Insight Editions · No. 167
The Sufi Path of Knowledge
Ibn al-'Arabi's Metaphysics of Imagination
William C. Chittick
William C. Chittick presents Ibn al-'Arabi's metaphysics of divine Being, imagination, cosmology, knowledge, Qur'anic interpretation, and the spiritual path to perfect servanthood.
A study guide to The Sufi Path of Knowledge 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, 1989) into a study guide. It follows the book's own order: the Introduction and the seven chapters (Overview, Theology, Ontology, Epistemology, Hermeneutics, Soteriology, Consummation), which together hold twenty numbered sections. The notes are drawn on only for context; the bibliography and the indexes of Koranic verses, hadiths, names and terms are left out.
Argument Map
The map reads from top to bottom as a single movement. God's Being shows itself through the names; the names leave their traces in a cosmos that is an imagination (Ch 3); human beings know that cosmos by reason and unveiling, which must be balanced (Ch 4) and applied to the Koran and to God's self-disclosures (Ch 5); the path weighs every experience by the Scale of the Law (Ch 6) and ends in the Perfect Man who sees with both eyes (Ch 7). Chittick's subtitle names the thread that runs through every level: imagination, the barzakh that is both the Real and other than the Real.
Chapter Map
| Part | Question | Key ideas |
|---|---|---|
| Intro | Who was Ibn al-'Arabi; how to read him | Life, Futuhat, Koranic roots |
| 1 Overview | The whole picture | Presence, names, wujud, Perfect Man |
| 2 Theology (s1-4) | Names and Essence | Relationships, Allah, tanzih/tashbih |
| 3 Ontology (s5-8) | What it is to exist | Entities, New Creation, imagination, Breath |
| 4 Epistemology (s9-11) | How we know | Reflection, unveiling, Scale of the Law |
| 5 Hermeneutics (s12-14) | Reading signs and Book | Faith, against ta'wil, allusion |
| 6 Soteriology (s15-18) | Walking the path safely | Shaykh, stations, servanthood |
| 7 Consummation (s19-20) | What the perfected see | Gods of belief, two eyes, bewilderment |
| 1165 | Born in Murcia, al-Andalus; raised in Seville |
| c. 1180 | Early "opening"; meeting with Averroes in Cordoba |
| 1202 | Pilgrimage to Mecca; begins the Futuhat al-makkiyya |
| 1229 | Fusus al-hikam composed in Damascus |
| 1231-38 | Second, final redaction of the Futuhat (560 chapters) |
| 1240 | Dies in Damascus, where his tomb remains |
- Read the Introduction and Chapter 1 first: together they give the whole system in miniature.
- Chapters 2 and 3 are the metaphysical core; Chapters 4 and 5 are about knowing; Chapters 6 and 7 are about practice and its fruit.
- The Synthesis collects takeaways, frameworks, a closer look, a who's who and connections to present-day work; the Glossary gives the Arabic terms with Chittick's English.
What the book is
Chittick's The Sufi Path of Knowledge (SUNY 1989): an annotated anthology of translations from the Futuhat al-makkiyya with commentary. The thread is imagination as metaphysics under tawhid.
Edition Spine
Parts: front matter; Introduction (method, life, Futuhat, reception); Ch 1 Overview; Ch 2 Theology; Ch 3 Ontology; Ch 4 Epistemology; Ch 5 Hermeneutics; Ch 6 Soteriology; Ch 7 Consummation; Synthesis; Glossary. Source: Chittick SUNY 1989 Futuhat anthology + commentary. Build with seed 25 like peer Self-Disclosure and Alone editions. Artifacts under perennial/Sufi_Path_of_Knowledge_Chittick.
Introduction: Imagination, Unity and the Meccan Openings
Chittick opens with a diagnosis: the West took a wrong turn when it put complete faith in reason and forgot that imagination opens the soul to kinds of perception the rational mind cannot reach. Corbin restored the word "imaginal". But Chittick wants to correct Corbin too: imagination in Ibn al-'Arabi never stands apart from tawhid, the declaration of God's Unity.
Why This Book: Two Sides Back in Balance
The mundus imaginalis is where invisible realities become visible and corporeal things are spiritualized. It is more real and subtle than the physical world, denser than the spirit. Islamic thought places eschatology there: death brought "in the form of a salt-colored ram and slaughtered", deeds weighed in the Scales.
| Imagination without Unity | Metaphysics without imagination |
|---|---|
| Corbin: entranced by the imaginal; plays down tawhid | Izutsu and philosophical studies: abstract ontology |
| Danger: some Jungianism divinizes the soul; "God" as projection = shirk, the gods back as real entities | Danger: misses the role imagination plays in everything Ibn al-'Arabi says |
Life and Works
- 1165: born in Murcia, al-Andalus; family of high standing.
- 1172: Almohad conquest; family moves to Seville; he serves as a governor's secretary.
- Youth: opening in a single retreat; meets Ibn Rushd.
- 1193: first trip out of Spain (Tunis).
- 1202: pilgrimage to Mecca after a vision sends him East; begins the Futuhat.
- Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Rum (never Iran).
- 1223: settles in Damascus; 1234 licence lists 290 works and 90 teachers.
- 1240: dies in Damascus.
The Meccan Openings
Opening (futuh) is near synonym of unveiling, tasting, witnessing and self-disclosure: knowledge given by God to the heart without teacher or reflection. It comes suddenly to one waiting at the door, through discipline in the Shari'a and the Tariqa under a shaykh, invocation (dhikr) and retreat (khalwa). The key verse is "Be godfearing and God will teach you" (2:282). What is opened is always understanding of the Koran.
The Futuhat, he insists, is dictated by unveiling, not reflection: "My heart clings to the door of the Divine Presence ... poor and needy, empty of every knowledge." Everything after his first vision of God's Face is "only the differentiation of the all-inclusive reality" given in that one look. The openings behind the book began while circling the Ka'ba in 1202.
Koranic Hermeneutics
How Ibn al-'Arabi Has Been Read
- Sadr al-Din Qunawi (d. 1274), stepson and heir: systematic, philosophical; put wujud at the centre; corresponded with Tusi.
- Jandi, Kashani, Qaysari: the Fusus commentary line that grew from Qunawi.
- Izutsu, Sufism and Taoism: clear, careful, but Fusus-only and read through Kashani.
- Corbin, Creative Imagination: brilliant, but "where does Ibn al-'Arabi end and Corbin begin?"
- Chodkiewicz, Le sceau des saints: grounded and stresses practice, but narrow in scope.
The Method of This Book
Chittick lets the Shaykh speak in his own words, mainly from the Futuhat, within the verses and hadiths he is explaining, rather than extracting "interesting teachings". He avoids comparisons with other traditions. Repetition is kept because everything is interrelated: "each part of our speech is interrelated with the other parts, since it is one entity". Ten planned chapters on cosmology and the perfect man were held back for a later volume.
Wrong Turn, Imaginal, and Tawhid
Chittick's diagnosis: the West put complete faith in reason and forgot that imagination opens perception reason cannot reach. Corbin restored "imaginal" (mundus imaginalis): denser than spirit, subtler than body; locus of eschatology (death as salt-colored ram; deeds in the Scales). Chittick corrects two partial readings.
Life Curve and Literary Miracle
Born Murcia 560/1165; Seville under Almohads; secretary; opening before sunrise; Averroes encounter (yes / yes / no; "Between the yes and the no spirits fly from their matter"). Eastward vision; Mecca 1202; Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Rum (never Iran); Damascus from 1223; dies 1240. Licence of 1234: 290 works, 90 teachers. Osman Yahia: ~700 works, ~400 extant; Futuhat ~17,000 pages / 560 chapters; "a drop in the ocean."
Opening: What Arrives at the Door
Opening (fath) ~ unveiling, tasting, witnessing, self-disclosure: knowledge given to the heart without teacher or reflection. Key verse: "Be godfearing and God will teach you" (2:282). Discipline: Shari'a, Tariqa, shaykh, dhikr, khalwa. What opens is always understanding of the Koran. Inrushes: divine, spiritual, ego-centric, satanic; master's task is discernment. Preparedness: "The water takes on the color of the cup" (Junayd).
Everything after the first vision of God's Face is "differentiation of the all-inclusive reality" given in that one look. The Futuhat is dictated by unveiling: "My heart clings to the door of the Divine Presence ... empty of every knowledge."
Koranic Hermeneutics: Reverence for the Letter
The Koran is linguistic embodiment of Real Being, barzakh between intelligence and God's knowledge. Cosmos is also Speech in the Breath of the All-merciful; the written Book is the easier key to "signs on the horizons and in themselves" (41:53). Rule: God intends every meaning a speaker of Arabic can draw from the literal text. Esoteric readings may add, never deny; never alter a ruling. "Enter houses by their doors" (2:189).
Futuhat as Opening Differentiated
Ibn Sawdakin reports: retreat at first light, opening before sunrise, then fourteen months; "all the mysteries which I put down in writing after opening." Chittick: knocking on the door until "glory of His Face"; all later speech = differentiation of that look. Meccan adjective: most of the treatise opened while circumambulating the House or waiting in the Sanctuary. Dedication to 'Abdallah Badr al-Habashi.
Interrelatedness: science of Folk of Allah ties cosmos parts; "He who knows the Koran and realizes it will know the science of the Folk of Allah... It is the scale of all scales" (III 200). Chittick's own twenty years, Tehran teachers (Nasr, Izutsu, Corbin, Ashtiyani), NEH fellowship, unfinished reading of whole Futuhat accepted because of that claim of interrelatedness.
Reception Detail: Qunawi Line and Philosophical Drift
Qunawi crystal-clear and systematic where the Shaykh is allusive; brings wujud to the center under external pressure of philosophy's definition (study of wujud qua wujud). Correspondence with Tusi aims to combine logical proofs with unveiling. Jandi, Kashani, Qaysari continue the Fusus line; Qaysari's introduction = summa of philosophical Sufism. Providential drift: teachings enter mainstream intellectuality; Shari'a remains lived, so commentators need not always restate practice. Cost: Western readers meet a filtered, abstract Ibn al-'Arabi. Chittick's corrective: restore Futuhat voice, Law scale, imagination under tawhid.
Life Sketch as Method Preface
Ibn al-'Arabi (560/1165 Murcia - 638/1240 Damascus): Andalusian beginnings, Maghrib travel, Mecca openings, Levant settlement. Chittick does not write biography for its own sake; the life frames how the Futuhat speaks: openings while circumambulating, not a philosopher's system built at a desk. The nickname Shaykh al-Akbar is later honorific; Chittick prefers the man's own speech over school slogans.
Reception cost restated: once wujud is centered under philosophical pressure, Western and even some Eastern readers meet an abstract pantheism-adjacent Ibn al-'Arabi. Chittick's book restores Law, imagination under tawhid, and Futuhat diction.
Interrelatedness Claim; Drop in Ocean; Fixed Terms
"He who knows the Koran and realizes it will know the science of the Folk of Allah... It is the scale of all scales" (III 200). Chittick accepts unfinished whole-Futuhat reading under that claim: parts illuminate parts. Drop in ocean: any Insight summary is a drop; the ocean remains. Fixed terms: Chittick stabilizes English for wujud, tajalli, khayal, barzakh, kashf, mizan, insan kamil so the reader is not lost in synonym fog. Method: let the Shaykh speak; translate densely; comment by mapping, not by replacing.
Chapter 1: Overview, the Divine Presence
Chittick's own map of the whole system, before the translations begin. Everything turns on one question, "How can I find God?", and on one answer that recurs on every level of reality: "He/not He" (huwa la huwa).
Finding God
Wujud means "existence" or "being", but literally "finding". So wahdat al-wujud is also the "Oneness of Finding". Ibn al-'Arabi's concern is not the concept of being but tasting (dhawq) it: a finding that is at once to perceive and to be what truly is.
Worlds and Presences
The world ('alam) means "everything other than God". Within it are worlds: macrocosm and microcosm; and the spiritual, imaginal and corporeal worlds of light, fire and clay (angels, jinn, Adam's body). Seen as not other than God, these are presences (hadra): the Presence of Imagination is the domain where everything is woven of images. Qunawi's later scheme named Five Divine Presences: God, spirit, imagination, body, and perfect man.
| Level | What it is | Stance |
|---|---|---|
| Essence (dhat) | God in Himself, "Independent of the worlds" (3:97) | Incomparability (tanzih) |
| Attributes / Names | Relationships between the Essence and what is other | Bridge |
| Acts | All creatures and what appears from them | Similarity (tashbih) |
Being, Existence, Nonexistence
Ranking in degrees (tafadul) follows: "above each one who possesses knowledge is someone who knows [more]" (12:76). No two things are the same in any attribute; light, knowledge and existence all come in intensities.
The Divine Attributes and Their Roots
The divine names are the single most important concept in Ibn al-'Arabi. The Essence is unknown, but it is precisely the Essence that is named: one person can be father, son and husband without becoming many. Every created quality has a divine root (asl ilahi). About 200 chapters of the Futuhat treat Sufi states and stations by first summarizing earlier masters, then asking what in God allows the quality to appear at all.
| Tanzih (incomparability) | Tashbih (similarity) |
|---|---|
| The Essence; known only by negation | Attributes and acts; much can be said |
| Logically and ontologically prior | Courtesy: attribute only what God attributed to Himself |
| Cosmos is Not He | Cosmos manifests the He |
The Acts: Forms, Entities, Possible Things
"There is nothing in the cosmos but forms", and a form implies a meaning. Things not yet in the cosmos are still "found" with God as objects of His knowledge, the immutable entities (a'yan thabita). In Avicenna's terms God is the Necessary Being; the entities are possible things, equally poised between existence and nonexistence until God gives "preponderance" to existence.
Macrocosm, Barzakh and Imagination
God is "Uplifter of degrees", so the cosmos is ordered between created light (angels) and clay. All these terms are relative: a candle is bright in a dark room, invisible in the noon desert. Paired terms (luminous/dark, subtle/dense, unseen/visible, high/low) describe poles; between them lie countless barzakhs. "There is nothing in existence but barzakhs ... and existence has no edges."
God is Manifest and Nonmanifest (57:3). The cosmos as a whole manifests all the names, so it is made "in His form", as was Adam: the universe is a great man, man a small universe.
The Microcosm
| Macrocosm | Microcosm | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Spiritual | Spirit (ruh) | "Attributed spirit", God's own ("My spirit", 15:29); aware of God only |
| Imaginal | Soul (nafs) | Individual awareness; luminous and dark; open-ended growth |
| Corporeal | Body (jism) | Clay; aware of nothing |
Cosmic Dynamics: Ever-New Creation
Time adds a second ambiguity: nothing is the same in two moments. This is the renewal of creation at each instant: "Each day He is upon some task" (55:29); His tasks are the creatures, His day the indivisible instant. "Self-disclosure never repeats itself", because the Divine Vastness forbids it. Tajalli, self-disclosure, shares a root with jilwa, the unveiling of the bride.
The Return to God
| Compulsory return | Voluntary return |
|---|---|
| Every creature: born, lives, dies, goes back | Only humans (and jinn) choose their route |
| "You are laboring toward your Lord ... and you shall encounter Him" (84:6) | Follow a prophet, or one's caprice (hawa) |
| A pear tree never leaves as a pumpkin | Men come in as men and may leave as pumpkins, monkeys or pigs |
Man begins as "the dimmest of apparitions dancing on the farthest of walls"; the human task is to join the apparition to its Light. Every degree may become a waystation, but a waystation exists only to be left, and the journey goes on forever.
Assuming the Traits of God
Takhalluq, "assuming the traits", comes from khuluq, character, written the same as khalq, creation. The Prophet's "tremendous character" (68:4) is ontological as well as moral. Hadiths: "The best thing in the Scale ... will be a beautiful character"; "I was sent to complete the beautiful character traits." The Most Beautiful Names are God's character traits (Repenter, Generous, Just, Patient, Grateful, Loving).
Center and Circle
Being as One/Many: the Essence is the Unity of the One; Being with its names is the Unity of Manyness. Picture a circle: Essence at the centre, ontological levels as concentric rings, names as the relationships of centre to each point. Mercy lives near the centre with Light, Knowledge and Unity; wrath near the edge with darkness and dispersion. The outward movement is creative; once full differentiation is reached, the unitive return is man's prerogative, ruled by Guidance (the prophets) against Misguidance (Satan and his friends).
- Mercy of free gift: embraces all things, even in chastisement.
- Mercy of obligation: prescribed for "those who are godfearing" (7:156); shows only as felicity.
The Scale of the Law
Shar', "Law", first meant animals entering water to drink, then a clear track. Revelation is universal (Adam to Muhammad), though Ibn al-'Arabi's prophets are Koranic through and through. The Law is the Scale (mizan) for weighing all knowledge and realization; without it we swim "in a shoreless ocean of ambiguity". Friends who follow only inner light stand in a station of great danger: "Iblis and countless 'spiritual teachers' have been led astray by it."
Perfect Man and Seeing Things as They Are
The perfect man (al-insan al-kamil) is the full form of the name Allah, every trait in balance. The prophets are exemplars; the Fusus gives 27 chapters, each a prophet with a divine wisdom.
| Reason | Imagination |
|---|---|
| Declares tawhid, sees incomparability | Perceives self-disclosure, sees similarity |
| Thinks in either/or | Sees neither/nor, both/and |
| At best accepts God's "hands" and "laughter" without asking how | When opened, sees God disclosing Himself, without knowing how |
Finding as Being and Tasting
Wujud = existence / being / finding. Concern is not the concept but tasting (dhawq). People of Unveiling and Finding; highest = Verifiers (muhaqqiqun). To find God is bewilderment (hayra): finding and not-finding at once. Abu Bakr: "Incapacity to attain comprehension is itself comprehension." Not "All is He" alone, but "All is He, all is not He," then sort points of view. "None knows God but God."
Presences and Worlds
World ('alam) = everything other than God. Worlds: macro / micro; spiritual, imaginal, corporeal (light, fire, clay). As not other than God: presences (hadra). Qunawi's Five Divine Presences: God, spirit, imagination, body, Perfect Man. Divine Presence = Essence, Attributes, Acts (II 114).
Light, Ranking, Roots of Attributes
Being (capitalized) = God: sheer Plenitude. Existents = rays: light in one respect, darkness in another. Absolute vs relative nonexistence. Ranking (tafadul): "above each one who possesses knowledge is someone who knows [more]" (12:76). Names = single most important concept; ~200 Futuhat chapters treat stations by asking what in God allows the quality. Every created quality has a divine root (asl ilahi).
Forms, Entities, Barzakh, Microcosm
"There is nothing in the cosmos but forms"; form implies meaning. Immutable entities (a'yan thabita) = possibles in God's knowledge. Necessary Being gives preponderance (tarjih). Macrocosm / microcosm: names scattered in cosmos, gathered in man. Imagination = He/not He; barzakh between spirit and body as existence between Being and nothingness. Ever-new creation (50:15); return; assuming traits (takhalluq); center and circle; Scale of the Law; Perfect Man who sees things as they are.
Macrocosm, Microcosm, Return, Traits, Circle
In the cosmos names are scattered; in man they are gathered. Barzakh and imagination sit between spirit and body. Ever-new creation: no stillness; motion first property (nonexistence to existence). Return to God: obligatory path and existential return. Assuming traits: participation in fullness of existence. Center and circle: God as center, creatures on circumference; nearer center, more intense finding. Scale of the Law keeps unveiling from becoming whim. Perfect Man sees things as they are: gives each thing its due (haqq).
Divine Presence Definitions and Ranking Intensities
Ibn al-'Arabi defines Divine Presence as Essence, Attributes, and Acts of Allah (II 114). Allah is the name of the Presence that gathers. Ranking in degrees of light: spiritual creatures nearer Being; corporeal more mixed with relative darkness; imaginal middle. Dream world: things share luminosity of consciousness yet remain other. Attributes undifferentiated at intense light; differentiated as intensity falls. Return roughly in form they came; Gabriel speaks for angels. Participation in fullness of existence = showing qualities of Being through assumed traits.
