## 1. Life and Works



Ibn 'Arabi referred to himself with fuller versions of his
name, such as Abu 'Abdallah Muhammad ibn
'Ali ibn al-'Arabi al-Ta'i
al-Hatimi (the last three names indicating his noble Arab
lineage). He was born in Murcia in 1165 to the family of a minor
official and received the standard education of a literatus, without
any special attention to religious topics. In his early teens he
underwent a visionary conversion "at the hands of Jesus"
(albeit the Jesus of the Koran), and this resulted in an
"opening" (*futuh*) of his soul toward the
divine realm. Shortly thereafter, in about 1180, his father took him
to meet his friend Averroes. Ibn 'Arabi recounts an
elliptical conversation in which he explained to the philosopher the
limits of rational perception. Corbin has taken this event as a
symbolic parting of ways between Islam and the West: with the help of
Latin Averroism, Western thinkers were soon to pursue an exclusively
rationalistic path leading "to the conflict between theology and
philosophy, between faith and knowledge, between symbol and
history" (Corbin 1969, 13). In contrast, Muslim intellectuals
tended rather to ignore Averroes, though Avicenna, Suhrawardi,
and other philosophers continued to be read, annotated, and improved
upon. At the same time, no one could fail to notice Ibn
'Arabi's challenge to merely rational understanding,
and many Muslim philosophers followed paths that undertook the
harmonization of reason, mystical intuition, and revelation.



Ibn 'Arabi studied the Islamic sciences with numerous
teachers in Andalus and North Africa. In 1201 he left the Muslim West
to perform the pilgrimage to Mecca and did not return. He traveled
extensively in Iraq and Anatolia, finally settling down in Damascus in
1223, where he trained disciples and wrote prolifically until his
death in November 1240.



Among his several hundred books and treatises, *Ringstones*
and *Openings* are the most famous. *Ringstones* became
the standard text to transmit his teachings and, during the next six
centuries, was the object of more than a hundred commentaries. Among
his many talented disciples, the most influential was his stepson Sadr
al-Din Qunawi (1210-74), who began the process
of systematizing his teachings and elucidating his perspective in
conversation with contemporary philosophy, even initiating a
correspondence with Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, the
important reviver of Avicenna (Qunawi,
*al-Murasalat)*.


## 2. Methodology



Qunawi differentiates Ibn 'Arabi's
position from that of *falsafa* and scholastic theology (Kalam)
by calling it *mashrab al-tahqiq*, "the school of
realization". *Tahqiq* is indeed the cornerstone of
Ibn 'Arabi's vast corpus, so it is important to have
a sense of what it means. The word is derived from the same root as
*haqq* and *haqiqa*, key terms in all the
sciences. *Haqq* means true, real, right, worthy, and
appropriate (in modern times, it is used to speak of human
"rights"); *haqiqa* means reality and truth.
The Koran uses *haqq*, the conceptual opposite of
*batil* (false, vain, unreal, inappropriate), in a
variety of senses, not least as a divine name, "the Real, the
True", and to designate the content of revelation (the Koran and
earlier scriptures). *Haqiqa* is not a Koranic term, but
it was used in the Hadith literature and given special attention in
philosophy. *Tahqiq* or "realization" means
to speak, affirm, and actualize *haqq* and
*haqiqa*--truth, reality, rightness,
appropriateness. Ibn 'Arabi finds its role in human
becoming encapsulated in the Prophet's saying, "Everything
has a *haqq*, so give to each that has a *haqq* its
*haqq*". In other words, everything in the universe,
society, and the soul has a rightness and an appropriateness, and the
human task vis-a-vis each thing is to act rightly and
appropriately; or, everything has rights, and people have the
responsibility (that is, the *haqq* "against them",
*'alayhim*) to observe those rights.



Another hadith explains that the primary *haqq*, upon which all
other *haqq*s are based, is that "There is no god but
God", which is to say that there is nothing truly real but the
Real, there is nothing truly right but the Right. In Islamic theology,
understanding this notion is called *tawhid* or
"the acknowledgement of [divine] unity" and is considered
the first of the three principles of faith; *tawhid* also
underlies the standpoints of the philosophers, even if some of them
seldom spoke of God per se, preferring terms like the First, the Good,
and the Necessary. This particular hadith tells us that God's
*haqq* against people (that is, their responsibility toward
him) is for them to acknowledge *tawhid*, and, if they do
so, their right against God (his responsibility toward them) is for
them to receive everlasting happiness,
*sa'ada*--the term philosophers used to
translate *eudaimonia*.



From earliest times, Muslim philosophers recognized that
*haqq*--truth, reality, rightness--was basic to the
quest for wisdom and the happiness of the soul. Already
al-Kindi, at the beginning of his most famous work, *On First
Philosophy*, writes that the goal of the philosopher is to reach
*haqq* and to practice *haqq*. Scholars translate the
word here and in similar contexts as "truth", but doing so
suggests that the issue was logical and epistemological, when in fact
it was ontological and existential; for the philosophers, the goal of
the quest for wisdom was transformation of the soul, and that could
not be achieved simply by logic and argumentation.
Al-Kindi's statement is in fact an early definition of
*tahqiq*, and the term itself became common in
philosophical texts, though it seldom has the same urgency that it has
in Ibn 'Arabi's works. For him it is the guiding
principle of all knowledge and activity and the highest goal to which
a human soul can aspire. It means knowing the truth and reality of the
cosmos, the soul, and human affairs on the basis of the Supreme
Reality, *al-Haqq*; knowing the Supreme Reality inasmuch as it
reveals itself in the *haqq*s of all things; and acting in
keeping with these *haqq*s at every moment and in every
situation. In short, the "realizers"
(*muhaqqiqun*) are those who fully actualize the
spiritual, cosmic, and divine potential of the soul (Chittick 2005,
chap. 5).



Some of the implications of *tahqiq* can be understood
when it is contrasted with its conceptual opposite,
*taqlid*, which means imitation or following authority.
Knowledge can be divided into two sorts, which in Arabic were often
called *naqli*, transmitted, and
'*aqli*, intellectual; or
*husuli*, acquired, and
*huduri*, presential. Transmitted knowledge is
everything that one can learn only by imitating others, like language,
culture, scripture, history, law, and science. Intellectual knowledge
is what one comes to know by realizing its truth within oneself, like
mathematics and metaphysics, even if these are initially learned by
imitation. Mulla Sadra calls intellectual knowledge
"non-instrumental" (*al-ghayr al-ali*),
because it accrues to the soul not by the instruments of sense
perception, imagination, and rational argumentation, but by the
soul's conformity with reason or intelligence
(*'aql*), which, in its fullest reality, is nothing but
the shining light of the Real. In short, Ibn 'Arabi, like
many of the Islamic philosophers, holds that real knowledge cannot
come from imitating others, but must be discovered by realization,
which is the actualization of the soul's potential. Ibn
'Arabi differs from most philosophers in maintaining that
full realization can only be achieved by following in the footsteps of
the prophets.


