I Methodological Preliminaries 469
II The Inner Transformation of Man 474
III The Multi stratified Structure of Reality 479
IV Essence and Existence 482
V The Self-evolvement of Existence 486 ---
Preface This is originally a book which I wrote more than fifteen years ago,
when I was teaching Islamic philosophy at the Institute of Islamic
Studies, McGill University, Montreal, Canada.
At that time I was becoming conscious of myself gradually getting
into a new phase of my intellectual life, groping my way towards a
new type of Oriental philosophy based on a series of rigorously
philological, comparative studies of the key terms of various
philosophical traditions in the Near, Middle, and Far East. The
present work was the very first product of my endeavour in this
direction.
The book was subsequently published in Japan in two separate
volumes in 1966—1967, under the title A Comparative Study of Key
Philosophical Concepts in Sufism and Taoism (with the subtitle ‘Ibn
‘Arab! and Lao-tzu - Chuang-tzu’) as a publication of the Institute
of Cultural and Linguistic Studies, Keio University, Tokyo, under
the directorship of the late Professor Nobuhiro Matsumoto.
A growing demand for a new, revised edition made me decide to
republish the book while I was in Iran. Printed in England, it had
been scheduled to come out in Tehran towards the end of the year
1978, when the sudden outbreak of the Khomeini ‘revolution’
rendered its publication impossible. Thus it was that, by a strange
working of fate, the book - completely revised, but still in the form
of galley proofs - came back with its author once again to Japan, the
place where it had first seen the light of day.
In the process of revising the book in its entirety, I did my best to
eliminate all the defects and imperfections that had come to my
notice in the meantime. But, of course, there are natural limits to
such work of correction and amendment.
I only hope that this old book of mine in a new form, despite many
mistakes and shortcomings that must still be there, might at least
make a modest contribution towards the development of ‘meta-
historical dialogues’ among representatives of the various
4m,
philosophical traditions in the East and West, a special kind of
philosophical dialogue of which the world today seems to be in
urgent need.
It is my pleasant duty to express my deep gratitude to the Iwanami
Shoten, Publishers, for having undertaken the publication of this
book. My thanks go in particular to Mr Atsushi Aiba (of the same
publishing house) who has spared no effort in smoothing the way for
the realization of this project. I take this occasion to thank also the
authorities of my alma mater, Keio University, from whom, as I
recall now, I derived inestimable encouragement while I was
engaged in writing this book in its original form.
T.Izutsu
October 4, 1981
Kamakura, Japan
Introduction As indicated by the title and the subtitle, the main purpose of the
present work in its entirety is to attempt a structural comparison
between the world-view of Sufism as represented by Ibn ‘ Arabi and
the world-view of Taoism as represented by Lao-tzu and Chuang-
tzu. I am aware of the fact that this kind of study has a number of
pitfalls. A comparison made in a casual way between two thought-
systems which have no historical connection may become superfi-
cial observations of resemblances and differences lacking in
scientific rigor. In order to avoid falling into this error, an effort will
be made to lay bare the fundamental structure of each of the two
world-views independently and as rigorously as possible before
proceeding to any comparative considerations.
With this in view, the First Part will be entirely devoted to an
attempt at isolating and analyzing the major ontological concepts
which underlie the philosophical world-view of Ibn ‘Arabi, while in
the second part exactly the same kind of analytic study will be made
concerning the world-view of Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu, in such a way
that both parts may constitute two entirely independent studies, one
of Ibn ‘Arabi and the other of ancient Taoism. Only in the third part
will an attempt be made to compare, and co-ordinate, the key-
concepts of these two world-views which have been previously
analyzed without any regard to similarities and differences between
them.
However this may be, the dominant motive running through the
entire work is the desire to open a new vista in the domain of
comparative philosophy and mysticism. A good starting point for
such a comparison is provided by the fact that both world-views are
based on two pivots, the Absolute and the Perfect Man, 1 a whole
system of ontological thought being developed in each case between
these two poles.
It is to be noted that as an ontological structure this is nothing
peculiar to Sufism and Taoism. The opposition of the Absolute and
the Perfect Man in various forms as the two pivots of a world-view is
a basic pattern common to many types of mysticism that have
2
Sufism and Taoism
developed in the world in widely different places and ages. And a
comparative consideration of a number of systems sharing the same
broad pattern and differing from each other in details both of origin
and historical circumstance would seem to prove very fruitful in
preparing the ground for that which Professor Henry Corbin has
aptly called ‘un dialogue dans la metahistoire’ , meta-historical or
transhistorical dialogue, and which is so urgently needed in the
present situation of the world.
Referring to the fact that Ibn ‘Arab! has evoked so much discus-
sion and controversy, unprecedented in the history of Islamic
thought, and attributing this fact to the nature of Islam itself which
combines two Truths: haqiqah ‘the truth based on Intellection’ and
shari'ah ‘the truth based on Revelation’, Dr Osman Yahya makes
the following interesting remark 2 : le cas d’Ibn ‘ Arabi ne se poserait
pas avec autant d’acuite dans une tradition de pure metaphysique
comme le taoism ou le vedanta ou la personality du Maitre . . . eut
pu s’epanouir librement, ni non plus dans une tradition de pure loi
positive ou son cas n’eut meme pas pu etre pose puisqu’il eut ete
refuse par la communaute tout entiere, irremediablement. Mais le
destin a voulu placer Ibn ‘Arabi a la croisee des chemins pour
degager, en sa personne, la veritable vocation de l’lslam.
There can be no denying that Lao-tzu’s metaphysics of Tao
presents in its abysmal depth of thought a number of striking
similarities to Ibn ‘ArabFs conception of Being. This is the more
interesting because, as I shall indicate in the Second Part, Lao-tzu
and Chuang-tzu represent a culmination point of a spiritual tradi-
tion which is historically quite different from Sufism.
We must, as I have remarked above, guard ourselves against
making too easy comparisons, but we must also admit, I believe,
that a comparative study of this kind, if conducted carefully, will at
least furnish us with a common ground upon which an intercultural
dialogue may fruitfully be opened.
In accordance with the general plan above outlined, the first half
of the present book will be concerned exclusively with an analytic
study of the key-concepts which constitute the ontological basis of
Ibn ‘ArabFs world-view. This world-view, as I have said, turns
round two pivots, the Absolute and the Perfect Man, in the form of
an ontological Descent and Ascent. In describing this cosmic pro-
cess Ibn ‘Arabi develops at every stage a number of concepts of
decisive importance. It is these concepts that the present work
intends to analyze. It purports to analyze methodically the ontologi-
cal aspect of Ibn ‘ArabFs mystical philosophy regarding it as a
system of key-concepts that relate to ‘being’ and existence’.
Ontology, we must admit, is but one aspect of the thought of this
extraordinary man. It has other no less important aspects such as
Introduction
3
psychology, epistemology, symbolism, etc., which, together, consti-
tute an original and profound world-view. But the concept of Being,
as we shall see, is the very basis of his philosophical thinking, and his
theory of Being is doubtless of such originality and of such a far-
reaching historical importance that it calls for separate treatment.
At the very outset I would like to make it clear that this is not a
philologically exhaustive study of Ibn ‘Arabi. On the contrary, the
present study is based, as far as concerns Ibn ‘Arabi himself, almost
exclusively on only one of his works: ‘The Bezels of Wisdom’ or
Fu$ii$ al-Hikam. It is essentially an analysis of the major ontological
concepts which Ibn ‘Arabi develops in this celebrated book that has
often been described as his opus magnum, and has been studied and
commented upon by so many people throughout the centuries. 3 So
on the material side, the present work does not claim to offer
anything new.
From the beginning it was not my intention to be exhaustive. My
intention was rather to penetrate the ‘life-breath’ itself, the vivify-
ing spirit and the very existential source of the philosophizing drive
of this great thinker, and to pursue from that depth the formation of
the whole ontological system step by step as he himself develops it.
In order to understand the thought of a man like Ibn ‘Arab!, one
must grasp the very spirit which pervades and vivifies the whole
structure; otherwise everything will be lost. All considerations from
outside are sure to go wide of the mark. Even on an intellectual and
philosophical level, one must try to understand the thought from
inside and reconstruct it in one’s self by what might be called an
existential empathy. For such a purpose, to be exhaustive, though of
course desirable, is not the first requirement.
Ibn ‘Arab! was not merely a profound thinker; he was an unusu-
ally prolific writer, too. The authorities differ among themselves on
the exact number. Al-Sha‘rani, to give an example, notes that the
Master wrote about 400 works. 4 The repertoire general of the
above-mentioned bibliographical work by Dr Osman Yahya lists as
many as 856 works, although the number includes doubtful works
and those that are evidently spurious.
In a situation like this, and for purposes like ours, it is not only
irrelevant but, even more, positively dangerous to try to note every-
thing the author has said and written on each subject over a period
of many years, For one might easily drown oneself in the vast ocean
of concepts, images and symbols that are scattered about in utter
disorder throughout the hundreds of his works, and lose sight of the
main line or lines of thought and the guiding spirit that underlies
the whole structure. For the purpose of isolating the latter from the
disorderly (as it looks at first sight) mass of symbols and images, it
4
Sufism and Taoism
will be more wise and perhaps, more profitable to concentrate on a
work in which he presents his thought in its maturest form . 5
In any case, the present work consists exclusively of an analysis of
the ‘Bezels of Wisdom’ except in a few places where I shall refer to
one of his smaller works for elucidation of some of the important
points . 6 As remarked above, Fu$us al-Hikam has been studied in
the past by many people in many different forms. And yet I hope
that my own analysis of the same book has something to contribute
toward a better understanding of the great Master who has been
considered by many people one of the profoundest, but at the same
time, obscurest thinkers Islam has ever produced.
Notes
1. In Ibn ‘ArabFs system, the Absolute is called haqq (Truth or Reality) and the
Perfect Man is called insan kamil meaning literally ‘perfect man’. In Taoism, the
Absolute is tao and the Perfect Man is sheng jen (Sacred Man or Saint), chert jen
(True Man), etc. I have dealt with the relationship between the Absolute and the
Perfect Man in Taoism in particular in my Eranos lecture for 1967: ‘The Absolute
and the Perfect Man in Taoism’, Eranos- Jahrbuch , XXXVI, Zurich, 1968.
2. Histoire et classification de I’ceuvre d’Ibn ' Arab f, 2 vols. 1964, Damas, avant-
propos, pp. 18-19.
3. Dr Osman Yahya lists more than 100 commentaries on Fkjzzj al-Hikam, cf. op.
cit., I, p. 17, pp. 241-257.