Finding God; Five Presences; Path Open
How can I find God? All must answer, then verify as People of Unveiling and Finding (ahl al-kashf wa'l-wujud). Path open to everyone: prophets bring it; friends follow. Five presence ranking often listed: God Himself; spiritual; imaginal; corporeal; Perfect Man. Last analysis: one Divine Presence gathering Essence, Attributes, Acts (II 114). Names scattered in cosmos, gathered in man. Barzakh and imagination between spirit and body. Ever-new creation: motion first property. Return obligatory and existential. Assuming traits: participation in fullness of existence. Center and circle: nearer the center, more intense finding. Scale of the Law keeps unveiling from whim. Perfect Man gives each thing its haqq.
| Presence layer | Intensity | Typical marks | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Essence | Sheer | Independent of worlds | Spiritual |
| High light | Angels, pure spirits | Imaginal | Middle |
| Forms of meanings | Corporeal | Mixed | Clay, sensory |
Marks on Horizons and in Selves; Return Forms; Gabriel Speaks
Marks on horizons and in selves (Koranic pairing) structure Overview: cosmos and man as parallel books. Return roughly in the form they came; Gabriel speaks for angels. Participation in fullness of existence = showing qualities of Being through assumed traits. Dream world: things share luminosity of consciousness yet remain other. Attributes undifferentiated at intense light; differentiated as intensity falls. Path questions Overview answers: Who is God? What is the cosmos? Who is man? How do we know? How do we return?
Chapter 2: Theology, the Names, the Essence and the Divinity
The connecting thread of the Koran, Chittick argues, is neither its stories nor its laws but the Most Beautiful Names. Ibn al-'Arabi only makes explicit what all Islamic thought assumes. This chapter sets out his vocabulary for the names, how they rank and quarrel, and why the Essence behind them stays unknown.
The Names of God: Five Clarifications
The names are the barzakh between the Essence and the acts. They are "called 'names' by the Law, 'relationships' by sound rational faculties, and 'attributes' by imperfect rational faculties" (the Kalam theologians).
- The names differ from the words we use for them.
- The names are relationships, not entities.
- Each name denotes both the Essence and its own meaning.
- That meaning is its reality or root.
- The reality determines the name's effects or properties in the cosmos.
1. Names of the names
What we utter are the "names of the names" (asma' al-asma'), revealed by God as Speaker. Every name has a meaning and a form. "Call upon Allah or call upon the All-merciful" (17:110): Allah is called by the meaning, the All-merciful by the form, since the forms of words take shape in the Breath of the All-merciful. Our spoken names are "like robes upon the names".
2. Relationships
One God has many names because the names are relationships (nisab, idafat) that appear as soon as God and the cosmos are set side by side: Creator, Maker, Guide, All-holy. They are "non-entities within entities": they have no existence of their own, "but their properties rule over existence". God "does not become multiple through them"; we know them "through the diversity of their effects within us".
3. Two denotations
4. Realities, roots, supports
A reality (haqiqa) is the Essence under one relationship. Root and support extend further, since any verse or hadith may name a root. Examples: dispute among angels rests on contrary names; "Each day He is upon some task" is the support of the present moment. The root of saints appearing in different guises is God's transmutation at the Resurrection, when He changes into the form people recognize. Realities never change: "the servant is a servant and the Lord a Lord", or Order would be corrupted. "In His knowledge we are like forms in a dust cloud."
5. Properties and effects
The Names of Engendered Existence
Conditionality (tawqif): only names God gave Himself may be applied to Him, out of courtesy. Yet "every name by which something is named ... is God's name". So the names are infinite: the ninety-nine are "mothers", like the 360 degrees of the sphere, and every possible entity has its own name gazing upon it.
| Not ascribed | Why |
|---|---|
| Mocker, Deceiver | He mocks and deceives (2:15, 3:54) but has not named Himself so |
| Miser | He "holds back" (al-mani') but gave "each thing its creation" (20:50); holding back what is not due is not miserliness |
| Liar, Ignorant | Contrary to His reality |
Secondary Causes
Only 83 of the 99 names in the received lists are certain, Ibn al-'Arabi says; the real lesson is "O people, you are the poor toward God" (35:15): "In reality there is nothing in existence but His names." Asbab (literally "ropes") are secondary causes. Many Sufis distrusted them; Ibn al-'Arabi reinstates them: "God did not establish the secondary causes aimlessly."
- Causes are veils: they lead back to God those who see them as veils, and "block everyone who takes them as lords".
- The chain: rain, tilling, sun, grain, milling, chewing, liver, blood, vapour, life. Faith lets the ear pierce these veils to hear "Be!"
- Causes have real effects, like an artisan's tools; the art is credited to the artisan.
- Our need of food is need of God: "one of His names is ... the form of that food." We call on Him by our state, not our words.
The Divine Roots of Hierarchy and Conflict
Martaba (level), from r-t-b "to be firm", is a relationship and so nonexistent; yet "the nonexistent displays effects!" King and subject share humanity; only levels distinguish them. "He who knows that excellence pertains to the levels, not to his own entity, will never deceive himself into thinking that he is more excellent." The Prophet: "I am but a mortal like you", then "To me it has been revealed".
Uplifter of degrees (40:15) only designates levels. Levels are infinite; every level must be inhabited, so ranking in degrees fills the cosmos. Divinity is the highest level and the Essence is not a level at all: "Divinity is the Level of the Essence." There are finally only two levels: Lord and servant.
The Names Personified: the Conference of the Names
The names also feed: the first provision from the All-provider is the names' own nourishment, the manifestation of their effects. A poet speaks for them: "Though we sit in the seat of joy, none but you can complete our joy."
The Divine Conflict
The Unity of the Essence
Since the Essence is one, there is no ranking in the divine things themselves: "a thing cannot be considered superior to itself", and wider scope does not mean greater excellence. Allah's relationship to all things is one relationship; number rules the names only within their loci.
| Incomparability (negation) | Acts / similarity (affirmation) |
|---|---|
| Independent, One, All-great, All-high | Compassionate, Forgiving, Magnificent, Self-exalted |
| Demanded by the Essence in Itself | Demanded by the Essence as a god |
| "All darknesses" | "All lights" (ontological qualities) |
The Essence and the Divinity
Divinity (uluha) is the Essence in relation to creatures; the Essence is "witnessed, but not known", while the Divinity is "known, but not witnessed". Loci of manifestation belong to the Level: if the Essence were manifest it would be known, encompassed, limited, confined, owned.
The Unknowability of the Essence
"God warns you about His Self" (3:28) and "Reflect upon all things, but reflect not upon God's Essence." The ban targets reflection (fikr), the method of Kalam and philosophy, not speech grounded in revelation and unveiling.
The Independence of the Essence and Divine Chivalry
The Essence is never compelled to create; but the Divinity, being generous, merciful and munificent, must have objects. "As soon as we have said 'Divinity,' we have also said 'cosmos.'" Asking by state is fuller than asking by words, and giving existence to the nonexistent, the neediest of all, is the greatest generosity.
The Name "Allah"
Allah is a proper name (not derived, out of courtesy) and all-comprehensive, so it cannot be invoked as such. "O Allah, provide for me!" means "O All-provider". One can have intimacy only with a specific name, never with Allah, which contains both Independence and rejoicing at repentance.
Incomparability and Similarity
Kalam treated tashbih as heresy and settled on "true, but do not ask how". For Ibn al-'Arabi both stances follow necessarily from Essence and Level. Reason over-stresses incomparability and explains away (ta'wil) God's hands and sitting; imagination is needed for similarity; godfearing and unveiling join the two.
| Group | Declares |
|---|---|
| Common people | Similarity |
| Rational thinkers (Kalam, philosophers) | Incomparability alone |
| People of Unveiling | Both, each in its place |
Five Clarifications Deepened
Names = barzakh between Essence and acts. Law calls them names; sound reason calls them relationships; imperfect reason (Kalam) calls them attributes.
- What we utter are names of the names (asma' al-asma'): robes upon the names; Allah / Khuday / Waq / Creator.
- Names are relationships (nisab): non-entities within entities; properties rule over existence; God does not become multiple.
- Each name denotes Essence and its own meaning: Exalter and Abaser one Named, many meanings. Ibn Qasi: each name named by all names.
- Reality / root / support: Essence under one relationship; dispute of angels on contrary names; "Each day He is upon some task" supports the present moment.
- Effects (athar): "The divine name is the spirit of its effect, while its effect is its form."
Engendered Names, Causes, Hierarchy, Conference
Names of engendered existence appear when God and cosmos are set side by side. Secondary causes: affirming them is courtesy at the end of the path; refusing them may be praiseworthy in wayfaring but blameworthy as station. Hierarchy and conflict have divine roots: contrary names (Exalter / Abaser, Guide / Misguider). Conference of the Names: personified debate over creation; each name seeks its effects. Divine conflict resolved in the Unity of the Essence.
Essence, Divinity, Allah, Tanzih/Tashbih
Essence unknown; Divinity (uluhiyya) = Essence as related to cosmos (Supreme Barzakh side). Independence of Essence: "Independent of the worlds" (3:97); divine chivalry (futuwwa) approaches through poverty. Name Allah: all-inclusive; gathers every name. Incomparability and similarity: both required; one without the other is incomplete tawhid.
Conference, Conflict, Independence, Chivalry
Conference of the Names dramatizes that creation answers a need of the names for loci, not a lack in the Essence. Divine conflict: contrary properties seek manifestation; hierarchy among names mirrors hierarchy among creatures. Unity of Essence: one Named. Unknowability: "Glory be to Him who is known only by the fact that He is not known." Independence: Independent of worlds as existent cosmos; not of immutability that already supplies thrall. Divine chivalry: approach through what He does not "have" as need: lowliness and poverty.
Secondary Causes and Divine Roots of Conflict Deepened
Refusing secondary causes can be perfection in state and imperfection in station. Obliteration removes reliance, not the cause; your entity is the greatest veil and the cause of your knowledge of God. "You did not throw when you threw but God threw" (8:17). Curtain = human nature; jealousy + mercy hang the veil (glories of Face would burn). Prayer for rain affirms causes. "I am your cause, depend on Me." Man affirms secondary causes; knows Lord not Essence. Abolishing causes = discourtesy, contender not servant.
Hierarchy: angels' dispute rests on contrary names. Present moment supported by "Each day He is upon some task." Saints appear in different guises on the root of God's transmutation at Resurrection. Realities never change: servant servant, Lord Lord, or Order corrupted. "In His knowledge we are like forms in a dust cloud."
Names, Attributes, Relationships; Most Beautiful Names
Divine Presence = Essence + Attributes + Acts. Essence is God without reference to relationships. Most Beautiful Names appear singly, in pairs, in groups; most Islamic theological thinking revolves around Koranic names. Kalam debates attributes; Ibn al-'Arabi relocates the debate into relationships (nisab) and effects (athar). Conference of Names: creation answers names' need for loci, not Essence's lack. Divine conflict: contrary properties seek manifestation. Hierarchy among names mirrors hierarchy among creatures. Unity of Essence: one Named. Unknowability: known only that He is not known. Independence: Independent of worlds as existent cosmos, not of immutability that already supplies thrall. Divine chivalry: approach through poverty and lowliness.
Secondary causes: affirm where God affirms; entity is greatest veil and cause of knowledge of God; "You did not throw when you threw" (8:17). Curtain = human nature; jealousy + mercy hang the veil. Prayer for rain affirms causes. Abolishing causes = discourtesy.
Most Beautiful Names Practice; Pairing; Effects
Names mentioned singly, in pairs, in groups throughout the Koran. Effects (athar) belong to names out of Jealousy: the Named is one; properties differ. Pairing (All-merciful / All-compassionate, Outward / Inward, First / Last) trains two-eyed reading. Gathering name Allah collects what scattered names disperse. Servant assumes traits of names without claiming Lordship: the difference between takhalluq and ta'alluh as theft. Present moment supported by "Each day He is upon some task." Saints appear in different guises on the root of God's transmutation at Resurrection. Realities never change: servant servant, Lord Lord, or the Order is corrupted. "In His knowledge we are like forms in a dust cloud."
Chapter 3: Ontology, Being, the New Creation, Imagination and the Supreme Barzakh
Ibn al-'Arabi is remembered as the founder of the Oneness of Being (wahdat al-wujud), though he never used the phrase. Chittick's longest chapter shows what the idea actually claims: only God is; everything else is a nonexistent entity made visible by Being. From there it moves through perpetual re-creation, the heart, cosmic imagination, and the Supreme Barzakh that stands between God and nothing.
5. Existence and Nonexistence
Reduced to a slogan, the doctrine says there is one Being, and all existence is its outward radiance. Critics call that "pantheism", usually as a dismissal. Chittick replies that the Shaykh's own account is "one of the most sophisticated and nuanced expressions" of tawhid in Islamic thought, and that later centuries did not adopt it because people were simple-minded. The key move: God in Himself is Being, and nonexistence has no relation to Him. What sets "everything other than God" apart is an admixture of nonexistence. But nonexistence here is not sheer nothing: things exist in God's knowledge "in a manner analogous to the way our thoughts exist in our minds".
Wujud and mawjud
Wujud carries three senses: Being, existence and finding. Chittick reserves Being for God's own Reality and existence for the fact that things are found in the cosmos. Philosophers separate a thing's quiddity (mahiyya, from ma hiya, "what is it?") from its existence: dragons and phoenixes can be discussed whether or not they exist. Only in God are the two identical, so when we ask "What is it?" of God, the only answer wide enough is wujud, which for the Shaykh is equivalent to "Allah". The term itself is not Koranic; it came from the philosophers. Ibn al-'Arabi answers their question "If God is wujud, are the things also wujud?" with "yes and no".
Possible things and the Preponderator
From the philosophers he takes the triad Necessary (cannot not be), impossible (cannot enter the cosmos, though it can exist in a mind) and possible (mumkin), "that reality whose relationship to existence and nonexistence is equal". For a possible thing to exist, the Necessary must "give preponderance" (tarjih) to its existence, so God is the Preponderator (murajjih).
- Searching the signs, the traveller finds no proof of a Maker except his own possibility: in himself, existence and nonexistence weigh the same, so he is poor toward a Preponderator.
- He then learns that this Preponderator is incomparable with the poverty of possible things.
- Finally he sees that the Necessary Being "cannot possibly become nonexistent".
The giving of preponderance is also a love story. The possible things sought existence "by their very essences", and God, who "loved to be known", submitted to that seeking "as a lover submits to his beloved". "But in reality, He only submitted to Himself. The possible thing is a veil over this divine seeking."
Entities, not archetypes
'Ayn in its technical sense means entity: what makes this thing this and not that. The famous 'ayn thabita is usually rendered "permanent archetype", which Chittick finds misleading. Platonic ideas correspond to the divine names; the immutable entities are the things themselves "before" they exist. Ibn al-'Arabi took the term from the Mu'tazilites, who, he says, did not grasp its full sense. His follower Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi made ta'ayyun, "entification", a central term.
| Immutable ('ayn thabita) | Existent ('ayn mawjuda) |
|---|---|
| In God's knowledge | In the cosmos |
| "Nonexistent", thingness of immutability | "Existent", thingness of existence |
| Infinite | Always finite |
| Never leaves God's knowledge | Still immutable in God's knowledge while it exists |
The old quarrel over whether the cosmos is eternal (philosophers) or temporally originated (theologians) becomes a matter of perspective. God never ceases seeing the cosmos, so from the side of His sight it is eternal; from the side of its own entity, which did not always exist, it is originated.
God is "Independent of the worlds" in respect of the cosmos's existence, not its immutability, which already supplies the Divinity with its thrall. The things, having tasted nonexistence, ask "with the tongue of their immutability" to taste existence: "Hence He brings them into existence for themselves, not for Himself."
Two kinds of nonexistence
The impossible has absolute nonexistence and can never exist; the Necessary has no share in nonexistence. "We [creatures] are at the level of the middle", nearer to nonexistence because we are nonexistent things, but marked by possibility, not impossibility.
"There is no thing whose treasuries are not with Us" (15:21): the treasuries are the possibilities of things. Things move "from an existence which we do not perceive to an existence which we do perceive", so their nonexistence is only relative (idafi).
Things, engendered existence and loci of manifestation
Thing (shay') is "one of the most indefinite of the indefinites", applicable to anything except God; out of courtesy Ibn al-'Arabi will not call God a thing. "God is, and no thing is with Him" uses kana, which Sibawayh took as a word denoting existence, not past time. Withness follows knowledge: "He knows us, so He is with us. We do not know Him, so we are not with Him." The command "Be!" (kun) gives kawn, engendered existence.
His signature term is mazhar, "locus of manifestation", which he claims to have used first. Most Sufis treat outward form as a deceptive veil; Ibn al-'Arabi "radically affirms the revelatory nature of phenomena": what appears is Being, coloured by the nonexistent things. The support is 57:3, read literally: He is Manifest ("Withersoever you turn, there is the Face of God", 2:115, similarity) and Nonmanifest ("Sight perceives Him not", 6:103, incomparability).
Unity lies in the Manifest; plurality lies in the loci. Because the Manifest never competes with the Nonmanifest, tawhid requires "no competition": the one who professes Unity should "not see anything unless He is the seen and the seer ... the hearer, the hearing, and the heard".
Self-disclosure and preparedness
Self-disclosure (tajalli) can be ontological (creating) or epistemological (unveiling to hearts), because for the Shaykh "existence and knowledge are two names for the same reality"; "Ignorance is nonexistence, while knowledge is verified existence." What each thing receives depends on its receptivity (qabul) and preparedness (isti'dad), as a classroom holds as many aptitudes as students. Minerals, plants, animals and humans form a ladder of capacity; only perfect man displays Being in its fullness.
- A cold temperament enjoys the heat that a hot one suffers.
- The sun blackens the washerman's face while it whitens the clothes.
- One breath puts out a lamp and kindles tinder.
- One verse yields one meaning to one hearer, nothing to another, many to a third.
"Surely He encompasses everything" (41:54): the Manifest is the Encompasser and, like a body, conceals the cosmos within as a spirit is hidden in a body. In the seventh and highest stage of annihilation, the traveller sees the Real in the locus "in the form of the preparedness possessed by the locus", and so loses even the right to attribute names and attributes to God.
Oneness of Being and the effects of the names
Every thing is a name of Being. "He who loses sight of the Face of the Real in the things is able to make claims, and making claims is identical with illness." In existence "they are/they are not": they are, since the Manifest is their properties; they are not, since they have no entity in existence. Likewise "He is and is not". The servant owns nothing of the names except his entity; "there is no ontological named thing except God". The effects too belong to the names, "out of God's Jealousy, lest those effects be attributed to the entities".
6. The New Creation
The Oneness of Being can look static, yet "few concepts are as central ... as change". Everything other than God is in flux. Two verses carry the idea: "they are in confusion as to a new creation" (50:15) and "Each day He is upon some task" (55:29). Two companion doctrines follow: no repetition in self-disclosure, and the divine vastness, which requires infinite possible things.
Infinite possibility
Possibility is an inexhaustible Treasury. Being can take the form of any possible thing, as the water on which the Throne rests (11:7) takes any vessel's shape. But one form excludes another, so the manifest cosmos is always finite: "the infinite does not enter into existence all at once; rather it enters little by little, with no end."
Perpetual renewal
The Ash'arites taught that "the accident does not remain for two moments" while substances endure. Ibn al-'Arabi's correction: substances too are accidents. "The whole cosmos is a collection of accidents" (Fusus), and the only true substance is the One Entity, Being or the Breath of the All-merciful. "No form ever remains for two instants ... the entities are receivers which take off and put on [existence]."
Breaking habits. Saints' miracles are called kharq al-'ada, "breaking the habit", and a habit is "that which returns". But nothing returns, so there are no habits to break: such acts are simply new engenderings. "The Divinity is vaster than that It should cause anything to return, but the similar things are veils upon the eyes of the blind."
Transmutation. At the Resurrection God appears in form after form until "He transmutes Himself into the form in which they saw Him the first time". This tahawwul is the root of all change, in imagination, in the senses and in the elements, where water becomes air and air fire. The cosmos holds "three mysteries: its substance, its forms, and transmutation. There is no fourth." God's states are shown in His rejoicing at repentance before it happens and in the wrath "with the like of which He has not become wrathful before". The image he uses is a tree: "He is the Root, and we are the branch ... The names are the boughs of this tree of existence, and we are identical with its fruit, or rather, He is identical with its fruit."
