-Ibn ʻArabǐ
Critical essay by
Domenico Napoletani, Ph.D.
Presidential Fellow Member, Institute for Quantum Studies
Chapman University
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“Everything other than the essence of the Real is intervening imagination and vanishing shadow” [3, sec. 4].
Understanding these words of the great medieval Muslim philosopher Ibn ‘Arabî (Murcia, 1165- Damascus, 1240) means accepting that no understanding is ever complete, that no rational proof can bound phenomena, and that constancy does not belongs to anything that appears and that will continue to change shape indefinitely [3, sec. 4], beyond and despite our desire to hold on to it. Constancy belongs only to the nonmanifest, nondelimited reality which is always one step further than what we can see.
For Ibn ‘Arabî, the Real can only be called God, Allah, the all-comprehensive name that points to that nondelimited reality, and that encompasses all other names, all possible delimited modalities of being [1, p. 66]. Ibn ‘Arabî consistently affirms Islam's view of God's incomparability—there is no god but God, and his unwavering affirmation of faith manifests itself in two ways: nothing, by definition, can compare to God, and yet nothing can exist that is not God. This radical submission to Islam’s tawhîd, the acknowledgment of unity, affirms God's ineffability while embracing His immanence [3, sec. 2]. While God is in all things, things themselves are only lack. This realization is stronger than simply acknowledging human limitations; it asserts that we possess nothing except our own poverty [1, p. 46], our lack of independent knowledge, of power, and of existence, if our true nature is that we are mere shadows.
But contrary to what it may seem, imagination and vanishing shadow are not meant to be negative concepts. They are the very ways the Real unfolds itself in the cosmos, constantly appearing and disappearing, much like our images in a mirror, which are in one sense identical to us, yet in another, they are not. It is this barzakh, this limiting condition, that shares in both existence and non-existence, that appears, and in which we live [1, p. 362; 2, p. 333].
Shadows become visible in darkness when light shines, yet in reality what we perceive is always and only light itself [1, p. 214], similarly, when we perceive something as existent, it is always the existence of the Real in its self-disclosure that we are experiencing. An excess of light can blind us, and Islamic mysticism speaks of the Real in its essence as a light so pure that, being without counterpart, it is not perceived [1, p. 217; 2, p. 31]. But Ibn ‘Arabî's metaphor of light goes even further: since light is perceived only through the medium that it encounters, in the end, we never experience light as such, but only ourselves [1, p. 342], to the extent we are capable of.
This is a perspective that could potentially lead to despair, with our subjective experience being forever our cage, and the limit of our knowledge. However, for Ibn ‘Arabî it is instead a source of wonder, the realization that in every limit we can sense what is being limited, in every veil the face that is veiled [1, p. 129]. We can live enthralled by each new facet of reality as it is experienced by us, knowing that a new unfolding of the Real will arise at each moment, a changing and living force that cannot be separated from our experience.
Ibn ‘Arabî is often called a philosopher, but this title is accurate only in the original sense that he was a lover of knowledge. His work asserts that truth is not confined by logic and that experiencing what is real means answering our most pressing questions not with a simple yes or no answer, but with both or neither. In his magnum opus the al-Futûhât al-makkiyya, or “Meccan Openings,” he speaks of us having two eyes: one that accepts the light of existence and the other that looks upon the darkness of non-existence [1, p. 362]. Even when the two eyes contradict each other, we share in both views, and we nurture both perspectives, since “who stands between witnessing and knowledge is bewildered, because he wavers between the two” [2, p. 71], and “whatever reason’s proofs have declared impossible to us, we have found possible and occurring in this earth” [2, p. 358]. Logic most appropriately functions as the scaffolding for discrimination and interpretation, while imagination leaps forward, linking to the senses what is not manifest.
But what is the point of these lofty speculations for each one of us? According to Ibn ‘Arabî, the Meccan Openings, spanning thousands of pages in today's pagination count, were “given by unveiling and dictated by God” and written without any reflective process [1, p. xv]. Today, this feat might seem unbelievable, especially given the complexity and intricate pattern of concepts in Ibn ‘Arabî’s work. Yet, we find similar, contemporary instances of astonishing, almost automatic creativity in the overflowing works of the philosopher Edmund Husserl and the theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, and in how formulas displaying tremendous insight in the properties of numbers appeared to Srinivasa Ramanujan fully formed, as if directly drawn by the goddess Namagiri.
The question that should matter to us, as we approach Ibn ‘Arabî’s work—even just a single phrase among his many—is not necessarily whether we need to follow his beliefs, if we are not already doing so. Ibn ‘Arabî would tell us that the Real partially manifests and delimits itself in all beliefs, as it is not bound by limiting conditions and it can choose to constrain and hide itself into any perspective [2, p. 92; 1, p. 337]. Rather, the essential question is whether, to be fully human and to fulfill our potential, we need to accept the reality of the transcendence that seems to be a precondition for generating words and insight out of silence and bewilderment.
Our contemporary discourse changes if we approach Ibn ‘Arabî’s thought with this question in mind, challenging our troubled relationship with objective truth, our confusion and frequent inability to accept multiple viewpoints, and our collective insecurity in the face of generative AI models that strip our intellect of meaning and reduce it to probability patterns, showing how little our reason is worth in itself.
Our confusion, brokenness and diminished faculties become just a pale, distorted mockery of the profound, life-affirming bewilderment we can experience in partaking of the generative power of true speech, the “Breath of the All-Merciful,” words that engender existence [2, p. 43]. Indeed, for Ibn ‘Arabî, words are so central to our destiny as human beings that for him, as for all Muslims, the Real most overtly disclosed itself to us through words, in the Koran, and “every existent thing finds in the Koran what it desires” [2, p. 242].
When we may doubt the worthiness of our humanity, Ibn ‘Arabî’ reminds us that we ourselves can manifest never-ending unfolding of knowledge and novelty, if willing receptacles of the light of the Real, and that true knowledge does not originate from what is already given, from data, or from reason alone, but from openings in our experience that through imagination grant us access to the invisible and the unspoken.
All quotations are from the al-Futûhât al-makkiyya, as translated and commented in these definitive resources on Ibn ‘Arabî’s work:
[1] Chittick, W. C. (1989). The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-‘Arabî’s Metaphysics of Imagination. State University of New York Press.
[2] Chittick, W. C. (1998). The Self-Disclosure of God: Principles of Ibn al-‘Arabî’s Cosmology. State University of New York Press.
[3] Chittick, W. C. (2020). Ibn ‘Arabî. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2020 Edition). Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/ entries/ibn-arabi/.