### 2.1 Divine Speech



It is difficult to overestimate the importance of the Koran as Ibn
'Arabi's source of inspiration (Chodkiewicz 1993a).
Far more than either the theologians or the philosophers, he dedicated
his efforts to absorbing God's word and being absorbed by it,
and his writings are suffused with quotations and terminology from the
text. As the divine speech (*kalam*), the Koran is
understood as nonmanifest and indistinct from the Divine Essence,
though it becomes manifest in recitation and writing. God's
speech reveals itself not only in scripture, but also in the universe
and the soul. The homologies among cosmos, soul, and scripture follow
easily on the Koran's imagery. In several verses it speaks of
God's creative act as his command "Be!", and it
alludes to the individual creatures as his words
(*kalimat*). The identity of speech and creativity is
also seen in the Koran's frequent use of the term
"sign" (*aya*) to designate the phenomena of
the universe, the interior events of the soul, and its own verses. In
effect, when God speaks--and he speaks because the Infinite Real
cannot but display its qualities and characteristics--he voices
three books, each of which is made up of signs/verses. As Ibn
'Arabi says of the cosmos, "It is all letters,
words, chapters, and verses, so it is the Great Koran" (Ibn
'Arabi, *al-Futuhat*, 1911 edition,
4:167.22).



In one of his best known explications of the nature of things, Ibn
al-'Arabi looks at God's creativity as an analogue
of human speech. Just as we create words and sentences in the
substratum of breath, so God creates the universe by articulating
words in the Breath of the All-Merciful (*nafas
al-rahman*), which is the deployment of existence
(*inbisat al-wujud*); indeed, existence itself is
synonymous with mercy (*rahma*). His most elaborate
cosmological scheme (among several) depicts the basic levels of cosmic
deployment as corresponding with the twenty-eight letters of the
Arabic alphabet, each representing a specific modality of articulated
existence (Burckhardt 1977, Chittick 1998).



The pivotal importance of the written Koran rests on the fact that it
voices the divine names and the signs/verses in human language,
thereby providing the key to deciphering the other two books. By
interpreting the Koran, we also interpret the cosmos and ourselves.
Ibn 'Arabi typically begins any discussion with a verse or
two, and he then proceeds to draw out meanings that have a bearing on
whatever the context may be. He insists that readings must conform to
the Arabic language as spoken by the original recipients of the Book,
but more often than not he offers surprising and highly original
interpretations. On close examination, these are seen to be consistent
with the language, even when they fly in the face of common sense. It
is precisely his ability to stick to the transmitted sources and
simultaneously bring out new meanings--which, once expressed,
seem almost self-evident--that has convinced the later tradition
of his exceptional mastery. He tells us that the author of the Koran
intends every meaning understood by every reader, and he reminds us
that human authors cannot have the same intention. Moreover, he tells
us that if someone re-reads a Koranic verse and sees exactly the same
meaning that he saw the previous time, he has not read it
"properly"--that is, in keeping with the
*haqq* of the divine speech--for the meanings disclosed in
the Three Books are never repeated.



God's words, like our own spoken words, dissipate quickly, so he
renews them constantly, "at every breath" (*ma'
al-anfas*). This is to say that "everything other than
God" (the standard definition of the cosmos) is re-created at
each instant (*tajdid al-khalq
fi'l-anat*) and all things undergo constant
change. The notion that "There is no repetition in [God's]
self-disclosure" (*la takrar
fi'l-tajalli*) is a basic principle of Ibn
'Arabi's thought. He sees it as a straightforward
application of *tawhid*. By acknowledging the unity of
the Real, we recognize that it is one and unique in its every act,
which means that each created thing and each moment of each thing is
one and unique; nothing can ever be repeated precisely because of each
thing's uniqueness and the divine infinity.


### 2.2 Deiformity



Ibn 'Arabi's basic project is to map out the
possibilities of human becoming, to clarify the distinction between
*haqq* and *batil*--truth and falsehood,
reality and unreality, right and wrong--and to point his readers
toward perfection, that is, realization of the Real "to the
extent of human capacity" ('*ala qadr taqat
al-bashar*), as the philosophers liked to put it. This in turn
requires becoming characterized by the divine names (*al-takhalluq
bi asma' Allah*), a process discussed by
al-Ghazali among others and called by Avicenna
*al-ta'alluh*, being like unto God, or deiformity. God
created human beings in the form of the name Allah itself, which is
called "the all-comprehensive name" (*al-ism
al-jami'*), because it is the referent of all other
divine names. Realization is then the process of actualizing knowledge
of the Three Books and bringing the soul into perfect harmony with the
Real, a harmony that becomes apparent in the transformation of
character and the flowering of virtue. The science of
"ethics" (*akhlaq*, pl. of *khuluq*,
character) does not concern itself simply with knowledge of right
behavior, but aims rather at understanding the soul's rootedness
in the divine names and mapping out the path of becoming characterized
by them. The Koran sets up Muhammad as the perfect model here with the
words it directs at him, "You have a magnificent character
[*khuluq 'azim*]" (68:4). This can be nothing
but the full realization of the divine speech, "the magnificent
Koran" (*al-qur'an al-'azim*,
15:87). According to Ibn 'Arabi, this is why
Muhammad's wife 'A'isha said about him,
"His character was the Koran."


### 2.3 Names and Relations



The Koran often speaks of God's "names"
(*asma'*), and it mentions a good number of
them--not "ninety-nine", as is traditionally said,
but anywhere between seventy and twice as many, depending on the
criteria used in counting. The names, which are often called
"attributes" (*sifat*), provide the points of
reference for Islamic theology. Ibn 'Arabi distinguishes
between "the names of the names" (*asma'
al-asma'*), which are the names voiced in human
language, and the names in themselves, which are realities in divinis.
Theologians wrote many books listing the names and explaining their
significance for God, the cosmos, and the human soul. Ibn
'Arabi devoted a book-length chapter of the
*Openings* specifically to them, and he composed an independent
treatise summarizing their role in human becoming (Ibn
'Arabi, *Kitab kashf
al-ma'na*).



Names are basic to the quest for deiformity because the Real in
itself, in its very Essence (*dhat*), is known only to
itself. "Others" (*ghayr*), which are the
signs/verses written out in the Three Books, know the Essence only
inasmuch as it reveals itself to them. In other words, although
everything is a "face" (*wajh*) of
God--"Wherever you turn, there is God's face"
(Koran 2:115)--to make distinctions among the omnipresent faces
we need to know their names and recognize their *haqq*s.



The word used to designate the Essence, *al-dhat*, is a
pronoun meaning "possessor of". Originally it was an
abbreviation for *dhat al-asma'*, "the
possessor of the names"; hence the synonymous term,
*al-musamma*, "the Named". The Koran refers
to the Essence as "He" (*huwa*), which alerts us
only to the fact that something is there. The word can just as well be
translated as "It", of course, because the Essence is
beyond gender, but Arabic grammar classifies all nouns and pronouns as
either masculine or feminine (indeed, when speaking of the Essence,
Ibn 'Arabi and others use the pronoun *hiya*,
"She", because *dhat* is feminine, and they
sometimes explain why the Essence is more properly feminine than
masculine; Murata 1992, 196-99). What we know from the names is
that "He/She" is merciful, knowing, alive, and so on, but
in itself the Essence remains unknown. Each name designates a specific
quality that becomes manifest the moment there is talk of the Real
(*al-haqq*) and creation (*al-khalq*). Hence Ibn
'Arabi says that the divine names can properly be called
relations (*nisab*).



The unique characteristics of human beings derive from their ability
to name things, which in turn results from the fact that they alone
were created in the form of the all-comprehensive name. A proof-text
is the verse, "God taught Adam the names, all of them"
(Koran 2:30). This means not only the names of the
particulars--God's signs in the Three Books--but also
the names of the universals, which the Koran calls God's
"most beautiful names" (*al-asma'
al-husna*). Human beings in any case have the potential to
know all names, but not the Essence named by the names. About that one
can only know "that it is" (the fact of its existence),
not "what it is" (its quiddity). Inasmuch as the names
correspond to the Essence, their meanings remain unknown, so they are
simply markers of transcendence or "incomparability"
(*tanzih*). Inasmuch as they denote an added quality,
such as mercy, knowledge, life, forgiveness, or vengeance, they
indicate God's immanence or "similarity"
(*tashbih*). In short, Ibn 'Arabi's
theological vision combines the apophatic and kataphatic
approaches.


