Ibn Arabi

ما المطلق؟ هل الله موجود؟

The Essence is unknowable; God makes Himself known through His Names

شخصي وغير شخصي معًايقوله صراحةً

Ibn Arabi distinguishes rigorously between the divine Essence (al-dhat) and the Divinity that relates to the world. Of the Essence nothing can be said or known: it is free of all relation and all attribute. Yet that same Reality manifests as Lord through His Names — the Merciful, the Wise, the Living — which need beings in order to become visible; in the chapter on Adam of the Fusus al-hikam, the human being is the mirror in which God contemplates His Names. This God loves, wishes to be known and turns to each according to their capacity, to the point that every believer worships the God their belief has shaped. The Absolute is both inaccessible ground and a face turned towards the creature; to confuse the two planes, or to separate one entirely from the other, is for him an error.

من أنا؟ هل توجد ذات حقيقية؟

Whoever knows himself knows his Lord: He and not He

الذات هي المطلقيقوله صراحةً

Ibn Arabi makes the traditional saying «whoever knows himself knows his Lord» an axis of his work. For him, the human being has no existence of its own: what exists in it is God's existence, manifested according to the predisposition of each creature, its immutable entity (ayn thabita) eternally present in divine knowledge. In the Fusus al-hikam, the chapter on Adam presents the complete human being (al-insan al-kamil) as the mirror in which Reality contemplates all its Names. To know oneself is to discover that the self, in itself, is nothing, and that its reality is that of the Real. Yet Ibn Arabi rejects fusion (ittihad) and incarnation (hulul): the servant remains servant. His formula is paradoxical: the creature is He and is not He.

لماذا نتألّم؟

We suffer behind the veil; divine mercy precedes wrath

الانفصال عن اللهيُستنتج من تعاليمه

Ibn Arabi does not treat suffering as a separate theme, but his work allows an answer to be reconstructed. The human being suffers because it is veiled: it perceives the multiplicity of things and not the single Reality manifest in them, and believes itself separate from God when its very existence is that of the Real. At the same time, Ibn Arabi gives central place to the divine saying that God's mercy precedes His wrath, and to the Qur'anic verse stating that His mercy embraces all things. Hence his thesis, controversial among theologians, that even the punishment of hell will eventually become sweet for those who dwell there, playing on the closeness in Arabic between punishment (adhab) and sweetness (adhb). Pain is real but provisional; the ultimate is mercy.

ماذا يحدث بعد الموت؟

From the barzakh to the resurrection: and mercy finally reaches everyone

الحياة الأبدية والقيامةيقوله صراحةً

Ibn Arabi fully accepts Qur'anic eschatology — death, the intermediate state, bodily resurrection, judgement, paradise and hell — and interprets it through his metaphysics of imagination. After death the soul enters the barzakh, an intermediate world of images where deeds and beliefs take form; at the resurrection it receives a new body suited to the next life. His boldest feature is the primacy of mercy: relying on the verse according to which God's mercy embraces all things, he holds in the Futuhat and the Fusus that the punishment of the fire is not eternal in its pain. The damned will remain in their abode, but the torment (ʿadhāb) will eventually turn sweet (ʿadhb) for them. Death does not destroy the being's relationship with God; it reveals it, because every creature has always been a manifestation of His names.

كيف يُبلَغ التحرّر أو الخلاص؟

Realising who one is means knowing one's Lord: knowledge by unveiling, not by reasoning

بالمعرفة المباشرةيقوله صراحةً

Ibn Arabi organises the path around the saying, transmitted in Sufi circles, that whoever knows himself knows his Lord. The goal is realisation (tahqiq): understanding by experience that every being is a manifestation of the divine Names and that the complete human being reflects the totality of those Names. That knowledge does not come from philosophical reasoning, to which he grants limited scope, but from unveiling (kashf), which God grants to whoever prepares through observance of the law, invocation, retreat and purification. Alongside this, Ibn Arabi holds that divine mercy embraces everything, which leads him to qualify the eternity of punishment in the hereafter.

هل نحتاج إلى معلّم؟

The ordinary path passes through masters, but God can teach directly

مفيد لكنه ليس ضروريًايُستنتج من تعاليمه

Ibn Arabi had numerous teachers in al-Andalus and the Maghreb, to whom he devoted portraits in The Spirit of Holiness, and in The Meccan Revelations he deals in detail with the rules of courtesy (adab) governing the relationship between disciple and master. For most people, the path runs through a shaykh who knows the states and dangers of the way. Yet Ibn Arabi admits and claims another mode of transmission: that of someone instructed directly by God or by spiritual figures such as Khidr, from whom he claimed to have received investiture. The human teacher is therefore the usual and valuable channel, but not the exclusive one, because the true teacher of all knowledge is God.

هل العالم حقيقي؟

The cosmos is the mirror in which God contemplates His Names

تجلٍّ للإلهييقوله صراحةً

Ibn Arabi conceives of the world as God's self-disclosure (tajalli). The first chapter of The Bezels of Wisdom, devoted to Adam, explains that God wished to see His Names in a being that would reflect them all: He created the cosmos like an unpolished mirror, and the human being was the polishing of that mirror. Everything that exists is thus a locus of manifestation of some divine Name. The world is neither God in His essence, which remains unknowable, nor an independent reality: it is «He and not He», and is renewed at every instant. Ibn Arabi therefore gives the world an intermediate status, comparable to imagination, real as reflection, without consistency of its own.

