-'Arabi's authority; a historian would weigh them differently.
| Sufi Path of Knowledge (1989) | Self-Disclosure of God (1998) |
|---|---|
| Metaphysics of imagination; knowing and the path | Cosmology: order, worlds, microcosm |
| Shorter extracts, thematically arranged | Whole sections, poetry kept |
| "Effect", "immutable", "nondelimited" | "Trace", "fixed", "unbounded" |
| Ends in the Perfect Man and bewilderment | Ends in the barzakh, bodies forever and mercy |
Who's Who
| Figure | Role in the book |
|---|---|
| Ibn al-'Arabi (1165-1240) | The Shaykh al-Akbar; author of the Futuhat al-makkiyya |
| William C. Chittick | Translator and commentator |
| Muhammad | Soul of the cosmos; his dreams, hadiths and practice are the model |
| Adam | Created with two hands in God's form; epitome of the cosmos |
| Gabriel and Seraphiel | Spirit of revelation, seen as Dihya; angel of the Trumpet |
| Moses and Khidr | Deputy who transforms the viewed thing; knowledge "from Our presence" |
| Abu Bakr | Dream-interpreter "correct in some and mistaken in some" |
| Abu Yazid al-Bastami | "How can he who sits with Him be mustered?"; distinction by poverty |
| Junayd | "The water takes on the color of its cup" |
| al-Hakim al-Tirmidhi | Posed the 157 questions answered in Chapter 73 |
| Avicenna and the philosophers | "Nothing proceeds from the One but one"; "Companions of the Causes" |
| al-Ash'ari and the Mu'tazilites | Kalam views on accidents, renewal and causality |
| Ibn Barrajan | Source of "the Real Through Which Creation Occurs" |
| Abu'l-'Abbas al-Sabti | Saint of charity in Marrakech who hurried his reward |
| Rabi'a al-'Adawiyya | Worship without wage; criticized on two points |
| 'Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, Abu'l-Su'ud ibn al-Shibl | Displayed power by command vs concealed power by choice |
| Corbin, Izutsu, Chodkiewicz, Addas | Modern scholars Chittick engages and builds on |
Deepening: Portable Cosmology without Soft Caps
The synthesis is not a second book. It is the portable circle: Real discloses as words and worlds; the human is the mirror; return is not optional. Readers who take only the imaginal without the Law, or only mercy without hierarchy, split what Chittick holds together.
Frameworks Reinforced
He/not He; two eyes (reason and imagination); Face and veil; First/Last and Manifest/Nonmanifest; command and creation; spirit-soul-body; appetite's haqq in a natural Garden; bodies forever; felicity essential. A closer look stays inside the perennial line: selective quotation can make the Shaykh say anything; Chittick's long passages resist that. Who's who stays with Futuhat figures and the Appendix saints.
- Introduction for method and twenty-eight degrees.
- Ch 1-2 for ontology and time of disclosure.
- Ch 3-4 for Face and veil as epistemology.
- Ch 5-7 for order and worlds.
- Ch 8-10 for microcosm and barzakh.
- Appendix I for tahqiq on persons.
A closer look Inside the Perennial Line
One-eyed reason and one-eyed imagination are both delusions. Soft word caps that once thinned the Insight prose are retired: the portable circle needs the density of wujud, tajalli, Face, veils, order, worlds, microcosm and barzakh together.
Glossary of Key Terms
Arabic terms with Chittick's English renderings in this book (see his Appendix II).
| Term | Chittick's English and meaning |
|---|---|
| adab | Courtesy: observing the right of each thing and each level |
| 'alam al-ghayb / al-shahada | The absent (unseen) / the witnessed (visible) world |
| 'aql | Reason, intellect; "fetter" that binds and declares incomparability |
| 'ayn thabita | Fixed entity: a thing as known by God, nonexistent in itself |
| barzakh | Isthmus: what is between two things, meeting both; imagination |
| haqq / tahqiq | Real, true, right, due / realization: giving each its due |
| isti'dad | Preparedness: a receptacle's capacity to receive |
| kashf | Unveiling: direct knowledge given by God |
| khalq jadid | New creation: renewal of the cosmos at every instant |
| khayal (muttasil / munfasil) | Imagination (contiguous / discontiguous) |
| khayal mutlaq | Unbounded Imagination: the cosmos as a whole, the Cloud |
| nafas al-rahman | Breath of the All-Merciful: the stuff of all creatures |
| nafs (natiqa) | Soul, self (rationally speaking soul) |
| ruh | Spirit: the inblown, governing reality |
| sabab | Occasion: secondary cause, a veil that cannot be lifted |
| shahwa / irada | Appetite (natural desire) / desire (divine and spiritual) |
| tajalli | Self-disclosure: God's showing Himself in every form |
| tanzih / tashbih | Declaring incomparable / declaring similar |
| tasarruf | Free activity: power to act in the cosmos |
| wajh (khass) | Face (specific face): a thing's reality turned toward God |
| wujud | Existence, being, finding: properly God alone |
Extended Term Clusters
Dense Term Table (Chittick renderings)
| Term | Rendering and use in this book |
|---|---|
| ahad / wahid | One as Essence / One as named and related; do not mix levels |
| amr / khalq | Command / creation; engendering vs prescribing |
| asma' / sifat | Names / attributes; relations of the Essence |
| 'ayn / a'yan thabita | Entity / fixed entities in God's knowledge |
| dhat | Essence; sealed from disclosure as such |
| fayd | Overflow / effusion of wujud |
| fitra | Original disposition; innate recognition |
| ghayb / shahada | Absent / witnessed; two worlds of the cosmos |
| hadra | Presence; a level of divine self-disclosure |
| hijab / satr | Veil / curtain; what hides and shows |
| himma | Spiritual energy / concentrated aspiration of the heart |
| insan kamil | Perfect Human: mirror of the names, barzakh walker |
| jabarut | World of dominion; often imaginal power |
| khalq jadid | New creation each instant; never repeated disclosure |
| khayal muttasil / munfasil | Contiguous / discontiguous imagination |
| ma'lum / ma'dum | Known / nonexistent; entity known while nonexistent in itself |
| mazhar / majla | Locus of manifestation / place of disclosure |
| nafas al-rahman | Breath of the All-Merciful; Cloud; stuff of creatures |
| qada' / qadar | Decree / measuring out to each entity |
| rahma | Mercy; preceding wrath; final |
| shari'a / haqiqa | Law / reality; scale and unveiling together |
| subuhat al-wajh | Glories of the Face; burn claims |
| tajalli / tajalliyat | Self-disclosure / disclosures; never repeat |
| tanzih / tashbih | Incomparability / similarity; two eyes |
| wujud / mawjud | Being/finding (God) / existent (creature by relation) |
| wajh / wajh khass | Face / specific face of each thing toward God |
About this book
The Self-Disclosure of God: Principles of Ibn al-'Arabi's Cosmology by William C. Chittick, 1998. 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