The Philosophy of Ibn 'Arabi

Rom Landau

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415448741
• eBook ISBN: 9781135029692
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Religion

Originally published 1959.

Ibn 'Arabi is one of the most significant thinkers of Islam. Yet he is far less widely known in the Western world than Ibn Sina, Al-Ghazali, Ibn Rushd or even Al Farabi. This volume provides original interpretations and illustrations to some of Ibn 'Arabi's ideas, as well as including a number of his texts in English.

Part One

One
The Life of IBN 'Arabī

Abū Bakr Muhammad ibn 'Alī Muḥyī al-Dīn al-Hātimī al Andalusī, commonly known as Ibn 'Arabī (or Ibnul 'Arabī), came from a pious family in which Ṣūfī interests were a tradition. His ancestors belonged to the Arab tribe of Tayy. At some time or another they moved from the Middle East to Southern Spain which, from the beginning of the 8th century, had been ruled by Arabian princes. By A.D. 1164, when Ibn 'Arabī was born in Murcia, in South-Eastern Spain, Muslim dominance in the Iberian peninsula had passed its peak and, indeed, was declining towards extinction. But Spanish intellectual life was still illumined by the afterglow of Moorish civilization. During the preceding three centuries, the intellectual zest and material splendour of Cordova and Seville surpassed those of Paris and possibly even of Constantinople. The Muslims of Spain had transmitted to Europe much of the wisdom of the Greeks; and with their co-religionists in Syria, Persia and Iraq had produced a corpus of philosophical and scientific knowledge that was to leave a deeper imprint upon European civilization than any other foreign culture, before or since.

At the beginning of the 12th century, an Arab youth in Andalusia had practically the whole of the then available knowledge spread before him in the schools and libraries of Southern Spain. Zoroastrian and Manichaean lore, Hebrew and Christian theology, Greek philosophy and mathematics, and every kind of Muslim intellectual achievement were by then formulated in manuscript, and there was no dearth of scholars to expound. It seems that Ibn 'Arabī, with his exceptional spiritual curiosity grasped every opportunity to profit from all available sources. At the age of eight he was in Lisbon where he received the rudiments of Muslim orthodox education. Besides learning the Qur'ān, he studied the principles of Islamic law. A few years later we find him in Seville, since 1170 the capital of the Moorish Empire of the Almohades. He remained there for some thirty years, continually employed in the study of the various branches of Islamic learning. During that time he also travelled extensively in both Spain and Morocco, and, in 1201, decided to make the pilgrimage to Mecca. He may have sought thus to escape from the simmering political upheavals in Spain and from the vigilant eyes of the learned ulema, who would look askance at a Sūfī scholar of distinctly unorthodox views. In the East, he visited not only Mecca, wherehe lived and taught for a while, but also Syria, Iraq and Asia Minor. By that time, his saintly life and his impressive record as a teacher and thinker had earned him great renown. Wherever he went, gifts were bestowed upon him, which later he passed on to the poor.

It was during his sojourn in Mecca and Damascus that Ibn 'Arabi wrote most of his books, especially the fundamental Fuṣūṣu'l-Hikam, known in English as either Gems of Philosophy or The Bezels of Divine Wisdom, and Al Futūḥāt al-Makkiyyah (Meccan Revelations). We have no exact knowledge of the number of books he wrote. He himself mentions almost three hundred. These comprise theology, mysticism, biography, philosophy, Quranic commentaries, and poetry. Ibn 'Arabī died in 1240 in Damascus, where his grave can be seen to the present day.

Two
IBN 'Arabī and Islamic Philosophy

THE central problem facing the Muslim philosophers was how to reconcile a God of absolute unity and perfection with the creation of a multiple universe full of imperfections. If God's will was responsible for the creation of the world, then we are confronted with the problem of the duality of God and His will. The same problem arises in regard to Divine mercy, charity, justice and the other attributes of God. Then there was the problem how the postulate of God's unity could be preserved in view of the fact that some 'part' of Him became the universe. Prior to the creation of the latter there was nothing beside God. So obviously the universe must be a 'fragment' of God's being, taken out of eternity and placed into time. Since God is eternal and spiritual, He must be beyond time, space and matter. Yet what distinguishes His universe from Himself is precisely its material existence in time and space. Whence did these come, with all their multiplicity and imperfections?