4. al-Sha‘rani, al-Yawaqit wa-al-Jawahir, Cairo, 1305 A.H., vol. I., p. 10.
5. Ibn ‘Arabi (born in Spain in 1165 A.D.) died in Damascus in 1240/ Fujiis
al-Hikam was written in 1229, ten years before his death. As regards his life anahis
works the best introduction, to my knowledge, is found in Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s
Three Muslim Sages, Cambridge, Mass., 1964, pp. 84-121.
6. As a concrete illustration of the oft-repeated attempt at bringing philosophical
coherence and order into the world-view of the Master, I shall in most cases give
al-QashanFs comments side by side with Ibn ‘ArabFs words. ‘Abd al-Razzaq al-
Qashani (d. 1330) is one of the greatest figures in the school of Ibn ‘Arabi. The
edition used in the present book is Sharh al-Qashani ‘ala Fu$u$ al-Hikam, Cairo,
1321 A.H. For the interpretation of difficult passages of the text I have also used
Qayjari and Jami.
I Dream and Reality
So-called ‘reality’ , the sensible world which surrounds us and which
we are accustomed to regard as ‘reality’, is, for Ibn ‘Arab!, but a
dream. We perceive by the senses a large number of things, distin-
guish them one from another, put them in order by our reason, and
thus end up by establishing something solid around us. We call that
construct ‘reality’ and do not doubt that it is real.
According to Ibn ‘Arabi, however, that kind of ‘reality’ is not
reality in the true sense of the word. In other terms, such a thing is
not Being ( wujiid ) as it really is. Living as we do in this phenomenal
world, Being in its metaphysical reality is no less imperceptible to us
than phenomenal things are in their phenomenal reality to a man
who is asleep and dreaming of them.
Quoting the famous Tradition, ‘All men are asleep (in this
world); only when they die, do they wake up,’ he remarks:
The world is an illusion; it has no real existence. And this is what is
meant by ‘imagination’ ( khayal ). For you just imagine that it (i.e ., the
world) is an autonomous reality quite different from and indepen-
dent of the absolute Reality, while in truth it is nothing of the sort 1 .
. . . Know that you yourself are an imagination. And everything that
you perceive and say to yourself, ‘this is not me’, is also an imagina-
tion. So that the whole world of existence is imagination within
imagination . 2
What, then, should we do, if what we have taken for ‘reality’ is but a
dream, not the real form of Being, but something illusory? Should
we abandon once for all this illusory world and go out of it in search
of an entirely different world, a really real world? Ibn ‘Arab! does
not take such a position, because, in his view, ‘dream’, ‘illusion’ or
‘imagination’ does not mean something valueless or false; it simply
means ‘being a symbolic reflection of something truly real’.
The so-called ‘reality’ certainly is not the true Reality, but this
must not be taken to mean that it is merely a vain and groundless
thing. The so-called ‘reality’, though it is not the Reality itself,
vaguely and indistinctively reflects the latter on the level of imagina-
tion. It is, in other words, a symbolic representation of the Reality.
8
Sufism and Taoism
Dream and Reality
9
All it needs is that we should interpret it in a proper way just as we
usually interpret our dreams in order to get to the real state of affairs
beyond the dream-symbols.
Referring to the above-quoted Tradition, ‘All men are asleep;
only when they die, do they wake up’, Ibn ‘Arab! says that ‘the
Prophet called attention by these words to the fact that whatever
man perceives in this present world is to him as a dream is to a man
who dreams, and that it must be interpreted’ . 3
What is seen in a dream is an ‘imaginal’ form of the Reality, not
the Reality itself. All we have to do is take it back to its original and
true status. This is what is meant by ‘interpretation’ ( ta’wil ). The
expression: ‘to die and wake up’ appearing in the Tradition is for
Ibn ‘ Arabi nothing other than a metaphorical reference to the act of
interpretation understood in this sense. Thus ‘death’ does not mean
here death as a biological event. It means a spiritual event consisting
in a man’s throwing off the shackles of the sense and reason,
stepping over the confines of the phenomenal, and seeing through
the web of phenomenal things what lies beyond. It means, in short,
the mystical experience of ‘self-annihilation’ (Jana).
What does a man see when he wakes up from his phenomenal
sleep, opens his real eyes, and looks around? What kind of world
does he observe then - that is, in the self-illuminating state of
‘subsistence’ ( baqa’)l To describe that extraordinary world and
elucidate its metaphysical-ontological make-up, that is the main
task of Ibn ‘Arabi. The description of the world as he observes it in
the light of his mystical experiences constitutes his philosophical
world-view.
What, then, is that Something which hides itself behind the veil of
the phenomenal, making the so-called ‘reality’ a grand-scale net-
work of symbols vaguely and obscurely pointing to that which lies
beyond them? The answer is given immediately. It is the Absolute,
the real or absolute Reality which Ibn ‘Arab! calls al-haqq . Thus the
so-called/ reality’ is but a dream, but it is not a sheer illusion. It is a
particular appearance of the absolute Reality, a particular form of
its self-manifestation (tajalli). It is a dream having a metaphysical
basis. ‘The world of being and becoming ( kawn ) is an imagination’ ,
he says, ‘but it is, in truth, Reality itself’. 4
Thus the world of being and becoming, the so-called ‘reality’,
consisting of various forms, properties and states, is in itself a
colorful fabric of fantasy and imagination, but it indicates at the
same time nothing other than Reality - if only one knows how to
take these forms and properties, not in themselves, but as so many
manifestations of the Reality. One who can do this is a man who has
attained the deepest mysteries of the Way (tariqah).
Prophets are visionaries. By nature they tend to see strange
visions which do not fall within the capacity of an ordinary man.
These extraordinary visions are known as ‘veridical dreams’ ( ru’ya
§adiqah ) and we readily recognize their symbolic nature. We ordi-
narily admit without hesitation that a prophet perceives through
and beyond his visions something ineffable, something of the true
figure of the Absolute. In truth, however, not only such uncommon
visions are symbolic ‘dreams’ for a prophet. To his mind everything
he sees, everything with which he is in contact even in daily life is
liable to assume a symbolic character. ‘Everything he perceives in
the state of wakefulness is of such a nature, though there is, cer-
tainly, a difference in the states’. 5 The formal difference between
the state of sleep (in which he sees things by his faculty of imagina-
tion) and the state of wakefulness (in which he perceives things by
his senses) is kept intact, yet in both states the things perceived are
equally symbols. 6
Thus, a prophet who lives his life in such an unusual spiritual state
may be said to be in a dream within a dream all through his life. ‘The
whole of his life is nothing but a dream within a dream’. 7 What Ibn
‘Arabi means by this proposition is this: since the phenomenal
world itself is in truth a ‘dream’ 8 (although ordinary people are not
aware of its being a ‘dream’), the prophet who perceives unusual
symbols in the midst of that general ‘dream’ -context may be com-
pared to a man who is dreaming in a dream.
This, however, is the deepest understanding of the situation, to
which most people have no access, for they are ordinarily convinced
that the phenomenal world is something materially solid; they do
not notice its symbolic nature. Not even prophets themselves - not
all of them - have a clear understanding of this matter. It is a deep
mystery of Being accessible only to a perfect prophet like
Muhammad. Ibn ‘Arabi explains this point taking as an illus-
tration the contrast between the prophet Yusuf (Joseph) and the
Prophet Muhammad regarding their respective depth of
understanding.
It is related in the Qoran (XII, 4) that Joseph as a small boy once
saw in a dream eleven stars, and the sun and the moon bowing down
before him. This, Ibn ‘Arab! observes, was an event which occurred
only in Joseph’s imagination {khayal). Joseph saw in his imagina-
tion his brothers in the form of stars, his father in the form of the
sun, and his mother in the form of the moon. Many years later,
before Joseph, who was now a ‘mighty prince’ in Egypt, his brothers
fell down prostrate At that moment Joseph said to himself, ‘This is
the interpreted meaning ( ta’wil ) of my dream of long ago. My Lord
has made it true!’ (XII, 99).
The pivotal point, according to Ibn ‘Arabi, lies in the last phrase:
10
Sufism and Taoism
‘has made it true’. 9 It means: ‘God has made to appear in the
sensible world what was in the past in the form of imagination’. 10
This implies that the realization or materialization in a sensible form
of what he had seen in a dream was, in the understanding of Joseph,
the final and ultimate realization. He thought that the things left the
domain of ‘dream’ and came out to the level of ‘reality’.
Against this Ibn ‘Arab! remarks that, as regards being sensible,
there is fundamentally no difference at all between ‘dream’ and
‘reality’; what Joseph saw in his dream was from the beginning
sensible, for ‘it is the function of imagination to produce sensible
things ( mahsusat ), nothing else’. 11
The position of Muhammad goes deeper than this. Viewed from
the standpoint of the prophet Muhammad, the following is the right
interpretation of what happened to Joseph concerning his dream.
One has to start from the recognition that life itself is a dream. In
this big dream which is his life and of which Joseph himself is not
conscious, he sees a particular dream (the eleven stars, etc.). From
this particular dream he wakes up. That is to say, he dreams in his
big dream that he wakes up. Then he interprets his own (particular)
dream (the stars = his brothers, etc.). In truth, this is still a continua-
tion of his big dream. He dreams himself interpreting his own
dream. Then the event which he thus interprets comes true as a
sensible fact. Thereupon Joseph thinks that his interpretation has
materialized and that his dream has definitely come to an end. He
thinks that he stands now completely outside of his dream, while, in
reality, he is still dreaming. He is not aware of the fact that he is
dreaming. 12
The contrast between Muhammad and Joseph is conclusively
summed up by al-Qashani in the following way:
The difference between Muhammad and Joseph in regard to the
depth of understanding consists in this. Joseph regarded the sensible
forms existing in the outer world as ‘reality’ whereas, in truth, all
forms that exist in imagination are (also) sensible without exception,
for imagination ( khayal ) is a treasury of the sensible things. Every-
thing that exists in imagination is a sensible form although it actually
is not perceived by the senses. As for Muhammad, he regarded the
sensible forms existing in the outer world also as products of imagina-
tion (khayaliyah), nay even as imagination within imagination. This
because he regarded the present world of ours as a dream while the
only ‘reality’ (in the true sense of the word) was, in his view, the
Absolute revealing itself as it really is in the sensible forms which are
nothing but so many different loci of its self-manifestation. This point
is understood only when one wakes up from the present life - which is
a sleep of forgetfulness - after one dies to this world through self-
annihilation in God.
