Table Of ContentIbn ‘Arabi
“This is a fine book which will make an excellent addition to the secondary
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Few authors working today can match William Chittick’s knowledge and
understanding of Ibn ‘Arabi and it is fortunate that he has written a book that
makes Ibn ‘Arabi’s complex worldview available in a relatively short format.”
SHAHZAD BASHIR, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF RELIGION, CARLETON COLLEGE,
MINNESOTA
SELECTION OF TITLES IN THE MAKERS OF THE MUSLIM WORLD
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IBN ‘ARABI
Oneworld Publications
10 Bloomsbury Street
London WC1B 3SR
England
© William C. Chittick 2005
This ebook edition first published 2012
All rights reserved
Copyright under Berne Convention
A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-85168-511-0
ISBN 978-1-78074-193-2 (ebook)
Typeset by Jayvee, India
Cover and text design by Design Deluxe
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CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
Ibn ‘Arabi’s Life
Abbreviations Used in the Text
1 THE MUHAMMADAN INHERITANCE
Inheritance
Opening
The Muhammadan Seal
Reading the Qur’an
Understanding God
Knowing Self
God’s Wide Earth
The Inheritor
2 THE LOVER OF GOD
Assuming the Traits of the Names
The Divine and Human Form
Imperfect Love
3 THE DIVINE ROOTS OF LOVE
Wujud
The Nonexistent Beloved
The Entities
The Genesis of Love
Love’s Throne
Human Love
Felicity
Poverty
Perfection
4 THE COSMOLOGY OF REMEMBRANCE
Remembrance
Prophecy
The Book of the Soul
The Breath of the All-Merciful
Knowledge of the Names
All-Comprehensiveness
Achieving the Status of Adam
The Perfect Servant
The House of God
5 KNOWLEDGE AND REALIZATION
Knowledge
Benefit
The Form of God
Reliable Knowledge
Following Authority
Realization
The Ambiguity of Creation
Giving Things their Haqq
The Rights of God and Man
The Soul’s Haqq
6 TIME, SPACE, AND THE OBJECTIVITY OF ETHICAL NORMS
The Methodology of Realization
Time and Space
Location
Time
Eternity
Constant Transformation
Ethics
Lost in the Cosmos
7 THE IN-BETWEEN
Relativity
The Worldview of In-Betweenness
Cosmic Imagination
The Soul
The Soul’s Root
Controversies
The Gods of Belief
8 THE DISCLOSURE OF THE INTERVENING IMAGE
Self-Awareness
Death
Love
9 THE HERMENEUTICS OF MERCY
Interpreting the Qur’an
Good Opinions of God
The Return to the All-Merciful
The Mercy of Wujud
Mercy’s Precedence
Essential Servanthood
Primordial Nature
Sweet Torment
Constitutional Diversity
Surrender
Resources
Index
INTRODUCTION
B
orn in Spain in 1165, Ibn ‘Arabi is at once the most influential and the most
controversial Muslim thinker to appear over the past nine hundred years. The
Sufi tradition looks back upon him as “the greatest master” (ash-shaykh al-
akbar), by which is meant that he was the foremost expositor of its teachings.
Modern scholarship is rightly skeptical about grandiose titles, but there is plenty
of evidence to suggest that this specific title is not out of line. On the quantitative
side, Ibn ‘Arabi’s massive al-Futuhat al-makkiyya (“The Meccan Openings”)
provides more text than most prolific authors wrote in a lifetime. Manuscripts of
several hundred other works are scattered in libraries, and scores of books and
treatises have been published.
But “greatness” is not to be judged by bigness, so we clearly need to look at
the contents of all those pages. Probably no one has ever read everything Ibn
‘Arabi wrote, and few specialists would even claim to have read the whole
Futuhat. Even so, “reading” is one thing, “understanding” something else. Ibn
‘Arabi has always been considered one of the most difficult of authors. This is
due to many factors, not least extraordinary erudition, consistently high level of
discourse, constantly shifting perspectives, and diversity of styles. Thorough
analysis and explication of a single page of the Futuhat demands many pages of
Arabic text, and the task becomes much more challenging when it is a question
of translation into a Western language.
One might suspect that Ibn ‘Arabi’s works are difficult because he wrote
unnecessarily complicated rehashes of earlier works. In fact, we are dealing with
an approach to Islamic learning that is remarkably original, so much so that he
has no real predecessor. Certainly, there were important authors during the
previous century who also expressed Sufi teachings with theoretical
sophistication, but compared even to the greatest of these, such as Ghazali, Ibn
‘Arabi represents a radical break.
Ghazali speaks for much of the early Sufi tradition when he tells us that
“unveiling” – that is, the unmediated knowledge that God bestows on his special
Description:The importance of Muhyi al-Din Ibn al-Arabi (1165-1240) for Islamic mysticism lies in the fact that he was a speculative thinker of the highest order, albeit diffuse and difficult to understand. His central doctrine is the unity of all existence. In this text, William Chittick explores how, through
