Ibn al-‘Arabī

Islamic scholar and philosopher

• Born: July 28, 1165
• Birthplace: Murcia, Valencia (now in Spain)
• Died: November 16, 1240
• Place of death: Damascus Ayyūbid Empire (now in Syria)

Ibn al-ՙArabī formulated and made explicit the inner doctrines of Sufism and was the link between the Eastern and Western schools of that philosophy.

Early Life

Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn al-ՙArabī al-Ḥātīmī al-Ṭa՚ī, commonly known as Ibn al-ՙArabī (ihb-nool-ar-a-BEE) was born in Islamic Spain to a well-to-do and respected family. He spent his early years in Murcia, moving first to Lisbon and later to the more cosmopolitan Seville, where his family settled. There he received his formal education and was given the leisure to pursue a developing interest in mystical approaches to religion and the teachings of Sufism. In search of spiritual enlightenment, he sought out individuals known for their wisdom and spiritual insights who would be willing to take him on as a pupil and guide him in his quest. One such figure, Fatimah of Córdoba, an elderly yet vigorous woman at ninety-five, became Ibn al-ՙArabī’s spiritual adviser for several years.

Students of Islamic philosophy customarily pursued a formal program of study in such subjects as cosmology, the metaphysical doctrines of Islam, analysis of the Qur՚ān for hidden meaning, and the science of letters and numbers. In addition, the student gained skills in the practice of private activities such as meditation, vigil, fasting, and prayer. On fulfilling these requirements, the successful aspirant was prepared to experience, understand, and control supersensory communications of several types. He was empowered with such gifts as visions, precognition, communing with the spirits of the dead, and healing. Ibn al-ՙArabī is reported to have been a proficient student who enjoyed numerous mystical experiences; he frequently visited cemeteries, where he spoke with the dead. It was during this intellectually fertile period of his life that he married the first of three wives, a woman named Maryam the daughter of a man of influence and wealth who was eager to partake of her husband’s spiritual experiences and quest.

At age twenty, and already initiated into the Sufi way, Ibn al-ՙArabī began to travel throughout Andalusia in search of greater enlightenment. During one of his stays in the city of Córdoba, he was invited to the home of Averroës, the most celebrated Islamic disciple of Aristotelian philosophy of the age and a friend of his father. The well-established scholar and the young visionary represented opposite approaches to the question of knowledge: Averroës proposed that reason was the foundation of wisdom, while to Ibn al-ՙArabī, true knowledge resulted from spiritual vision. Nevertheless, Averroës fully understood Ibn al-ՙArabī’s goals and recognized that his visitor had attained a level of understanding superior to most. Ibn al-ՙArabī describes Averroës’ reaction to the visit thus:

He had thanked God, I have been told, to have lived at a time when he could have seen someone who had entered into spiritual retreat ignorant and had left it as I had done. He said: “It was a case whose possibility I had affirmed myself without however as yet encountering someone who had experienced it. Glory be to God that I have been able to live at a time when there exists a master of this experience, one of those who open the locks of His doors. Glory be to God to have made me the personal favor of seeing one of them with my own eyes.”

Ibn al-ՙArabī continued his peripatetic existence in Andalusia and North Africa, visiting sages, holding debates, and writing. He was also subject to frequent visions. In one such vision, received in 1198, he was ordered to depart for Asia. Heeding the command, he arrived in Mecca in 1201 and remained there for four years, devoting himself to study, public discussion of his views, and writing. During his stay in the holy city of Islam, he married his second wife, wrote several works including a famous collection of love poems and began composition of his most famous book, al-Futūhāt al-Makkīyah (thirteenth century; the Meccan revelations), a lengthy compendium of esoteric knowledge.

Life’s Work

Sufism represents an Islamic tradition, as old as the religion itself, of a small group of devout believers exemplified by the earliest followers of Muḥammad the Prophet who renounce the rewards and temptations of this world in order to lead a life of contemplation and prayer. The emphasis of the group is on the direct experience of God; its fundamental tenet is that “there is no reality but the Reality (God), and that all other realities are purely relative and dependent upon His reality.” The cumulative experiences and insights of those who followed the early Sufis constitute a complex doctrine; as a tradition, it was wrapped in heavy symbolism and obscure references, accessible only to those who could receive the dogma orally from an enlightened master. Ibn al-ՙArabī succeeded in changing the pattern of transmission by recording much of this wisdom in books, making it possible for the tradition, full of veiled allusion, to be communicated to wider audiences in clearer and more accessible form. He is known among the Sufis as “the greatest Shaikh” for his role as the first to set in writing the vast amount of doctrine contained in the Sufi oral tradition.