## 3. Ontology



Foremost among the technical terms of philosophy that Ibn
'Arabi employs is *wujud*, existence or
being, a word that had come to the center of philosophical discourse
with Avicenna. In its Koranic and everyday Arabic sense,
*wujud* means to find, come across, become conscious of,
enjoy, be ecstatic. It was used to designate existence because what
exists is what is found and experienced. For Ibn 'Arabi,
the act of finding--that is, perception, awareness, and
consciousness--is never absent from the fact of being found. If
on the one hand he speaks of *wujud* in the standard
Avicennan language of necessity and possibility, he simultaneously
talks of it--in terms long established by the Sufi
tradition--as the fullness of divine presence and human
consciousness that is achieved in realization (Dobie 2007).



Among the Koranic divine names is "Light"
(*al-nur*), for God is "the light of the heavens
and the earth" (24:35). Naming God "Light" is
tantamount to naming him Being, for, as Qunawi explains,
"True Light brings about perception but is not perceived",
just as True Being brings about manifestation and finding but is
neither manifest nor found. Qunawi continues by saying
that True Light is "identical with the Essence of the Real in
respect of Its disengagement from relations and attributions"
(Qunawi, *al-Fukuk*, 225). In other words,
True Light is Nondelimited Being (*al-wujud al-mutlaq*),
and it discloses itself as delimited being (*al-wujud
al-muqayyad*). It is precisely this Light that brings about
finding, awareness, and perception. Just as there is no true being but
God, so also there is no true finder but God and nothing truly found
but God. As Ibn 'Arabi explains:



> 
> Were it not for light, nothing whatsoever would be perceived
> [*idrak*], neither the known, nor the sensed, nor the
> imagined. The names of light are diverse in keeping with the names of
> the faculties.... Smell, taste, imagination, memory, reason,
> reflection, conceptualization, and everything through which perception
> takes place are light. As for the objects of perception... they
> first possess manifestation to the perceiver, then they are perceived;
> and manifestation is light.... Hence every known thing has a
> relation with the Real, for the Real is Light. It follows that nothing
> is known but God. (Ibn 'Arabi,
> *al-Futuhat*, 1911 edition, 3:276-77)
> 


### 3.1 *Wahdat al-Wujud*



Ibn 'Arabi has typically been called the founder of the
doctrine of *wahdat al-wujud*, the Oneness of Being or
the Unity of Existence, but this is misleading, for he never uses the
expression. Passages in his writings that approximate it have no
special significance, nor are they out of place in the general trend
of contemporary philosophy and theology, both of which affirmed the
unity of the Necessary Being. Why *wahdat al-wujud* was
singled out to typify Ibn 'Arabi's position is not
clear. Part of the reason is that he highlights *tawhid*
as his guiding principle and gives *wujud* a special
prominence in his vocabulary. It was utterly obvious to him that there
is no Real Being but God and that everything other than God is unreal
being; this is another way of saying what Avicenna says, that all
things are possible or contingent save the Necessary Being. In short,
Ibn 'Arabi, and even more so his followers like
Qunawi, focused on the Real *Wujud* as the
one, unique reality from which all other reality derives. On the rare
occasions when his immediate followers used the expression *wahdat
al-wujud*, they did not give it a technical sense. The first
author to say that Ibn 'Arabi believed in *wahdat
al-wujud* seems to have been the Hanbalite polemicist Ibn
Taymiyya (d. 1328), who called it worse than unbelief. According to
him, it means that no distinction can be drawn between God and the
world. His attack set in motion a long controversy over the term,
often with little or no attempt to define it. At least seven different
meanings were ascribed to it in the later literature, and Orientalists
followed suit, declaring that Ibn 'Arabi invented the
doctrine, and then interpreting it negatively (a la Ibn
Taymiyya) or, less commonly, positively (a la 'Abd
al-Rahman Jami [d. 1492], the first of Ibn
'Arabi's defenders to embrace the expression)
(Chittick, 1994b).


### 3.2 Nondelimitation



To call Real Being "one" is to speak of the unity of the
Essence. In other terms, it is to say that Being--Light in
itself--is nondelimited (*mutlaq*), that is, infinite and
absolute, undefined and indefinable, indistinct and indistinguishable.
In contrast, everything other than Being--every existent thing
(*mawjud*)--is distinct, defined, and limited. The
Real is incomparable and transcendent, but it discloses itself
(*tajalli*) in all things, so it is also similar and
immanent. It possesses such utter nondelimitation that it is not
delimited by nondelimitation. "God possesses Nondelimited Being,
but no delimitation prevents Him from delimitation. On the contrary,
He possesses all delimitations, so He is nondelimited
delimitation" (Ibn 'Arabi,
*al-Futuhat*, 1911 edition, 3:162.23).


### 3.3 Imagination



Imagination (*khayal*), as Corbin has shown, plays a
major role in Ibn 'Arabi's writings. In the
*Openings*, for example, he says about it, "After the
knowledge of the divine names and of self-disclosure and its
all-pervadingness, no pillar of knowledge is more complete" (Ibn
'Arabi, *al-Futuhat*, 1911 edition,
2:309.17). He frequently criticizes philosophers and theologians for
their failure to acknowledge its cognitive significance. In his view,
*'aql* or reason, a word that derives from the same root
as *'iqal*, fetter, can only delimit, define, and
analyze. It perceives difference and distinction, and quickly grasps
the divine transcendence and incomparability. In contrast, properly
disciplined imagination has the capacity to perceive God's
self-disclosure in all Three Books. The symbolic and mythic language
of scripture, like the constantly shifting and never-repeated
self-disclosures that are cosmos and soul, cannot be interpreted away
with reason's strictures. What Corbin calls "creative
imagination" (a term that does not have an exact equivalent in
Ibn 'Arabi's vocabulary) must complement rational
perception.



In Koranic terms, the locus of awareness and consciousness is the
heart (*qalb*), a word that has the verbal sense of fluctuation
and transmutation (*taqallub*). According to Ibn
'Arabi, the heart has two eyes, reason and imagination,
and the dominance of either distorts perception and awareness. The
rational path of philosophers and theologians needs to be complemented
by the mystical intuition of the Sufis, the "unveiling"
(*kashf*) that allows for imaginal--not
"imaginary"--vision. The heart, which in itself is
unitary consciousness, must become attuned to its own fluctuation, at
one beat seeing God's incomparability with the eye of reason, at
the next seeing his similarity with the eye of imagination. Its two
visions are prefigured in the two primary names of the Scripture,
*al-qur'an*, "that which brings
together", and *al-furqan*, "that which
differentiates". These two demarcate the contours of ontology
and epistemology. The first alludes to the unifying oneness of Being
(perceived by imagination), and the second to the differentiating
manyness of knowledge and discernment (perceived by reason). The Real,
as Ibn 'Arabi often says, is the One/the Many
(*al-wahid al-kathir*), that is, One in Essence and
many in names, the names being the principles of all multiplicity,
limitation, and definition. In effect, with the eye of imagination,
the heart sees Being present in all things, and with the eye of reason
it discerns its transcendence and the diversity of the divine
faces.