Dream and Reality
11
The basic idea which, as we have just observed, constitutes the very
starting-point of Ibn ‘Arabi’s ontological thinking, namely, that
so-called ‘reality’ is but a dream, suggests on the one hand that the
world as we experience it under normal conditions is not in itself
Reality, that it is an illusion, an appearance, an unreality. But
neither does it mean, on the other hand, that the world of sensible
things and events is nothing but sheer fantasy, a purely subjective
projection of the mind. In Ibn ‘Arabi’s view, if ‘reality’ is an illusion,
it is not a subjective illusion, but an ‘objective’ illusion; that is, an
unreality standing on a firm ontological basis. And this is tan-
tamount to saying that it is not an illusion at all, at least in the sense
in which the word is commonly taken.
In order that this point become clear, reference must be made to
the ontological conception peculiar to Ibn ‘Arab! and his school of
the ‘five planes of Being’ . The structure of these ‘planes’ (/ hadarat ) 13
is succinctly explained by Al-Qashani as follows. 14 In the Sufi
world-view, five ‘worlds’ fawalim) or five basic planes of Being are
distinguished, each one of them representing a Presence or an
ontological mode of the absolute Reality in its self-manifestation.
(1) The plane of the Essence ( dhat ), the world of the absolute
non-manifestation ( al-ghayb al-mutlaq) or the Mystery of
Mysteries. 15
(2) The plane of the Attributes and the Names, the Presence of
Divinity ( uliihiyah ). 16
(3) The plane of the Actions, the Presence of Lordship
(rubiibiyah) .
(4) The plane of Images (amthal) and Imagination (khayal). 11
(5) The plane of the senses and sensible experience
(mushahadah) .
These five planes constitute among themselves an organic whole,
the things of a lower plane serving as symbols or images for the
things of the higher planes. Thus, according to al-Qashani, what-
ever exists in the plane of ordinary reality (which is the lowest of all
Divine Presences) is a symbol-exemplification (mithal) for a thing
existing in the plane of Images, and everything that exists in the
world of Images is a form reflecting a state of affairs in the plane of
the Divine Names and Divine Attributes, while every Attribute is
an aspect of the Divine Essence in the act of self-manifestation.
Details about the five planes will be given in the following chap-
ters. Suffice it here to note that the whole world of Being, in Ibn
‘Arabf s view, consists basically of these five levels of Divine self-
manifestation, and that there exists between the higher and lower
levels such an organic relation as has just been mentioned. With this
in mind, let us return to the problem of our immediate concern.
12
Sufism and Taoism
Anything that is found at the lowest level of Being, i.e., the
sensible world, or any event that occurs there, is a ‘phenomenon’ in
the etymological meaning of the term; it is a form {§urah) in which a
state of affairs in the higher plane of Images directly reveals itself,
and indirectly and ultimately, the absolute Mystery itself. To look at
things in the sensible world and not to stop there, but to see beyond
them the ultimate ground of all Being, that precisely is what is called
by Ibn ‘ArabTunveiling’ ( kashf ) or mystical intuition . 18 ‘Unveiling’
means, in short, taking each of the sensible things as a locus in which
Reality discloses itself to us. And a man who does so encounters
everywhere a ‘phenomenon’ of Reality, whatever he sees and hears
in this world. Whatever he experiences is for him a form manifesting
an aspect of Divine Existence, a symbol for an aspect of Divine
Reality. And in this particular respect, his sensory experiences are
of the same symbolic nature as visions he experiences in his sleep . 19
In the eyes of a man possessed of this kind of spiritual capacity,
the whole world of ‘reality’ ceases to be something solidly self-
sufficient and turns into a deep mysterious foret de symboles, a
system of ontological correspondences. And dreams which arise in
the ‘imaginal’ plane of Being turn out to be the same as the things
and events of the world of sensory experience. Both the world of
sensible things and the world of dreams are, in this view, the same
domain of symbols. As al-Qashani says, ‘Everything which comes
manifesting itself from the world of the Unseen into the world of
sensible experience - whether it manifests itself in the senses or
imagination, or again in an image-similitude - is a revelation, an
instruction or communication from God’ . 20
The symbolic structure of the world here depicted, however, is
accessible only to the consciousness of an extremely limited number
of persons. The majority of people live attached and confined to the
lowest level of Being, that of sensible things. That is the sole world
of existence for their opaque consciousness. This lowest level of
Being only, being tangible and graspable through the senses, is real
for them. And even on this level, it never occurs to them to ‘inter-
pret’ the forms of the things around them. They are asleep.
But since, on the other hand, the common people, too, are
possessed of the faculty of imagination, something unusual may -
and does - occur in their minds on rare occasions. An invitation
from above visits them and flashes across their consciousness like
lightning when it is least expected. This happens when they have
visions and dreams.
Ordinarily, imagination or fantasy means the faculty of producing
in the mind a deceptive impression of the presence of a thing which
is not actually there in the external world or which is totally non-
existent. With Ibn ‘Arab!, it has a different meaning. Of course in
Dream and Reality
13
his theory, too, imagination is the faculty of evoking in the mind
those things that are not externally present, i.e., things that are not
immediately present in the plane of sensible experience. But it is not
a wild fantasy or hallucination which induces the mind to see things
that are nowhere existent. What it produces is not a groundless
reverie. It makes visible, albeit in an obscure and veiled way, a state
of affairs in the higher planes of Being. It is a function of the mind
directly connected with the ‘world of Images’.
The ‘world of Images’ (‘ alam al-mithal ) is ontologically an inter-
mediate domain of contact between the purely sensible world and
the purely spiritual, i.e., non-material world. It is, as Affifi defines it,
‘a really existent world in which are found the forms of the things in
a manner that stands between “fineness” and “coarseness”, that is,
between pure spirituality and pure materiality ’. 21
All things that exist on this level of Being have, on the one hand,
something in common with things existing in the sensible world, and
resemble, on the other, the abstract intelligibles existing in the
world of pure intellect. They are special things half-sensible and
half-intelligible. They are sensible, but of an extremely fine and
rarefied sensible-ness. They are intelligible, too, but not of such a
pure intelligibility as that of the Platonic Ideas.
What is commonly called imagination is nothing but this world as
it is reflected in the human consciousness, not in its proper forms,
but obliquely, dimly, and utterly deformed. Images obtained in such
a way naturally lack an ontological basis and are rightly to be
disposed of as hallucinations.
Sometimes, however, the ‘world of Images’ appears as it really is,
without deformation, in the consciousness even of an ordinary man.
The most conspicuous case of this is seen in the veridical dream. The
‘world of Images’ is eternally existent and it is at every moment
acting upon human consciousness. But man, on his part, is not
usually aware of it while he is awake, because his mind in that state is
impeded and distracted by the material forces of the external world.
Only when he is asleep, the physical faculties of his mind being in
abeyance, can the faculty of imagination operate in the proper way.
And veridical dreams are produced.
However, even if a man sees in his sleep a veridical dream, it is
always presented in a series of sensible images. And it remains
devoid of significance unless it be ‘interpreted’. Ibn ‘Arabi sees a
typical example of this in the Biblical- Qoranic anecdote of
Abraham sacrificing his son.
Abraham once saw in a dream a sacrificial ram appearing in the
image of his son Isaac (Ishaq). In reality, this was a symbol. It was a
symbol for the first institution of an important religious ritual;
14
Sufism and Taoism
namely, that of immolation of a sacrificial animal on the altar. And
since this ritual itself was ultimately a symbol of man’s offering up
his own soul in sacrifice, Abraham’s vision was to be interpreted as a
sensible phenomenal form of this spiritual event. But Abraham did
not ‘interpret’ it. And he was going to sacrifice his son. Here is the
explanation of this event by Ibn ‘Arabi . 22
Abraham, the Friend (of God), said to his son, ‘Lo, I have seen
myself in my dream sacrificing thee’. (Qoran XXXVII, 102). Dream,
in truth, is a matter, pertaining to the plane of Imagination. 23 He,
however, did not interpret (his dream). What he saw in the dream
was a ram assuming the form of the son of Abraham. And Abraham
supposed his vision to be literally true (and was about to sacrifice
Isaac). But the Lord redeemed him from the illusion of Abraham
with the Great Sacrifice (i.e. the sacrifice of a ram). This was God’s
‘interpretation’ of the dream of Abraham, but the latter did not know
it. He did not know it because all theophany in a sensible form in the
plane of Imagination needs a different kind of knowledge which
alone makes it possible for man to understand what is meant by God
through that particular form. . . .
Thus God said to Abraham, calling out to him, ‘O Abraham, thou
hast taken the vision for truth’ (XXXVII, 104-105). Mark that God
did not say, ‘Thou has grasped the truth in imagining that it is thy
son’. (The mistake pointed out here) arose from the fact that
Abraham did not ‘interpret’ the dream but took what he had seen as
literally true, when all dreams must of necessity be ‘inter-
preted’ ... If what he imagined had been true, he would have
sacrificed his son. 24 He merely took his vision for truth and thought
that (Isaac, whom he had seen in the dream) was literally his own son.
In reality, God meant by the form of his son nothing more than the
Great Sacrifice.
Thus He ‘redeemed’ him (i.e., Isaac) simply because of what occurred in
Abraham’s mind, whereas in itself and in the eye of God it was not at all a
question of redeeming. 25
Thus (when Isuac was ‘redeemed’) his visual sense perceived a
sacrificial animal (i.e., a ram) while his imagination evoked in his
mind the image of his son . (Because of this symbolic correspondence)
he would have interpreted his vision as signifying his son or some
other thing if he had seen a ram in imagination (i.e., in his dream,
instead of seeing his son as he actually did). Then says God, ‘Verily
this is a manifest trial’ (XXXVII, 106), meaning thereby the trial (of
Abraham by God) concerning his knowledge; namely, whether or
not he knows that the very nature of a vision properly requires an
‘interpretation’. Of course Abraham did know that things of Im-
agination properly require ‘interpretation’. But (in this particular
case) he carelessly neglected to do that. Thus he did not fulfil what
was properly required of him and simply assumed that his vision was
a literal truth.
Abraham was a prophet. And a man who stands in the high spiritual
15
Dream and Reality
position of prophethood must know (theoretically) that a veridical
dream is a symbol for an event belonging to the plane of higher
realities. And yet Abraham actually forgot to ‘interpret’ his dream.
If prophets are like that, how could it be expected that ordinary men
‘interpret’ rightly their dreams and visions? It is but natural, then,
that an ordinary man cannot see that an event occurring in so-called
‘reality’ is a symbol for an event corresponding to it in the higher
plane of the Images.