These problems had worried not merely the Muslim philosophers but also their antecedents and masters, the Greeks, from Aristotle down to Philo, Plotinus and Origen. Though the Muslims accepted many of the Aristotelian and Neo-platonic postulates, they did not develop them merely as Muslim interpretations. Each thinker attempted clarification in his own individual way. Hardly any two of them re-expressed the doctrine of the Nous or of the Logos in identical manner, each seeking a formula that would, to his mind, satisfy the demands of logic and yet not contravene the doctrines of the Qur'ān. Their interpretations ranged from the rationalism of the Mu'tazilah to the intellectual sterility of the Ash'arites; from unredeemed anthropomorphism to the complex doctrine of world spirits as postulated by Ibn Sīnā; from Al-Fārābi's veneration of Aristotelian mathematics and astronomy to Al-Ghazālī's revolt against both the Greeks and philosophy sui generis.

Some of the schemes devised by the Muslim philosophers are eminently satisfying to the demands of logic. They have the beauty of true works of art. By interposing an active 'agent' between God and His creation —whether called Universal Reason or First Cause, Logos or Universal Spirit—they relieved God of all responsibility for the existence of such troublesome entities as time, space, multiplicity, and so on. But when, at the beginning of the 12th century, Al-Ghazālī wrote his Tahāfut al-Falāsifah he showed that his predecessors, despite the apparent impeccability of their reasoning, had shirked the central issue. Their solutions had been essentially linguistic ones. By substituting the term Divine 'knowledge' for Divine 'will', and the Neo-platonic 'necessity' for 'creation', they imagined themselves to have overcome all the difficulties. They had made the universe finite in space and infinite in duration; they had limited God (or, rather, the First Cause) to dealing only with universals and not with particulars; they had attributed to everything an eternal potential existence (in the mind of God) and had thus eliminated the 'possibility' of anything new being created by God, for such new creation would have removed God from eternity and placed Him in time. Not so, insisted Al-Ghazālī opposing such mental acrobatics. Even God's thinking must be the outcome of His will. Since He knows everything He must be concerned not only with universals but also with particulars. How, he challenged his predecessors, could we conceive of a finite space and an infinite time? Does not infinite time presuppose also infinite space? Is not space related to body, and time to the body's movement? And, Al-Ghazālī, a more orthodox Muslim than they, protested that not only the soul, as the philosophers said, but also the body is immortal. Though the great Ibn Rushd wrote his scathing Tahāfut al-Tahāfut against Al-Ghazālī, and used every weapon of Aristotelian logic against him, he did not really invalidate Al-Ghazālī's arguments. But the verbal ingenuities he employed proved sufficiently persuasive to influence Western scholastics for several centuries.

The Muslim philosophers accomplished their tasks efficiently. Their efforts compare by no means unfavourably with those of some of their great successors, such as Descartes, Kant or Leibniz. Kant's Das Ding an sick added little to the shay' (thing) of the Muslims; and the monad of Leibniz can hardly claim superiority over its cousin, the atom of Muslim atomists. It must, however, be conceded that the Muslim philosophers failed to resolve the fundamental conflict between the Qur'ān and its rational justification, just as the Western scholastics failed to solve the corresponding conflict in the Christian doctrine. The fault, however, was not theirs. It was inherent in the conflict itself. The fundamental truths of the Qur'ān, in common with those of all genuine religions, are spiritual truths. Their postulates and their 'logic' must needs differ from those that have formed the basis of Western philosophical (and scientific) pursuits ever since Aristotle. It may be that the truths of science and of rationalism in general pose no insoluble riddles to Aristotelian logic, though it would appear that modern atomic science and mathematics are beginning to find them insufficient. In dealing, however, with dimensions of truth in which matter (and substance) are not the one and all, we find that particular logic of little assistance. Whether we accept or dismiss the truths of mysticism, we all agree that those truths cannot be 'proved' by a logic derived essentially from Aristotle, Such logic bases itself on a quantitative universe in which substance, whether in the sense of materia prima or materia secunda is the decisive reality of existence. By disregarding quality—which it attempts to define in terms of quantity—it takes little heed of essence. The underlying forces behind the universe—the instruments of the First Cause, or God, or whatever we wish to call it—are, however, timeless and spaceless essence. Quantity does not enter therein, even though it may become a vehicle. Thus, in trying to explain essence in terms of substance—the common technique of most Western philosophy—we attempt to explain one dimension by another one.