Ibn al-ՙArabī was a prolific writer, believed to have authored 250 separate titles. Aside from his writings on Sufism, he composed short treatises, letters, poetry, and abstract philosophical works. His most impressive work, however, is al-Futūhāt al-Makkīyah. The motivation for writing the book, as the title implies, came from a compelling outside source divine revelation and the author is spoken of as simply the vehicle through which the message was recorded. The lengthy treatise, considered the main sourcebook of the sacred sciences of Islam, is made up of 560 chapters; it records the sayings of the earlier Sufis, explains the principles of metaphysics and various sacred sciences, and describes Ibn al-ՙArabī’s own spiritual development. A second important work, Fuṣūs al-ḥikam (1229; The Bezels of Wisdom, 1980), is Ibn al-ՙArabī’s spiritual testament. This twenty-seven-chapter book, which contains the basic doctrines of Islamic esotericism, was inspired by a vision of the Prophet holding a book and ordering the writer to transmit the word to future generations.

Because Ibn al-ՙArabī’s metaphysical doctrines came from inspiration rather than meditation, his works generally lack coherence and frustrate those who read them hoping to gather from them a systematic and comprehensive view of the universe. Students of Ibn al-ՙArabī suggest that his aim was not to give a rationally satisfying explanation of reality. In fact, some would argue that he was not a philosopher at all, since he was not interested in constructing a complete and consistent system of thought. What he attempted to do, rather, was to present a vision of reality, the attainment of which depended on the practice of certain methods of realization.

At the core of Ibn al-ՙArabī’s thought, as for all Sufism, is the concept of the transcendent unity of Being: Though God is separate from the universe, he encompasses all of it. While God manifests himself in the creation, he transcends it. While God is above all qualities, he is not devoid of them. The qualities, or Names, are infinite, yet they are summarized in the Qur՚ān to make them understandable. Knowledge of these Names, then, leads to knowledge of God, and to spiritual realization. One who has attained this level, the “Universal Man,” is one who has understood the Names, has mastered all the stages of enlightenment, and has been able to combine the fullness of being and of knowledge. The Prophet Muḥammad was such a Universal Man, as were the great saints of Islam who, over the generations, transcended material reality and understood all the spiritual possibilities of the universe.

The goal of all Sufis is union with the Divine, achieved in the gradual ascent through several levels of spiritual attainment culminating in a state of complete contemplation of God. The desired union with the Divine Being only comes after the arduous ascent, as if climbing a mountain, toward spiritual purification. Prayer is the essential element of this climb and also its ultimate goal; humans begin by praying to God and end their search by purifying their soul and allowing God to pray within them. Humans thus become the mirrors of God and finally understand all of God’s Names.

Each step in this spiritual quest requires passage from the outward reality to the inner one, to the true essence of things: from the external, or exoteric, to the hidden, or esoteric. The nonmaterial nature of the quest makes the use of ordinary words insufficient. For this reason, the Sufis often rely on a language full of symbols, the only adequate tool to describe the hidden meaning of nature, the true significance of the religious experience, and the inner workings of a person’s soul.

Ibn al-ՙArabī’s articulation of the ideals of Sufism brought him fame, notoriety, and even some enemies. He spent the last part of his life living and lecturing in different areas of the Middle East and Asia Minor, coming into contact with numerous influential writers and thinkers. One of his disciples, Sadr al-Dīn al-Qunawi, is considered the essential bridge between Western Sufism and the equally vigorous school developing in Iran during the thirteenth century. Ibn al-ՙArabī eventually settled in Damascus in 1223, where he remained for most of the rest of his life. There he devoted himself to teaching and writing and, as a respected sage, was able to influence future generations of Sufis, both Eastern and Western. He was survived by two sons and a daughter. One of the sons became an accomplished poet; of the daughter it is said that she was able to respond to difficult theological questions at an early age.