How can man cultivate such an ability for seeing things symboli-
cally? What should he do in order that the material veil covering
things be removed to reveal the realities that lie beyond?
Regarding this question, Ibn ‘ Arab! in a passage of the Fusu$ points to
a very interesting method. It is a way of discipline, a way of practice for
cultivating what he calls the ‘spiritual eyesight’ (‘ayn al-basirah). It is a
way that renders possible the inner transformation of man.
This inner transformation of man is explained by Ibn ‘Arab! in
terms of transition from the ‘worldly state of being {al-nash’ah
al-dunyawiyah) to the ‘otherworldly state of being’ {al-nash’ah
al-ukhrawiyah ). 26 The ‘worldly state of being’ is the way the major-
ity of men naturally are. It is characterized by the fact that man, in
his natural state, is completely under the sway of his body, and the
activity of his mind impeded by the physical constitution of the
bodily organs. Under such conditions, even if he tries to understand
something and grasp its reality, the object cannot appear to his mind
except in utter deformation. It is a state in which man stands
completely veiled from the essential realities of things.
In order to escape from this state, Ibn ‘Arab! says, man must
personally re-live the experiences of Elias-Enoch and re-enact in
himself the spiritual drama of the inner transformation symbolized
by these two names.
Elias (Ilyas) and Enoch (Idris) were two names assumed by one
and the same person. They were two names given to one person in
two different states. Enoch was a prophet before the time of Noah.
He was raised high by God and was placed in the sphere of the sun.
His name was Enoch in that supreme position. Later he was sent
down as an apostle to the Syrian town of Baalbek. In that second
state he was named Elias . 27
Elias who was sent down in this manner to the earth from the high
sphere of heaven did not stop halfway but became totally ‘earthly’.
He pushed the ‘elemental if unhurt) state of being’ on the earth to its
extreme limit. This symbolizes a man who, instead of exercising his
human reason in a lukewarm way as most people do, abandons
himself thoroughly and completely to the elemental life of nature to
the degree of being less than human.
16
Sufism and Taoism
While he was in that state, he had once a strange vision, in which
he saw a mountain called Lubnan split up and a horse of fire coming
out of it with a harness made entirely of fire. When the prophet
noticed it, he immediately rode the horse, bodily desires fell from
him and he turned into a pure intellect without desire. He was now
completely free from all that was connected with the physical self . 28
And only in this purified state could Elias see Reality as it really is.
However, Ibn ‘Arab! observes, even this supreme ‘knowledge of
God’ ( ma'rifah bi-Allah) attained by Elias was not a perfect one.
‘For in this (knowledge). Reality was in pure transcendence
(munazzah), and it was merely half of the (perfect) knowledge of
God ’. 29 This means that the pure intellect that has freed itself
completely from everything physical and material cannot by nature
see God except in His transcendence ( tanzih ). But transcendence is
only one of the two basic aspects of the Absolute. Its other half is
immanence (tashbih). All knowledge of God is necessarily one-
sided if it does not unite transcendence and immanence, because
God is transcendent and immanent at the same time. Who, how-
ever, can actually unite these two aspects in this knowledge of God?
It is, as we shall see in Chapter III, the prophet Muhammad, no one
else, not even Elias.
Keeping what has just been said in mind, let us try to follow the
footsteps of Enoch-Elias in more concrete, i.e., less mythopoeic,
terms.
As a necessary first step, one has to go down to the most elemen-
tal level of existence in imitation of the heavenly Enoch who went
down to the earth and began by living at the lowest level of earthly
life. As suggested above, one must not stop halfway. Then abandon-
ing all activity of Reason and not exercising any longer the thinking
faculty, one fully realizes the ‘animality’ ( hayawaniyah ) which lies
hidden at the bottom of every human being. One is, at this stage, a
pure animal with no mixture of shallow humanity. Such a man ‘is
freed from the sway of Reason and abandons himself to his natural
desires. He is an animal pure and simple ’. 30
In this state of unmixed animality, the man is given a certain kind
of mystical intuition, a particular sort of ‘unveiling’ ( kashf ). This
‘unveiling’ is the kind of ‘unveiling’ which is naturally possessed by
wild animals. They experience this kind of ‘unveiling’ because, by
nature, they do not exercise, and are therefore not bothered by, the
faculty of Reason.
In any case, the man who seriously intends to re-experience what
was once experienced by Enoch-Elias must, as a first step,
thoroughly actualize his animality; so thoroughly, indeed, that ‘in
the end is “unveiled” to him what is (naturally) ’’unveiled” to all
Dream and Reality
17
animals except mankind and jinn. Only then can he be sure that he
has completely actualized his animality ’. 31
Whether a man has attained to this degree of animality may be
known from outside by two symptoms: one is that he is actually
experiencing the animal ‘unveiling’, and the other is that he is
unable to speak. The explanation by Ibn ‘ Arabi of these two symp-
toms, particularly of the first one, is quite unusual and bizarre, at
least to our common sense. But it is difficult to deny the extraordi-
nary weight of reality it evokes in our minds. It strikes as real
because it is a description of his own personal experience as an
unusual visionary.
The first symptom, he says, of a man actually experiencing the
animal kashf , is that ‘he sees those who are being chastised (by the
angels) in the graves, and those who are enjoying a heavenly felicity,
that he sees the dead living, the dumb speaking, and the crippled
walking’. To the eye of such a man there appear strange scenes
which our ‘sane and healthy’ Reason would unhesitatingly consider
sheer insanity. Whether such a vision is rightly to be regarded as
animal experience is a question about which the ordinary mind is
not in a position to pass any judgment. For here Ibn ‘Arab! is talking
out of his personal experience . 32 But we can easily see at least that,
in the mind of a man who has completely liberated himself from the
domination of natural Reason, all those petty distinctions and dif-
ferentiations that have been established by the latter crumble away
in utter confusion, and things and events take on entirely different
and new forms. What Ibn ‘Arab! wants to say by all this is that all the
seemingly watertight compartments into which Reality is divided by
human Reason lose their ontological validity in such an ‘animal’
experience.
The second symptom is that such a man becomes dumb and is
unable to express himself ‘even if he wants and tries to describe in
words what he sees. And this is a decisive sign that he has actualized
his animality ’ 33 Here he gives an interesting description of his own
experience concerning this point:
Once I had a disciple who attained to this kind of ‘unveiling’. How-
ever, he did not keep silent about his (experience). This shows that he
did not realize his animality (in perfect manner.) When God made
me stand at that stage, I realized my animality completely. I had
visions and wanted to talk about what I witnessed, but I could not do
so. There was no actual difference between me and those who were
by nature speechless.
A man who has thus gone all the way to the furthest limit of
animality, if he still continues his spiritual exercise, may rise to the state
of pure Intellect . 34 The Reason (‘ aql ) which has been abandoned
18
Sufism and Taoism
before in order to go down to the lowest level of animality is an
‘aql attached to and fettered by his body. And now at this second
stage, he acquires a new ‘aql, or rather recovers possession of his
once-abandoned ‘aql in a totally different form . The new ‘aql , which
Ibn ‘Arabi calls ‘pure Intellect’ (‘aql mujarrad ), 35 functions on a
level where its activity cannot be impeded by anything bodily and
physical. The pure Intellect has nothing at all to do with the body.
And when a man acquires this kind of Intellect and sees things with
the eye of the pure Intellect itself, even ordinary things around him
begin to disclose to him their true ontological structure.
This last statement means, in terms of Ibn ‘ArabFs world-view,
that the things around us lose their independence in the eye of such
a man and reveal their true nature as so many ‘phenomena’ of things
belonging to the ontological stage above them.
(Such a man) has transformed himself into a pure Intellect away from
all natural material elements. He witnesses things that are the very
sources of what appears in the natural forms. And he comes to know
by a sort of intuitive knowledge why and how the things of nature are
just as they are . 36
In still more concrete terms, such a man is already in the ontological
stage above that of the things of nature. He is in the stage of the
Divine Names and Attributes. In the language of ontology peculiar
to Ibn ‘Arabi, he is in the stage of the ‘permanent archetypes’ (a‘yan
thabitah ), 37 and is looking down from that height on the infinitely
variegated things of the sensible world and understanding them in
terms of the realities (haqaiq) that lie beyond them.
He who has attained to this spiritual height is an ‘arif or ‘one who
knows (the transcendental truth)’, and his cognition is rightly to be
regarded as an authentic case oidhawq or ‘immediate tasting’. Such
a man is already ‘complete’ (tamm).
As we have remarked before, however, the cognition of Enoch
was only ‘half’ of the cognition of the Absolute reality. A man of
this kind is certainly tamm, but not yet ‘perfect’ (kamil). In order that
he might be kamil, he has to go a step further and raise himself to a
point where he sees that all, whether the ‘permanent archetypes’ or
the things of nature or again he himself who is actually perceiving
them, are after all, nothing but so many phenomenal forms of
the Divine Essence on different levels of being; that through all the
ontological planes, there runs an incessant and infinite flew of the
Divine Being . 38 Only when a man is in such a position is he a ‘Perfect
Man’ ( insan kamil).
The above must be taken as an introduction to the major prob-
lems of Ibn ‘Arabi and a summary exposition of the experiential
basis on which he develops his philosophical thinking. It has, I think,
Dream and Reality
19
made clear that Ibn ‘ Arabi’ s philosophy is, in brief, a theoretic
description of the entire world of Being as it is reflected in the eye of
the Perfect Man. It is, indeed, an extraordinary world-view because
it is a product of the extraordinary experience of an extraordinary
man. How, then, does the Perfect Man, that is, a man who has been
completely awakened, see the world? That will be the main theme
of the following chapters.
Before we close this chapter, however, it will not be out of place
to look back and re-examine the major concepts that have been
touched upon, and consider the relations that are recognizable
among them. In so doing we have to keep in mind that we are still at
a preliminary stage of our research, and that all we have done is
simply to adumbrate the structure of the whole system.
First and foremost, I would like to draw attention to a fact of
capital importance which has been suggested in the course of the
present chapter but not explicitly stated; namely, that the
philosophical thought of Ibn ‘Arabi, with all its perplexing complex-
ity and profundity, is dominated by the concept of Being. In this
sense, his thought is, in essence, through and through ontological.