> 
> He who stops with the Koran inasmuch as it is a
> *qur'an* has but a single eye that unifies and
> brings together. For those who stop with it inasmuch as it is a
> totality of things brought together, however, it is a
> *furqan*.... When I tasted the latter..., I
> said, "This is lawful, that is unlawful, and this is
> indifferent. The schools have become various and the religions
> diverse. The levels have been distinguished, the divine names and the
> engendered traces have become manifest, and the names and the gods
> have become many in the world". (Ibn 'Arabi,
> *al-Futuhat*, 1911 edition, 3:94.16)
> 



When Ibn 'Arabi talks about imagination as one of the
heart's two eyes, he is using the language that philosophers
established in speaking of the soul's faculties. But he is more
concerned with imagination's ontological status, about which the
early philosophers had little to say. Here his use of
*khayal* accords with its everyday meaning, which is
closer to image than imagination. It was employed to designate mirror
images, shadows, scarecrows, and everything that appears in dreams and
visions; in this sense it is synonymous with the term
*mithal*, which was often preferred by later authors. Ibn
'Arabi stresses that an image brings together two sides
and unites them as one; it is both the same as and different from the
two. A mirror image is both the mirror and the object that it
reflects, or, it is neither the mirror nor the object. A dream is both
the soul and what is seen, or, it is neither the soul nor what is
seen. By nature images are/are not. In the eye of reason, a notion is
either true or false. Imagination perceives notions as images and
recognizes that they are simultaneously true and false, or neither
true nor false. The implications for ontology become clear when we
look at the three "worlds of imagination".



In the broadest sense of the term, imagination/image designates
everything other than God, the entire cosmos inasmuch as it is
contingent and evanescent. This is what Ibn 'Arabi calls
"Nondelimited Imagination" (*al-khayal
al-mutlaq*). Each of the infinite words articulated in the
All-Merciful Breath discloses Being in a limited form. Everything
without exception is both God's face (*wajh*), revealing
certain divine names, and God's veil (*hijab*),
concealing other names. Inasmuch as a thing exists, it can be nothing
but that which is, the Real Being; inasmuch as it does not exist, it
must be other than the Real. Each thing, in Ibn
'Arabi's most succinct expression, is He/not He
(*huwa/la huwa*)--Real/unreal, Being/nonexistence,
Face/veil. "In reality, the 'other' is affirmed/not
affirmed, He/not He" (Ibn 'Arabi,
*al-Futuhat*, 1911 edition, 2:501.4).



In a narrower sense of the word, imagination denotes what Corbin calls
the *mundus imaginalis* (*'alam
al-khayal*). Like most traditions, Islam conceives of the
cosmos as a hierarchy of worlds, usually two or three; the Koran
contrasts the Unseen (*ghayb*) with the Visible
(*shahada*), and these are typically called the world of
spirits and the world of bodies, or, in philosophical terms, the
intelligible and the sensible realms. The Koran also speaks of
"heaven, earth, and everything in between", and one of Ibn
'Arabi's contributions was to bring out the full
implications of the in-between realm, which in one respect is unseen,
spiritual, and intelligible, and in another respect visible,
corporeal, and sensible. This is precisely the *mundus
imaginalis*, where spiritual beings are corporealized, as when
Gabriel appeared in human form to the Virgin Mary; and where corporeal
beings are spiritualized, as when bodily pleasure or pain is
experienced in the posthumous realms. The *mundus imaginalis*
is a real, external realm in the Cosmic Book, more real than the
visible, sensible, physical realm, but less real than the invisible,
intelligible, spiritual realm. Only its actual existence can account
for angelic and demonic apparitions, bodily resurrection, visionary
experience, and other nonphysical yet sensory phenomena that
philosophers typically explain away. Ibn 'Arabi's
foregrounding of the in-between realm was one of several factors that
prevented Islamic philosophy from falling into the trap of a mind/body
dichotomy or a dualistic worldview.



The third world of imagination belongs to the microcosmic human book,
in which it is identical with the soul or self (*nafs*), which
is the meeting place of spirit (*ruh*) and body
(*jism*). Human experience is always imaginal or soulish
(*nafsani*), which is to say that it is
simultaneously spiritual and bodily. Human becoming wavers between
spirit and body, light and darkness, wakefulness and sleep, knowledge
and ignorance, virtue and vice. Only because the soul dwells in an
in-between realm can it choose to strive for transformation and
realization. Only as an imaginal reality can it travel
"up" toward the luminosity of the spirit or
"down" toward the darkness of matter.


### 3.4 The *Barzakh*



In discussing the ontological role of image/imagination, Ibn
'Arabi often uses the term *barzakh* (isthmus,
barrier, limit), which in the Koran is that which stands between the
sweet and salty seas (25:53, 55:20) and prevents the deceased soul
from returning to the world (23:100). Generally, theologians
understood it to be the "location" of the soul after death
and before the Day of Resurrection. Ibn 'Arabi employs the
term to designate anything that simultaneously divides and brings
together two things, without itself having two sides, like the
"line" that separates sunlight and shade. He uses the term
Supreme Barzakh (*al-barzakh al-a'la*) as a synonym
for Nondelimited Imagination. It is, in other words, the cosmos, the
realm of possible things, which in themselves are neither necessary
nor impossible, neither infinite nor finite. Or, it is the Breath of
the All-Merciful, which is neither Nondelimited Being nor articulated
words.



> 
> The Real is sheer Light and the impossible is sheer darkness. Darkness
> never turns into Light, and Light never turns into darkness. The
> created realm is the *barzakh* between Light and darkness. In
> its essence it is qualified neither by darkness nor by Light, since it
> is the *barzakh* and the middle, having a property from each of
> its two sides. That is why He "appointed" for man
> "two eyes and guided him on the two highways" (Koran
> 90:8-10), for man exists between the two paths. Through one eye
> and one path he accepts Light and looks upon it in the measure of his
> preparedness. Through the other eye and the other path he looks upon
> darkness and turns toward it. (Ibn 'Arabi,
> *al-Futuhat*, 1911 edition, 3:274.28)
> 


## 4. Things and Realities



The divine names designate the universal qualities that suffuse
existence, such as life, knowledge, desire, power, speech, generosity,
and justice (these often being called "the seven leaders"
among the names). These qualities are found in everything, because
they pertain to the very Essence of the Real and accompany its
self-disclosure. They remain largely nonmanifest, however, because
each thing has its own preparedness (*isti'dad*) or
receptivity (*qabiliyya*), and none can display the Real
per se. Although each thing is a face, each is also a veil; He/not
He.



> 
> God says, "The giving of your Lord can never be walled up"
> (Koran 17:20). In other words, it can never be withheld. God is saying
> that He gives constantly, while the loci receive in the measure of the
> realities of their preparedness. In the same way, you say that the sun
> spreads its rays over the existent things. It is not miserly with its
> light toward anything. The loci receive the light in the measure of
> their preparedness. (Ibn 'Arabi,
> *al-Futuhat*, 1911 edition, 1:287.10)
> 



What then determines the measure of preparedness? This goes back to a
thing's "reality" (*haqiqa*), its
"whatness" or "quiddity"
(*mahiyya*). This is determined not by our definitions,
but by God's knowledge, because he knows the thing always and
forever, whether or not it exists in the cosmos. Ibn
'Arabi commonly refers to the realities simply as
"things" (*ashya'*, pl. of
*shay'*) or "entities"
(*a'yan*, pl. of *'ayn*). They do not
exist in themselves, because nothing truly exists but the Real Being,
so they are "the nonexistents"
(*al-ma'dumat*). In philosophical terms, they
are "possible" (*mumkin*), so they may or may not
come to exist, in contrast to the Real Being, which is necessary
(*wajib*), so it cannot not exist.