The problems awaiting solution by the Muslim philosophers were beyond the power of the Aristotelian logic that most of them accepted. Evidently a less circumscribed, a more 'spiritual', instrument was needed. The mystics alone appear to have possessed such an instrument, which we might describe as vision —a direct awareness of Reality, unencumbered by intellectual interference. Though it might not be impossible to arrive at similar truths by intellectual means, such findings will be only accidental, and they will have been gained at second hand. While they reach us after having been distilled through, or reflected in, our intellect, the truths obtained by direct vision are an immediate and spontaneous experience. We might liken them to light reaching us direct from the sun as compared with light depicted in an artist's painting. (Since the great artist, somewhat like the mystic, sees truth directly, his representation of truth will be more concrete than that of the scientist.)

Three
The Nature of IBN 'Arabī's Doctrine

THE truths expressed in the philosophy of Ibn 'Arabī are those of a seer and a mystic, not of a philosopher, even though he did his best to explain them through a philosophical system. His uniqueness derives precisely from the fact that he was both a seer—who often saw more clearly and more deeply even than other mystics —and at the same time possessed the equipment of a philosopher, however unorthodox and even fantastic that equipment appears at times to have been.

Though the core of his doctrine and many of its details are Ibn ' Arabī's own, his vast reading and his catholicity enabled him to utilize innumerable extraneous sources. Of the purely native, or Spanish sources, most prominent were those of the Ṣūfīs of Al-Meria, whose doctrines spread through most of Muslim Spain. In his book on our philosopher, however, Dr A. E. Affifi shows that the influence of the Spanish Ṣūfī, Ibn Masarra, and his schools, affected Ibn 'Arabī far less than was assumed by the great Spanish expert, Miguel Asin y Palacios. The Qur'ān and Ḥadīth form the chief basis upon which Ibn 'Arabī builds his doctrine. That he would be influenced by his pantheistic predecessor, the martyred Al-Ḥallāj, goes without saying. The same is true of several Eastern Ṣūfīs with whose work Ibn 'Arabī became acquainted during his stay in the Middle East. Coming after most of the founders of Islamic scholasticism, he naturally derived a great deal from the Ash'arites, the Mu'tazilah, the Carmathians and the Ikhwān al-Ṣafā, the earliest Muslim encyclopaedists, Aristotle, in the Neo-platonic garb provided for him by the Muslim philosophers, left profound traces in Ibn 'Arabī's system. So did the Hellenistic schools of Plotinus and the Stoics. Scholars have also detected Zoroastrian and Manichaean influences. Yet, whatever his source, he seldom failed to assimilate it so completely as to make it appear to originate in his own mind. This is particularly true of the use he makes of the Qur'ān which he interprets in any way that happens to suit his peculiarly uncompromising system.

Ibn 'Arabī's philosophy is usually described as pantheistic. Pantheism however, as commonly understood, is little more than an ennobled form of materialism. Only in recent years have scholars begun to call Ibn 'Arabī a monist. Yet the term monism, as applied to him, seems not sufficiently qualitative to provide an adequate label for the great Murcian's theosophy. The term that might possibly suit his doctrine best is non-dualism, a term that implies not merely its monistic character but also its complete overcoming of all dualistic conceptions. He is, indeed, the sole Muslim thinker who, while accepting the uncompromising monotheism of the Qur'ān, succeeded in providing that gospel with a philosophical interpretation that resolves the innumerable problems of duality as implied by the seemingly mutually contradictory statements of Islam's holy text.

If it can be said that one single consideration preoccupied Ibn 'Arabī more than any other it was the necessity for proving the non-duality of everything concerning God and His universe. A purely monistic answer to the problems of the apparent duality of a perfect God and an imperfect universe, of active and passive, of good and evil, of Divine omnipotence and human free will, would not have sufficed. It had to be shown unmistakably that there was no room for any duality whatsoever within and between the various elements. If any Western philosopher, rooted in a Semitic Weltanschauung, succeeded in providing such a non-dualistic philosophy, it was Ibn 'Arabī. He may often strain our patience almost beyond endurance; he may tax our powers of comprehension more severely than any other philosopher, Western or Eastern; his apparent ambiguities and contradictions may drive us wellnigh to despair. But finally our patience is richly rewarded. A splendid system of perfect non-dualism rises before us, and innumerable questions that other Western systems leave only partially explained receive answers equally satisfying from a philosophical and a religious point of view.

The difficulties which Ibn 'Arabī presents to the student lie not so much in ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Front Matter 1
• Front Matter 2
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Table Of Contents
• Part One
• Part TwO
• Index