The concept of Being in the double meaning of ens and esse is the
highest key-concept that dominates his entire thought. His philoso-
phy is theological, but it is more ontological than theological. That is
why even the concept of God (Allah) itself which in Islam generally
maintains its uncontested position is given here only a secondary
place . 39 As we shall see presently, God is a ‘phenomenal’, i.e.,
self-manifesting, form assumed by Something still more primordial,
the Absolute Being. Indeed, the concept of Being is the very found-
ation of this world-view.
However, it is by no means a common-sense notion of Being.
Unlike Aristotle for whom also Being had an overwhelming fascina-
tion, Ibn ‘Arab! does not start his philosophizing from the concept
of Being on the concrete level of ordinary reality. For him, the
things of the physical world are but a dream. His ontology begins -
and ends - with an existential grasp of Being at its abysmal depth,
the absolute Being which infinitely transcends the level of common
sense and which is an insoluble enigma to the minds of ordinary
men. It is, in short, an ontology based on mysticism, motivated by
what is disclosed only by the mystical experience of ‘unveiling’
(kashf).
The absolute Being intuitively grasped in such an extraordinary
experience reveals itself in an infinite number of degrees. These
degrees or stages of Being are classified into five major ones which
were introduced in this chapter as ‘five planes of Being’. Ibn ‘Arabi
himself designates each of these planes of Being hadrah or ‘pres-
ence’ . Each hadrah is a particular ontological dimension in which
20
Sufism and Taoism
the absolute Being (al-wujud al-mufiaq) manifests itself. And the
absolute Being in all the forms of self-manifestation is referred to by
the term haqq
The first of these five planes of Being, which is going to be our
topic in the next chapter, is Reality in its first and primordial
absoluteness or the absolute Being itself. It is the Absolute before 40
it begins to manifest itself, i.e., the Absolute in a state in which it
does not yet show even the slightest foreboding of self-
manifestation. The four remaining stages are the essential forms in
which the Absolute ‘descends’ from its absoluteness and manifests
itself on levels that are to us more real and concrete. This self-
manifesting activity of the Absolute is called by Ibn ‘Arab! tajalli, a
word which literally means disclosing something hidden behind a
veil.
the first hadrah (the Absolute in its
absoluteness)
the second hadrah (the Absolute mani-
festing itself as God)
the third hadrah (the Absolute mani-
festing itself as Lord)
the fourth hadrah (the Absolute mani-
festing itself as half-spiritual and
half-material things)
the fifth hadrah (the Absolute mani-
festing itself as the sensible world)
As this diagram shows, everything in Ibn ‘ArabFs world-view,
whether spiritual of material, invisible or visible, is a tajalli of the
Absolute except the Absolute in its absoluteness, which is, needless
to say, not a tajalli but the very source of all tajalliyat.
Another point to note is that these five planes constitute an
organic system of correspondences. Thus anything found in the
second hadrah, for example, besides being itself a ‘phenomenon’ of
some aspect of the first hadrah , finds its ontological repercussions in
all the three remaining hadarat each in a form peculiar to each
hadrah.
It is also important to remember that the first three planes are
purely spiritual in contrast with the fifth which is material, while the
fourth represents a border-line between the two.
With these preliminary notions in mind we shall turn immediately
to the first hadrah.
Dream and Reality
Notes
21
1. Fujiis al-Hikam , p. 117/103. In quoting from the Fuju$ al-Hikam (. Fw> .), I shall
always give two paginations: (1) that of the Cairo edition of 1321 A.H., containing
al-Qashani’s commentary, and (2) that of Affifi’s critical edition, Cairo, 1946 (1365
A.H.).
2. Fus., p. 199/104. ‘Imagination within imagination’ here means that the world as
we perceive it is a product of our personal faculty of imagination which is active
within the larger domain of the ‘objective’ Imagination. For a lucid and most
illuminating exposition of the concept of Imagination in this latter sense, see Henry
Corbin L’ imagination creatrice dans le soufisme d’Ibn ‘Arabi, Paris, 1958.
3. Fus., p. 200/159.
4. Fu$., p. 200/159
5. Fuj., p. 110/99.
6. Fu$., p. 111/99.
7. ibid.
8. i.e., a system of symbols pointing to the Absolute.
9. ja'ala-ha haqqa.
10. Fuj., p. 112/101.
11. Fuj., p. 113/101.
12. Fus., pp. 112-113/101. The following words of al-Qashani are found in his
commentary, p. 113.
13. literally, (Divine) Presences. They are the five fundamental modes or dimen-
sions of the self-manifestation of the Absolute.
14. p. 110. It is to be remembered that this is not the only form in which the ‘planes
of Being’ are presented. Al-Qashani himself gives in another place a slightly different
explanation (see later, Chapter XI).
15. to be explained in the following chapter.
16. to be discussed in Chapter VII together with the next plane, the plane of the
Actions.
17. This is an intermediary plane which lies between the properly Divine domain of
Being (1,2, 3) and the material world of senses, the so-called ‘reality’ (5). It is a world
sui generis of eternal Archetypes or Images, in which the originally formless Ideas
assume ‘imaginal’ forms and in which the material things of our empirical world
appear as ‘subtle ( latif ) bodies’ having been divested of their grossly material forms.
18. p. 111/99.
19. ibid.
22
Sufism and Taoism
20. p. 110.
21. Commentary on the Fu$u$, p. 74. This commentary is found in the above-
mentioned Cairo edition by Affifi. Throughout the present work, this commentary
will be referred to as Affifi, Fu$., Com.
22. Fu$., pp. 84-86/85-86.
23. i.e., it is a symbol, and needs ‘interpretation’.
24. i.e., God would not have stopped him.
25. The last sentence means: God redeemed Isaac with a sacrificial ram. But the
truth is that the whole matter merely looked to Abraham as ‘redeeming’ . There was,
in fact, no ‘redeeming’ because from the beginning it was not God’s intention to
make Abraham sacrifice his son. Since, however, Abraham had misunderstood
God’s intention, what God did to his son was in his eyes an act of redemption.
26. Fu$., pp. 234—235/186.
27. Fus., p. 227/181.
28. Fw>., p. 228/181.
29. ibid.
30. Fus., p. 235/186.
31. ibid.
32. Besides, all his statements are, in general, based on his personal experience,
whether he explicitly says so or not. And this is one of the reasons why his description
(of anything) is so powerful and persuasive.
33. These words, together with the following quotation, are from Fuj., p. 235/186-
187.
34. i.e., a spiritual state in which the intellect (‘ aql ) is free from all physical fetters
(al-Qashanl).
35. The Arabic here is a bit confusing because the same word ‘aql is used for both
forms: the ‘physical’ or ‘natural’ ‘aql which a mystic must abandon and the pure
‘spiritual’ ‘aql which he acquires afterwards.
36. Fu$., p. 236/187.
37. About the ‘permanent archetypes’ details will be given later.
38. Fuf., p. 236/187.
39. unless, of course, we use, as Ibn ‘Arab! himself often does, the word Allah in a
non- technical sense as a synonym of the Absolute ( haqq ).
40. Strictly speaking, the word ‘before’ is improper here because the ‘absoluteness’
is beyond all temporal relations: there can be neither ‘before nor after in the
temporal sense.
II The Absolute in its Absoluteness
In religious non-philosophical discourse the Absolute is normally
indicated by the word God ox Allah. But in the technical terminol-
ogy of Ibn ‘Arabi, the word Allah designates the Absolute not in its
absoluteness but in a state of determination. The truly Absolute is
Something which cannot be called even God. Since, however, one
cannot talk about anything at all without linguistic designation, Ibn
‘Arabi uses the word haqq (which literally means Truth or Reality)
in referring to the Absolute.
The Absolute in such an absoluteness or, to use a peculiarly
monotheistic expression, God per se is absolutely inconceivable and
inapproachable. The Absolute in this sense is unknowable to us
because it transcends all qualifications and relations that are
humanly conceivable. Man can neither think of anything nor talk
about anything without first giving it some qualification and thereby
limiting it in some form or another. Therefore, the Absolute in its
unconditional transcendence and essential isolation cannot be an
object of human knowledge and cognition. In other words, as far as
it remains in its absoluteness it is Something unknown and unknow-
able. It is forever a mystery, the Mystery of mysteries.
The Absolute in this sense is said to be ankar al-nakirat, i.e., ‘the
most indeterminate of all indeterminates’, 1 because it has no qual-
ities and bears no relation to anything beside itself. Since it is
absolutely indeterminate and undetermined it is totally unknow-
able. Thus the phrase ankar-nakirat means ‘the most unknown of all
the unknown’.
From the particular viewpoint of the Divine self-manifestation
(tajalli) which will be one of our major topics in what follows, the
Absolute in the state of unconditional transcendence is said to be at
the level of ‘unity’ ( ahadiyah ). There is as yet no tajalli. Tajalli is
only expected of it in the sense that it is to be the very source of
tajalli which has not yet begun. And since there is actually no
occurrence of tajalli , there is absolutely nothing recognizable here.
In this respect the Absolute at this stage is the One ( al-ahad ). The
L
24 Sufism and Taoism
word ‘one’ in this particular context is not the ‘one which is a
whole of ‘many’. Nor is it even ‘one’ in opposition to ‘many . It
means the essential, primordial and absolutely unconditional sim-
plicity of Being where the concept of opposition is meaningless.
The stage of Unity is an eternal stillness. Not the slightest move-
ment is there observable. The self- manifestation of the Absolute
does not yet occur. Properly speaking we cannot speak even nega-
tively of any self-manifestation of the Absolute except when we
look back at this stage from the later stages of Being. The tajalli of
the Absolute begins to occur only at the next stage, that of the
‘oneness’ ( wahidiyah ) which means the Unity of the Many.
It is impossible that the Absolute manifest itself in its absolute-
ness. ‘Those who know God in the true sense assert that there can
never be self-manifestation in the state of Unity , 2 because, not
only in the normal forms of cognitive experience in the phenomenal
world but also even in the highest state of mystical experience, there
is, according to Ibn ‘Arab!, kept intact the distinction between the
one who sees ( nazir ) and the object seen ( manzur ). Mystics often
speak of ‘becoming one with God’, which is the so-called unio
mystica. In the view of Ibn ‘ Arabi, however, a complete unification
is but a fallacy on their part or on the part of those who misconstrue
their expressions. If a mystic, for example, describes his experience
of unio mystica by saying, ‘I have seen God through Him’
( Nazartu-hu bi-hi) meaning ‘I have transcended my own existence
into God Himself and have seen Him there with his own eyes’, and
supposing that the expression is true to what he has really experi-
enced, yet there remains here a distinction between himself who
sees and himself who is seen as an object.