Significance

It is evident that Sufism, like similar schools of thought whose goal is spiritual communion with an Absolute, defies a simple and precise definition. Moreover, the experiences its adherents seek cannot be understood easily or even appreciated by the uninitiated; nor can they be described, with any clarity, using ordinary everyday language. Ibn al-ՙArabī’s most notable contribution was to record his own understanding of how this communion with a Supreme Being was attained, recounting, in the process, centuries-old insights hitherto transmitted only orally by enlightened individuals. He thus gave later generations a language with which to describe their experiences and a definitive doctrine from which to continue to develop the theoretical foundations of Sufism.

Through the centuries, Ibn al-ՙArabī’s influence has been enormous; he has been read and studied as seriously by his detractors as by his disciples. Clear links have been traced from Ibn al-ՙArabī to all subsequent Sufi schools of thought and religious orders throughout the Islamic world. In modern times, his works continue to be read as far east as India and Pakistan; his odes are recited in Sufi monasteries in Egypt and North Africa. Some scholars have suggested that Ibn al-ՙArabī strongly, if indirectly, influenced Dante, whose works reveal parallels with the spiritual quest of the Sufi.

Bibliography

Addas, Claude. Ibn ՙArabī: The Voyage of No Return. Translated by David Streight. Cambridge, England: Islamic Texts Society, 2000. Part of the Muslim Personalities series, this book examines Ibn al-ՙArabī and Sufism. Includes a bibliography.

Affifi, Abul E. The Mystical Philosophy of Muhyid Din-Ibnul ՙArabī. 1939. Reprint. New York: AMS Books, 1974. The first serious and comprehensive examination of Ibn al-ՙArabī’s philosophy, this work attempts to make the Muslim sage understandable to Western readers. Refers to Ibn al-ՙArabī as a pantheist and a typical mystic philosopher, labels that other scholars find difficult to justify. Useful bibliography and an informative appendix.

Asín Palacios, Miguel. Islam and the Divine Comedy. Translated by Harold Sunderland. London. 1926. Rev. ed. Lahore, Pakistan: Qausain, 1977. The seminal work by the distinguished Spanish Arabist and translator of Ibn al-ՙArabī. The author was the first scholar to suggest the link between Dante and Islamic mysticism. A fascinating study of the transmission of philosophical and literary motifs.

Coates, Peter. Ibn ՙArabī and Modern Thought: The History of Taking Metaphysics Seriously. Oxford, England: Anqa, 2002. Explores the metaphysics of Ibn al-ՙArabī in the context of modern philosophy.

Corbin, Henry. Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ՙArabī. Translated by Ralph Manheim. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. Explores in great detail Ibn al-ՙArabī’s notion of the creative imagination, which, according to the author, is the goal of the mystical experience. A serious and erudite work displaying great familiarity with Eastern and Western schools of mystical philosophy. The author attempts to understand Ibn al-ՙArabī’s thought in relation to these traditions.

Ibn al-ՙArabī. Sufis of Andalusia: The “Ruh al-quds” and “al-Durrat al-Fakhirah” of Ibn ՙArabī. Translated with an introduction and notes by R. W. J. Austin. London: Allen and Unwin, 1971. A translation of one of Ibn al-ՙArabī’s most accessible works, his account of Hispano-Muslim sages who influenced and guided him in his search for enlightenment. Of particular interest is Ibn al-ՙArabī’s mention of numerous female role models, described as having reached high levels of spirituality within a tradition that generally excludes women from such pursuits. The volume contains a fairly informative biographical portrait.

Knysh, Alexander. Ibn ՙArabī in the Later Islamic Tradition: The Making of a Polemical Image in Medieval Islam. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Examines the controversy surrounding Ibn al-ՙArabī’s philosophy in the tradition of Islam, a tradition suspicious of his mysticism. Looks at the intellectual strategies used by his detractors over time.

Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. Three Muslim Sages. 1969. Reprint. Delmar, N.Y.: Caravan Books, 1976. A third of the book is devoted to Ibn al-ՙArabī, emphasizing the importance of the medieval thinker in the development of Sufism in particular and Islam in general. Dismisses much of the criticism against Ibn al-ՙArabī by asserting that his thought is highly original and resulted from divine inspiration.

Shah, Idries. The Sufis. 1964. Reprint. London: Octagon Press, 1984. A serious and readable account of the theories, development, and principal figures of Sufism. The author uses numerous examples of ways in which Sufi motifs and practices found their way into European letters and institutions. Suggests that Sufism was disseminated mainly by its poets and quotes Ibn al-ՙArabī’s poetry as a possible model for the development of the cult of the Virgin Mary.