Born in Murcia (Spain) in 1165 CE, Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn ‘Arabī is known by the Sufis as “The Master of Masters,” “Sultan of the Gnostics,” and “Reviver of Religion.” He spent his early life in Seville, where he received his education and was influenced by two women mystics. In Cordoba, he met Ibn Rushd, who himself believed in neo-platonised Aristotelianism in a very dogmatic manner. Ibn Arabi traveled throughout North Africa and the Near East: Cairo, Mecca, Konya, Baghdad, Aleppo, and Damascus. He wrote about 350 works, which range from brief treatises to his magnum opus The Meccan Illuminations فتوحات مکیه, containing 560 chapters dealing with different occult ideas and his own mental experiences.
Another of his most widely read works is The Bezels of Wisdom فصوص الحکم, in which, over 26 chapters, he expounds the fundamental doctrines of Sufi esoterism. The Interpreter of Desires, ترجمان الاشواق , is a poetic text centered on love and desire.
Although his work lacks intellectual value but it is quite difficult to read and hard to understand, as it is written in his own style of language using very strange vocabulary, based on that used in the earlier Sufi texts. The reader must learn not only the exact meaning of his words but also the related nuances and images. This is a complex symbolic language that requires deciphering. This is one reason why some Shia scholars have praised him, they couldn’t see beyond the linguistic fog.
Ibn ‘Arabī belongs to a kind of mysticism or Sufism that can be considered esoteric: he seeks mystical experiences and is strongly influenced by Neoplatonism. He claimed that the so called intuitive knowledge he possessed came directly from God. The use of Neoplatonic doctrines and terminology made his work interesting for those who followed philosophy of Plotinus. Among his doctrines, the most important are the transcendental unicity of being and the perfect man, who plays a central role in emanation of things from God, an idea starkly different to creationism of Qur’an.
In the third verse of chapter 112 we read:
لَمْ يَلِدْ وَلَمْ يُولَدْ
Translation: “He (God) begets not, nor is He begotten.”
His constant evocation of the meeting with the prophets, his continual affirmation that he is conversing with the saints of the past, his claim to a special divine inspiration through an angel or the prophet Muḥammad (PBUH&P), and his incessant recourse to the so-called evidence for the invisible earned him charges of unorthodoxy and, even, of being a satanic spirit. Seen as a pantheist by some, others have emphasized the eminently spiritual character of his thought.
Like most Sufis, he was a charlatan, who used superficial language that bought him influence in a medieval world infused with superstition and ignorance. He has been considered as a “philosopher” like any other, precisely because he formulated a complete metaphysical and cosmological, psychological and anthropological doctrine, which in principle is in contrast to scientific worldview and falls into category of pseudoscience.
Sometimes, he adopted a position against philosophy and even stated that the knowledge of the philosophers is totally vain. He rejected reflection because it causes confusion and lack of truthfulness. He also maintained that reflection is a veil, debated by some, but that is not negated by any of those who follow the Path; only those who practice speculative reflection and reasoning by induction claim otherwise. He was against reason because most reasonable people would not experience similar psychological disorders as Sufis.
He, therefore, believed that it is very rare that philosophers experience spiritual states; if and when these do occur, they are similar to the introspection and contemplation of the mystics. The only true philosopher, the one worthy of the name “wise,” a term, which for him is the Gnostic charlatan, is someone who seeks to perfect his knowledge through contemplation and spiritual experience. The rest, who use only their intellects, will never even perceive more than a tiny part of the truth.
This hatred of intellect is against the teachings of Qur’an, which emphasizes the importance of reason again and again.
In verse 100 of chapter 10, we read:
وَيَجْعَلُ الرِّجْسَ عَلَى الَّذِينَ لَا يَعْقِلُونَ.
Translation: “and He will place defilement upon those who will not use reason.”
In verse 18 of chapter 39, we read:
ٱلَّذِينَ يَسْتَمِعُونَ ٱلْقَوْلَ فَيَتَّبِعُونَ أَحْسَنَهُۥٓ ۚ أُو۟لَـٰٓئِكَ ٱلَّذِينَ هَدَىٰهُمُ ٱللَّهُ ۖ وَأُو۟لَـٰٓئِكَ هُمْ أُو۟لُوا۟ ٱلْأَلْبَـٰبِ.
Translation: “Those who listen to what is said, and follow the best in it: those are the ones whom Allah has guided, and those are the ones endued with intellect.”
See also: Ibn-e-Arabi was a heretic – Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Ishaq Fayadh
For Ibn Arabi, the truth has two aspects, the manifest and the concealed. There is a truth that is reached by following a new path; not that of human reason, but that of the heart, the true organ of mystical perception. This idea has been rejected by recent advances in linguistics, epistemology and neuroscience.