If, instead of saying ‘I have seen Him through Him , he said, I
have seen Him through myself’, ( Nazartu-hu bi), does the expres-
sion describe the experience of the Unity? No, by the very fact that
there intervenes ‘I’ (ana) the absolute Unity is lost. What about,
then, if he said ‘ I have seen Him through Him and myself’ ( Nazartu-
hu bi-hi wa-bi )? Even in that case - supposing again that the
expression is a faithful description of the mystic s experience — the
pronominal suffix -tu (in nazartu ) meaning ‘I (did such-and-such a
thing)’ suggests a split. That is to say, the original Unity is no longer
there. Thus in every case ‘there is necessarily a certain relation
which requires two elements: the subject and object of seeing. And
this cannot but eliminate the Unity, even if (the mystic in such an
experience) only sees himself through himself’. 3
Thus even in the highest degree of mystical experience, that of
unio, the prime Unity must of necessity break up and turn into
duality. The Absolute on the level of Unity, in other words, remains
for ever unknowable. It is the inescapable destiny of the human act
The Absolute in its Absoluteness
25
of cognition that, whenever man tries to know something, there
comes in a particular relation, a particular condition which impedes
an immediate grasp of the object. Man is unable to know anything
without taking up some position, without looking at it from some
definite point. The Absolute, in its absoluteness, however, is pre-
cisely Something which transcends all such relations and aspects.
Is it impossible, then, for man to say even a word about the Abso-
?■ lute? Can we not predicate anything at all of the absolute Absolute?
| As is clear from what has just been said, strictly speaking no predi-
cation is possible. Philosophically, however, there is one single thing
which we predicate of the Absolute on this level. It is ‘being’. As
long as it is a word with a meaning, it also delimits and specifies the
Absolute. But within the boundaries of philosophical thinking,
‘being’ is the most colorless - and therefore the least specifying
predication thinkable. It describes the Absolute with the highest
degree of unconditionality.
The Absolute viewed from this standpoint is called by Ibn ‘Arab!
dhat 4 or ‘essence’. The world dhat in this context means absolute
Being (wujud mu(laq), Being qua Being, or absolute Existence, that
is, Existence viewed in its unconditional simplicity. As the epithet
‘absolute’ indicates, it should not be taken in the sense of a limited
and determined existent or existence; it means Something beyond
all existents that exist in a limited way, Something lying at the very
source of all such existents existentiating them. It is Existence as the
ultimate ground of everything.
The ontological conception of the Absolute is a basic thesis that
runs through the whole of the Fu$us. But Ibn ‘Arabi in this book
does not deal with it as a specifically philosophic subject. On behalf
of the Master, al-QashanT explains the concept of dhat scholastic-
ally. He considers it one of the three major ideas that concern the
very foundation of Ibn ‘ ArabF s thought. The whole passage which is
reproduced here is entitled ‘an elucidation of the true nature of the
Essence at the level of Unity’. 5
The Reality called the ‘Essence at the level of Unity’ ( al-dhat al-
ahadiyah) in its true nature is nothing other than Being (wujud) pure
and simple in so far as it is Being. It is conditioned neither by
non-determination nor by determination, for in itself it is too sacred
(muqaddas) to be qualified by any property and any name. It has no
quality, no delimitation; there is not even a shadow of multiplicity in
it.
It is neither a substance nor an accident, for a substance must have a
quiddity other than existence, a quiddity by which it is a substance as
differentiated from all other existents, and so does an accident which,
furthermore, needs a place (i.e., substratum) which exists and in
which it inheres.
26
Sufism and Taoism
And since everything other than the Necessary Being ( wajib ) is either
a substance or an accident, the Being qua Being cannot be anything
other than the Necessary Being. Every determined (i.e., non-
necessary) being is existentiated by the Necessary Being. Nay, it is
essentially [no other than the Necessary Being] 6 ; it is entitled to be
regarded as ‘other’ than the Necessary Being only in respect of its
determination. (Properly speaking) nothing can be ‘other’ than it in
respect to its essence.
Such being the case (it must be admitted that in the Necessary Being)
existence is identical with essence itself, for anything which is not
Being qua Being is sheer non-Being (‘ adam ). And since non-Being is
‘nothing’ pure and simple, we do not have to have recourse, in order
to distinguish Being qua Being from non-Being, to a particular act of
negation, namely, the negation of the possibility of both being com-
prehended under a third term . 7 Nor does Being ever accept non-
Being; otherwise it would, after accepting non-Being, be existence
which is non-existent. Likewise, pure non-Being, on its part, does not
accept Being. Besides, if either one of them (e.g., Being) accepted its
contradictory (e.g., non-Being) it would turn into its own contradic-
tory (i .e., non-Being) while being still actually itself (i.e., Being). But
this is absurd.
Moreover, in order that anything may ‘accept’ something else there
must necessarily be multiplicity in it. Being qua Being, however, does
not include any multiplicity at all. That which does accept Being and
non-Being is (not Being qua Being but) the ‘archetypes’ ( a'yan ) and
their permanent states in the intelligible world, becoming visible with
Being and disappearing with non-Being.
Now everything (in the concrete world of ‘reality’) is existent through
Being. So in itself such an existent is not Being. Otherwise when it
comes into existence, we would have to admit that its existence had
already existence even before its own (factual) existence. But Being
qua Being is from the beginning existent, and its existence is its own
essence. Otherwise, its quiddity would be something different from
existence, and it would not be Being. If it were not so, then (we would
have to admit that) when it came into existence, its existence had an
existence (i.e., as its own quiddity) even before its own existence.
This is absurd.
Thus Being itself must necessarily exist by its own essence, and not
through existence of some other thing. Nay, it is that which makes
every other existent exist. This because all other things exist only
through Being, without which they would simply be nothing at all.
It is important to notice that al-Qashani in this passage refers to
three categories of Being; (1) Being qua Being, that is, absolute
Being, (2) the archetypes, and (3) the concrete beings or existents of
the sensible world. This triple division is a faithful reflection of the
main conception of Ibn ‘Arabi himself. In the Fu$u$, he does not
present a well-organized ontological discussion of this problem
from this particular point of view. It is nonetheless one of the
The Absolute in its Absoluteness
27
cardinal points of his philosophy. A concise systematic presentation
is ound in his short treatise, Kitab Insha’ al-Dawa’ir . 8 There he
mentions the three categories, or, as he calls them, three ‘degrees’
or ‘strata’ (maratib), of Being, and asserts that there can be no other
ontological category. These three are: (1) the absolute Being (2) the
limited and determined Being, and (3) something of which neither
Being nor non-Being can be predicated. The second of the three is
the world of the sensible things while the third, which he says can
neither be said to exist nor not to exist, is the world of the
archetypes.
As for the ontological nature of the archetypes and the sensible
things we shall have occasions to discuss it in detail later on. The first
degree of Being alone is what interests us in the present context.
Know that the things that exist constitute three degrees, there being
no other degree of Being. Only these three can be the objects of our
knowledge, for anything other than these is sheer non-Being which
can neither be known nor be unknown and which has nothing at all to
do with anything whatsoever.
With this understanding I would assert that of these three
(categories) of things the first is that which possesses existence by
itself, i.e., that which is existent per se in its very essence. The
existence of this thing cannot come from non-Being; on the contrary,
it is the absolute Being having no other source than itself. Otherwise,
that thing (i.e., the source) would have preceded it in existence’
Indeed, it is the very source of Being to all the things that exist; it is
their Creator who determines them, divides them and disposes them.
It is, in brief, the absolute Being with no limitations and conditions.
Praise be to Him! He is Allah, the Living, the Everlasting, the
Omniscient, the One, who wills whatever He likes, the Omnipotent . 9
It is remarkable that Ibn ‘Arabi, in the concluding sentence of the
passage just quoted, explicitly identifies the absolute Being with
Allah, the Living, Omniscient, Ominpotent God of the Qoran. It
indicates that he has moved from the ontological level of discourse
with which he began to the religious level of discourse peculiar to
the living faith of the believer.
As we have remarked before, the Reality in its absoluteness is, in
Ibn ‘Arabi’s metaphysical-ontological system, an absolutely
unknowable Mystery that lies far beyond the reach of human cogni-
tion. Properly speaking, in the name of Allah we should see the
self-manifestation ( tajalli ) of this Mystery already at work,
although, to be sure, it is the very first beginning of the process and
is, in comparison with the remaining levels of tajalli, the highest and
the most perfect form assumed by the Mystery as it steps out of its
abysmal darkness. However, from the viewpoint of a believer who
talks about it on the level of discourse directly connected with his
28
Sufism and Taoism
living faith, the absolute Being cannot but take the form of
Allah. Existence per se cannot in itself be an object of religious
belief.
This fact makes it also clear that whatever we want to say about
the absolute Being and however hard we try to describe it as it really
is, we are willy-nilly forced to talk about it in one aspect or another
of its self-manifestation, for the Absolute in the state of non-
manifestation never comes into human language. The absolute
Reality in itself remains for ever a ‘hidden treasure , hidden in its
own divine isolation.
It will be natural, then, that, from whatever point of view we may
approach the problem, we see ourselves ultimately brought back to
the very simple proposition from which we started*, namely , that the
Absolute in its absoluteness is essentially unknown and unknow-
able. In other words, the inward aspect of the Absolute defies every
attempt at definition. One cannot, therefore, ask, What is the
Absolute?’ And this is tantamount to saying that the Absolute has
no ‘quiddity’ ( mahiyah ).'°
This, however, does not exclude the possibility of a believer
justifiably asking what is the mahiyah of God. But the right answer
to this question can take only one form. And that sole answer is,
according to Ibn ‘ Arabi, represented by the answer given by Moses
in the Qoran.
The reference is to XXVI (23-24) where Moses, asked by
Pharaoh, ‘And what is the Lord of the worlds?’ ( Ma rabbu al-
‘alamina?), answers, ‘The Lord of the heavens and earth and what is
between them’. Ibn ‘Arab! considers the question hurled at Moses
by Pharaoh (‘ What is ...?’) as a philosophical one asking about the
mahiyah of God, asking for a definition of God. And he gives the
situation of this dialogue quite an original interpretation.