ما الحب؟

God loved to be known: love is the origin of the world and its return

الشوق والوصاليقوله صراحةً

Ibn Arabi makes love the very principle of creation. Relying on a saying attributed to God in the Sufi tradition — I was a hidden treasure and loved to be known — he explains that the world is born of divine love for self-manifestation, and that all created love is, at bottom, God's love for himself through creatures. No one loves anything but God, even when believing they love a particular person, because all beauty is his manifestation. In the chapter on love in the Futuhat he distinguishes divine, spiritual and natural love and describes their states. In the Tarjuman al-ashwaq, a collection of love poems inspired by the young Nizam, he declares that his heart has become capable of every form and that he follows the religion of love, wherever its caravans turn.

هل نحن أحرار أم أن كل شيء مقدَّر؟

God gives only what each essence asks for: the secret of destiny

لا يوجد فاعليقوله صراحةً

Ibn Arabi addresses the question in the chapter of the *Fusus al-hikam* devoted to the prophet Uzayr, under the name «secret of destiny» (*sirr al-qadar*). His thesis is that the divine decree follows God's knowledge, and that this knowledge follows the known: the immutable essences (*aʿyān thābita*) of each thing, which by their own preparedness ask for what they will receive. No one is compelled except by what he himself is in God's knowledge. At the same time, the only real agent is God, acting through the forms of creatures. The consequence is not moral fatalism, since the revealed law still binds, but that the self who believes it decides on its own is a partial perspective on a single divine activity.

لماذا نتأمّل أو نصلّي؟

Prayer is intimate conversation between God and his servant

صداقة مع اللهيقوله صراحةً

In the last chapter of the *Fusus al-hikam*, devoted to the Prophet Muhammad, Ibn Arabi interprets ritual prayer (*ṣalāt*) as *munājāt*, intimate conversation: drawing on the hadith that God has divided the prayer between Himself and His servant, he holds that in it God speaks and listens at once, and that the one who prays sees the One with whom he converses. Hence he calls it, following another hadith, the coolness of the Prophet's eyes. Alongside prescribed prayer he valued remembrance of God (*dhikr*) and retreat (*khalwa*), which he describes in the *Epistle of Lights*. The aim is not to leave the relationship but to worship God as if seeing Him, what tradition calls *iḥsān*, until recognising Him in every form.

هل يستطيع العقل أن يعرف الحقيقة القصوى؟

Reason binds; divine unveiling grants the knowledge of secrets

الحقيقة القصوى وراء العقليقوله صراحةً

In the introduction to *The Meccan Openings* (*al-Futuhat al-makkiyya*), Ibn Arabi distinguishes three kinds of knowledge: that of the intellect, obtained by demonstration; that of states, reached only by tasting or experience; and that of secrets, which lies above the intellect and is granted by God to prophets and saints. He plays on the etymology of *ʿaql* (intellect), related to the hobble placed on a camel: reason binds and delimits, and so cannot encompass a God who is both transcendent and present in every form. In his letter to the theologian Fakhr al-Din al-Razi he advises him to leave speculation and seek the knowledge that comes from God through retreat and remembrance.

الانسحاب من العالم أم تغييره؟

The highest is outwardly indistinguishable: he returns to live among creatures

التأمّل في الفعليُستنتج من تعاليمه

Ibn Arabi practised retreats (khalwa) and describes in the Futuhat the illuminations he received in them, but he does not make retreat the goal. In his spiritual hierarchy the highest rank belongs to the malamiyya, the «people of blame», who after attaining realisation return to ordinary life, without distinctive dress or visible wonders, and blend in with common people while their inner being remains with God. The spiritual journey, for him, has a return: the one who has ascended to God descends again towards creatures to serve and guide them. His own life was that of a traveller between al-Andalus, the Maghreb, Mecca, Anatolia and Damascus, in contact with masters, disciples and rulers, to whom he occasionally wrote advising them on how to govern. Contemplation and presence in the world are not opposed: the world is God's manifestation.

Oxford (Reino Unido) y Berkeley (EE. UU.), y en línea · Reino Unido / Estados Unidos

Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society: symposia and courses

Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society

The Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society was founded in 1977 to promote understanding of the work of Ibn Arabi and his followers, and is represented by non-profit organisations in Oxford and Berkeley. Since 1982 it has published a peer-reviewed journal, since 1984 it has held conferences in the UK and the USA, with more than a hundred talks available as podcasts and videos, and it runs an education programme with courses. Since 2002 it has also been collecting copies of the historic manuscripts of his works. It is the reference institution for the rigorous study of the Shaykh al-Akbar.

Chisholme House (Escocia), Sutton Courtenay (Oxfordshire), Londres y en línea · Reino Unido

Beshara: Foundation course and Masnavi study

The Beshara Trust

Beshara is the educational offering of the Beshara Trust, a British charity founded in 1971. Its foundation course takes the metaphysics of Ibn Arabi as its starting point to explore what it means to know oneself and the world in the light of the Unity of Existence, combining an introductory weekend, fortnightly online sessions and an optional residential at Chisholme House in the Scottish Borders. It also runs study groups on Rumi's Masnavi and other texts of the Sufi tradition. It is funded by philanthropic donations and voluntary work, and bookings are made by contacting the trust.