There is no stillness: motion's "first property" is the passage of entities from nonexistence to existence. The Futuhat opens: "Praise belongs to God who brought the things into existence from a nonexistence and from its nonexistence"; the "nonexistence of nonexistence" is the things' hidden existence in the Treasuries.
Never-repeating self-disclosures
Abu Talib al-Makki (d. 996) said God "never discloses Himself in a single form to two individuals, nor in a single form twice", which hardened into the axiom la takrar fi'l-tajalli. "Those who recognize it worship Him in every state. Those who do not recognize it deny Him in every state." The changes do not split the Self-discloser, any more than a man's shifting thoughts make him many: "he knows ... that his he-ness remains the same".
Boredom
The pleasure of encounter exceeds the pleasure of unbroken companionship, so the Beloved absents Himself to teach courtesy in love, as the frightened man finds new safety sweeter than lasting safety. Paradise bliss is therefore renewed at every instant, made keener by "expecting separation".
The heart
Qalb (heart) shares a root with taqallub (fluctuation). "The hearts of all the children of Adam are like a single heart between two of the fingers of the All-merciful. He turns it wherever He desires." In Islamic usage the heart is a seat of knowledge, not sentiment. It is the "noblest house in the man of faith", the microcosmic Throne: "My earth and My heaven embrace Me not, but the heart of My believing servant does embrace Me."
| Heart (qalb) | Reason ('aql) |
|---|---|
| From "fluctuation" | From 'iqal, the fetter that hobbles a camel |
| Nondelimited, like Being | Delimits, defines, binds |
| Fluctuates with the self-disclosures | Fixes God in one state |
| "For him who has a heart" (50:37): not everyone | Every human has it |
Nondelimitation
God is nondelimited (mutlaq), and also "free of delimitation by nondelimitation": He can take on every limit without being bound by it, a "Nondelimited Delimitation". Likewise He is not "incomparable with similarity". "The greatest ascetic discipline of the knowledgeable servant is to refrain from denying Him in any form and from delimiting Him by incomparability."
The "gnostics through Him" combine tanzih and tashbih and see Him in each thing; those who know by reason put Him at a distance and "call to Him from a far place" (41:44). The Folk of Allah must therefore know "the doctrine of every sect and creed concerning God, in order to witness Him in every form". God has all-pervading Being, they all-pervading witnessing. The prayer direction shows the balance: His Face is wherever you turn, yet you face the Kaaba in prayer.
7. Cosmic Imagination
Truth about things is not found in "either/or" but in "both/and" or "neither/nor". Ambiguity "is an ontological fact": Being alone is certain, and it is the coincidence of opposites. Our clearest access to this is our own imagination, above all dreams. As imagination is the barzakh between spirit and body, existence is the barzakh between Being and nothingness; the cosmos is God's "dream", and at death we wake to its interpretation. Ignorant of imagination, philosophers and theologians explained away whatever defied logic, while others said only "God says so". The shahada, "no god but God", already joins negation and affirmation.
He/not He
The lover is "obliteration in affirmation": affirmed because commands are addressed to him, obliterated because "God created you and what you do" (37:96). God as Lover is the reverse: hidden in the visible world, where the eye falls only on the servant's act, but affirmed in the World of Witnessing. The cosmos displays all the names in differentiated mode; the human being displays them in undifferentiated mode. In the Tirmidhi hadith Adam chooses God's right hand, "though both hands of my Lord are right", and finds himself and his seed inside it while standing outside it: "a place of bewilderment: He/not He." Zayd's foot is not his hand, yet each is Zayd.
What imagination is
Imagination (khayal) gives a meaning (an intelligible without form) a sensory form. Normally meanings and sensory forms exclude each other; imagination joins them, so it manifests the name the Strong. "Nothing has truly gained possession of the [Divine] Form except imagination."
- Meanings free of substrata, perceived by reason through proof or a priori.
- Sensory things, perceived by the senses.
- Imaginal things, perceivable by either: "meanings that assume shape in sensory forms", shaped by the form-giving faculty.
| Name | What it is | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Nondelimited Imagination | All existence; the cosmos as such | "neither existent nor nonexistent" |
| Discontiguous (munfasil) | Intermediate world, autonomous of the viewer | Gabriel in the form of Dihya |
| Contiguous (muttasil) | The soul and its faculty; ends with the imaginer | Dreams, daydreams |
A barzakh separates two things "while never going to one side", like the line between shadow and sunlight, or the barrier between two seas that "do not overpass" (55:19). If the senses could see it, it would be one of the two sides.
Dreams
Sleep was placed in animals "so that everyone might witness the Presence of Imagination" and notice that the sensory world too is transmuted every instant. Interpretation (ta'bir) means "crossing over" from form to meaning; so does expression ('ibara), which carries words "from imagination to imagination". When speaker's and listener's images coincide, that is "understanding". The Prophet dreamt of drinking milk until his fingertips were quenched and gave the rest to 'Umar: "Knowledge."
The manifestation of the impossible
Only imagination makes sense of reports about the afterlife, such as fruits of the Garden "neither cut off, nor forbidden" (56:33), eaten while staying on the tree. Rational thinkers call such visions "corrupt imagination". The Shaykh's reply: "let it be sound or corrupt, I do not care. Our goal is only to establish the existence of imagination." "He who does not know the level of imagination has no true knowledge whatsoever."
8. The Supreme Barzakh
Being does not change; existents never rest. The source of that restlessness lies in the Barzakh between God and nothingness, the "Supreme Barzakh" or "Barzakh of Barzakhs", distinct from the barzakh between spirits and bodies. Its names overlap without being exact synonyms.
The Cloud
Asked "Where was our Lord before He created the creatures?", the Prophet said: "He came to be in a cloud ('ama'), neither above which nor below which was any air." Negating the air shows that nothing drives this Cloud except God; "before" signals a relationship, not time. The Shaykh reads "came to be", not "was", and counts five such comings-to-be: in the Cloud, on the Throne (20:5), in the lowest heaven each night, in the earth (6:3), and with all things "wherever you come to be" (57:4).
The Breath of the All-merciful
The phrase comes from two hadiths: "Do not curse the wind, for it derives from the Breath of the All-merciful" and "I find the Breath of the All-merciful coming to me from the direction of Yemen". Nafas (breath) is tied to tanfis, "relief". Its root is love: "I was a Treasure but was not known, so I loved to be known"; breath is yearning's movement.
| Human breath | All-merciful Breath |
|---|---|
| A vapour | The Cloud |
| Relieves tightness in the chest | Relieves the distress of the names and entities |
| Carries words | Carries God's words, the creatures |
| 28 letters from places of articulation, ha' to waw | 28 cosmic letters, from the First Intellect to each thing's utmost limit |
| Throat shapes the sound | Preparedness of the entities shapes Being |
God's love for us comes from vision (seeing us in Himself as the Hidden Treasure); our love for Him comes from audition, hearing "Be!" while still immutable in the Cloud: "we were not able to keep back from existence."
Relief through mercy
| All-merciful (rahman) | All-compassionate (rahim) |
|---|---|
| Essential mercy, free gift | Mercy of obligation |
| All-inclusive: "Existence itself is a mercy for every existent thing" | Specific: for the godfearing who pay alms and have faith |
| Root of all | Earned, yet still grounded in the free gift |
Nonexistence is constriction; the possible thing knowing its possibility is in distress, and the names suffer at being unable to show their effects. "Through the Breath of the All-merciful God gave relief to the divine names." Since mercy precedes wrath and all comes from it, "all people and creatures end up with mercy". The breather finds ease in breathing out, so creation is God's mercy even toward Himself: "the cosmos is identical with mercy, nothing else."
The Real Through Whom Creation Takes Place
The phrase (al-haqq al-makhluq bihi) is from Ibn Barrajan of Seville (d. 1141), drawn from "We created them not save through the Real" (44:39, 15:85). Al-haqq stands opposite khalq (creation) and batil (the unreal, which equals nonexistence). "Wujud is all Real. However, some of what is Real is described as created, and some ... not created." The Cloud is the first thing of which "where?" can be asked; between it and earth there are only names of acts.
The Universal Reality
The Reality of Realities is the Cloud seen as the totality of relationships between God and the world: the nonmanifest root (Lord) of each manifest branch (vassal). It is "neither existent nor nonexistent, neither temporally originated nor eternal, but eternal in the eternal and temporally originated in the temporally originated". Ibn al-'Arabi lists four objects of knowledge: the Essence, the cosmos, the human being, and this Reality, which joins them. He also calls it the Third Thing, beside what exists by itself and what exists by another.
The air absent from the Cloud has a pun: hawa' (air) and hawa (caprice). Saying no air touches the Cloud means God does not turn things about "because of airs": "the states change, but He does not change with them." His speech is eternal yet "temporally originated" for the one it reaches (21:2).
Nature
Tabi'a comes from a root meaning "to imprint" or "seal". It is the receptive, feminine side, though it holds active and receptive forms alike. It is darkness beside the spirit, but light beside nothingness ("darkness is a kind of light"). It is never seen, only its effects.
- The highest, greatest mother: the Supreme Barzakh, synonym of the Cloud; the First Intellect is "one of the forms of Nature".
- The second mother, "daughter of the Greatest Nature", between the Universal Soul and the Dust (Hyle); she gives birth to bodily forms.
- The four natures: heat and cold active, dryness and wetness receptive; their mutual aversion is the root of all conflict, including the dispute of the higher plenum (38:69).
- Woman and man: Nature is to the Divine Command as woman to man. "There can be no Command without Nature and no Nature without Command."
Bewilderment as the right result
Chittick ends by conceding that the Barzakh cannot be made fully clear, because its nature is ambiguity. "If you say the cosmos is He, I have to reply that it is not He ... I will say yes and no." "Engendered being is only imagination, yet in truth it is the Real. He who has understood this point has grasped the mysteries of the Path" (Fusus). The dead end of reason does not end the search ("increase me in knowledge"); it points to other ways of knowing, guided by revelation, and so leads into the next chapter: how do we find God?
Wujud Deepened: Entities, Marriage, Shadow
Only God is; else = nonexistent entity made visible by Being. We see neither things in themselves nor God in Himself: Being coloured by properties of nonexistent things. Wujud = Being / existence / finding. Necessary / possible / impossible; God = Preponderator. Traveller's three journeys (II 382): own possibility; incomparability of Preponderator; Necessary cannot become nonexistent.
Immutable entity ('ayn thabita) ≠ Platonic archetype (names are closer to that). Same reality: immutable in knowledge, existent in cosmos. Needle-in-sea hadith: immutable infinite, existent finite. Divine marriage: entity = wife; attentiveness of love = marriage; offspring = existence; wedding feasts = rejoicing of names; no divorce.
New Creation, Heart, Nondelimitation
Khalq jadid (50:15); "Each day He is upon some task" (55:29); no repetition (la takrar fi'l-tajalli). Ash'arites: accident lasts not two moments; Ibn al-'Arabi: substances too are accidents; substance = One Entity / Breath. Remaining two moments = claim of independence. Day = indivisible moment; chameleon; miracles as "breaking habits" when there are no habits.
Heart (qalb) ~ fluctuation (taqallub); between two fingers of the All-merciful; Ka'ba of the Real; "My earth and heaven embrace Me not, but the heart of the believing servant." Reason ('aql) from hobble ('iqal). Stability in variegation (tamkin fi'l-talwin) higher than mere stability. Goblet of love: glass takes color of wine.
Nondelimitation: God not delimited by nondelimitation; "Nondelimited Delimitation." Greatest ascetic discipline: not deny Him in any form. Folk of Allah must know every creed's doctrine to witness Him in every form.
Cosmic Imagination and Supreme Barzakh
He/not He: 8:17 "You did not throw when you threw, but God threw." Imagination: meaning given sensory form; Nondelimited / discontiguous / contiguous. Dreams: sleep so all witness Presence of Imagination; ta'bir = crossing over; "People are asleep; when they die they awake." Impossible manifests in imagination (Garden fruits eaten yet remain). Trumpet = horn of light (wide and narrow).
Supreme Barzakh names: Nondelimited Imagination, Cloud ('ama'), Breath of the All-merciful, Real Through Whom Creation Takes Place, Universal Reality, Nature, Reality of Perfect Man. Cloud: "Where was our Lord before creating?" "In a cloud..." Breath: vapour, relief, vehicle of words; creatures = words; 28 letters. Mercy precedes wrath; existence itself a mercy. Nature = receptive/feminine; four natures; conflict -> dispute of angels.
Preparedness, Oneness Slogan, Breath Letters
Self-disclosure and preparedness (isti'dad): classroom; unanswered prayer (17:20); sun cold/hot by temperament; washerman face black clothes white; breath extinguishes lamp ignites tinder. "You want Him to give you something your preparedness cannot receive." Oneness of Being slogan: not his phrase; effects belong to names out of Jealousy; "they are / they are not."
Breath: 28 letters, places of articulation; ha' first (First Intellect) to waw last; genera limited, individuals infinite. "Letters not other than Breath nor same." Mercy: All-merciful (essential, free, all-inclusive) vs All-compassionate (obligation, specific) 7:156. Nature: highest mother; four natures; spirits created from Nature hence embodiable. Close: Fusus 159 "Engendered being is only imagination, yet in truth it is the Real."
Dreams, Impossible, Horn of Light, Nature Close
Imagination Absolute Ruler over known things. Sleep: rest vs transferal; Treasury of Imagination; king entering treasuries; born blind/deaf imperfect treasuries. Angels do not dream; locus elemental plane under sphere of moon. Horn of light: no corrupt imagination at the horn; judgment belongs to reason; narrow at top (Essence sciences fewer), wide at bottom (Presence of Acts). Meeting Place of Two Seas (18:60): embodies meanings, subtilizes sensory.
Nature (tabi'a): imprint/seal; receptive feminine; darkness relative to spirit, light relative to nothing; Intellect a form of Nature; Woman:man :: Nature:Command. World of Command good; Creation's composition requires evil; angels' protest (2:30). Analysis of Fusus line leads to bewilderment; incapacity to comprehend; revelation guides imagination; bridge to epistemology.
Existence / Nonexistence; Immutable Entities; New Creation Core
Oneness of Being (wahdat al-wujud): not his slogan; pantheism is a dismissive mislabel. God is Being; other = admixture of nonexistence; nonexistence is not sheer nothingness (things in God's knowledge are like thoughts). Cosmos is He/not He. Wujud: Being (Essence) vs existence (things found). Necessary / possible / impossible. Entity ('ayn); immutable entity ('ayn thabita) is the thing itself before existence, not a Platonic "permanent archetype" (Platonic ideas map nearer to names). One Entity: earth and plants; Zayd and Amr both man. Needle in sea hadith: immutable infinite, existent finite. Divine Marriage: entity as wife, attentiveness of love as marriage, offspring existence.
New creation (khalq jadid, 50:15): "Each day He is upon some task" (55:29); no repetition; water takes shape of receptacle. Ash'arites: accident does not remain two moments; Ibn al-'Arabi: substances too are accidents; substance = One Entity / Breath. Remaining two moments would be independence from God. Tree of existence: He root, names boughs, we fruit. Heart (qalb) = fluctuation; between two fingers of the All-merciful; Ka'ba and Throne; "My earth and heaven embrace Me not, but the heart of the believing servant." Stability in variegation higher than bare stability. Nondelimitation: God not delimited by nondelimitation; greatest discipline: not deny Him in any form.
Imagination Absolute Ruler over known things. Three senses: Nondelimited (all existence), discontiguous (intermediate world), contiguous (soul faculty). Supreme Barzakh names: Cloud, Breath of the All-merciful, Real Through Whom Creation Takes Place, Universal Reality, Nature, Reality of Perfect Man. Mercy precedes wrath; existence itself is a mercy; all end in mercy.
He/not He; Cloud; Letters; Nature; Horn
He/not He: Badr sand (8:17); lover obliterated in Visible, affirmed in Witnessing. Cosmos names differentiated; man undifferentiated. Adam hadith: both hands right; Adam in hand and outside: bewilderment. Barzakh: line between shadow and sunlight; two seas (55:19); mirror: "I saw my form, I did not see my form."
Cloud ('ama'): "Where was our Lord before creating?" "In a cloud, neither above nor below which any air." Five comings-to-be: Cloud, Throne, heaven, earth, all-inclusive (57:4). Breath: vapour, relief, vehicle of words; creatures = words; 28 letters from ha' (First Intellect) to waw. "Letters not other than Breath nor same." All-merciful (essential, free, all-inclusive) vs All-compassionate (obligation, specific) 7:156. Nature: imprint/seal; receptive feminine; four natures; spirits from Nature hence embodiable; World of Command good; Creation's composition requires evil; angels' protest (2:30). Horn of light: narrow at top (Essence sciences fewer), wide at bottom (Presence of Acts); Meeting Place of Two Seas (18:60).
| Term | Function | Caution | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Immutable entity | Thing before existence | Not Platonic archetype | Breath |
| Substance of cosmos | Letters = words of God | Cloud | Where before creating |
| First "Where?" | Nature | Receptive mother | Relative darkness |
Relative Nonexistence; Boredom; Satisfaction; Treasuries
Relative vs absolute nonexistence; we are the middle. Dialogue: Nonexistence says "Be as you are"; things help God against impossible nonexistence (47:7) and never return because of the sweet pleasure of existence. Treasuries (15:21) = possibilities. Thing (shay') most indefinite of indefinites; not ascribed to God (courtesy). "God is, and no thing is with Him"; He is with things, not they with Him. Boredom (malal): "God does not become bored that you should become bored"; boredom from unceasing companionship; greatest veils: ignorance and yourself. Encounter sweeter than unceasing companionship; paradise bliss renewed. "Boredom is the greatest proof that man has remained ignorant." Satisfaction not desirable in knowledge: "My Lord increase me in knowledge" (20:114). Belief's object is only ourselves if we do not pass; presence only with yourself; "returning from yourself to yourself." Those who recognize worship Him in every state; "Praise God for every state." Mirror facing sun ignites cotton. Man fluctuates but knows his he-ness same.
Chapter 4: Epistemology, Knowledge, Reason, Unveiling and the Scale of the Law
Having shown in Chapter 3 that reason ends in bewilderment before a cosmos that is He/not He, Chittick now asks how anyone comes to know God at all. Ibn al-'Arabi's answer has three parts: knowledge is the highest good and is endless; reason, reflection and consideration have real but narrow uses; and the sure road runs through the Scale of the Law, which opens the heart to unveiling.
9. Knowledge and the Knower
Few concerns weigh as much in Islam as the search for knowledge ('ilm). The only thing the Prophet was told to ask more of was knowledge: "My Lord, increase me in knowledge!" (20:114). The Shahada frames all of it: knowledge is first of God, and "other than God" matters because no knowledge of God comes without intermediaries. The other must be known with a view toward God, and everything taken back to the One. That is what tawhid means.
Unlike many Sufis who put love first, Ibn al-'Arabi approaches God mainly through knowing. The jurists' knowledge of the Law, the theologians' Kalam and the philosophers' reason are all "useful and good", yet each can become an obstruction to the most useful knowledge, the kind "taught by God Himself".
Knowledge and mercy are the two attributes the Koran calls all-embracing (40:7). Knowledge cannot be defined, since it contains every definition and nothing is brighter than it to light it up. Its seat is the heart: knowledge is "for the heart to acquire something as that thing is in itself, whether the thing is nonexistent or existent" (I 91).
'Ilm and ma'rifa
Arabic has two words for knowing. The Koran ascribes only 'ilm to God. Many Sufis ranked ma'rifa ("gnosis") higher, meaning the direct knowledge called unveiling, witnessing and tasting. Ibn al-'Arabi places ma'rifa as "lordly" and 'ilm as "divine", then shrugs: the other camp simply swaps the labels, so "the disagreement lies in the names, not in the meaning" (II 318). Chittick therefore translates both as "knowledge" unless the contrast matters.
Knowledge needs practice
Knowledge without practice is not knowledge. The Shaykh's metaphysical reason: knowledge alone touches only God as Nonmanifest; knowledge with practice spans both Nonmanifest and Manifest, which is the wider domain because it holds "both creation and the Real" (II 533). Practice includes inward acts of the soul as well as outward acts of the body, and the most inclusive inward practice is faith (II 559).