He argues: this question was asked by Pharaoh not because he
was ignorant, but simply because he wanted to try Moses. Knowing
as he did to what degree a true apostle of God must know about
God, Pharaoh wanted to try Moses as to whether the latter was truly
an apostle as he claimed to be. Moreover, he was sly enough to
attempt cheating those who were present, that is, he designed the
question in such a way that, even if Moses were a genuine apostle,
those present would get the impression of Moses being far inferior
to Pharaoh, for it was to be expected from the very beginning that
Moses - or anybody else for that matter - could not in any case give
a satisfactory answer to the question. However, Ibn Arabi does not
clarify the point. On his behalf, al-Qashani gives the following
explanation. 12
By asking, ‘What is God?’, Pharaoh gave those who were there
the impression that God had somehow a mahiyah in addition to His
The Absolute in its Absoluteness
29
existence. The onlookers were thereby led to the idea that, since
God had a mahiyah , a true apostle must know it and must, there-
fore, be able to give a satisfactory answer to the question. Since,
however, there can be no ‘definition’ ( hadd ) of God in the logical
sense, a true apostle - if he is a true apostle, and not a fraud - can
never give a ‘satisfactory’ answer in the form of a definition. But in
the eyes of those who are not conversant with the real nature of the
problem, a vague non-definitive answer is a sign indicating that the
man who gives such an answer is not a real ‘knower’.
Now the actual answer given by Moses runs: ‘the Lord of the
heavens and earth and what is between them”. This is just the right
answer and the only possible and the most perfect answer in this
case. It is, as Ibn ‘Arabi puts it, ‘the answer of those who truly know
the matter’. Thus Moses in his answer said what there was really to
be said . And Pharaoh, too, knew perfectly well that the right answer
could not be anything other than this. Superficially, however, the
answer looks as if it were not a real answer. So Pharaoh achieved his
aim of producing the impression in the minds of the onlookers that
Moses was ignorant of God, while he, Pharaoh, knew the truth
about God.
Is it wrong, then, philosophically to ask, ‘What is God?’ as
Pharaoh did? No, Ibn ‘Arabi says, 13 the question in this form is not
at all wrong in itself. To ask about the mahiyah of something is
nothing other than asking about its reality or real essence. And
God does possess reality. Strictly speaking, asking about the
mahiyah of something is not exactly the same as asking for its logical
definition. To ask about the mahiyah of a thing, as understood by
Ibn ‘Arabi, is to ask about the reality ( haqiqah ) of that object, which
is unique and not shared by anything else. 14 ‘Definition’ in the
logical sense is different from this. It consists of a combination of a
genus and a specific difference, and such a combination is thinkable
only in regard to things (i.e., universal) that allow of common
participation.
Anything, therefore, that has no logical genus in which to belong
cannot be ‘defined’ , but this does not in any way prevent such a thing
having its own unique reality which is not common to other things.
More generally speaking, ‘there is nothing’, as al-Qashani
observes, 15 ‘that has not its own reality ( haqiqah ) by which it is just
as it is to the exclusion of all other things. Thus the question (what is
God?) is a perfectly justifiable one in the view of those who know
the truth. Only those who do not possess real knowledge assert that
anything that does not admit of definition cannot be asked as to
“what” (ma) it is’.
Moses, in reply to the question: ‘What is God?’, says that He is
‘the Lord of the heavens and earth and what is between them, if you
30
Sufism and Taoism
have a firm faith’. Ibn ‘Arabi sees here ‘a great secret’ ( sirr kabir)
that is to say, a profound and precious truth hidden under a seem-
ingly commonplace phrase.
Here is a great secret. Observe that Moses, when asked to give an
essential definition ( hadd dhatl ), answered by mentioning the ‘act’
(fi'l )' 6 of God.
Moses, in other words, identified 17 the essential definition (of God)
with the (essential) relation of God to the forms of the things by
which He manifests Himself in the world or the forms of the things
which make their appearance in Him. Thus it is as though he said, in
reply to the question: ‘What is the Lord of the worlds?’, ‘It is He in
whom appear all the forms of the worlds ranging from the highest -
which is the heaven - to the lowest - which is the earth, or rather the
forms in which He appears ’. 18
Pharaoh, as the Qoran relates, sets out to show that such an answer
can come only from a man who is ignorant of God or who has but a
superficial knowledge of God. He tries thereby to prove in the
presence of his subjects his superiority over Moses. The latter,
against this, emphasizes that God is ‘the Lord of the East and West
and what is between them, if you but have understanding’ (XXVI,
28 ).
This second statement of Moses is interpreted by Ibn ‘Arabi in
such a way that it turns out to be a symbolic expression of his own
ontology. The East, he says, is the place from which the sun makes
its appearance. It symbolizes the visible and material aspect of
theophany. The West is the place into which the sun goes down to
conceal itself from our eyes. It symbolizes the invisible aspect (i.e.,
ghayb) of the self-manifestation of the Absolute. And these two
forms of theophany, visible and invisible, correspond to the two
great Names of God: the Outward (al-zahir) and the Inward ( al -
batin). The visible theopany constitutes the world of concrete mat-
erial things (‘ alam al-ajsam ), while the invisible theophany results in
the rise of the non-material spiritual world (‘alam al-arwah). Natu-
rally ‘what lies between the East and West’ would refer to those
forms that are neither purely material nor purely spiritual, that
is, what Ibn ‘Arabi calls amthal or Images on the level of
Imagination . 19
Here Ibn ‘Arabi draws attention to a fact which seems to him to
be of decisive importance; namely that, of the two answers given by
Moses, the first is qualified by a conditional clause: ‘if you have a
firm faith’ . 20 This indicates that the answer is addressed to those who
have yaqin, i.e., the ‘people of unveiling’ (kashf) and immediate
unitative knowledge ( wujud ). 21 Thus in the first answer Moses
simply confirms what the true ‘knowers’ have yaqin about. What,
then, is the content of this yaqin which Moses is said simply to be
The Absolute in its Absoluteness
31
confirming here? The answer is given by al-Qashani in the following
way . 22
The truth of the matter is that it is an impossibility to give a direct
answer to the question about the reality of God without any refer-
ence to any relation. Thus Moses, instead of anwering directly to the
question asked concerning the mahlyah (of God), mentions the act
(of theophany). He thereby indicates that the Absolute is above all
limitation and definition, and that it does not come under any genus
nor can it be distinguished by any specific difference because it
comprehends the whole in itself.
So (instead of trying to define the Absolute) Moses has recourse to an
explication of the reality of the Lordship ( rububiyah ). In this way
(instead of explaining God) he is content with explaining what is
attributed to Him, namely with stating that He is the One to whom
belongs the Lordship of the world of the higher spirits, the world of
the lower objects and all the determinations, relations and attribu-
tions that lie between the two worlds. He states that God is the
Outward by his Lordship over all and the Inward by his inmost nature
(huwiyah, lit. ‘He-ness’) which resides in all, because He is the very
essence of everything that is perceived in any form of experience.
Moses makes it clear that the definition of God is impossible except in
this way, that is, except by putting Him in relation to all without
limitation or to some (particular things). This latter case occurs when
he says (for example): ‘(He is) your Lord and the Lord of your
ancient ancestors' .
In contrast to the first answer which is of such a nature, the second
one is qualified by a different conditional clause: ‘if you have
understanding’ , or more precisely ‘if you know how to exercise your
reason ’. 23 This clause indicates that the second answer is addressed
to those who understand everything by Reason (‘ aql ), those, in
other words, who ‘bind and delimit’ things 24 in their understanding.
These people are those whom Ibn ‘Arab! calls ‘the people of
binding, limiting and restricting’ (ahl ‘aql wa-taqyid wa-hasr ).
These are the people who grasp any truth only through arguments
created by their own reason, i.e., the faculty of setting formal
limitations.
The gist of both the first and the second answer consists in
identifying the object asked about (i.e., the Absolute) with the very
essence of the world of Being. Moses, to put it in another way, tried
to explain the Absolute in its self-revealing aspect, instead of mak-
ing the futile effort to explain it in its absoluteness. Pharaoh who
asked that question - apart from his bad intention - and Moses who
replied as he did, were right each in his own way. When Pharaoh
asked him ‘What is God?’ Moses knew that what Pharaoh was
asking for was not a ‘definition’ of God in the philosophical or
logical sense. Therefore he did give the above-mentioned answers.
32 Sufism and Taoism
If he had thought that Pharaoh’s intention was to ask for a
definition, he would not have answered at all to the question,
but would have pointed out to Pharaoh the absurdity of such a
question . 25
All this has, I think, made it clear that for Ibn ‘ ArabI the Absolute in
its absoluteness is an ‘absolute mystery’ ( ghayb mutlaq), and that
the only way to approach the Absolute is to look at it in its self-
revealing aspect. Is it then possible for us to see the Absolute itself
at least in this latter aspect? Will the Unknown-Unknowable trans-
form itself into Something known and knowable? The answer, it
would seem, must be in the affirmative. Since, according to a Tradi-
tion, the ‘hidden treasure’ unveils itself because it ‘desires to be
known’ , self- manifestation must mean nothing other than the Abso-
lute becoming knowable and known.
But, on the other hand, the Absolute in this aspect is no longer the
Absolute in itself, for it is the Absolute in so far as it reveals itself. In
Ibn ‘Arabi’s world-view, the world of Being consists of material
objects ( ajsam , sg. jism) and non-material or spiritual beings
( arwah , sg. ruh). Both these categories are the forms of self-
manifestation assumed by the Absolute. In this sense everything,
whether material or spiritual, reveals and discloses the Absolute in
its own way. However, there is a certain respect in which these
things cover up the Absolute as thick impenetrable veils in such a
way that the Absolute hides itself behind them and is invisible in
itself. As a famous Tradition says: ‘God hides Himself behind
seventy thousand veils of light and darkness. If He took away these
veils, the fulgurating lights of His face would at once destroy the
sight of any creature who dared to look at it.’
In referring to this Tradition, Ibn ‘Arabi makes the following
remark : 26
Here God describes Himself (as being concealed) by veils of dark-
ness, which are the physical things, and by (veils) of light, which are
fine spiritual things, for the world consists of ‘coarse’ things and ‘fine’
things, so that the world in itself constitutes a veil over itself. Thus the
world does not see the Absolute as directly as it sees its own self . 27
The world, in this way, is forever covered by a veil which is never
removed. Besides (it is covered by) its knowledge (or consciousness)
that it is something different and distinct from its Creator by the fact
that it stands in need of the latter . 28 But (in spite of this inner need) it
cannot participate in the essential necessity which is peculiar to the
existence of the Absolute and can never attain it.
Thus the Absolute remains for this reason forever unknowable by an
intimate knowledge, because no contingent being has access to it
(i.e., the essential necessity of the Absolute).
