What is Ibn ʿArabī?
Ibn ʿArabī (1165–1240) was an Andalusian Sufi mystic and philosopher, born in Murcia. He is best known for the doctrine of waḥdat al-wujūd, the unity of being: the teaching that only God truly exists, and that the world is the place where the divine reveals itself to itself. Within the Sufi tradition he is called al-Shaykh al-Akbar, the Greatest Master.
Ibn ʿArabī and related ideas
Ibn ʿArabī is often charged with pantheism, but the charge rests on a category error. Pantheism holds that the world is God. Waḥdat al-wujūd holds that the world manifests God's being without being identical to it. His teaching is often compared to Advaita Vedānta, the Hindu non-dualism that takes only consciousness to be ultimately real. Both traditions distinguish ultimate and relative reality, and both hold that direct experience closes the gap. The metaphysical frameworks differ, especially on the nature of creation and divine personhood. Ibn ʿArabī should also be distinguished from Sufism as a whole: he is a Sufi, but his philosophical elaboration of waḥdat al-wujūd is the doctrine of one school, not a consensus position within the tradition.
Life
Born in Murcia in 1165 to an aristocratic Andalusian family, Muḥyī al-Dīn ibn ʿArabī moved with his father to Seville as a child and received the standard education of his class: Arabic grammar, Qurʾān, ḥadīth, and Mālikī jurisprudence. The turning point recorded in his autobiographical writings came in a vision in his late teens, in which he reported seeing the prophets Jesus, Moses, and Muḥammad and was instructed to take the path of taḥqīq, the verification of truth by direct experience rather than by transmission. He travelled across Andalusia and the Maghreb meeting the Sufi masters of his generation, then made the ḥajj to Mecca in 1202. He settled in Damascus from 1223 and died there in 1240. By the count of his later editor ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Shaʿrānī, he left behind more than three hundred works in Arabic. The most widely read are al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya (The Meccan Openings), a 560-chapter compendium of Sufi doctrine, and Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam (The Bezels of Wisdom), a shorter text presenting twenty-seven chapters keyed to twenty-seven prophets.
The doctrine of waḥdat al-wujūd
The phrase waḥdat al-wujūd (unity of being) is not Ibn ʿArabī's own coinage. It was coined a generation later by his commentator and stepson Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī. The doctrine itself is in the texts. The Arabic word wujūd means being or existence; it applies properly only to God. Created things do not have being of their own. They are places through which divine being is disclosed in finite forms. The world is not separate from God, which would be polytheism, and not identical to God, which would be a confusion of categories. It is the manifestation (ẓuhūr) of God to God through the forms of finite things. The human being is the most complete locus of this self-disclosure. Ibn ʿArabī cites repeatedly a ḥadīth qudsī: neither my heaven nor my earth contains me, but the heart of my believing servant contains me. The heart of the realised gnostic, the ʿārif, is this capacious place.
The structural similarity to Advaita Vedānta has been noted by every comparativist from Toshihiko Izutsu in the 1960s onward. Ibn ʿArabī's vocabulary is scrupulously Islamic, yet his doctrine is unmistakably resonant with non-dual Vedāntic thought. The two traditions developed in mutual ignorance of each other during the same medieval century, which makes the convergence striking. Similar recognitions appear at almost the same date in the German Rhineland in Meister Eckhart and in the apophatic theology of the Eastern Christian tradition.
Influence
Ibn ʿArabī's influence is enormous and largely Persian. His commentator al-Qūnawī taught the next generation. Through al-Qūnawī, the doctrine reached the great Persian Sufi lineages and through them the Ottoman intellectual world. Rumi was probably never a direct student, but al-Qūnawī was Rumi's friend in Konya and conducted his funeral prayer in 1273. Persian poetry from Maḥmūd Shabistarī through Jāmī works within the waḥdat al-wujūd framework. Indian Naqshbandī Sufism imported the doctrine to the Mughal court. In the modern Arab world, Ibn ʿArabī remains both revered and contested. Orthodox Sunnī jurists from Ibn Taymiyya in the fourteenth century to contemporary Salafī critics have charged him with pantheism. His defenders argue that the charge mistakes the grammar of the doctrine.
Why he isn't yet in the index
The material the index currently carries reaches Ibn ʿArabī through later figures and through secondary literature on Sufism. No primary text in his own name has been added yet. Toshihiko Izutsu's Sufism and Taoism (1966) remains the most-cited comparative entry point. William Chittick's The Sufi Path of Knowledge (1989) is the standard scholarly introduction in English. The Beshara translations of selected Futūḥāt chapters have been in print since the 1970s. The poetry of al-Tarjumān al-Ashwāq (The Interpreter of Desires) is perhaps the most accessible single doorway. Ibn ʿArabī belongs in any contemplative-life index, and the gap is named here in advance of its closing.