Useful knowledge and felicity
The Prophet sought refuge from "a knowledge which has no use." Useless knowledge is cut off from its source; useful knowledge sees the web of things with God at the centre and takes the knower back to Him. Many commentators, starting with Ibn 'Abbas, read "I created jinn and mankind only to worship Me" (51:56) as "to know Me". Hence "knowledge of other than God is a waste of time" (IV 221).
But all knowledge returns to God, so the question is which face of God it returns to. Useful knowledge leads to the Merciful and Forgiving, not the Avenger, and so to felicity (sa'ada) rather than wretchedness (shaqa'). Felicity is "to attain ... all the individual desires created within him" (II 673), which happens fully only in the Garden. Wrath "will be cut off", approval never (III 382). Anything that does not lead to God "by a road of felicity" is not knowledge but surmise (zann): "surmise avails naught against the Real" (53:28).
The limits and the infinity of knowledge
All knowledge is knowledge of God, yet the Essence cannot be known. We know His names and their effects, the creatures, never the Essence. "Glory be to Him who is known only by the fact that He is not known!" (II 552). Abu Bakr put it best: "Incapacity to attain comprehension is itself comprehension", which is "knowledge/not knowledge".
The flip side is endlessness. The possible things are infinite, so the objects of knowledge are infinite, and human knowing never stops, here or hereafter. This is "the secret of man's felicity". For the blessed, each new self-disclosure fits a soul shaped by faith and practice and is a new joy. For the wretched, each sight of things as they are contradicts their beliefs and is a new torment, until mercy's precedence over wrath eases it.
All this knowledge is already latent in us. At the Covenant (7:172) God "deposited within man knowledge of all things, then prevented him from perceiving" it. So all coming-to-know is recollection (tadhakkur), unveiled "instant by instant", never all at once, since the infinite cannot be gathered into a finite moment. Dhu'l-Nun remembered the Covenant; the rest of us believe it on report (II 686).
Flight, not renunciation
Infinity also reshapes Sufi practice. "So flee to God" (51:50): the soul is safe through manyness, since "Allah" gathers all the names of good, and the names of mercy outnumber those of taking to task. Each name wants to hold you; felicity lies in increase, which means passing on to the property of another name. So "flight" goes on forever (II 156).
Renunciation (zuhd) of "everything other than God" is useful early on but finally ignorance. The whole cosmos glorifies God (17:44); the secondary causes are our only means of knowing Him; and no one can "come out" of the cosmos without coming out of himself, which would join the possible thing to impossibility. The next verse explains the flight: "And set not up with God another god" (51:51). True flight is "from ignorance to knowledge". Even the Prophet's retreats in the cave of Hira' ended in a return to people; "man's inward dimension is the cell of his retreat" (III 263).
10. Acquiring Knowledge
Knowledge comes through reflection, unveiling or scripture. The knowing subject is one: the human subtle reality, or soul. When it knows by reflecting, its mode is reason ('aql); when it knows directly from God, the mode is the heart (qalb). The roots tell the story: 'aql is a fetter, binding and defining; qalb is fluctuation, turning with the never-repeating self-disclosures.
| Reason ('aql) | Heart (qalb) |
|---|---|
| Root sense: fetter, binding | Root sense: turning, fluctuation |
| Works through reflection and the senses | Receives directly from God |
| Reaches incomparability (what God is not) | Sees similarity in self-disclosure as well |
| Prone to obfuscation | Unveiling "not seized by obfuscation" |
| Follows the authority of reflection | Follows the authority of God |
The rational faculty
In spiritual beings 'aql is better rendered intellect, as in the First Intellect. In man it almost always implies restriction. There are six perceivers: hearing, sight, smell, touch, taste and reason. The senses are never mistaken; "the error belongs only to that which passes judgment" (I 213). Reason perceives in two modes: one inherent and infallible like the senses, the other dependent on six instruments, the five senses plus reflection.
Reason has a second, moral sense: the opposite of passion (shahwa). Passion is good in itself, the life of the animal soul and a gift of mother Nature. There is an accidental passion one must not follow and an inherent one one must follow, weighed by the Divine Scale (II 191). "Were it not for reason, natural passion would be praiseworthy" (II 190). Likewise caprice (hawa) is negative only because the Law exists: "Follow not what you love, but follow what I love" (II 336).
- Angels and inanimate things: innate knowledge of God, no reason, no passion.
- Animals: innate knowledge plus passion.
- Mankind and jinn: passion and cognitions of their outward forms, but no innate gnosis in their spirits. They get reason to keep passion within the Scale of the Law, and reflection to acquire sciences.
Reflection: the human affliction
Reflection (fikr) belongs only to human beings and comes from the divine form in which Adam was created. Bees and spiders share the cognitive and practical faculties of the soul; neither animals nor the First Intellect nor the Universal Soul has the third, reflective faculty, which mirrors God's "He governs the affair, He differentiates the signs" (13:2) (I 260). It is man's highest tool, and so his great affliction (bala'), a trial that can lead to felicity or ruin.
Reflection may roam only in imagination, which collects the senses' data, and a "form-giver" builds forms that do not exist as such. Reflection may land on an obfuscation or a proof "without knowing which it is", yet thinks it knows. Reason, "a plain creature", accepts what reflection hands it, so "the rational faculty has more ignorance than knowledge of what is not near to it". God told reason to reflect ("Have they not reflected?", 7:184) so it would grasp "that the only way to know God is for God to give it knowledge". Reason misread the order and made reflection its leader (I 125).
What reflection can give is incomparability. The marks that show the cosmos is originated, once negated of God, denote Him: "denotations have two faces, though they are one in entity" (II 305). The signs "upon the horizons and in themselves" (41:53) are self-disclosure, and "Is not your Lord sufficient?" means sufficient as a denotation of Himself. Positive knowledge, of what God is, needs revelation. Faith in the reports makes a person felicitous; making "corrupt reflection his leader" and explaining the reports away makes him wretched (II 648).
Consideration and its playing field
Nazar, "consideration", is the reasoning of the theologians and philosophers. The Koran commands it, and the Shaykh calls it positive, but the learned forgot its goal. Reflection is "a station of danger" because it cannot tell when it is wrong. It is reliably right only on the Koranic verses that actually invite reflection and heed ("Do they not consider how the camel was created?", 88:17); applied to the verses of reason, hearing, knowing or faith, it "will never be correct" (II 230).
Following authority
Taqlid, following authority, comes from qilada, a collar: you wear another's words around your neck. Jurists contrast it with ijtihad; Ibn al-'Arabi contrasts it with tahqiq, verification. Sufis often sneer at taqlid as the habit of the common people. The Shaykh turns the argument round: taqlid cannot be escaped. Only the One knows through His own Essence. Everyone else knows through faculties added to the self, the senses and reason, and so follows their authority. Since reason follows reflection, its hits are "by chance". The only question is whom to follow.
Following leads to verification. The Tribe polishes the heart with invocation, Koran recitation, presence and self-examination (muraqaba), guards the seven members (eyes, hearing, tongue, hand, foot, stomach, private parts) and the heart, drops reflection because it "disperses his singleminded concern", and waits at the Lord's gate. When it opens, what was once narrated on faith is now known by unveiling that confirms the scriptures (I 271).
Unveiling
The second kind of knowledge goes by unveiling (kashf), tasting, opening, insight and witnessing. Knowledge comes by reflection or by bestowal (wahb), the divine effusion; the sciences of prophets and friends lie "beyond the stage of reason", though a sound reason can accept them (I 261). There are only two ways to God. Unveiling is incontrovertible and needs no proof beyond what one finds in oneself. (His Fez companion Ibn al-Kattani said the proof is unveiled too; true for him, the Shaykh notes, but not a rule.) Rational demonstration is lower, since obfuscations can always attack a proof (I 319).
| Science | Reached by | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Reason | Self-evidence or proof | "God is, and nothing is with Him" |
| States | Tasting only; cannot be defined | Sweetness of honey, love, yearning; the pool "sweeter than honey" |
| Mysteries | The Holy Spirit's breath in the heart; prophets and friends | Includes reports, such as "there is a Garden", true if the reporter is truthful |
"Knowledge is a light which God throws into the heart of whomsoever He will." Hence the hard saying: "He who has no unveiling has no knowledge" (I 218). The evidence: the prophets, separated by ages, never disagreed about God, while the people of consideration "never cease disagreeing" (II 290).
11. The Scale of the Law
For all his complexity, Ibn al-'Arabi offers one solution to every confusion: "if you should quarrel on anything, refer it to God and the Messenger" (4:59). God and the Messenger set up the Scale of the Law, the norm that puts everything in its place.
The Law in the wide sense
For the Shaykh shari'a is not just jurisprudence. In its basic sense it is the "wide road" of Islam: legal rulings, but also the intellectual principles of right knowledge and the moral guidance behind noble character. It can also mean Islam's outward dimension beside the inner path (tariqa) and reality (haqiqa). Every religion sent by God is a shar'. Citing 21:25, he holds that the religion of the prophets is one, namely tawhid, worship and "performing the religion", while specific practices differ and can be abrogated (II 414).
- Rulings: commands (obligatory, recommended, indifferent) and prohibitions (forbidden, reprehensible). The five legal categories thus have an ontological root.
- Reports about the Real: the unknowable Essence; the knowable, either attributes of incomparability ("Nothing is like Him", 42:11) or attributes of acts that demand the cosmos.
- Reports about the cosmos.
Reason cannot find the path of nearness on its own, since only one who knows "what is in the Self of the Real" can know it (III 79). Sending the Law is proof that God loves us for our sake (II 328).
The Scale
Mizan means a balance with two pans and a "tongue". Commenting on "He set up the Scale ... Exceed not the Scale" (55:7-9), the Shaykh says every art, level and state has its scale: logic for meanings, with premises as its pans; grammar for speech; the "known measure" of provision (15:21). The human body is itself a scale: the hands are the pans, the self is the tongue, felicity on the right, wretchedness on the left. Health is the equilibrium of the four natures; disequilibrium means destruction (III 6).
Wisdom and courtesy
Justice puts each thing in its place; wisdom (hikma) acts properly in each situation. The sage is "he who does what is proper for what is proper as is proper" (II 163). The name Wise faces both the Knowing and the Governing: "How many a knower there is who does not put a thing in its place! And how many a placer of things who puts them in places on the basis of chance" (I 389). Its rule: "Give everyone who has a right his right", answering to "God gave each thing its creation, then guided" (20:50).
Courtesy (adab) is that wisdom lived out. The revealed religions are "God's rules of courtesy" (IV 58); every "Do this" and "Avoid that" in the Koran is one. Adab comes from ma'daba, a banquet: courtesy is "to bring together all good". "God taught me courtesy, so how beautiful is my courtesy!" means He gathered every beautiful thing in the Prophet (II 640).
Courtesy toward secondary causes
The test case is secondary causes. Pseudo-spirituals who want to go "straight to Him" past the means God set up show discourtesy. Rejecting causes is "an imperfection in station but a perfection in state": fine on the way, blameworthy at the end (II 602).
Sufi obliteration (mahw) removes the servant's reliance on causes, never the causes. "You did not throw when you threw, but God threw" (8:17): God obliterated the Prophet, affirmed the cause, and still "only threw with the hand of His Messenger" (II 553). The greatest veil is your own entity, yet it is where your knowledge of God exists, so it cannot be removed. Your human nature is the curtain from behind which God speaks (42:51). He keeps it in place out of jealousy, lest the other encompass Him, and mercy, since creatures would burn before "the glories of His face" (II 554).
The Scale of Knowledge
Above the Law's Scale stands the Scale of Knowledge, which stays in man's hand in this world and the next. Its relation to God's Scale is that of a mirror held up to a person weighing: in it one sees the scale, the weighing and the weigher. Abu Bakr: "I have never seen anything without seeing God before it." The person of this unveiling learns that he is, and always was, "ever-creating" (khallaq).
- To God belongs creation: He "gave each thing its creation".
- To the servant belongs the due: he "gives each thing its due".
- The courteous man creates "through works, not through saying 'Be!'": he says the Basmala, and the divine name drives Satan out of the work.
The Scale of Reason
Reason guided by the Law is sound (salim). "God's wide earth" (29:56, 4:97) is, inwardly, your body, where the Law applies while the spirit lives in it. "Emigrating in it" means moving from the body's earth of caprice to its earth of reason, "within whose hand is the lamp of the Law". The veils of causes "will never be lifted"; passing one cause brings you to another, and the strongest cause is the Law itself, "the handhold" (3:103) holding the light for the darkness of causes (III 249). If reason could secure felicity alone, the messengers "would be useless" (III 83).
Affirming similarity
The ontological basis of similarity (tashbih) is the Barzakh, the Cloud between God and the cosmos. In that ocean, possible things are called Knowing and Powerful, while the Real takes on "wonder, receiving joyfully, laughter, rejoicing, withness". "So return what belongs to Him, and take what belongs to you! He possesses descent, and we possess ascent" (I 41). In substance, the Breath of the All-merciful, "a maggot and the First Intellect are the same"; rank appears only in forms (III 452). The rule: "Negate similarity and affirm the property!" "Nothing is like Him" negates; "and He is the Hearing, the Seeing" (42:11) affirms. The religions speak of such attributes "as reality, not as metaphor"; scholars without unveiling interpret them away (II 502). God moves through states without being moved by them, "just as the number 'one' undergoes fluctuation in the levels of the numbers" (III 314).
- Reflection rules reason, the strongest talisman. Given power so man would see he knows nothing except through God, it turned the order round: "You will not know God, O reason, except through me!"
- Imagination rules meanings, clothing them in sensory form; it cannot be abolished on this plane.
- Habits rule rational souls.
How people react to the reports of similarity
| Group | Response |
|---|---|
| The apostate | Raises doubts about the proof of the messenger and turns back on his heels |
| The condescending | Says it is mercy for the weak; privately judges the descriptions impossible |
| The submitting | Has faith but admits ignorance of how the attributes relate to God |
| The interpreters | Explain the words away (ta'wil) to protect the proofs that confirmed the messenger and to match 42:11 |
| The literalists | Stuck in imagination, apply the words as to themselves: "only one-half of faith" |
Man must affirm both because he was made in the form of Allah, the all-comprehensive name and "coincidence of opposites". Taqlid has three ranks: following the Lord (the highest), following reason's self-evident knowledge, and following reason's reflection. "In the cosmos, the root is ignorance, while knowledge is acquired." Knowledge is existence and belongs to God, so "just as you have acquired existence from Him, so also acquire knowledge from Him." Do not worry about apparent contradictions in the reports: "each report dwells within a specific level, while you are the presence which comprehends all those levels" (III 160).
Knowledge: Mine of Mercy, Practice, Limits
"My Lord, increase me in knowledge" (20:114) is the only increase the Prophet is told to seek. Knowledge from the "mine of mercy" (II 370); cannot be defined by genus/difference. Seat = heart: "heart's acquisition of a thing as it is in itself" (I 91). 'Ilm vs ma'rifa: disagreement in names not meaning; ma'rifa via practice and godfearingness (2:282). Knowledge without practice = Nonmanifest only; with practice = Manifest + Nonmanifest. God's deception (makr): give knowledge demanding practice, then deprive of practice.
Limits: Essence unknowable; "Glory be to Him known only by the fact He is not known." Never quenching: tasting / drinking / quenching; seeker like drinking sea water. Knowledge = recollection (tadhakkur) of Covenant (7:172). Abu Bakr: incapacity to comprehend is comprehension.
Acquiring Knowledge: Reason, Reflection, Unveiling
Three sources: reflection, unveiling, scripture. Reason ('aql = binding) vs heart (qalb = fluctuation). Six perceivers: five senses + reason; senses never err; error belongs to judgment. Reflection (fikr) unique to humans; chain: senses -> imagination -> reflection -> reason. Reflection yields only incomparability (what God is not). Consideration (nazar) has its playing field; greatest error: interpreting away the Law.
Following authority (taqlid) inescapable; choose whom. Reason is a follower of authority. Tahqiq completes taqlid: polish heart; eliminate dispersing reflection; verify what was only narrated. Unveiling: kashf, dhawq, fath, basira, shuhud. Three sciences (I 31): reason; states (tasting); mysteries (Holy Spirit into heart). "He who has no unveiling has no knowledge" (I 218).
Scale of the Law, Courtesy, Similarity Reports
Shari'a wide sense = all Islamic teaching. Word descends; at Footstool divides into rulings and reports. Scale (mizan): sura 55:7-9; Law establishes justice; if God dropped Scale cosmos annihilated. Wisdom: "does what is proper for what is proper as is proper." Courtesy (adab): "God taught me courtesy." Affirm secondary causes where God affirms them; abolishing causes = discourtesy.
Scale of Knowledge above Scale of Law (held here and hereafter). Scale of Reason: emigrate from caprice to reason within the body; Law = handhold. Affirming similarity: Barzakh / Cloud locus of tashbih; "Nothing is like Him" (42:11) separates and joins. Three talismans: reflection over reason; imagination over meanings; habits over souls. Five reactions to similarity reports: turn back; accommodate; faith with ignorance of relation; interpreters; literalists; the saved combine faith as God means it with negate-similarity via 42:11.
Caprice, Passion, Talismans, Love via Religions
Caprice says "I am god worshiped by every existent" and ends at center of Fire. Only man stronger than caprice via reason. Creatures know God innately except men and jinn. Reflection misread "Have they not reflected?": meant reflect to learn only God gives knowledge of God. Love: reason's negations yield no lover; religions' positive descriptions make love; then "Nothing is like Him." All love is love of God: gnostics hear every love poem as about Him.
Prostration of the Heart; Flight; Scale of Knowledge
Tirmidhi question: prostration; branch bows to root; shadow to object; angels "We have no knowledge"; heart prostrates to names and never rises; no claims, no reckoning. Flight to Allah (51:50) = passing to more names; renunciation that flees cosmos is ignorance (17:44). Specific poverty relieved; universal poverty never. Inward dimension = cell of retreat.
Scale of Knowledge: man as mirror sees scale, weighing, weigher. Abu Bakr: never seen a thing without seeing God before it. Possessor is "ever-creating." Servant gives each thing its due: commanded act made faultless; forbidden act's due is not bringing it into existence. Say Basmala, not "Be!"
Knowledge Seat; Reason vs Unveiling; Useful Knowledge; Caprice
Seat of knowledge is the heart: acquire a thing as it is in itself, existent or nonexistent. Ma'rifa often = unveiling, witnessing, tasting. Mutakallimun and Peripatetics use reason as primary tool; for Ibn al-'Arabi reason must serve revelation and unveiling, not replace them. Useful knowledge is knowledge that benefits: of God, of the path to Him, of what harms and helps. Caprice claims "I am god worshiped by every existent" and ends at Fire's center; only man is stronger than caprice via reason rightly used. Creatures know God innately except men and jinn who can forget. Reflection misread: meant to learn that only God gives knowledge of God. Love: reason's negations yield no lover; religions' positive descriptions make love; then "Nothing is like Him." All love is love of God for the gnostic.
Three talismans: reflection over reason, imagination over meanings, habits over souls. Flight to Allah (51:50) = passing to more names; fleeing the cosmos entirely is ignorance (17:44). Specific poverty relieved; universal poverty never. Nawafil hadith: follow reports until the Real is hearing and seeing. "Do not follow your rational faculty in its interpretation!"
Gnostics; Transmission; Courtesy toward Causes; Similarity Knowledge
Gnostics ('arifun) as greatest friends: knowledge as the thing is in itself. Transmission (taqlid) vs realization (tahqiq): both needed; realization without transmission invents; transmission without realization is dry. Courtesy toward causes: affirm secondary causes where God affirms; your entity is the veil and the cause of knowing God. Similarity knowledge: knowing God through assumed traits and reports, not through Essence capture. Prostration of the heart: branch bows to root; shadow to object; angels "We have no knowledge"; heart prostrates to names and never rises; no claims, no reckoning. Inward dimension = cell of retreat. Possessor of the scale is "ever-creating." Say Basmala, not "Be!"
Chapter 5: Hermeneutics, Faith, Self-Disclosure and Reading the Koran
Chapter 4 showed that reason can reach only what God is not. Chapter 5 asks what follows for reading revelation. Chittick moves in three steps: faith as a light that reason cannot produce and that rational interpretation (ta'wil) weakens; the perception of self-disclosure through unveiling, tasting, witnessing and vision; and the Koran itself, whose literal text must be honoured while God opens meanings without limit.