What exactly are things? They are the concomitants
(*lawazim*) of Being, or the potentialities of
manifestation latent in Infinite Possibility, or the never-ending
delimitations of the Nondelimited. If a thing is found in the cosmos,
it is a specific self-disclosure of Real Being, a face of God, a word
articulated in the All-Merciful Breath, a color made visible by the
radiance of Light. Inasmuch as things appear, they display Being and
its attributes; inasmuch as their receptivity is delimited and
defined, they act as veils. Each is a *barzakh*, an imaginal
thing, simultaneously an image of Being and an image of
nothingness.



> 
> There is no true being that does not accept change except God, for
> there is nothing in realized Being but God. As for everything other
> than He, that dwells in imaginal being.... Everything other than
> the Essence of the Real is intervening imagination and vanishing
> shadow. No created thing remains upon a single state in this world,
> the next world, and what is between the two, neither spirit, nor soul,
> nor anything other than the Essence of God. Rather, each continuously
> changes from form to form, constantly and forever. And imagination is
> nothing but this.... So the cosmos only became manifest within
> imagination.... It is it, and it is not it. (Ibn
> 'Arabi, *al-Futuhat*, 1911 edition,
> 2:313.12)
> 



The philosophers and theologians commonly debated God's
knowledge of the particulars. The Koran says repeatedly that God knows
everything. "Not a leaf falls", it says, "but God
knows it" (6:59). Ibn 'Arabi holds that God's
knowledge of both universals and particulars pertains to the Essence
and does not change. God knows the falling leaf always and forever,
and when it is time for it to fall, he says to it, "Fall!"
So also are all things: "His only command, when He desires a
thing, is to say to it 'Be!', and it comes to be"
(Koran 36:82).



In themselves the known things are nonexistent (like ideas that have
no existence outside our minds), but when God issues the
"engendering command" (*al-amr
al-takwini*)--the word "Be!"
(*kun*)--they enter into being (*kawn*). Ibn
'Arabi calls the thingness of the things in the divine
knowledge "the thingness of fixity" (*shay'iyyat
al-thubut*), because the things in themselves never change.
Despite appearances, the engendering command does not remove them from
their fixity, for nothing becomes manifest but Being, though delimited
and defined by the thingness of the things. The common example is
light: When it shines through a piece of colored glass, it appears as
colored, but light alone is manifest.


### 4.1 Fixed Entities



Most famously, Ibn 'Arabi discusses the things known to
God as "fixed entities" (*a'yan
thabita*). Early translators opted for expressions like
immutable or permanent "archetypes" or
"essences", without noting that there is no difference in
whatness between "fixed entities" and "existent
entities" (*a'yan mawjuda*). The fixed
entities are the things inasmuch as they are nonexistent in themselves
but known to God; the existent entities are the exact same things
inasmuch as they have been given a certain imaginal or delimited
existence by the engendering command. The fixed entities are not the
"archetypes" of the existent entities but are rather
identical (*'ayn*) with them; nor are they
"essences", if by this is meant anything other than the
entities' specific whatness.



By having recourse to the fixity of entities in the divine knowledge,
Ibn 'Arabi is able to say that the dispute between
theologians and philosophers over the eternity of the world goes back
to their perception of the entities. Those who maintain that the world
is eternal have understood that "the Real is never qualified by
first not seeing the cosmos, then seeing it. On the contrary, He never
ceases seeing it." Those who maintain that the world is
qualified by new arrival (*huduth*) "consider the
existence of the cosmos in relation to its own entity", which is
nonexistent. Hence they understand that it must have come into
existence (Ibn 'Arabi, *al-Futuhat*,
1911 edition, 2:666.35).



Followers of Ibn 'Arabi sometimes distinguished between
divine names and entities by calling the former "universal
names" and the latter "particular names". Ibn
'Arabi observes theological norms when he declares that
the divine names are "conditional"
(*tawqifi*), which is to say that we should call
God only by those names that he himself uses in scripture. Ibn
'Arabi also acknowledges, however, that every single thing
is a divine name, because each designates the Nondelimited in respect
of a certain delimitation. In this sense, each thing, each entity, is
a "specific face" (*wajh khass*) of God that
differentiates it from every other thing. After quoting the prophetic
saying that God has "ninety-nine" names, Ibn
'Arabi explains that these names designate the
"mothers" of the names, which give birth to all the rest.
He continues:



> 
> Every one of the possible entities has a specific divine name that
> gazes upon it and gives it its specific face, thereby distinguishing
> it from every other entity. The possible things are infinite, so the
> names are infinite, for new relations arrive with the new arrival of
> the possible things. (Ibn 'Arabi,
> *al-Futuhat*, 1911 edition, 4:288.1)
> 


### 4.2 The Reality of Realities



Ibn al-'Arabi calls the word *shay'*, thing,
"one of the most indefinite of the indefinites" (*min
ankar al-nakirat*), because it can refer to anything
whatsoever, existent or nonexistent, real or unreal. Nonetheless, he
tells us that he avoids using it in reference to God because God does
not use it to name himself. He does call God an entity, however,
especially in the phrase "the One Entity"
(*al-'ayn al-wahida*), typically in contexts that
bring to mind what the later tradition sometimes called the doctrine
of the Oneness of Being. For example:



> 
> Through Him we [existent entities] become manifest to Him and to us.
> In one respect we are through Him, but He is not through us, since He
> is the Manifest, and we remain with our own root [i.e., nonexistence],
> even if we bestow--through the preparedness of our
> entities--certain affairs that belong to our entities, and even
> if we are named by names that the veiled person supposes to be our
> names, such as Throne, Footstool, Intellect, Soul, nature, sphere,
> body, earth, heaven, water, air, fire, inanimate object, plant,
> animal, and jinn. All this belongs to One Entity, nothing else. (Ibn
> 'Arabi, *al-Futuhat*, 1911 edition,
> 1:691.14)
> 



Ibn 'Arabi does in fact refer to God as a thing in one
passage of an early work, and this has caught the attention of several
observers, because he mentions there "the third thing", a
notion that seems to throw light on his whole approach (Takeshita
1982, Bashier 2004). At first he seems to be talking in the standard
Avicennan language of necessity and possibility, but then he brings up
the notion of *barzakh* to explain how these two can be
interrelated. Things, he says, can be divided into three sorts. The
first sort is qualified by *wujud* in its very essence,
and this is the Necessary Being, God, who is nondelimited in existence
(*mutlaq al-wujud*) and who bestows existence on all
things. The second sort is existent (*mawjud*) through
God, namely delimited existence (*al-wujud al-muqayyad*),
which is the cosmos, everything other than God. "As for the
Third Thing", he writes:



> 
> it is qualified neither by existence nor by nonexistence, neither by
> new arrival nor by eternity.... The cosmos becomes manifest from
> this Third Thing, for this thing is the Reality of the Universal
> Realities of the cosmos, which are intelligible to the mind....
> If you say that this thing is the cosmos, you speak the truth, and if
> you say that it is the Eternal Real, you speak the truth. If you say
> that it is neither the cosmos nor the Real but rather an added
> meaning, you speak the truth. (Ibn 'Arabi,
> *Insha'*, 16-17)
> 



Given the detailed description of the Third Thing provided in the full
passage, it is clear that Ibn 'Arabi is discussing
Nondelimited Imagination as the Supreme Barzakh. The Third Thing,
however, never became established as a technical term, in contrast to
the synonym that he mentions in this same passage, the Reality of
Realities, also called the Universal Reality and the Muhammadan
Reality. Reality (*haqiqa*), as already noted, is used to
mean entity, quiddity, thing, and possible thing, though it is
commonly used more broadly as well. Thus God's Koranic names are
called realities, but not entities or things.