Ibn ʿArabī expounded the doctrine of Being and its manifestations more gnostically than philosophically in the usual sense of the term. He talked about Divine Essence, the Names and Qualities, theophany, and other issues of this kind, but he did not use the language of the so called muslim philosophers either. His metaphysics starts at the Beginning, which is above Being, of which Being is the first “decision.”
His doctrine of necessity included an exposition of the meaning of the term “existence” understood as Being, although he approached the problem from a different angle with respect to that of the Neoplatonic philosophers of his time. He was the first to formulate the doctrine of the unicity of existence or transcendental unicity of being. This means that as God is totally transcendent in relation to the universe, then the universe is not totally separate from Him. This is opposite to how the school of Ahlulbayt (PBUT) interprets the oneness of God, i.e.: God is radically different from his creation.
In the Sabah supplication, we read:
يَا مَنْ دَلَّ عَلَىٰ ذَاتِهِ بِذَاتِهِ
Translation: “O He Who demonstrates His Reality by His Reality”,
وَتَنَزَّهَ عَنْ مُجَانَسَةِ مَخْلُوقَاتِهِ
Translation: “and transcends from unicity with His creation”,
وَجَلَّ عَنْ مُلائَمَةِ كَيْفِيَاتِهِ
Translation: “and is exalted beyond conformity with His qualities”.
Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq (PBUH) said:
إن الله تبارك وتعالى خلو من خلقه، وخلقه خلو منه وكل ما وقع عليه اسم شيء ما خلا الله عزوجل فهو مخلوق، والله خالق كل شيء، تبارك الذي ليس كمثله شيء.
Translation: “Verily, Allah, the Blessed and Exalted, is empty from His Creation, and His Creation is empty of Him. Whatever can be defined by the word `thing’ is a creation other than Almighty Allah. Exalted is He who is beyond compare.” (Shaykh Saduq, The Book of Divine Unity, Ch. 7, Hadith 3.)
Imam Ali al-Rida (PBUH) said:
كنهه تفريق بينه وبين خلقه
Translation: “The Core of His Reality is the distinction between Him and His Creation.”
(Shaykh Saduq, The Book of Divine Unity, Ch. 2, Hadith 2.)
But for Ibn Arabi, the reality of God forms a unicity that spans complementary and opposite terms. He is the center in which all oppositions meet, and it transcends all the contradictions involved in multiplicity. In Him, there is a kind of “coincidence of opposites,” which cannot be reduced to the categories of reason.
God is at once exterior and interior, One and multiple, first and last, Creator and creature, eternal and temporary, necessary and contingent, lover and beloved, intelligent and intelligible. All of these conflicting divine attributes form a single reality. This thesis has led shia scholars to view it as pantheistic.
See also: Was Ibn Arabi a devotee of Ahlulbayt (PBUT)? – Grand Ayatullah Sayyid Sadiq Rouhani
The perfect man of Ibn Arabi is a very superficial construct of his own imagination. He is the reason for the world’s existence, is the full image of Almighty Allah and contains within him all the possibilities of the universe: he is a microcosm, and, this man is the prototype of creation, because human perfection is linked to the divine image. He is a being which does not need adornment or special characteristics to be honored and respected, because he is God’s representative on earth.
Like the concept of Atman in Hindu Mythology, for Ibn Arabi too the human soul is part of the universal soul represented as matter, and residing in the human body. This idea is contested by modern science. Every human body has it’s own chemistry and every soul is distinct from the other. Anyways, this is a reason that the mystic’s purpose is to unite with the divine, an act, which is the result of the love that divine beauty stirs within humans.
This union does not imply an end or annihilation of existence, rather an understanding of human existence as a ray of divine Being not possessed by other things. Such ideas may result in political violence in present times, because the spiritual unification of cult members may result in them attacking the other. Peaceful coexistence requires plurality and individual freedoms.
See also: Mulla Sadra’s philosophy is a dead horse
However, no matter how hard the Sufis pretend to know something by playing around the words like existence and being, their ideas have no foundation and do not produce any verifiable knowledge. These are abstract ideas that carry no scientific value and do not enable us to understand the world as it is. Existence can not have grades if it is not divisible like light. Being or existence are just words that our brain needs to associate with existents in the outside world, existence doesn’t exist itself. The existents too exist in spacetime and their essence is their composition, as described by modern science.
Ibn ‘Arabī’s influence on Sufi spirituality has been enormous, reaching many Sufi cults and brotherhoods around the world. He is very much responsible for intellectual decline and scientific backwardness of Muslim societies. His thoughts were adopted by some Shias, like Sayed Hayder Amuli and Mulla Sadra, but majority of Shia scholars rejected them as heresy. Ibn Arabi died in 1240 CE at the age of 75. He was buried in the Banu Zaki cemetery, in Damascus.
See also: Handwritten verdict of Grand Ayatullah Sistani about Ibn Arabi
Source: Encyclopedia of Medieval Philosophy, editor: Henrik Lagerlund, second edition pp. 749 – 751, Springer, 2020.