12. Faith and Rational Interpretation
When Ibn al-'Arabi criticizes "the rational thinkers", he rarely means unbelievers, who "can be dismissed with a wave of the hand". He means believers who interpret the revealed texts to fit their own presuppositions: the theologians and philosophers.
What faith is
The word iman comes from a root meaning to be safe and secure. To have faith is to feel secure in the knowledge received about God and to commit oneself to practising it. Its near synonym tasdiq means acknowledging someone's truthfulness, which is an act of intelligence. The theologians locate belief in the heart, but for Ibn al-'Arabi the heart is the seat of reason and unveiling, so faith is a kind of knowledge, not an emotion.
Faith has three sides: speech, practice and belief. Its reality is belief, but by the Law it must appear in word and act. The Prophet defined the person of faith socially: "he before whom people feel secure with their possessions and themselves" (II 26).
Faith is also primordial. "Every child is born according to primordial nature (fitra)", which is the witnessing to God's Oneness at the Covenant. Entering Nature, "the place of forgetfulness", the child forgets. A resolute follower of his parents' faith is safer than a clever reasoner, whose proofs leave him "no leg upon which to stand". When associating others with God (shirk) is cleared away, the new faith is simply the Covenant faith again: shirk is "a cloud which comes between the eye and the sun" (II 616).
Faith is tested
God gave man claims (da'wa), a divine attribute ("Verily I am God, there is no god but I", 20:14). A claim is a report and may be true or false, so it must be tested, and the Law's worship is the test (III 248). Even sending messengers is a trial. They come from our own kind because envy blinds us to our equals. Were a black beetle to announce it was God's messenger, crowds and kings would follow it without asking for a sign (III 83).
The light of faith
| Light | Perceives | Bestows felicity? |
|---|---|---|
| Reason | What is necessary, impossible and permitted for the Divinity; incomparability only | No, not on its own |
| Knowledge | Dispels ignorance; can exist without faith ("misguided in spite of knowledge", 45:23) | Only with faith |
| Faith | Everything, unless obstructed, including the Essence's self-descriptions and similarity | Yes |
| Faith + knowledge | "God raises up those who have been given knowledge in degrees" (58:11) | Highest |
One attests to a messenger not by proofs but by a self-disclosure of the name Light that colours the inward self. Felicity comes only through faith and knowledge of tawhid (III 78). These are the people of tawhid by reason who never followed a Law. The hadith says "He who dies knowing that there is no god but God will enter the Garden", not "believing". Iblis knows God is One, yet as "the first to set down associating others as a custom" he bears the punishment of all who associate (I 314).
Three intoxications
- Natural (the faithful): wishes stand up as forms in imagination: "When I become intoxicated, I am lord of palace and throne." Sometimes God makes the imagined form real, as with the garden Iblis conjured to tempt Solomon, which God let him keep.
- Rational (the gnostics): drunk on its proofs, reason rejects reports that give God creaturely attributes; it "stretches out its legs on another's carpet". Sobered by faith, it admits that "the garment is ignorant of the weaver".
- Divine (the perfect): intoxication with God: "O God, increase my bewilderment in Thee!"
Ta'wil: taking the text "back"
Ta'wil is a Koranic word (seventeen verses) meaning to take back to the origin, hence to interpret. Chittick pauses on Henry Corbin, who made ta'wil a cornerstone of Ibn al-'Arabi's thought and linked it to Shi'ism. Chittick objects: Ibn al-'Arabi almost always uses the word negatively, for interpreting scripture so as not to offend reason. The interpreter makes reason "the scale in which everything else must be weighed, including the Word of God". In that sense, notes Chittick, "practically all modern hermeneutics and scriptural exegesis" is ta'wil.
On the disputed verse 3:7 ("none knows its interpretation save only God and those firmly rooted in knowledge"), Ibn al-'Arabi takes the reading that includes the firmly rooted, but stresses what they say: "We have faith in it". They ask by bestowal ("bestow upon us mercy", 3:8), not by earning.
Interpretation can also be bought. Al-Malik al-Zahir, Saladin's son, once called for "the wallet" and showed Ibn al-'Arabi signed legal opinions: "not a single ugly thing happens without the pronouncement of a jurist". The most respected jurist of the land had ruled that he could fast any month he chose instead of Ramadan. Satan, given power from the Presence of Imagination, dresses caprice in "a strange interpretation" (III 69).
The rational thinkers
Taking heed (i'tibar) can come from tasting (the root) or reflection (the branch). "There is nothing whose knowledge cannot be attained through unveiling and finding", so the Shaykh "forbids reflection totally" on the path. Yet he praises "the divine Plato", who tasted the states. "Philosopher" means lover of wisdom, and every intelligent person loves wisdom. The philosophers are blamed not for the name but for opposing the messengers; "if they had sought it from God, not from reflection, they would have hit the mark in everything." Mu'tazilites and Ash'arites hit the mark at the root and err in branches. They do not know that God gives some servants a faculty beyond reason, much as sight would seem impossible to hearing. Reason "acquires from all the faculties, while it gives nothing to any of them", and every error is a misplaced relationship (II 523).
The Mu'tazilites came close on the nonexistent entities, and the passage on three objects of knowledge recalls Chapter 3: Nondelimited Being, nondelimited nothingness (the impossible), and between them the Supreme Barzakh holding the possible things. Nothingness stands before Being "like a mirror", and the form Being sees there is the possible thing (III 46-47).
Whose acts?
The Kalam fought over free will in terms of acts. Ash'arites gave all acts to God (with man's "performance", kasb); Mu'tazilites gave them to the servant. Ibn al-'Arabi credits both with a kind of tawhid, since neither split an act between two agents.
| School | Position | Ibn al-'Arabi's verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Mu'tazilite | Acts are the servant's | Stronger outwardly; the Law's commands support it; but he is "unaware" |
| Ash'arite | Acts are God's; man only "performs" | Stronger in unveiling; but he "does not witness", blinded by "performance" |
| Gnostic | He/not He: "You did not throw when you threw, but God threw" (8:17) | Sees one divine name prescribing the Law to another within the servant |
Like the wind moving branches that are free to move, secondary causes are real yet carry no effect of their own (II 629). In a visual unveiling God showed him the first created thing and said: "I create the things at the secondary causes, not by means of them." When he asked about "Do!" and "Do not do!", a witty exchange followed: "Thou art the Creator of courtesy and dispute", and God told him to cling to this witnessing "until you cross over the Narrow Bridge" (II 204).
His own view wavers by standpoint. Man made in the divine form must own his acts, or the Law's address would be "a game". His disciple Isma'il ibn Sawdakin gave him the decisive argument: without acts man could not be in the Form or assume the names. "No one can know the joy that came to me", and "the master may gain something from the disciple" (II 681).
The verse "You did not throw when you threw, but God threw" puts the affirmation between two negations, and calls this "a good test". Negating the act is correct; affirming it is correct; which is better for the servant is "a place of bewilderment" (II 147).
13. Knowing God's Self-Disclosure
Wujud means Being and finding. God's "Necessary Being" is also "necessary finding": He finds Himself and cannot not. The Verifiers are the People of Unveiling and Finding.
Finding in ecstasy
In Sufi audition (sama'), tawajud is inviting ecstasy, wajd is ecstasy, and wujud is "finding the Real in ecstasy" (II 538). An ecstasy without that finding is not ecstasy. The Real is found "in an unknown mode", shaped by the listener's preparedness and the divine name watching over him. The gnostic takes from every ecstatic the finding of the Real he brings, even if the ecstatic does not recognize it.
Light, darkness and the veils
God is sheer Light, the impossible sheer darkness, and creation the Barzakh between. Being is One, but the entities make it One/Many: "through Him we are, and through us He is", though only insofar as He is a god; in His Essence "God is Independent of the worlds" (3:97). The possible thing looks only at itself and so only at the veil, and since removing the veils would remove possibility, "the veils will be hung down forever" (III 276). Every faculty is that light under another name, and Arabic idrak ("perception", literally "reaching") was rendered in Persian by yaft, "finding". Light is defined as "any divine inrush which dispels engendered existence from the heart", and the Koran is light because its verses dispel doubts.
Self-disclosure is all-inclusive (the All-merciful sitting on the Throne, 20:5) and specific (each individual's knowledge of God) (III 101). Stones and plants receive it constantly; angels, jinn and humans receive it "from behind the veil of the unseen" (III 67). The Essence never discloses itself; disclosure in beliefs and rational concepts are "bridges" over which one "crosses" (II 606).
Increase and the ladder
Even the Prophet was told to pray "increase me in knowledge". The highest science is knowledge of self-disclosures, then rational consideration; "most people have only beliefs, not sciences". Self-disclosure to the manifest dimension increases each person in his own field: the jurist in law, the logician in logic, the grammarian in grammar, though non-gnostics credit their own reflection ("an ass carrying books", 62:5). Self-disclosure to the nonmanifest dimension gives "plain texts", meanings without equivocality, and frees one from "the toil of reflection".
- Islam (submission), the first step.
- Faith, virtue (ihsan), knowledge, declaring holy, declaring incomparable, independence, poverty, abasement, exaltation, variegation, stability in variegation.
- Annihilation going up, subsistence coming down.
Naming the perception
| Term | Emphasis | Key text |
|---|---|---|
| Unveiling (kashf) | Perceiver's side; usually visionary forms seen outside oneself | "He who has no unveiling has no knowledge" (I 218) |
| Tasting (dhawq) | Inward, indescribable state; only from self-disclosure, never from report | "Any knowledge not derived from tasting is not the knowledge of the Folk of Allah" (II 574) |
| Witnessing (shuhud) | Preceded by belief, so admits denial; leaves a "witness" trace in the heart | "Every witnessing is a vision, but not every vision a witnessing" (II 567) |
| Vision (ru'ya) | Not preceded by knowledge; only admission | Moses asked "give me vision", not witnessing (7:143) |
Tasting is like eating an apple: the apple is one, yet each bite has its own taste (II 671). Tasting is "the first beginnings of self-disclosure", drinking its middle, quenching its end (II 133). In self-disclosure within meaning, the beginning is the whole: Ibn al-'Arabi says the entire Futuhat is the differentiation of one look at the One Entity, which is why his speech hangs together, as the verses of the Koran do (II 548). Tastings are rank-specific: messengers, prophets and friends each have their own, and "the final stages of the friends are the first states of the prophets", so no friend can say from which station Moses asked for vision (II 51).
The "opening" begins with nightly vigils: scattered lights flicker with darkness between, a first mark of acceptance, until "a greatest light" appears (II 626). The heart's eye (basira) is veiled by rust, passion and gazing upon "others"; polished by invocation and Koran recitation, its light meets God's "light of existence" and the unseen is unveiled, though only in the measure God wills (II 241). Light too bright blinds, as bats emerge only in light equal to their sight (III 369).
- Abu Madyan: "Feed us with fresh flesh; feed us not with dried meat", meaning, tell us only what was opened in your own heart.
- Shaykhs demand an immediate answer, whatever is cast into the heart, and reject reflected ones.
- A shaykh conceals what form an opening will produce, lest a treacherous ego imitate the form without the meaning, as the hypocrite imitates faith.
Witnessing, wujud and shuhud
Witnessing needs two lights. Because "the earth will shine with the light of its Lord" (39:69) at the Resurrection and every soul has some light, Ibn al-'Arabi argues "how can he be wretched forever? For light does not come from the world of wretchedness"; evil is nonexistence, and "the root is the Restorer" (II 485). Chittick then corrects a long debate: Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi (d. 1624) attacked "Oneness of Being" (wahdat al-wujud) in the name of "Oneness of Witnessing" (wahdat al-shuhud), but Ibn al-'Arabi never used the first term, and for him wujud belongs to God while shuhud belongs to the servant: "everyone in wujud is the Real, and everyone in shuhud is creature" (III 306). The debate targeted a later received doctrine, not his position.
The sober "through his Lord" see the Real behind or as the things; the sober "through himself" can say only "Nothing is like Him" and cannot finish the verse, "He is the Hearing, the Seeing", through tasting (II 547). Whatever the mode, "the seeker seeks only knowledge, witnessing or vision of Him, and all of these are from Him; they are not He Himself" (II 663).
Perceiving the veil
"The water takes on the color of its cup" explains all diversity: of religions, of beliefs, and of Sufi lists of stations (seven, forty, a thousand), since each traveller reports his own path and "self-disclosure never repeats itself".
Every form is a veil, and "there is nothing but passage from veil to veil". The possessors of kernels (39:18) know a kernel lies behind the shell, so "he who maintains there is vision speaks the truth, and he who holds there is no vision speaks the truth" (IV 105). All of it is imagination: "People are asleep, and when they die, they awake" from "a dream within a dream", yet they never stop dreaming (IV 19).
14. Understanding the Koran
Unveiling sees God's self-disclosure in the forms of the cosmos, so it knows the literal truth of the Koran's statements. To say God's "real meaning" lies beneath the surface is discourtesy (su' al-adab). If God then opens further meanings that keep the literal sense, one accepts them with thanks. But one may not interpret by "common sense" or "scientific fact", nor without the Law, faith, practice and godfearing; and a new reading must harmonize with the forebears.
What reason is for
Unveiling witnesses God's hand, eyes, foot and face, His laughter, wonder and self-transmutation, things reason declares impossible. Reflecting on the Essence is forbidden ("God warns you about His Self", 3:28), and even al-Ghazali, praised elsewhere, "was discourteous" here (II 389). Yet reason has a real field: God's existence and Unity. Chittick presses this: ignore reason and, "like contemporary contextualists", you see many self-disclosures but deny the one Reality behind them. The Shaykh is a "perennial philosopher" who knows the water takes the cup's colour and that sound intellect still pierces to the One.
Unlettered knowledge
The Prophet was "unlettered" (ummi, 7:158). For Ibn al-'Arabi this does not exclude memorizing Koran and hadith; it means not using reflection or juristic analogy to extract meanings. Such a heart receives God-given (ladunni) knowledge, like Khadir's ("knowledge from Us", 18:65, with the plural pronoun signalling a knowledge that gathers manifest and nonmanifest). The jurist and thinker are never "upon insight" (12:108): the jurist revises yesterday's ruling, and the thinker finds a Mu'tazilite, Ash'arite, Brahmin or philosopher refuting his certain proof (II 644).
Reason's real virtue is acceptance (qabul): it cannot reach the gnostic sciences, but it can accept them and thank God that "its acceptance is nobler than its reflection" (I 305). Reason is also love's shackle, since it is the very act of distinguishing self from God; love rules the "accepting reason" far more than the "considering reason" (II 358). The "possessors of kernels" use reason as a shell around a kernel; the "men of rational faculties" have only the shell (III 120).
The Koran and the Prophet's character
Qur'an is usually "recitation", but the root means gathering; Furqan means separation. The Koran gathers all earlier scriptures, as Allah gathers all names and perfect man gathers God and cosmos (III 160).
- Given "the all-comprehensive words"; Adam knew only the names, so he stood second (II 88).
- "A prophet when Adam was between water and clay"; all prophets were his deputies, their Laws branches of his. "Were Moses alive, he would find it impossible not to follow me" (III 141).
- The banner of praise is "the praise of praises", earned by praising God with the Koran, which gathers all praises (II 88).
- The Mother of the Book is the Fatiha: seven verses epitomizing all scriptures (II 134).
- 'A'isha: "His character was the Koran." Whoever wants to see him "let him look upon the Koran" (IV 60).
Context, and every sense intended
Critics accuse him of reading out of context. Chittick replies that "context" depends on what one thinks the text is. For Ibn al-'Arabi the context is God's knowledge, and "every existent thing finds in the Koran what it desires" (III 94). Ta'wil puts man in judgment over revelation; he insists man be judged and shaped by it. "The Koran is much too sacred to be taken by storm"; historical detail is mostly "useless knowledge" for felicity.
He also allows denial its place. In witnessing the coincidence of opposites, first learned from Abu Sa'id al-Kharraz, he found that its deniers are right by reason. "With reason we deny what reason denies.... With the Law we deny what the Law denies.... As for unveiling, it denies nothing"; it puts each thing in its level (II 605).
The commentary of the Folk of Allah
On "let him not associate one with his Lord's worship" (18:110), the exoteric reading (no partner gods) is "sound", but the Folk also hear: do not worship God's Unity, which "does not know you", but His Lordship, which brought you into being. "The Koran is the shoreless ocean." The rational thinker cannot take "everything glorifies God" literally and so explains it away; the Folk, given faith and unveiling, hear the glorification even of the nonexistent entities, which "see and are seen, hear and are heard" in their immutability (III 257).
Allusion
The jurists are right that knowledge comes by learning; they are wrong that only prophets learn from God: "He taught man what he knew not" (96:5), "He gives wisdom to whomsoever He will" (2:269). Abu Yazid told the scholars: "You take your knowledge dead from the dead, but we take our knowledge from the Alive who does not die!" Even rain outranks such scholars: the Prophet bared his head to it because "it is newly acquainted with my Lord."
Hadith by unveiling
He quotes hadiths the experts reject, such as "He who knows himself knows his Lord" and the Hidden Treasure, which is "sound on the basis of unveiling, but not established by way of transmission" (II 399). The "prophets among the friends" witness Gabriel addressing Muhammad's locus of manifestation and so may know a weak hadith to be true, or ask the Prophet about a "sound" one and hear "I did not say it", sometimes even seeing the forger's face. They bring no new Law, and since Satan cannot take a prophet's form, what such a form says is correct (I 150).
Faith, Light, Three Intoxications, Ta'wil
Faith (iman): security root; belief in heart + tongue (+ practice). Not from proofs: "a light which God throws into the heart." Faith ascribes truth to God; knowledge need not. Iblis to Jesus: say the Shahada; Jesus: "I will say it, but not on the basis of your words." Faith on the messenger's words. Fitra / Covenant. Felicity via faith and knowledge of tawhid.
Three intoxications (II 544): natural (imagination); rational (drunk on proofs, rejects reports); with God ("increase my bewilderment"). Ta'wil: Chittick vs Corbin; Ibn al-'Arabi mostly negative on taking text "back" against the letter. "Sound knowledge is that along with which faith remains" (II 660). Learned interpreters make the Book lie down; the successful make it stand up.
Knowing Self-Disclosure; Acts; Light and Veils
Wujud = Being and finding. People of Unveiling and Finding. Sama': wajd / tawajud / wujud. "There is nothing but speech and listening." Light vs darkness; creation = Barzakh. Vision: cosmos sees only cosmos in the Real; you are shadow. All-inclusive vs specific self-disclosure. Increase of knowledge: highest = knowledge of self-disclosures. Ladder: islam ... faith, ihsan, knowledge, stability in variegation, annihilation / subsistence.
Ash'arites (God creates acts, kasb) vs Mu'tazilites (servant creates). Wind and branches; "I create the things at the secondary causes, not by means of them." 8:17 affirmation between two negations. Terms: self-disclosure (source) vs unveiling (perceiver); tasting only by self-disclosure. Witnessing vs vision; Sirhindi's wahdat al-shuhud vs term Ibn al-'Arabi never used for his own doctrine.
Understanding the Koran: Letter, Unlettered, Allusion
Literal sense always honored; seeking a "real meaning" that denies the letter = discourtesy. Preconditions: Law, faith, practice, taqwa. Goal of rational inquiry: unveiling that witnesses hand, eyes, foot, laughter, transmutation; forbidden to reflect on Essence. Unlettered (ummi): not using reflection; ladunni (18:65). Koran and Prophet's character: 'A'isha: his character was the Koran. Every sense intended that Arabic allows. Commentary of the Folk of Allah; allusion (ishara) adds without denial. Hadith by unveiling may confirm soundness of non-mutawatir report only.
Ladder, Witnessing Meanings, Dream within Dream
Ladder of ascent: each person's own ladder; prophecy not earned; same steps in kind; servant stays servant. Opening: nightly vigils, scattered lights then greatest light. Sight vs insight; polish by invocation and Koran; two lights meet. Perceiving the veil: never together in existence even if together in witnessing; "the Real does not repeat a form." "People are asleep; when they die they awake"; dream within a dream. Unlettered knowledge knows nothing unreal in existence; Scale left at the door; better smash it than bring it inside the sanctuary of opening.