> 
> There is no existent possible thing in everything other than God that
> is not connected to the divine relations and lordly realities that are
> known as the Most Beautiful Names. Therefore every possible thing is
> in the grasp of a divine reality. (Ibn 'Arabi,
> *al-Futuhat*, 1911 edition, 2:115.27)
> 



By mentioning "universal" realities in talking about the
Third Thing, Ibn 'Arabi means the divine names and
attributes, which become manifest through the particular realities,
the entities. He has in view a version of the Tree of Porphyry, though
he never uses the expression: Each individual (leaf) is a member of a
species (twig), which in turn belongs to a genus (branch), and so on,
until all are eventually subsumed under the genus of the genera, the
Reality of Realities. This Reality is neither the Necessary Being nor
the cosmos. In God it is the divine knowledge of all things, and as
such is eternal; in the cosmos, it is the ever-changing totality that
is temporal creation. Drawing from terminology he uses elsewhere, his
followers call this Reality in God "the Most Holy
Effusion" (*al-fayd al-aqdas*), and they define it as
God's self-disclosure to himself in himself, or the
self-knowledge by which he knows every concomitant of his own
infinity. They contrast it with "the Holy Effusion"
(*al-fayd al-muqaddas*), the creative act that brings all
realities and entities into manifestation.


### 4.3 Entification



Qunawi gave currency to a technical term,
*ta'ayyun* or "entification", that plays a
major role in discussions of the Reality of Realities among Ibn
'Arabi's followers. The word is derived from
*'ayn*, entity, and it means to become an entity. Given
that an entity is a thing, one might translate it as
"reification", not in the sense of a human cognitive
process, however, but as a designation for the manner in which
Nondelimited Being becomes determined, limited, defined, and
"thingish" in the process of disclosing itself as
everything other than God. Thus all things are entifications or
delimitations or determinations of the Nondelimited Real, which is
then called "the Nonentification" (*al-la
ta'ayyun*). As for the Reality of Realities, it is the First
Entification, because all other entifications follow in its wake.



In her lengthy, though far from complete, study of Ibn
'Arabi's technical terms, Su'ad
al-Hakim mentions forty synonyms for the Reality of Realities,
all under the heading *al-insan al-kamil*,
"the Perfect Man". This notion, which can perhaps best be
understood in Western terms as the Divine Logos through which all
things are created, stands at the center of Ibn
'Arabi's worldview and integrates all its disparate
dimensions. Hakim does not mention the Third Thing as one of the
synonyms, but the continuation of the passage in which Ibn
'Arabi speaks of it does make clear that the Reality of
Realities is indeed the reality (or the fixed entity) of the Perfect
Man:



> 
> Man has two perfect relations, one through which he enters into the
> divine level, and one through which he enters into the cosmic
> level.... He is as it were a *barzakh* between the cosmos
> and the Real, bringing together and embracing both creation and the
> Real. He is the dividing line between the cosmic and divine levels,
> like the dividing line between shadow and sunlight. This is his
> *reality*. So he has nondelimited perfection in both new
> arrival and eternity, while God has nondelimited perfection in
> eternity and does not enter into new arrival--high exalted is
> He!--and the cosmos has nondelimited perfection in new arrival
> and does not enter into eternity--it is too base for that! Thus
> man is all-comprehensive. (Ibn 'Arabi,
> *Insha'*, 22)
> 


## 5. The Return



After *tawhid*, the remaining two principles of Islamic
faith are prophecy (*nubuwwa*) and the Return
(*ma'ad*), a word that is often translated loosely
as eschatology. For both philosophers and Sufis, discussion of
prophecy focused on human deiformity, and the issues they raised led
theologians and jurists to accuse them of claiming to be greater than
the prophets; Ibn 'Arabi in particular was the center of a
long controversy over the relative merits of prophet and saint
(Chodkiewicz 1993b).



Both schools of thought also had a great deal to say about the Return,
which was viewed in two respects: compulsory and voluntary. From the
standpoint of the compulsory Return, the cosmos unfolds following its
own ineluctable laws, and human beings go back to God in a series of
stages that mirror the stages of cosmogenesis. From the standpoint of
the voluntary Return, free will allows human beings to play a role in
determining the trajectory of their own becoming. To a certain degree
they are co-creators of their own souls and the posthumous realms,
which are experienced in karmic terms, that is, as the result of a
chain of causality set in motion by their own individual
understandings, character traits, and activities. Ibn
'Arabi marks a watershed in the discussion of both sorts
of Return, not least because his explications of the *mundus
imaginalis* allowed him to provide rational arguments for issues
like bodily resurrection that, according to Avicenna, could not be
understood by reason but can only be accepted on the basis of faith
(Avicenna, *al-Shifa'*, 347-48; Avicenna,
*al-Najat*, 3:291). Ibn 'Arabi's leads
were expanded on by later thinkers, most exhaustively by Mulla
Sadra in the fourth book of his magnum opus, *al-Asfar
al-arba'a*, on the topic of the soul and its unfolding
(Mulla Sadra 2008).


### 5.1 The Circle of Existence



When the theologians discussed the Return, they tried to prove the
accuracy of the Koranic depictions of the Day of Resurrection, hell,
and paradise, mainly by appealing to the authority of God's
word. They had little to say about the actual nature of the soul, the
structure of the cosmos, or the ontological status of the posthumous
realms. In contrast, both philosophers and Sufis were intensely
interested in these issues, as well as in the complementary question
of the Origin (*mabda'*). Origin and Return became major
themes in both schools of thought, but, in contrast to the
philosophers, Sufis highlighted the exemplary role of Muhammad. Thus,
for example, they drew a favorite image from a Koranic verse related
to the Prophet's "night journey"
(*isra'*, also called the
*mi'raj* or "ladder"), when he was
taken up through and beyond the heavens to encounter God: "He
was two-bows'-length away, or closer" (53:9). In Arabic
the word *qaws* or bow, like Latin *arcus*, also means
the arc of a circle, so the two bows can be understood as two arcs.
These came to be called "the descending arc" (*al-qaws
al-nuzuli*), that is, the path of increasing
delimitation and darkness that leads away from the Origin, and
"the ascending arc" (*al-qaws
al-su'udi*), the ever-increasing disengagement
(*tajarrud*) and luminosity of the soul on the path of the
Return.


### 5.2 Stages of Ascent



It was noted that one of Ibn 'Arabi's cosmological
schemes describes the universe in terms of twenty-eight letters that
articulate words in the All-Merciful Breath. Twenty-one of these
letters correspond to stages of the descending arc, which reaches its
lowest point with the four elements. The remaining letters designate
the stages of the ascending arc, beginning with minerals, going on to
plants, animals, angels, and jinn, and then on to man, the
twenty-seventh letter. The twenty-eighth and final letter designates
"the levels, stations, and stages", that is, the invisible
degrees of perfection achieved by the unfolding of human souls on the
path of the Return.