Finding, Light Definitions, Two Lights, Mirror Vision
Wajib al-wujud = necessary finding. Ecstasy found in unknown mode per preparedness. Light defined: divine inrush dispelling engendered existence from heart. Koran is light. Mirror: you never see the surface; cosmos sees only cosmos in the Real; nothing sees Him but He. Two lights: radiant (takes sight; seventy veils) vs without rays (full moon; sun at noon). Ibn al-'Arabi's vision: small embraces large; camel through needle's eye; eyes preferred over reason; each faculty shown incapable.
Faith Light; Rational Interpretation; Letter and Allusion; Ladder
Faith is not given by proofs alone; it is a light God throws into the heart of whom He will; may come after proofs or without them. Reason supports Unity but cannot grasp full significance of Reality alone. When Ibn al-'Arabi criticizes rational thinkers he mostly has in mind people who already have faith yet insist on interpreting revealed texts by their presuppositions. Stand with the Book; do not lay the Book down under reason's veto. Letter and allusion: Folk of Allah read both; allusion without letter is whim; letter without opening is dryness. Ladder of ascent: each person's own ladder; prophecy not earned; servant stays servant. Opening: nightly vigils; scattered lights then greatest light. Sight vs insight; polish by invocation and Koran; two lights meet. Perceiving the veil: never together in existence even if together in witnessing; "the Real does not repeat a form." "People are asleep; when they die they awake." Unlettered knowledge knows nothing unreal in existence; better smash the Scale of reason than bring it into the sanctuary of opening, yet the Law Scale remains at the door as courtesy.
Finding (wujud) and ecstasy found in unknown mode per preparedness. Mirror: you never see the surface; cosmos sees only cosmos in the Real; nothing sees Him but He. Two lights: radiant (takes sight; seventy veils) vs without rays (full moon; noon sun).
Ash'arite / Mu'tazilite Contrast; Stand with Book; Witnessing Meanings
Rational camps that already believe still force the Book under presuppositions. Ash'arite and Mu'tazilite arguments about attributes and vision become, for Ibn al-'Arabi, partial eyes: each sees a true mark and misses the complementary mark. Stand with the Book: letter first, then allusion. Witnessing meanings: meanings take form; dream within dream; death wakes. Finding definitions: wajib al-wujud = necessary finding. Ecstasy in unknown mode per preparedness. Koran is light. Ibn al-'Arabi's vision anecdotes: small embraces large; camel through needle's eye; eyes preferred over reason; each faculty shown incapable. Folk of Allah: Koran is the scale of all scales (III 200).
Chapter 6: Soteriology, the Scale, the Stations and Safety in Servanthood
Chapter 6 asks how a traveller is saved without being destroyed by the openings he seeks. Chittick moves in four steps. Unveiling must be weighed against the Law. The path consists of stations, in which man actualizes the divine names latent in his form. The traveller must understand good and evil, the two commands and the straight path so that he neither falls into antinomianism nor into despair. And the only final safety is servanthood, the knowledge that one is nothing.
15. Weighing Self-Disclosure
Reason, Ibn al-'Arabi said, must "accept" what comes from God. This is not a blank cheque. It means accepting what comes through the Koran and the Hadith, which any Muslim accepts in theory. Unveiling adds nothing to the principles or corollaries of faith; at most it fills in details. Its real work is to turn creed into vision: the traveller no longer merely believes that "God's hand is above their hands" (48:10), since he sees it. "Unveiling is the verification of faith" (I 218).
Reflection cannot gainsay revelation: "The Divine Knowledge does not enter into any scale, since it set up the scale" (II 291).
But how can a traveller know his "tasting" is from God and not Satan? The answer is short: any knowledge, tasting, witnessing or self-disclosure that contradicts the literal sense of the Koran and the Hadith must be abandoned. Unveiling, like reason, submits to the Scale of the Law. The friend of God (wali) is always a follower (tabi'), and his charter is "Say: 'I call to God upon insight, I and whoever follows after me'" (12:108).
Knowledge and practice
The Law gives two kinds of knowledge: reports about the objects of faith (God, angels, messengers, scriptures, the Last Day, the measuring out of good and evil) and rulings on practice. To the second it can add nothing but understanding.
The friends climb to the divine names, which pour sciences and lights into them in the measure of their preparedness. These are not sciences of Law-giving but lights for understanding what the messenger brought. Junayd's dictum is the rule: "This knowledge of ours is delimited by the Book and the Sunna." The friend has only one small share of Law-giving: he may compose a new form from parts that the Law already sets down, as a "good custom" (sunna hasana), whose reward the Prophet promised, provided it makes nothing lawful unlawful or the reverse.
| Scale | How it weighs | Used by the Tribe? |
|---|---|---|
| Rational | Logic for meanings, grammar for words | Not their way, though they share the meanings |
| Unveiling | The affinity (munasaba) between a knowledge and the godfearing practice that preceded it. If the practice demands it, the knowledge is earned; if not, it is a bestowal (wahb) | Yes; "the scales of affinities do not make mistakes" |
| Law | Ask the masters of Hadith, not "those who have opinions of their own"; look for a single principle (asl) linking the issue to the Book or Sunna of some prophet from Adam to Muhammad | Yes; the decisive scale |
| Practice | Hold your prayer up against the "ideal image" (mithal) taken from the Lawgiver, "limb by limb, joint by joint", so as to "set up the weighing with justice" (55:7-9) | Yes |
Shari'a and Reality
Many Sufis distinguished the Law (shari'a) from the Reality (haqiqa), as if the Law governed only the sensory world and fell away once the traveller reached God. Ibn al-'Arabi denies any real distinction. "The Shari'a is identical with the Reality." The Law negates and affirms in one breath, "Nothing is like Him, and He is the Hearing, the Seeing" (42:11), and that is exactly how Reality is: one Being, yet many relationships. Reality is "the Unity of Manyness", which is hard to see, whereas the Unity of the One is obvious. Because only the elect saw this unity, the Sufis split the Law (its manifest properties) from the Reality (its nonmanifest ones) (II 563).
The door that is locked
Only a prophet sees both the casting angel and the casting. God "has locked the door of angelic descent with rulings of the Law, but He has not locked the door of descent with knowledge of those rulings into the hearts of the friends" (II 569). Reception depends on preparedness, which is not earned, and this is why those philosophers who claim prophecy can be acquired are wrong.
Spiritual states
Unveiling opens the World of Imagination, "whose byways never end" and which is the home of the satans. Chittick adds a sharp aside: modern seekers want "the experience", yet parts of the unseen world are "far more dangerous than the worst jungles of the visible world". The Law, which governs the inward as much as the outward, is the framework without which "the traveler will be thrown about by every blast of deceiving wind."
A state (hal, from a root meaning to change) is a bestowal that comes and goes; a station (maqam) is earned and fixed. Those who think a state lasts have mistaken a succession of likes for one state (II 133).
| State as experience | State as power | |
|---|---|---|
| Meaning | Love, yearning, fear, intoxication, absence, entering the heart unbidden | Miracles: "breaking of habit", governing control, bringing things to be (takwin), acting through Resolve (himma) |
| Danger | Possessor is like a madman, not answerable to the Law, and "loses much good" (III 527) | Proves nothing; magicians can do it; invites pride |
| Ibn al-'Arabi's verdict | "In this world a state is an imperfection, in the next a perfection" (II 358) | The real friend conceals it out of courtesy; "as the perfect man ascends in station, he decreases in state" (II 319) |
The true friend is the one of whom the Prophet said, "when they are seen, God is remembered." People suppose this means someone who works wonders. Ibn al-'Arabi says it means someone seen "in the extremity of his weakness", hiding his power behind worship (II 385).
- Stronger than the soul: if lifelong, "madness", like Abu 'Iqal, who neither ate nor drank for four years in Mecca.
- Passing, or equal to capacity: he returns with reason intact, looking like a man who stops mid-conversation to hear the king's messenger.
- Weaker than capacity: he takes it while still talking to you, and you notice nothing.
Hence the travellers seek exile (ghurba) from states: "Halting with the state is a bane upon its possessor", and "the state is the greatest veil over man" (II 527).
Divine deception
God is "the best of deceivers" (3:54). The Sufis defined His deception (makr) as continuing favours to a servant despite his disobedience and letting his state stay despite his discourtesy. Ibn al-'Arabi's own definition is subtler: God gives a servant knowledge that demands practice and then deprives him of the practice, or gives him practice and then deprives him of sincerity in it.
The deception of the elect of the elect is the urge to display signs, telling oneself that miracles will draw people to God. Messengers must display signs because they abrogate earlier rulings and need proof; a friend only "recounts" the messenger's call, so signs profit him nothing. To ask for the rank of prophet "is to beat cold iron" (II 531). In a vision of the "waystation of destruction" he learned the destructive sciences of philosophers and sorcerers "so that I might avoid them" (II 583).
The shaykh
All Sufis agree: no one enters the path without a shaykh. The path is unknown before it is walked, because God is unknown, and one must "enter houses by their doors" (2:189), which here means the chains of transmission. Chapter 281 sets out what a real shaykh must know.
- He knows the incoming thoughts (khawatir), praiseworthy and blameworthy, and how a blameworthy thought disguises itself as praiseworthy.
- He tells true from merely imaginal unveiling and trains the disciple like the hairdresser who adorns the bride.
- Lacking any of this, he is a quack who "makes the healthy person ill and kills the patient".
- Two kinds of shaykh: those who keep the Law, "merciful to one another", worried more than joyful; and possessors of states, who are to be respected but not followed.
- No disciple can be trained "between two shaykhs", any more than there can be a cosmos between two gods; mere companionship for blessing (baraka) with many is fine. "Reverence is the root of salvation."
The relation runs both ways. A shaykh who exalts himself over needy disciples forgets his own poverty before God. The verified shaykh thanks God for the disciples, because their need for him confirms his need for God; he loves them like a drowning man loves his rescuer. So "the disciple through his state is the shaykh's shaykh" (III 19).
16. Names and Stations
Man was created on the form of the name Allah and so carries every divine name. But more of a name is not always better: the Overpowering Tyrant (al-jabbar) unbalanced by other names produces a monster. What man is can be anything; what he should be cannot be read off by reason, because the God whose form he bears is unknowable. Only God can say how His form should be displayed, which is the function of the Law: "If you love God, follow me, and God will love you" (3:31). Even generosity and justice "in the divine mode" cannot be built on our own ideas of "charity" and "humanity".
Perfect knowledge combines incomparability ("Nothing is like Him") and similarity ("Worship God as if you see Him"; "Withersoever you turn, there is the Face of God", 2:115). Revealed words keep their ordinary Arabic meanings (14:4): "two hands" (38:75) cannot mean "power". So believers come in three kinds: the perfect, who combine both relationships; those who stop at reason; and those who stop at similarity. "There is no fourth group." The perfect servant faces both relationships with one undivided essence, "like the atom between two other atoms" (II 3).
What a station is
"Every station in the path of God is earned and fixed, while every state is a bestowal ... like the flashing of lightning" (II 176). The Futuhat devotes nearly one hundred chapters (462-558) to "waystations", each tied to a specific type of friend and a Koranic verse that acts as his divine root. A "waystation" is where God descends to you or you alight upon Him; a "mutual waystation" is a meeting between the two movements, before either arrives (II 577).
| Duration | Examples |
|---|---|
| This world and the next | Witnessing, majesty, beauty, intimacy, awe, expansion |
| Until the first step into the Garden | Fear, contraction, sadness, hope |
| Until death | Renunciation, repentance, struggle, ascetic discipline, withdrawal, adornment |
| Come and go with their conditions | Patience (in adversity), gratitude (for blessings), abstinence |
Whether satisfaction (rida) is a state or a station is answered both ways: it is a divine attribute, and in a creature "if it becomes fixed, it is a station, and if it disappears, it is a state" (II 212). Stations are never lost by moving on. "It is a passage to the second station, but not from the first; or rather, it is a passing with the latter", just as learning a new science does not erase the old one (III 225).
Entering patience is the name the Patient turning its face (tawajjuh) toward the seeker; the name gains a locus too.
Each station is divine, lordly or all-merciful, governed by the names Allah, Lord and All-merciful, and it takes effect in the three worlds of the person according to whether he has submission, faith or virtue (the three levels in the hadith of Gabriel). The diagram above shows Ibn al-'Arabi's own example.
Assuming the character traits of God
The stations are the human side of what, seen from the divine side, is "assuming the traits of the names" (takhalluq). "Assuming the character traits of God, that is Sufism" (II 267). The word khuluq (character) is close to khalq (creation), so the traits are not surface morals but the shape of one's being. A hadith says "God has three hundred character traits; he who assumes one of them will enter the Garden" (II 72). The philosophers called the same process "gaining similarity to God" (tashabbuh bi'l-ilah).
Noble and base character traits
God is the root of all noble traits, and in His relations with creatures He is always noble. "God did not name Himself by any name without appointing for man a share in assuming the trait of that name" (I 124). Strictly speaking, then, "assumption" is the wrong word: the traits are already in man's innate disposition (jibilla). They are original, not borrowed. God is generous without limit, yet He is also Withholder, Harmer and Abaser; man's traits are likewise unlimited in themselves and limited in their exercise.
17. Pitfalls of the Path
If the gnostic manifests all the divine names, and God creates evil as well as good, does the gnostic manifest evil too? "Yes and no." In that ambiguous zone grew the charge of antinomianism, started by Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) and repeated by orientalists and a modern Muslim critic who wrote that "a thoroughly monistic system ... can not, by its very nature, take seriously the objective validity of moral standards." The answer lies in distinguishing God as Being, from whose point of view all paths are straight, from God as Guide (al-hadi), who wants human felicity.
Good and evil
"There is no good but God." Good is Being; evil is the lack of Being, so it is nonexistence. The Prophet prayed, "The good, all of it, is in Thy hands, while evil does not go back to Thee" (III 373). God's mercy brought the entities out of the evil of nonexistence into the good of existence, which is why "God's mercy precedes His wrath" (II 157). The cosmos "exists fundamentally for felicity"; wretchedness is an accident.
- Convention of the revealed Laws.
- Agreeableness to a person's constitution.
- Perfection established by proofs.
- Attaining one's individual desire (gharad).
The two commands
| Engendering (takwini) | Prescriptive (taklifi) | |
|---|---|---|
| Form | "Be!" (36:82) | "Do this, avoid that" |
| Mediated? | Without intermediary | Through a prophet |
| Tied to | God's desire (irada) | God's call (nida') |
| Disobeyed? | Never | By men and jinn |
| Status | A command in the true sense | Really an "imperative mood", so "no one whatsoever disobeys God's command" |
The disobeyer still obeys the Divine Will and opposes only "the command by intermediary" (III 510).
The perfection of imperfection
Without imperfection there would be no "other than God", hence no cosmos, and the Hidden Treasure would stay hidden. "He gave everything its creation" (20:50), so every thing is perfect in its level, and "perfection is an intrinsic attribute of the things, while imperfection is an accidental affair whose essence is perfection" (I 679). A horse is a horse from birth, but a human being's last breath is his "known station" (37:164). Men and jinn, "the two weighty ones", must therefore travel, upward by the Shari'a or downward by the command of the Desire (I 258).
Even jealousy (ghayra, implying an "other", ghayr) and forgetfulness are divine names (II 244). Ibn al-'Arabi distinguishes completion (tamam), which is in creation, from perfection (kamal), which is acquired: "He gave everything its creation, then guided." "He who stops with his completion has been deprived" (III 405).
God's conclusive argument
Does God force the wicked? No. He knows each entity as it is and gives it existence; He "does not make a pear tree into a pear tree." "Knowledge follows its object": the object determines the knowledge, not the reverse. So "To God belongs the conclusive argument" (6:149). "Praise none but yourself and blame none but yourself" (Fusus). Even Satan says: "do not blame me, but blame yourselves" (14:22).
The straight path
From God's point of view every path is straight. "My Lord is on a straight path" (11:56) follows directly on "There is no crawling creature but He takes it by the forelock." A plant's straightness is to grow down toward water; an animal's is to move horizontally; "the straightness of a bow is its crookedness" (II 217). But the question that matters is which name you reach: every path ends at Allah, yet Allah comprises the Merciful and the Avenger. The Fatiha's prayer therefore asks not for the all-inclusive "path of Allah" but for the delimited path of the Prophet, the Koran (6:153). "The road of felicity is that set down by the Law, nothing else" (II 148).
Completing the noble traits
Felicity requires perspicacity through faith (firasa), the "light of Allah" with which the believer sees, as the sun lets the eye tell large from small. It is attributed to the comprehensive name Allah because it discloses both praiseworthy and blameworthy movements (II 235). Character illness, like bodily illness, is a disequilibrium. The divine physician (prophet, heir or sage) cannot reshape the soul, since "Thy Lord has finished with creation and character"; he can only redirect each trait to its proper use (masraf). The unbalanced travel by struggle and discipline; the balanced travel "cheerful and joyous" (II 236).
Weighing Disclosure; States; Shaykh
Unveiling verifies faith; adds details, not new principles. Friend always follower. Any unveiling contradicting literal Koran / Hadith must be abandoned. Unveiled command making unlawful lawful = duping. Junayd: "This knowledge of ours is delimited by the Book and the Sunna." Shari'a = Haqiqa for those who see Unity of Manyness.
States (hal) = bestowals; stations (maqamat) = earnings. Powers (karama, himma): Perfect friends conceal; "when they are seen, God is remembered." As perfect ascends in station he decreases in state. Inrush levels; exile from states; deception (makr): knowledge without practice. Baghdad 608/1211: storehouses of deception; only safety = Scale of Law. No path without shaykh; "Enter houses by their doors"; reverence is root of salvation; no disciple between two shaykhs.
Names, Stations, Pitfalls, Servanthood
Animal man vs perfect man; Trust (amana) 33:72 = manifest name Allah as vicegerent. Stations: Futuhat waystations tied to Koranic verses. Assuming traits (takhalluq bi-akhlaq Allah): "Assuming the character traits of God, that is Sufism" (II 267). Noble vs base: God always noble; traits innate (jibilla) so "assumption" is recovery of original.
Good = Being; evil = nonexistence. Two commands: engendering (takwini, "Be!") never disobeyed; prescriptive (taklifi) via Law. Perfection of imperfection: without otherness Hidden Treasure stays hidden. Conclusive argument (6:149): knowledge follows its object. Straight path: all paths straight in one sense; road of felicity = Law only. "I was sent to complete the noble character traits."
Safety in servanthood: cling to nothingness; Muhammad "His servant" before "His messenger." Servitude ('ubuda) vs servanthood ('ubudiyya). Perils of lordship: realities never change; servant servant, Lord Lord.
Two Commands, Straight Path, Blame, Lowliness
Engendering command never disobeyed; prescriptive is "imperative mood." Without revelation no opposition. After "Slink into it" (23:108) no prohibitions. Straight path: plant straight downward, animal horizontal, bow's straightness is its crookedness. Paths as numerous as breaths; what matters which name you reach. Perspicacity through faith (firasa). Seal of prophets completes noble traits by giving proper uses to what looked base. Exaltation of lowliness: greatest servant = greatest locus. Obligatory and supererogatory works: nawafil draw near until hearing and seeing are His.
Stations Typology; Assuming Traits Anatomy; Good/Evil Roots
Typology: station deeply rooted vs state intermittent; outward+inward vs inward first; durations to both worlds / Garden / death / conditional. Passage: pass with not from the first station. Divine root of each station: attentiveness of a name. Degrees: islam / iman / ihsan; worlds mulk / jabarut / malakut. Assuming traits = philosophers' tashabbuh bi'l-ilah; two anatomies (Ghazali cosmic; names in man). Seven leading names: alive, knowing, desiring, hearing, seeing, speaking, powerful.
Four roots of good/evil: Law's convention; agreeableness to constitution; perfection by proofs; attaining desire. "The good, all of it, is in Thy hands." Cosmos created for felicity; wretchedness accidental.