The decisive difference between animals and humans lies not in speech
or rationality, but rather in the fact that man was created in the
form of God per se, that is, God as designated by the
all-comprehensive name. Everything else was created under the care of
less comprehensive names. Adam's divine form is God's
all-inclusive face, the Reality of Realities that embraces the full
range of possible entifications of Nondelimited Being. The human
microcosm has the potential to realize--that is, to actualize the
reality of--everything present in the Book of the Cosmos and the
Book of Scripture. Just as the visible, corporeal world came into
manifestation by way of several stages of entification, beginning with
the Reality of Realities and descending by way of the invisible worlds
until it reached the minerals, so also the "levels, stations,
and stages" come into existence through the on-going
self-disclosure of Real Being in the invisible realms of the ascending
arc and reach their fruition when they return to the Origin. It is at
that point that the circle of existence is completed, the dividing
line disappears, and the imaginal distinction between Real and
creation is effaced. As Ibn 'Arabi writes:



> 
> "He was two-bows'-length away." Nothing makes the
> two bows/arcs manifest from the circle save the imagined line. It is
> sufficient that you have said that it is "imagined", since
> the imagined is that which has no existence in its entity... .
> The cosmos, next to the Real, is something imagined to have existence,
> not an existent thing. The existent thing and existence are nothing
> but the Entity of the Real. This is His words, "Or
> closer." The "closer" is the removal of this
> imagined thing. When it is removed from imagination, nothing remains
> but a circle, and the two arcs are not entified. (Ibn
> 'Arabi, *al-Futuhat*, 1911 edition,
> 4:40.9)
> 



Human embodiment at the visible level represents an essential stage in
the manifestation of the Reality of Realities, but realization of that
Reality takes place within the soul, that is, on the imaginal and
spiritual levels. The possibilities of manifestation represented by
plants and animals are relatively limited; external appearance reveals
their secrets to observers, and no one confuses a cabbage with a
carrot, or a horse with a donkey. But such is not the case with human
beings, whose external uniformity conceals an unlimited inner
diversity. The imaginal and spiritual contours of human souls, their
awareness and character traits, can never be judged by the
body's appearance; human virtue and vice pertain to unseen
realms. Culture, art, literature, politics, science, technology, and
other peculiarly human accomplishments are the soul's
exteriorizations. Ibn 'Arabi is not concerned, however,
with every human possibility, because the paths that lead away from
the full and balanced realization of the divine form are legion.
Rather, he wants to delineate the broad contours of the perfections of
deiformity, for it is these that lead to harmony with the Real in the
posthumous realms. Even on this level, however, it is impossible even
to enumerate these perfections, given that, as he tells us, their
archetypes number 124,000, in keeping with the number of prophets from
the time of Adam.


### 5.3 The Two Commands



Ibn 'Arabi often addresses the cosmic uniqueness of human
beings in terms of the command (*amr*), an important Koranic
term that has a strong bearing on the way in which theologians and
philosophers addressed the issue of determinism and free will, or
nature and nurture. It was said earlier that the "engendering
command" (*al-amr al-takwini*) is the
creative word "Be!" (*kun*) and that it turns
nonexistent entities into existent entities. God addresses this
command to all existent things without exception, and everything is
obedient to it. It provides no way to distinguish between right and
wrong, good and evil, better and worse, because all things are exactly
what they must be. Everything manifests the Real, *al-Haqq*,
and each is a specific face of God with its own *haqq*. From
this standpoint, nothing in the cosmos is
*batil*--false, vain, or wrong.



The fact is, however, that human beings, created in the form of
God's all-comprehensive name, are always faced with choices.
Rational investigation is handicapped in its ability to choose the
good over the bad, the right over the wrong, the beautiful over the
ugly, the *haqq* over the *batil*, because,
without outside help, it cannot transcend the evanescent images that
make up the appearance of the cosmos. It has no access to the ultimate
criteria whereby the *haqq* of things--their reality,
truth, rightness, and appropriateness vis-a-vis the
Real--can be discerned. In other words, the cosmic and human
books cannot be interpreted rightly (*bi'l-haqq*) without
guidance (*huda*) from the Real (*al-haqq*), the
author of the engendering command. Guidance is precisely the function
of the prophets, by means of whom God issues commandments and
prohibitions. This act of issuing is called "the prescriptive
command" (*al-amr al-taklifi*), because it
sets down principles and directives that need to be followed in order
to discern the *haqq*s of things and act appropriately.



The engendering command brings the cosmos into existence, but the
divine attributes demand much more than life, awareness, desire,
power, and other qualities that are presupposed by the existence of
minerals, plants, and animals. Among the ontological possibilities
actually present in the Essence and actually manifest in the universe
are mercy, love, compassion, forgiveness, justice, fairness, wisdom,
and many other moral and ethical traits whose significance only
becomes clear in human activity and interactions. All these are
ontological qualities, but, in order for them to become fully
manifest, the engendering command must give rise to the prescriptive
command, which instructs people in the *haqq* of love, mercy,
beneficence, kindness, and other traits. Becoming rightly
characterized by the divine names does not happen simply by the
natural course of events; it calls for the engagement of the will.
Only by choosing the *haqq* over the *batil*,
right over wrong, good over evil, can people realize the full
possibilities of their own deiformity.



By making guidance available, the prescriptive command also provides
the possibility of error and misguidance. It is the occasion, in other
words, for the actualization of various possibilities of being and
becoming that are demanded by divine attributes such as severity,
wrath, pride, and vengeance, not to speak of forgiveness and pardon.
In any case, human beings, through their own freedom, play a role in
actualizing possibilities of the Divine Infinity that otherwise would
have no raison d'etre, paradise and hell being the most
salient examples. Distinguishing between the two commands allows us to
grasp the difference between fact and value, between what is and what
ought to be. But these are two sides of the same self-disclosure of
Being. By issuing commands and prohibitions, the Real introduces
causal factors that force human beings to assume responsibility for
what they will become on the moral and spiritual levels. This is why
Ibn 'Arabi says that people are "compelled to be
free" (*majbur fi ikhtiyarihim*). The
degree to which they conform to the letter and spirit of the
prescriptive command determines "the levels, stations, and
stages" that they will reach in the ascending arc of the Return;
posthumously, their levels and stages will become differentiated in
the ascending levels of paradise and the descending levels of hell.
Without human (or analogous, all-comprehensive, free beings), an
infinity of ontological possibilities would not find their
actualization. As Ibn 'Arabi puts it, "If not for
us, the next world would never become differentiated from this
world" (Ibn 'Arabi, *al-Futuhat*,
1911 edition, 3:253.21).


## 6. Human Perfection



Like the philosophers, Ibn 'Arabi sees the human soul as
an unlimited potential and understands the goal of life to lie in the
actualization of that potential. Avicenna sums up the philosophical
view in a passage found in two of his major works:



> 
> The perfection specific to the rational soul is for her to become an
> intellective world within which is represented the form of the All,
> the arrangement intelligible in the All, and the good that is effused
> upon the All.... She turns into an intelligible world, parallel
> with the entire existent world, and witnesses what is unconditioned
> comeliness, unconditioned good, and real, unconditioned beauty while
> she is unified with it, imprinted with its likeness and guise, strung
> upon its thread, and coming to be of its substance. (Avicenna,
> *al-Shifa'*, 350; Avicenna,
> *al-Najat*, 3:293)
> 



Ibn 'Arabi agrees with this general picture, but he
considers it barren, because it fails to take into account those
dimensions of reality--the vast majority of dimensions, as he
sees it--that do not properly belong to the world of
intellection; all the intermediary realms, not to speak of the
sensible realm itself, are essentially imaginal, not intelligible. He
insists, in fact, that "Imagination is the widest known
thing" because "it exercises its properties through its
reality over every thing and non-thing. It gives form to absolute
nonexistence, the impossible, the Necessary, and possibility; it makes
existence nonexistent and nonexistence existent" (Ibn
'Arabi, *al-Futuhat*, 1911 edition,
1:306.17, 306.6).



In several passages, Ibn 'Arabi describes the ascent of
the soul on the ladder (*mi'raj*) to God. One of
these is Chapter 167 of the *Openings*, called "On the true
knowledge of the alchemy of happiness". Here he contrasts the
parallel ladders of a philosopher and a prophet's follower. In
each stage, the follower meets what Muhammad met in his Night Journey,
but the philosopher finds only what his knowledge of the natural world
allows him to find; in short, when seekers pass through the ascending
realms of the *mundus imaginalis*, they gain what accords with
their own cognitive preparation. In the first heaven, for example, the
follower meets the prophet Adam, whom God had "taught all the
names", and he benefits from Adam's omniscience, but the
philosopher meets only the moon. In each successive level, the
follower encounters a prophet and assimilates his knowledge, but the
philosopher finds the celestial spheres (Ibn 'Arabi,
*al-Futuhat*, Chapter 167, 1997, 2019). It is worth
noting that Avicenna himself had written an interpretation of
Muhammad's night journey in philosophical terms that runs
parallel to what Ibn 'Arabi ascribes to the philosopher
here, but the text was in Persian, so Ibn 'Arabi would not
have seen it (Heath 1992).


### 6.1 The Station of No Station



Each of "the levels, stations, and stages" represents an
actualization of a potential deiformity, or an instance of becoming
characterized by one or more divine names. Each divine attribute and
each prophetic archetype sets up a "station"
(*maqam*) in which human beings can stand and from which
they can observe the nature of things. There are countless stations of
knowledge and spiritual perfection, and each bestows specific
character traits and points of view. Ibn 'Arabi often
tells us that such-and-such a chapter of the *Openings*
pertains to the standpoint of Moses, or Jesus, or Abraham. In the same
way, he divides *Ringstones* into twenty-seven chapters, each
of which is dedicated to a prophet or sage who is presented as a word
or logos (*kalima*) embodying the wisdom (*hikma*) of a
specific divine name. His ultimate purpose in describing the various
standpoints is to highlight the Station of No Station (*maqam
la maqam*), also called "the Muhammadan
Station". This is full realization of the Reality of Realities;
it embraces all stations and standpoints without being determined and
defined by any of them. "The people of perfection have realized
all stations and states and passed beyond these to the station above
both majesty and beauty, so they have no attribute and no
description" (Ibn 'Arabi,
*al-Futuhat*, 1911 edition, 2:133.19).



Perfect Man, standing in the Station of No Station, is in effect the
human analogue of Nondelimited Being, which assumes every delimitation
without itself becoming limited. Qunawi sometimes calls
this station "the point at the center of the circle of
existence" because it has no dimensions in itself, but all of
manifest reality is arranged in reference to it. He also explains it
in terms of the contrast between Being and quiddity (i.e., fixed
entity). Everyone other than Perfect Man has a specific whatness,
distinguishing him from everyone else, which is to say that each
person stands in a defined "level, station, and stage".
Perfect Man, however, manifests the Real per se, so his whatness is
identical with Being, not with this or that. Qunawi
writes:



> 
> No one tastes this and reaches its source except him whose essence has
> come to be nondelimited. Then the bonds--the contingent
> properties, states, attributes, stations, configurations, acts, and
> beliefs--are loosened, and he is not confined by any of them. By
> his essence he flows in everything, just as existence flows in the
> realities of all things without end or beginning.... When the
> Real gave me to witness this tremendous place of witnessing, I saw
> that its possessor has no fixed entity and no reality.
> (Qunawi, *al-Nafahat*, 265-66; cited in
> Chittick 2004)
> 


### 6.2 Perfect Man



As the model of human possibility, Perfect Man represents the
individual who has traversed the circle of existence, reached the
station of Two-Bows' Length, and returned to his origin, the
Reality of Realities. Standing in the Station of No Station, he is
He/not He, Eternal/newly arrived, Infinite/finite. He alone functions
as God's "vicegerent" (*khalifa*) or
representative, the intermediary between God and creation, which is
precisely the role for which Adam was created (Koran 2:30).
Qunawi writes:



> 
> The true Perfect Man is the *barzakh* between Necessity and
> possibility, the mirror that brings together in its essence and level
> the attributes and properties of Eternity and new arrival... . He
> is the intermediary between the Real and creation... . Were it
> not for him and the fact that he acts as a *barzakh* no
> different from the two sides, nothing of the cosmos would receive the
> divine, unitary effusion, because of the lack of correspondence and
> interrelationship. (Qunawi, *al-Fukuk*, 248)
> 



To put this in another way, Perfect Man is the spirit that animates
the cosmos. This is the theme that begins the first chapter of Ibn
'Arabi's *Ringstones*, which explains the
manner in which Adam--the human being--manifests the wisdom
of the all-comprehensive name. In a parallel way, he writes in the
*Openings*:



> 
> The whole cosmos is the differentiation of Adam, and Adam is the
> All-Comprehensive Book. In relation to the cosmos he is like the
> spirit in relation to the body. Hence man is the spirit of the cosmos,
> and the cosmos is the body. By bringing all this together, the cosmos
> is the great man, so long as man is within it. But, if you look at the
> cosmos alone, without man, you will find it to be like a proportioned
> body without a spirit. (Ibn 'Arabi,
> *al-Futuhat*, 1911 edition, 2:67.28)
> 


### 6.3 Divine Presences



Ibn 'Arabi's followers often summarized the notion
of Perfect Man by having recourse to a scheme that came to be known as
"the Five Divine Presences" (*al-hadarat
al-ilahiyyat al-khams*). Ibn 'Arabi uses
presence (*hadra*) to designate any realm in which Being (i.e.,
finding and being found) becomes manifest under the auspices of a
general quality; in this sense it is roughly synonymous with world
(*'alam*) or level (*martaba*). In one
passage, for example, he explains that the cosmos is made up of two
worlds or two presences, that of the Unseen and that of the Visible,
"though a third presence is born between the two from their
having come together", and that is the world of imagination (Ibn
'Arabi, *al-Futuhat*, 1911 edition,
3:42.5). Most commonly, as in his chapter on the divine names in
*Openings*, he uses presence to designate a name's realm
of influence and then describes various ways in which the properties
and traces of the name are displayed in the cosmos and human beings;
one might say that he is describing how things participate in Platonic
ideas. The most inclusive of these presences is the
"divine" (*al-hadrat al-ilahiyya*), that is,
the realm that comes under the sway of the all-comprehensive name.
Concerning it Ibn 'Arabi writes, "There is nothing
in Being/existence [*wujud*] but the Divine Presence,
which is His Essence, His attributes, and His acts" (Ibn
'Arabi, *al-Futuhat*, 1911 edition,
2:114.14).



Qunawi seems to have been the first to speak of "the
Five Divine Presences", and the expression soon became
commonplace, though several different schemes were proposed. He uses
the expression to explain how the Reality of Realities, or the First
Entification, embraces all entifications and thereby becomes manifest
in five basic realms. The first presence is the Reality of Realities
in divinis, embracing the divine knowledge of the cosmos. The second,
third, and fourth presences are the same three worlds about which Ibn
'Arabi spoke: the unseen (spiritual), the imaginal, and
the visible (corporeal). The fifth presence is Perfect Man in his
all-comprehensive deployment, embracing the other four presences in a
synthetic whole: his fixed entity is identical with the Reality of
Realities, his spirit with the unseen world, his soul with the
imaginal world, and his body with the visible realm (Chittick 1984).
In this way of conceiving of man, the role that the Logos plays in
giving birth to the cosmos is clear. Qunawi puts it in a
nutshell: Perfect Man is "the perfected human reality of the
Essence, one of whose levels is the Godhead
[*al-uluhiyya*]; all existent things are the loci of
manifestation for his differentiated qualities and properties"
(Qunawi, *al-Nafahat*, 66-67).