Scale of the Law; Prophets and Friends; Stations; Two Commands
Unveiling, like reason, must submit to the Scale of the Law. Prophets and friends: friends inherit; they do not legislate anew. Sincere Folk of Allah can be duped into preferring unveiling that nullifies an established ruling; that is misguidance dressed as opening. State may mark immaturity if it is becoming-manifest in a divine attribute without rooted station. Two commands: engendering (takwini, Be!) never disobeyed; prescriptive (taklifi) may be opposed as ruling. Without revelation no opposition. Straight path: plant straight downward, animal horizontal, bow's straightness is its crookedness. Paths as numerous as breaths; what matters which name you reach. Perspicacity through faith (firasa). Seal of prophets completes noble traits by giving proper uses to what looked base. Exaltation of lowliness: greatest servant = greatest locus. Obligatory and supererogatory: nawafil draw near until hearing and seeing are His.
| Station feature | State feature | Risk | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Deeply rooted | Intermittent | Prefer state over Law | Outward + inward |
| Inward first | Claim without courtesy | Divine root = name | Passing |
Assuming traits = tashabbuh bi'l-ilah of the philosophers, relocated: seven leading names (alive, knowing, desiring, hearing, seeing, speaking, powerful). Cosmos created for felicity; wretchedness accidental.
Passage of Stations; Divine Roots; Degrees; Good and Evil Anatomy
Passage: pass with not from the first station. Divine root of each station: attentiveness of a name. Degrees: islam / iman / ihsan; worlds mulk / jabarut / malakut. Typology: station deeply rooted vs state intermittent; outward+inward vs inward first; durations to both worlds / Garden / death / conditional. Assuming traits anatomy: Ghazali cosmic map vs names in man. Seven leading names listed again as practice map. "The good, all of it, is in Thy hands." After "Slink into it" (23:108) no prohibitions in that address. Straight path images: plant, animal, bow. Paths numerous as breaths. Perspicacity (firasa) through faith. Seal completes noble traits by proper use of what looked base.
| Degree | World | Practice mark | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Islam | Mulk | Submission of body | Iman |
| Jabarut | Faith of heart | Ihsan | Malakut |
| Innate trait | Its proper application |
|---|---|
| Cowardice | Toward committing forbidden things |
| Avarice | In respect of one's religion |
| Envy | Of one who spends in God's way or seeks knowledge |
| Eager desire (hirs) | For good, and to spread it |
| Talebearing | Telling the tale of good, "as the garden tells the tale of the sweet smelling flowers" |
| Arrogance, harshness, seeking subjugation | Toward those arrogant against God's command and hostile to Him |
Abu Yazid, asked what he desired, said "I desire not to desire", meaning: make me desire only what You desire. When a latecomer bowed before reaching the rank, the Prophet said, "May God increase you in eager desire, but do not repeat"; God praises the Prophet himself as "eagerly desirous" over his people (9:128). Noah's plea for his drowned son (11:46) teaches the courtesy of asking only on the basis of knowledge (II 616).
18. Safety in Servanthood
As noble traits accumulate, a new danger appears: the servant may claim them as his own and become a rival to God. His only protection is to cling to his nothingness. Everything that manifests Being is God's; what is his alone is nonexistence, poverty and ignorance. Paradoxically, "the more perfect man's nothingness, the more perfectly he manifests God's attributes." This is why the Shahada calls Muhammad "His servant" before "His messenger".
The Koran uses the name Lord (rabb) about 900 times and never without an object: "your Lord", "Lord of the worlds". "The name 'Lord' is never employed without ascription, since it demands the vassal by its very existence" (II 437). Its correlate is the servant ('abd), which covers the whole cosmos and corresponds to the philosophers' "possible thing".
| Servitude ('ubuda) | Servanthood ('ubudiyya) | |
|---|---|---|
| Answers | The engendering command | The prescriptive command |
| Worship | Inherent (dhati), shared with the whole cosmos, which "glorifies God" | Conventional, commanded through prophecy |
| Who | Gnostics "have no relationship except to Him" | Everyone else "stands in the station of servanthood" |
The perils of lordship
Lord and servant never mix: "the servant is servant and the Lord Lord" (II 371). Through assuming the traits, man gains lordly powers: Resolve (what he wants takes imaginal form), speech ("Be!") and touch, like Jesus shaping the clay bird. But in man this power "is a trial, not a bestowal of honour" (II 308). The most dangerous names are Overbearing, Magnificent, Inaccessible and Avenger. Displayed outside the Law, they make a Pharaoh, who said "I am your lord most high" (79:24). Ibn al-'Arabi redefines "adornment" (tahalli) as manifesting servitude continually while assuming the names; "God sets a seal on every heart which is 'magnificent, overbearing'" (40:35).
The "People of Blame" (malamiyya), the perfect gnostics, never hold magnificence inwardly. "Those who bow" bow before the attribute, not the entity: when a gnostic bows to a tyrant, he bows to the overbearing power of God, "Magnificence is My cloak and tremendousness My shawl" (II 33).
The exaltation of lowliness
The highest waystation is to be kept in "the constant witnessing of his own servanthood", whether or not God has dressed him in lordly robes, as in "Glory be to Him who carried His servant by night" (17:1) (III 32). Even a praiseworthy lordly quality like mercy, claimed as one's own, takes the servant out of his level (II 616). Abu Yazid was told: "Come near to Me through that which I do not possess: lowliness and poverty", and on another occasion, "Leave aside your self and come!" Servanthood itself is distance; knowing one is a servant is nearness (II 561).
The perfect servant
To animal man God says, "Be! And now that you are, do this and avoid that." To perfect man He says only "Be!", because in him the two commands coincide. Subsistence (baqa') is a permanent relationship shared with God; annihilation (fana') is a passing creaturely state that can even veil a servant from his servitude, and servitude is the one attribute that is nobler in the creature than lordship would be (II 515). The Prophet's "I will be master of mankind on the Day of Resurrection, without boasting" means he is the most thoroughly realized servant: "The Man is not he who realizes his Lord. The Man is he who realizes his own entity" (II 74). Ibn al-'Arabi permits himself one boast on that basis: "For the rest of this age, I am that one!", because "I am the pure and utter servant who knows nothing of the flavor of lordship" (III 41).
Obligatory and supererogatory works
The root of all supererogation (nafl, "bounty") is that we are God's free will offering: He was under no obligation to create us (II 167). The famous hadith qudsi sets the frame: "My servant draws near to Me through nothing I love more than what I have made obligatory for him. My servant never ceases drawing near to Me through supererogatory works until I love him. Then ... I am his hearing through which he hears, his sight through which he sees, his hand through which he grasps, and his foot through which he walks."
Ibn al-'Arabi ranks the two. In the nearness of supererogatory works God is the servant's faculties; this is a state, and the servant still says "I". In the nearness of obligatory works the servant becomes God's hearing and sight; this is a station, and it is higher. "Obligatory" comes from a root meaning "to cut", just as "the womb (rahim) is a branch cut from the All-merciful (al-rahman)". God "looks at the cosmos only through the sight of the perfect servant ... That servant is precisely the veil between the cosmos and the burning glories" (II 354). The words "I am his hearing" show that it was always so; the only gift of nearness is the unveiling that one has been hearing through God all along (III 67).
Angels, whose obligations fill every breath, are servants by compulsion only; humans also serve by free choice, so only they can "seek Him through Him" (IV 30). The Prophet is highest, "the tongue of the Real" (III 142).
The chapter ends with "everlasting ease" (rahat al-abad). The great Men could bring things into being by Resolve, but they leave the turning of creatures to God. If wonders appear through them, they say, "What do we have to do with making claims? We are nothing." Like a sovereign obeyed for his rank, not his humanity, "the level is the ruler, not themselves" (II 96).
Chapter 7: Consummation, the Gods of Belief and Seeing with Two Eyes
The last chapter asks what the traveller finally becomes. Chittick answers in two sections. The first, Transcending the Gods of Belief, shows that everyone worships God as He appears in the cup of his own belief, and that the gnostic alone frees himself from every knot by accepting them all. The second, Seeing with Two Eyes, ends the book not with Oneness but with duality: the perfect man sees God as incomparable with one eye and as similar with the other, serves every divine name, hides among ordinary people and dwells in the station of no station.
19. Transcending the Gods of Belief
Faith (iman) is belief, verbal attestation and practice, and its objects are fixed by revelation: "God, the angels, the prophets, the scriptures and the Last Day" (2:177). Belief (i'tiqad, 'aqida) is a different word, absent from the Koran. Its root means to tie a knot. Every human being has beliefs, since every existent is a delimited thing with a delimited consciousness, a knot in the heart.
Belief goes back to the preparedness of the immutable entity, but preparedness is never fixed. People are not puppets. God knows their choices in advance, but they do not, and each choice has a real effect. Whoever sincerely prays "My Lord, increase me in knowledge" (20:114) opens himself to more knowledge, and knowledge is light, and light is existence.
Faith is enough for felicity, yet felicity has as many degrees as there are felicitous souls, since existence is a "ranking according to excellence" (tafadul). The tighter a person ties his knot, the further he is from the Nondelimited; the more he loosens it, the nearer he comes. But the loosening must be defined by God through the Law, since "what appears as tightening and restriction from the human point of view may in fact, from the divine point of view, be loosening and deliverance."
The roots of belief
No two people have the same belief because God's self-disclosure never repeats itself. Ibn al-'Arabi calls God's self-transmutation (tahawwul) the "divine self-disclosure in the forms of beliefs" (II 311).
God transcends change in His Essence; the "station of change" only lends its name to self-disclosures "in the measure of the beliefs occasioned within the creatures instant by instant" (II 683). When a person's conception changes, God does not vanish from the old one: "He has an existence in this second conception" (IV 142). Hence the advice: "If anyone wants entrance to God, let him abandon his reason and place before himself God's Law, for God does not accept delimitation, and reason is a delimitation" (III 515).
The diversity is grounded in God. "He is God, One" names the Unity of the One; "God, the Everlasting Refuge" names the Unity of the Many, in which all the names take refuge. Because God is the root of every diversity in beliefs, "everyone will end up with mercy", like letters that differ at their points of articulation yet are all carried by one breath (III 465).
The Fusus distinguishes two self-disclosures. The unseen self-disclosure of the Essence (the He-ness) gives the heart its preparedness. The visible self-disclosure then lifts the veil, and "the servant sees Him in the form of his own belief." He who delimits God denies Him elsewhere; he who frees Him from delimitation "acknowledges Him in every form... ad infinitum", and keeps praying, three times over in the text, "My Lord, increase me in knowledge!" (Fusus 120).
Worshiping God and self
The conclusion is blunt. "No one worships anyone but himself" (II 667); "the creatures worship nothing but a created thing" (IV 386). The gnostic knows who is disclosing Himself and why, but only God knows how, "neither angel nor prophet." Preparedness comes in two kinds: an essential preparedness giving all-inclusive vision, and an accidental one earned by knowledge (IV 443).
The other side of this is that nobody can worship anything but God. "Thy Lord has decreed that you worship none but Him" (17:23) is read by exoteric scholars as a command. Unveiling reads it as an ordainment, a statement of fact. The idolater who names his god Manat, al-'Uzza or al-Lat "worships none but God, though he does not know"; at death the covering is lifted (IV 260). God even answers his prayers, since he has had recourse to the Level of Divinity (I 328). His mistake is not the object but the road: "he has set up for himself a special road of worship which was not established for him by a revealed Law" (I 405).
| Who prays | Name | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| God over us (33:43) | the Last | He lags behind the servant and becomes the God of belief, the Real the servant creates in his heart |
| We to God | "last" | We follow Him, and He looks at us only in the form in which we come |
Knowing self, and the paths of belief
"He who knows himself knows his Lord" here takes a new shade: he knows his own Lord, the water in his own cup, not God as He is. "No existent thing has anything from God except its own specific Lord. It cannot possibly have the All" (Fusus 90). Self-knowledge may also be knowledge of incapacity, as in Abu Bakr's saying, "Incapacity to attain comprehension is itself comprehension." Ibn al-'Arabi praises God first by the names of acts, beginning with himself; since he can never finish with himself, he can never reach the names of incomparability. Whoever claims to praise God by them through witnessing "has not known himself" (II 641). The self is "an ocean without shore", so knowledge of God has no end (III 121).
| Who | Knows God as | Verse sent for him |
|---|---|---|
| Highest | Nondelimited | "Nothing is like Him" (42:11) |
| Middle | Delimited by attributes of perfection | "He knows everything", "the Hearing, the Seeing" |
| Lower | Delimited by time, place and measure | "The All-merciful sat upon the Throne" (20:5), "with you wherever you are" |
| Perfect | All of these | "He knows where they come from and where they go" |
In respect of incomparability every path is straight and every belief equal, since all exist. In respect of similarity the paths lead to different names, some yielding felicity and some wretchedness. The path of faith is wide; "the path of misbelief is even wider, since 'my name is legion.'" And seen in its possibility the cosmos has a chronic disease: possibility is deviation, so "there is no straightness... There is no hope for its cure."
Belief and the Law
Worship is innate to creation (the engendering command), yet the faithful are commanded to worship One God (9:31), so that they do not become "slaves of the meanings" of separate names, with need worshipping the All-provider and illness the Healer (II 409). The decisive text:
The belief of the gnostic and the beatific vision
"God possesses the all-inclusiveness of wujud, while they possess the all-inclusiveness of shuhud" (III 161). The heart is the widest and narrowest thing, open to everything but able to hold only one thought at a time (II 515). So the gnostic ties every knot by untying each in turn: "The creatures have knotted their beliefs concerning God and I bear witness to everything they believe." He cannot pass on what he sees, since "God never discloses Himself in a single form to two individuals, nor in a single form twice." Communities can share a creed because lesser viewers see Him "in the forms of similars"; gnostics cannot coin a term for Him. And the gnostic will not even say God is nondelimited: "He who declares Him nondelimited has not known Him, and he who declares Him delimited is ignorant of Him" (III 384).
Death is the touchstone of belief. "Man dies in accordance with the way he lived" and at death "your sight today is piercing" (50:22). In the barzakh he meets up to twelve forms: of his practice, knowledge, station, state, messenger, the angel, and of names of acts, attributes, descriptions, incomparability and the Essence (II 295). A follower whose belief matches the learned sees it imaginalized in the outer, sound imagination, the kind that showed Gabriel as Dihya.
Gods of Belief; Self as Cup; Beatific Vision
Belief (i'tiqad) = knot in the heart. Rooted in preparedness of immutable entity. Self-disclosure never repeats; Resurrection hadith: God appears, denied, then shows the mark = form of their belief. Junayd: water takes color of cup; no one worships but himself (as configuration). "Be in yourself a hyle for the forms of all beliefs" (Fusus 113). Gnostic: all-inclusiveness of shuhud; recognizes Him in every form; ties every knot by untying all.
Two Eyes; Two Perfections; No Station; Bewilderment
Possessor of Two Eyes (dhu'l-'aynayn): 90:8-10; one eye Being, other nothingness; creation = barzakh. Qur'an (gathering) vs furqan (differentiating): only furqan -> shirk; only qur'an -> batiniyya deny Law. Being with God wherever you are; seventy veils; "Thou art Thyself the veils."
Two perfections: essential (servanthood, one Perfect Man, Nonmanifest) vs accidental (manliness, many perfect men, Manifest). Serving the names: 99 shares of servanthood; Substitutes seven. People of Blame; station of no station: no name dominates; equilibrium. Bewilderment: right theoretical result when both knowledges are correct. Practice remains unambiguous: follow the revealed road.
Serving Names; People of Blame; No Station Deepened
Ninety-nine names hadith: who counts them enters the Garden = ninety-nine shares of servanthood. Substitutes (abdal) seven under seven living names. Perfect man: no name dominates; names impede each other toward sobriety. Pole = 'Abd Allah / 'Abd al-Jami'. People of Blame: hidden; when seen, God remembered. Station of no station: not absence of Law but absence of fixed claim; bewilderment with courtesy. Both knowledges correct: theory may say yes and no; practice follows the Messenger.
Mirror Counsel; Levels of Vision; Essential vs Accidental Perfection
Mirror counsel: constitutions disparate; man is brother's mirror; messengers most balanced; Muhammad all-inclusive constitution; gaze at God in Muhammad's mirror. Levels of knowledge = levels of vision at Resurrection. Men see Lord with eye of every belief on Day of Visitation. Essential perfection = light / degree in Self of Real; accidental = wages in Gardens. Manliness: help vs enemies, mercy to friends, then call to essential perfection. Mirror complete vs perfect: perfect only when it shows the looker. None poorer toward cosmos than perfect man; keeps cosmos distracted.
Gods of Belief; Two Eyes; People of Blame; Station of No Station
Faith includes belief, verbal expression, practice; object of belief is not free invention. Transcending gods of belief: every believer worships a god delimited by his creed; the Real is hyle for beliefs; water takes the cup's color. Two eyes: tanzih and tashbih; Qur'an gathers, Furqan separates. One eye = delusion; two eyes = path. Mirror counsel: constitutions disparate; man is brother's mirror; Muhammad all-inclusive constitution; gaze at God in Muhammad's mirror. Levels of knowledge = levels of vision at Resurrection. Essential perfection = light in Self of Real / servanthood; accidental = wages in Gardens / manliness. People of Blame: by manifesting all names without Lordship they become totally ordinary; when seen, God is remembered. Station of no station: not absence of Law but absence of fixed claim; bewilderment with courtesy. Ninety-nine names hadith: counting = ninety-nine shares of servanthood. Substitutes under living names. Pole = Abd Allah / Abd al-Jami'. Both knowledges correct: theory may say yes and no; practice follows the Messenger.
Counting Names; Substitutes; Perfect vs Complete Mirror; Manliness
Ninety-nine names hadith: who counts them enters the Garden = ninety-nine shares of servanthood, not a verbal tally alone. Substitutes (abdal) seven under seven living names. Perfect man: no name dominates; names impede each other toward sobriety. Complete mirror vs perfect: perfect only when it shows the looker. None poorer toward the cosmos than the perfect man; he keeps the cosmos distracted from claiming independence. Manliness: help vs enemies, mercy to friends, then call to essential perfection. Men see Lord with eye of every belief on Day of Visitation. Levels of knowledge = levels of vision. Knots of belief untied without contempt for the believer's mark.
20. Seeing with Two Eyes
Absolute Oneness belongs to the Essence alone. The moment anyone says God is one, there is a sayer and a said, so tawhid itself demands duality. "Whenever you say 'two', dispute takes place" (21:22; II 93). Chittick therefore ends a book on the great exponent of Unity with duality, quoting the Shaykh's impatience: "The actual situation is nothing but knower and known, lord and vassal... Let him abandon the illusions of that which he calls 'rationally conceivable'!" (IV 102).
Every duality is also a sign of Unity, since nothing made the One two but Itself. Adam became a pair through Eve, drawn from his own rib; the Essence became two through the Divinity, which is "nothing other than God's Essence" (III 314). The cosmos is to God as body to spirit, and we know spirit only through the body: hence "He who knows his soul knows his Lord" and "We shall show them Our signs upon the horizons and in themselves" (41:53). The Manichaeans saw the duality and could not climb out of it to the One (II 439).
The Possessor of the Two Eyes
"Have We not appointed for him two eyes... and guided him on the two highways?" (90:8-10). One eye sees Being, the other nothingness. Creation is "the Barzakh between Light and darkness... the firm impediment which prevents sheer light from dispelling darkness, and sheer darkness from taking away sheer light" (III 274). "You did not throw when you threw, but God threw" (8:17): one eye sees God throwing, the other Muhammad (III 470).
| Sees only | Name of the Book | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Unity | qur'an, "that which brings together" | The deviant esotericists (batiniyya): deny ranking and the Law |
| Multiplicity | furqan, "that which differentiates" | Association: gods multiplied "without proof" (23:117) |
| Both | Every verse has outward sense, inward sense, limit and place of ascent | The face of God in each thing; lawful, unlawful and indifferent kept distinct |
Being with God wherever you are
The traveller cannot reach the Unity of the One. His goal is to return to his root, the "nothing" in "God is, and nothing is with Him", which is his immutable entity; this is the Unity of Manyness. Yet "God is with the cosmos, but the cosmos is never with God" (II 56). "He is with you wherever you are" (57:4) is never reversed, because we do not know how He accompanies us (II 582). "We accompany only His rulings, not Him" (II 287).
The veils are subtle: "Thou art Thyself the veils... We are veiled from Thee only through Thee" (II 159). In a vision Ibn al-'Arabi stood breast-deep in a spring of white milk and heard that prostration to something other than God is felicity only by God's command, which is why the Law sets the kibla: "The kibla is not God, but God is in it" (III 376). "Union" is simply the gnostic's witnessing of a withness that was always there, and "this union cannot turn into separation, just as knowledge cannot turn into ignorance" (II 480).
Two perfections
| Essential | Accidental | |
|---|---|---|
| Name | Servanthood ('ubudiyya) | Manliness (rajuliyya) |
| Reflects | Incomparability, the Nonmanifest | Similarity, the Manifest |
| Number | One "Perfect Man" | Many perfect men, each unique |
| Reward (57:19) | "their light"; degree in the Self of the Real | "their wage"; degrees in the Gardens |
| Ranking | None: "They are degrees" (3:163) | "Some We have ranked above others" (2:253) |
A mirror is complete when made but perfect only when it shows a face; so the perfect man is God's goal in creation. He has two visions: one of God as Independent of the worlds, seen in nothing; one of the All-merciful permeating all things. Through the second "none is poorer toward the cosmos than perfect man", for he sees in things not their entities but the names of God (III 151).
Serving the divine names
"God has ninety-nine names. He who counts them will enter the Garden." To al-Tirmidhi's question, "How many are the shares of servanthood?", Ibn al-'Arabi answers ninety-nine, one per name (II 92). Friends of God are named by the names that rule them: the seven Substitutes (abdal), one per clime, are 'Abd al-Hayy, 'Abd al-'Alim, 'Abd al-Qadir and so on (II 7). Of himself he says that when God made him a servant of the names, "I found no more intense effect than from the name Inaccessible" (II 506).
| Figure | Specific name |
|---|---|
| The Pole (any age) | 'Abd Allah, plus one other |
| Moses | 'Abd al-Shakur, Servant of the Grateful |
| David | 'Abd al-Malik, Servant of the King |
| Muhammad | 'Abd al-Jami', Servant of the All-comprehensive |
In the perfect man no name dominates. The names impede one another, so he stays in "extreme sobriety" where lovers are enraptured: "He discloses Himself to the lovers in nondelimited beauty, but to those who know Him in nondelimited perfection. What does perfection have in common with beauty?" "There can be no sheer servanthood... except in perfect man alone, and no sheer lordship... except in God" (II 603).
The People of Blame
Perfect servanthood makes a man totally ordinary, "like a tree or a bird", unnoticed by his age. These are the malamiyya, "those who know and are not known" (II 145). They put every secondary cause in its place without leaning on it: to abolish a cause "calls its Establisher stupid", to depend on it is association (II 16).
| Type | Marks | Limit |
|---|---|---|
| Worshipers ('ubbad) | Renunciation, pure acts; read al-Muhasibi; refuse to pray for others: "What thing am I?" | See nothing beyond their works |
| Sufis | See all acts as God's; seek states, unveilings, charismatic gifts and display them; chivalry | "Frivolity", self-conceit; exposed to deception |
| People of Blame | Nothing beyond the obligations and the Sunna; walk in the markets; poor toward all things, since all are named "Allah" | None: the highest, with Muhammad as their master |
The station of no station
Perfection is "being removed from attributes and effects." The gnostic is contracted in expansion and expanded in contraction. Abu Sa'id al-Kharraz knew God "through the fact that He brings opposites together" (57:3; II 512). The highest station has no content: "O people of Yathrib, you have no station" (33:13). Asked how he was this morning, Abu Yazid said, "I have no morning and no evening; morning and evening belong to him who is delimited by attributes" (II 133). He is the olive tree "neither of the east nor of the west" (24:35).
| 2 | kinds: one who inherits a ruling found in no earlier Law, or one who passes through all stations into no station (Abu Yazid) |
| 1 | Jesus, a Muhammadan, who will seal the Greater Friendship |
He is also the destitute (muflis). "One dirham outstrips a thousand": the poor man spends all and returns to God, the rich keeps a remainder to return to. "The possessors of riches are imprisoned", while the thirsty man reaches the mirage, "finds it is no-thing, and there he finds God" (24:39). "Nothing of the command belongs to thee" (3:128) made the Prophet destitute (III 105). Such people are fixed in place, varying in rank, like mountains "passing by like clouds" (27:88): "stability in variegation" (II 386).
Bewilderment
The name Allah yields three outstanding properties in the servant: incomparability, worship and bewilderment. The elect say by turns "We are we and He is He", "He is we and we are He", and "We are not purely we and He is not purely He", and 8:17 confirms all three by affirming and negating at once. "Knowledge of God is bewilderment, and knowledge of creation is bewilderment" (IV 279).
Both knowledges are correct: the chapter's last word
The closing passage of the chapter (II 661.10) turns bewilderment into a rule for knowing. In the highest witnessing no curtain and no veil remains, since a veil limits the veiled and God has no limit upon His Essence. He speaks from every form, but not in every form; He is seen by every eye and heard by every hearing, yet no speech is heard from Him. "He obliterates" (13:39) and He is identical with what is obliterated; "He establishes" and He is identical with what is established.
| Knowledge of proofs | Knowledge of unveiling |
|---|---|
| Negates the vision: it has nothing of Him in its hands and works by declaring incomparability | Affirms and preserves it: no locus of manifestation appears without its seeing Him there |
God belongs to each faculty according to that faculty, so that it never leaves its own office and grasps of Him only what it is in itself; each faculty ends by knowing and describing its own essence. Because "He has decreed that none be worshiped but Him" (17:23), even idol-worshippers worship only God through the locus they have chosen. God gives them drink, yet they become wretched when they fail to honour the Divine Side in that form: "Look how one group reaches felicity, and others become wretched!"
Two Sufi sayings close the chapter. "Whatever you imagine, God is different from that" is both right and wrong: it makes manifest and it veils. "God is not proven by any proof" is answered by the observation that when He is invoked He is invoked through Him: He is "the rational faculty of the rational thinkers, the reflection of the reflectors, the invocation of the invokers, the proof of the provers." The last line holds both eyes together: "Were He to come out of a thing, it would cease to be. And were He to be within a thing, it would cease to be."
Synthesis
The whole book in takeaways, frameworks, a critical reading, the main figures and the places where Ibn al-'Arabi's ideas touch present-day work.
Carrying the Path of Knowledge
Portable result: Being belongs to God; cosmos is He/not He; knowing needs two eyes and the Scale; the path ends in servanthood and no station. Readers who take imagination without tawhid, or unveiling without Law, or mercy without hierarchy, split what Chittick holds together.
Frameworks table (working)
| Framework | Use | |
|---|---|---|
| He/not He | Every ontological claim | Two eyes |
| Every epistemic claim | Scale of Law | Every unveiling |
| Names as relationships | Theology without multiplying God | New Creation |
| No habit, no claim of independence | Station of no station | End of path without antinomianism |
Portable Frameworks Compacted
Carry these without soft-capping them into slogans:
- He/not He with two eyes (tanzih + tashbih).
- Wujud as Finding/Being; entities immutable then existent.
- Imagination under tawhid: Absolute Ruler, barzakh, Cloud/Breath.
- Scale of the Law over reason and unveiling alike.
- Preparedness (isti'dad) limits reception; jealousy of names assigns effects.
- Servanthood over Lordship claims; People of Blame; no station.
- Mercy final: wrath within mercy; felicity essential; evil accidental.
- Perfect Man as gathering mirror; Pole as Abd Allah.
A closer look: Western readers who meet only Fusus-through-philosophy miss Futuhat Law and practice. Who should read: students of Islamic metaphysics, comparative mysticism, and anyone tracking how imagination is rescued from fantasy into ontology.
Key Takeaways
- Being belongs to God alone. Wujud is the Real; everything else "borrows" existence, like light reflected in a mirror. Things are possible: in themselves they neither exist nor not exist.
- The Essence is unknowable; the names are what we know. We know God only through relationships (nisab) between the Essence and the cosmos, named Merciful, Knowing, Creator and so on.
- The names are relationships, not entities. They have properties and effects, yet "they have no existence in themselves", which saves the Essence from multiplicity.
- "Allah" is the all-comprehensive name. It gathers every other name, so the human being made in its "form" can manifest them all.
- Incomparability and similarity both hold. Reason declares God beyond every likeness (tanzih); revelation and unveiling find Him in every form (tashbih). Holding only one gives a lopsided God.
- Fixed entities are not archetypes. Every thing is eternally known to God as a fixed entity ('ayn thabita); God gives existence to it according to its preparedness. God does only what the entity asks of Him by its nature.
- Creation is new at every instant. No self-disclosure is repeated; the world is renewed with each breath while people "are uncertain of a new creation" (50:15).
- The cosmos is He/not He. Like an image in a mirror or a dream, the world is both the Real and other than the Real: this is why Chittick calls the book a "metaphysics of imagination".
- The Breath of the All-merciful is the stuff of things. God's mercy "relieves" the names of their longing to be manifest; the Breath, articulated like speech, takes on the forms of all creatures.
- The Supreme Barzakh (the Cloud, the Reality of Realities, the Real Through Whom Creation Takes Place) stands between Necessary Being and nonexistence and holds all things.
- Imagination is a real level of being. Dreams, the after-death world and the appearing of angels and of God "in forms" all happen in imagination, which makes the impossible manifest: meanings take bodies.
- Knowledge must be useful. The knowledge that counts brings felicity; Ibn al-'Arabi values ma'rifa that is "tasted" over theory, and knowledge always calls for practice.
- Reflection is a human affliction. Reason is a limiting ('aql, "fetter") faculty: superb at declaring incomparability, helpless before the self-disclosure of the Real.
- Unveiling is a gift, not a technique. It comes through God-fearing practice and an empty, receptive heart. It is checked, not replaced, by the Law.
- The Shari'a is the Scale. Every insight, state and inrush is weighed by revealed Law; "whoever lets the Scale fall from his hand" is deceived.
- Courtesy (adab) is wisdom in action. Give each thing its due, including secondary causes, which God set up and which the gnostic does not despise.
- Faith is a light in the heart, given before understanding. It accepts the reports of similarity without rational "interpretation".
- Against ta'wil. Ibn al-'Arabi condemns reason taking scripture "back" to what it can conceive; the literal sense stands and every sense the words carry is intended by God.
- The Koran is read by allusion (ishara), as the Folk of Allah do: inner meanings are added to the outward sense, never substituted for it.
- Self-disclosure is known by tasting. "Finding" (wujud) in ecstasy, witnessing and vision are increase in knowledge, yet God is never seen except through a veil, and the last veil is the self.
- Weigh every disclosure. States and unveilings can be divine deception (makr); the seeker needs a shaykh and the Law.
- Assuming the traits of the names (takhalluq) is the path: realizing in oneself the names according to their proper places, with the Prophet's character as the model.
- The perils of lordship. Using the names to rule or to work wonders exposes the seeker to ruin; servanthood ('ubudiyya) is the only safe station.
- Everyone worships the god of his belief. Each person's God is "made" in the cup of his own preparedness; the gnostic recognizes God in every belief and is a hyle for them all.
- Seeing with two eyes is the mark of perfection: Unity and multiplicity, incomparability and similarity, qur'an and furqan, held at once.
- The People of Blame are the highest friends: outwardly ordinary, inwardly in the station of no station.
- The goal is bewilderment, not a final answer. "O God, increase my bewilderment in Thee": the gnostic is bewildered because he has found, and "both knowledges", proof and unveiling, are correct.
Frameworks at a Glance
| Framework | Where | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Essence / Divinity / names | Ch 2 | Separates what can never be known from God as related to the cosmos |
| Conference of the Names | Ch 2 | Mythic picture of why the cosmos had to be made: the names need loci |
| Tanzih / tashbih | Ch 2, 4, 7 | Two necessary, partial views of God; the "two eyes" |
| Possible / Necessary / impossible | Ch 3 | Ontological status of things between Being and nothingness |
| Fixed entity + preparedness | Ch 3 | Explains why each thing receives exactly the existence it does |
| New Creation (khalq jadid) | Ch 3 | Cosmos renewed every instant; no self-disclosure repeats |
| He/not He and the three imaginations | Ch 3 | Cosmos, intermediate world and human faculty as levels of imagination |
| Breath of the All-merciful | Ch 3 | Creation as divine speech articulated in letters and words |
| Reflection / following / unveiling | Ch 4 | Three sources of knowledge, with their scope and limits |
| Scale of the Law | Ch 4, 6 | Measure for weighing knowledge, states and acts |
| Literal sense + allusion | Ch 5 | Reading scripture without "interpreting it away" |
| Stations and states | Ch 6 | Acquired, lasting qualities vs gifts that come and go |
| Takhalluq (assuming the traits) | Ch 6 | The ethical path: realizing the names in their proper places |
| Lordship / servanthood | Ch 6, 7 | Where danger lies and where safety lies |
| God of belief / God of the Messenger | Ch 7 | Distinguishes self-made images of God from what revelation brings |
| Essential / accidental perfection | Ch 7 | Pure servanthood vs serving whichever name the moment calls for |
| Chittick (this book) | Corbin (Alone with the Alone) |
|---|---|
| Let the texts speak; short commentary | Interpretive essay in Corbin's own vocabulary |
| Koran, hadith and the Shari'a at the centre | Esoteric, Shi'ite and Iranian frame; Law in the background |
| Imagination as a level of being and a barzakh | Creative Imagination and the mundus imaginalis |
| Rejects reading ta'wil as the key | Makes ta'wil the central act |
| Goal: perfect servanthood and bewilderment | Goal: meeting one's Angel, the "Form of God" |
A closer look
- Anthology, not argument. The book is an arrangement of translated passages. Chittick chose and ordered them, so the coherence the reader sees is partly his; the Futuhat itself is digressive and repetitive. Readers meet a systematic Ibn al-'Arabi that the text does not present in this order.
- Defending the master. Chittick plays down the "pantheist" and "monist" readings and the wahdat al-wujud label. That corrects older scholarship, but it can understate how strongly later critics, from Ibn Taymiyya onward, objected, and why (see Knysh's study of the polemic).
- Fixed renderings. Terms like "self-disclosure", "preparedness" and "the Real" make the English consistent but can hide the range of the Arabic words and make passages sound more technical than they are.
- Mostly the Futuhat. The Fusus, the poetry and the shorter treatises appear little; so do historical context and Ibn al-'Arabi's predecessors (Ibn Masarra, al-Ghazali, the Andalusian schools).
- Hard claims left standing. The fixed entities seem to make destiny inescapable; idol worship counts as worship of God; the gnostic's knowledge outranks love. Chittick reports these faithfully but rarely presses on them philosophically.
- Strengths. The book remains the standard English entry into the Futuhat: careful translations, full citations, a rich index of terms, and a correction of the idea that Sufi metaphysics floats free of Koran and Law.
Who's Who
| Figure | Role in the book |
|---|---|
| Ibn al-'Arabi (1165-1240) | The "Greatest Master" (al-Shaykh al-Akbar); author of the Futuhat |
| The Prophet Muhammad | Model of perfection; the "Muhammadan" inheritor stands in the station of no station |
| Abu Yazid al-Bastami | Early Sufi whose sayings illustrate the station of no station and the perils of claiming lordship |
| Junayd | "The color of the water is the color of its cup": belief takes the shape of the believer |
| Abu Bakr and 'Umar | Abu Bakr: "Incapacity to attain comprehension is itself comprehension"; 'Umar receives the rest of the milk of knowledge in the Prophet's dream |
| Bilal | The freed slave whose call to prayer shows the exaltation of lowliness |
| Khidr | The prophet of knowledge "from Our presence" (18:65), the type of unlettered knowledge |
| Jesus | The Seal of universal friendship, a Muhammadan |
| Averroes (Ibn Rushd) | The philosopher whose meeting with the young Ibn al-'Arabi contrasts reason and unveiling |
| Sadr al-Din Qunawi | Chief disciple; systematized the teaching and its vocabulary of wujud |
| The Ash'arites and Mu'tazilites | Kalam schools whose rational theology Ibn al-'Arabi both uses and limits |
| The philosophers (falasifa) | Masters of reflection; right on incomparability, blind to self-disclosure |
| Corbin, Izutsu, Nasr | Modern interpreters Chittick engages or builds on in the Introduction |
Glossary of Key Terms
| Term | Chittick's English and meaning |
|---|---|
| adab | Courtesy: giving each thing and each situation its due, before God and creatures |
| 'abd / 'ubudiyya / 'ubuda | Servant / servanthood / servitude; the safe and highest station of the human being |
| ahl Allah | The Folk of Allah: the gnostics and friends who know by unveiling |
| 'alam al-khayal / al-mithal | World of imagination / of images: the intermediate world between spirits and bodies |
| 'aql | Reason, the rational faculty; literally a "fetter" that delimits and binds |
| 'ayn thabita (a'yan) | Fixed entity: a thing as eternally known by God, nonexistent in itself |
| barzakh | Isthmus: anything that separates two things and joins them; the Supreme Barzakh holds all things |
| dhawq | Tasting: direct experiential knowledge |
| fikr / nazar | Reflection / rational consideration |
| furqan / qur'an | Discrimination / gathering: seeing distinctions and seeing unity |
| hadra | Presence: a domain in which a name or level exercises its properties |
| Haqq | The Real: God as Being, also "the true, the right, the due" |
| Haqiqa / Shari'a / Tariqa | Reality / Law / Path; for Ibn al-'Arabi the Law and Reality are one |
| hal / maqam | State (a passing gift) / station (an acquired, lasting quality) |
| hayra | Bewilderment: the highest knowledge of God and of creation |
| huwa la huwa | He/not He: the ambiguous status of the cosmos and of every image |
| insan kamil | Perfect Man: the human being who actualizes all the names |
| ishara | Allusion: the Sufi mode of reading inner meanings alongside the outward sense |
| isti'dad | Preparedness: a thing's capacity to receive existence and self-disclosure |
| kashf | Unveiling: knowledge given directly by God to a purified heart |
| khalq jadid | New creation: the cosmos renewed at every instant |
| khayal | Imagination: a faculty, an intermediate world, and the cosmos as a whole |
| makr | Deception, divine guile: a grace that leads astray the one who does not weigh it |
| malamiyya | People of Blame: the highest friends, outwardly ordinary |
| ma'rifa / 'arif | Gnosis / the gnostic: knowledge that is realized, not only learned |
| maqam la maqam | Station of no station: the Muhammadan station beyond every delimitation |
| mazhar (mazahir) | Locus of manifestation: the place where a name or self-disclosure appears |
| mumkin | Possible thing: neither necessary nor impossible; the status of every creature |
| murajjih | Preponderator: God, who tips a possible thing toward existence |
| nafas al-Rahman | Breath of the All-merciful: the "substance" in which all creatures are articulated |
| nisba (nisab) | Relationship: what a divine name is, between the Essence and the cosmos |
| qalb | Heart: the organ of unveiling, named for its constant fluctuation (taqallub) |
| rububiyya | Lordship: the dangerous station of exercising divine names over others |
| shuhud / mushahada | Witnessing: vision of the Real in the loci of manifestation |
| tajalli | Self-disclosure: God's showing Himself in the forms of things and in hearts |
| takhalluq | Assuming the traits (of the names): the ethical core of the path |
| taqlid | Following authority: accepting knowledge on the word of another |
| tanzih / tashbih | Declaring incomparability / declaring similarity; the two eyes of sound vision |
| ta'wil | Interpretation: "taking back" a text to what reason accepts; rejected when it denies the literal sense |
| al-'Ama' | The Cloud: the Supreme Barzakh, first receptacle of the Breath |
| uluhiyya | Divinity: God as the one who possesses all the names, distinct from the Essence (dhat) |
| wujud / mawjud | Being, existence, "finding" / existent thing |
| wali / wilaya | Friend (of God) / friendship, sainthood |
Extended Caution Notes
- Wahdat al-wujud: later slogan; Chittick tracks effects and jealousy of names instead of pantheism labels.
- Immutable entity: not "permanent archetype"; the thing itself in knowledge.
- Imagination: ontological barzakh, not daydream.
- Kashf: unveiling that still needs the Scale.
- Insan kamil: Perfect Man as mirror and barzakh walker, not Superman.
- Maqam la maqam: no fixed claim, not antinomianism.
- Rahma: existence-mercy precedes wrath; all end in mercy.
About this book
The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-'Arabi's Metaphysics of Imagination by William C. Chittick, 1989. 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