The Absolute in its Absoluteness 33
Here again we come across the eternal paradox: the things of the
world, both material and non-material, are, on the one hand, so
many forms of the Divine self-manifestation, but on the other, they
act exactly as veils hindering a (complete) self-manifestation of
God. They cover up God and do not allow man to see Him directly.
In this latter sense, the created world in relation to the absolute
Absolute is referred to in the Qoran by the pronoun ‘they’ (hum).
Hum is grammatically a ‘pronoun of absence’ . It is a word designat-
ing something which is not actually present. The creatures, in other
words, are not there in the presence of the Absolute. And this
‘absence’ precisely is the ‘curtain’.
The recurring Qoranic phrase hum alladhina kafaru ‘they are
those who cover up’ means, according to the interpretation of Ibn
‘Arabi, nothing other than this situation of ‘absence’. The verb
kafara in the Qoran stands in opposition to amana ‘to believe in’,
and signifies ‘infidelity’ or ‘disbelief’. But etymologically the verb
means ‘to cover up’. And for Ibn ‘Arabi, who takes the word in this
etymological meaning, alladhina kafaru does not mean ‘those who
disbelieve (in God)’ but ‘those who cover and veil’. Thus it is an
expression referring to people who, by their ‘absence’, conceal the
Absolute behind the curtain of their own selves . 29
The whole world, in this view, turns out to be a ‘veil’ (hijab)
concealing the Absolute behind it. So those who attribute Being to
the world enclose the Absolute within the bounds of a number of
determinate forms and thereby place it beyond a thick veil. When,
for example, the Christians assert that ‘God is Messiah, Son of
Mary’ (V, 72), they confine the Absolute in an individual form and
lose sight of the absoluteness of the Absolute. This makes them
absent from the Absolute, and they veil it by the personal form of
Messiah. It is in the sense that such people are Kafirs, i.e., ‘those
who cover up (-Hhose who disbelieve )’. 30
The same thing is also explained by Itj>n ‘Arabi in another interest-
ing way. The key-concept here is the Divine self-manifestation
(tajalli). And the key-symbol he uses is that of a mirror, which
incidentally, is one of his most favorite images.
The Absolute, ‘in order that it be known’, discloses itself in the
world. But it discloses itself strictly in accordance with the require-
ment of each individual thing, in the form appropriate to and
required by the nature of ‘preparedness’ ( isti‘dad ) of each indi-
vidual existent. There can absolutely be no other form of self-
manifestation. And when the locus, i.e., the individual thing in
which the Absolute discloses itself happens to be a human being
endowed with consciousness, he sees by intuition the self-revealing
34 Sufism and Taoism
Absolute in himself. Yet, since it is after all the Absolute in a
particular form determined by his own ‘preparedness’ , what he sees
in himself is nothing other than his own image or form (surah ) l as
mirrored in the Absolute. He never sees the Absolute itself. His
Reason may tell him that his own image is visible there reflected in
the Divine mirror, but, in spite of this consciousness based on
reasoning, he cannot actually see the mirror itself; he sees only
himself.
The Divine Essence (dhat) discloses itself only in a form required by
the very ‘preparedness’ of the locus in which occurs the self-
manifestation. There can be no other way.
Thus the locus of the Divine self-manifestation does not see any-
thing, other than its own form as reflected in the mirror of the
Absolute It does not see the Absolute itself. Nor is it at all possible
for it to do so, although it is fully aware of the fact that it sees its own
form only in the Absolute. .
This is similar to what happens to a man looking into a mirror in the
empirical world. When you are looking at forms or your own form in
a mirror you do not see the mirror itself, although you know well that
you see these forms or your own form only in the mirror.
Thus we are faced with a curious fact that the forms or images of
things in a mirror, precisely because they are visible, intervene
between our eyesight and the mirror and act as a veil concealing t e
mirror from our eyes.
This symbol (of mirror) has been put forward by God as a particularly
appropriate one for His essential self-manifestation so that the per-
son who happens to be the locus of this Divine self-manifestation
might know what exactly is the thing he is seeing. Nor can there be a
symbol closer than this to (the relation between) contemplation (on
the part of man) and self-manifestation (on the part of God).
(If you have some doubt of this) try to see the body of the mirror
while looking at an image in it. You will not be able to do so, nevei.
So much so that some people who have experienced this with regard
to images reflected in the mirror maintain that the form seen in the
mirror stands between the eyesight of the person who is looking and
the mirror itself. This is the furthest limit which (an ordinary intel-
lect) can reach . 31
Thus the view that the image in the mirror behaves as a ‘veil
concealing the mirror itself is the highest knowledge attainable by
ordinary people; that is, by those who understand things through
their intellect. But Ibn ‘ Arabi does not forget to suggest in the same
breath that for those who are above the common level of under-
standing there is a view which goes one step further than this. The
deepest truth of the matter, he says, is represented by a view which
he already expounded in his al-Futuhdt al-Makkiyah.
The Absolute in its Absoluteness
35
The ‘deepest truth’ here referred to is explained by al-Qashani as
follows: 32
That which is seen in the mirror of the Absolute is the form of the
man who is looking; it is not the form of the Absolute. To be sure, it is
no other than the very Essence of the Absolute that discloses itself to
his eye, but this self-manifestation is done in his (i.e., the man’s)
form, not in its (i.e., the Essence’s) form.
However, the form seen in (the mirror of) His Essence is far from
constituting a veil between Him and the man who is looking. On the
contrary, it is the Essence at the level of Unity ( ahadiyah ) disclosing
itself to the man in his form. And shallow indeed is the view of those
who assert in connection with the (symbol of the) mirror that the
form (seen) works as a veil between it and the man who sees (the
form therein).
And al-Qashani adds that a deep understanding of this nature is
only obtainable in the experience of immediate vision and ‘unveil-
ing’. This may be explained somewhat more theoretically and
briefly in the following manner.
The image reflected in the mirror of the Absolute has two differ-
ent aspects. It is, in the first place, a self-manifestation of the
Absolute in a particular form in accordance with the demand of the
‘preparedness’ of the locus. But in the second place, it is the Form of
the Divine self-manifestation, however much it may be particular-
ized by the demand of the locus. The reflected image behaves as a
concealing veil because the spiritual eye of an ordinary man is
riveted to the first of these aspects. And as the second aspect looms
in the consciousness of the man through the profound experience of
‘unveiling’ the reflected image ceases to be a veil, and the man
begins to see not only his own image but the Form of the Absolute
assuming the form of his own.
This, Ibn ‘Arabi asserts, is the highest limit beyond which the
human mind is never allowed to go. 33
Once you have tasted this, you have tasted the utmost limit beyond
which there is no further stage as far as concerns the creatures. So do
not covet more than this. Do not make yourself weary by trying to go
up further than this stage, for there is no higher stage than this.
Beyond this there is sheer nothing.
We may remark that the ‘highest limit’ here spoken of is the stage
peculiar to the Perfect Man. Even for the Perfect Man there can be
no spiritual stage realizable at which he is able to know the Absolute
as it really is, i.e., in its absoluteness. Yet, such a man is in a position
to intuit the Absolute as it reveals itself in himself and in all other
things. This is the final answer given to the question: To what extent
and in what form can man know the Absolute?
36
Sufism and Taoism
And this will be the only and necessary conclusion to be reached
concerning the metaphysical capability of the Perfect Man if we are
to start from the basic assumption that Divine Essence ( dhat ) and
Unity ( ahadiyah ) are completely identical with each other in indi-
cating one and the same thing, namely, the Absolute in its absolute-
ness as the highest metaphysical stage of Reality. There is, however,
another theoretical possibility. If, following some of the outstanding
philosophers of the school of Ibn ‘ Arabi, we are to divide the highest
level of Reality into two metaphysical strata and distinguish be-
tween them as (1) dhat, the absolute Absolute and (2) ahadiyah
which, although it is still the same absolute Absolute, is a stage
lower than dhat in the sense that it represents the Absolute as it is
turning toward self-manifestation - then, we should say that the
Perfect Man in his ecstatic experience is capable of knowing the
Absolute qua Absolute just before it reveals itself in eidetic and
sensible forms, that is, the Absolute at the stage of ahadiyah, though
to be sure the Absolute at the stage of dhat still remains unknown
and unknowable.
Notes
1. Fuj., p. 238/188. We may remark in this connection that in another passage (p.
188) Ibn ‘Arabi uses the same phrase, ankar al-nakirat , in reference to the word shay ’
‘thing’. He means thereby that the concept of ‘thing’ is so indeterminate that it is
comprehensive of anything whatsoever.
2. Fuy., p. 95/91.
3. ibid.
4. Here and elsewhere in this book in the conceptual analysis of the Absolute at the
stage of absoluteness I follow the tradition of those who completely identify the
metaphysical stage of dhat with that of ahadiyah, like Qashani and Qaysari. It is to be
remarked that there are others (like Jill) who distinguish between dhat and ahadiyah .
For them, dhat is the absolute Absolute while ahadiyah is the next metaphysical stage
at which the Absolute discloses itself as the ultimate source of tajalti.
5. Fu$., Com., p. 3.
6. The printed text is here obviously defective. I read: bal huwa bi-i‘tibdr al-haqiqah
[‘ aynu-hu , wa-ghayru-hu ] bi-itibar al-ta‘ayyun.
7. because there cannot be a wider concept that would comprehend within itself
both Being and non-Being.
8. K.S., H.S. Nyberg, ed., Leiden, 1919, p. 15 et. sqq.
9. ibid.
The Absolute in its Absoluteness
37
10. Mahiyah from Ma hiya? meaning ‘what is it?’ corresponding to the Greek
expression to ti en einai.
11. Fuy., p. 259/207-208.
12. p. 259.
13. Fu$., pp. 259-260/208.
14. It is to be noted that in Islamic philosophy in general the mahiyah ‘what-is-it-
ness’ is of two kinds: (1) mahiyah ‘in the particular sense’ and (2) mahiyah ‘in a
general sense’ . The former means ‘quiddity’ to be designated by the definition, while
the latter means ontological ‘reality’, that which makes a thing what it is.
15. p. 260.
16. i.e., the act of ‘Lordship’ which in the philosophy of Ibn ‘Arabi means the act of
self-manifestation in the concrete phenomena of the world.
17. i.e., replaced the definition of God by the mentioning of the relation of God to
His phenomenal forms.
18. Fuy., pp. 260/208.
19. Fuy., p. 260/208-209. Concerning ‘what lies between the East and West’,
however, Ibn ‘ Arabi in this passage simply says that it is intended to mean that God is
Omniscient (bi kull shay’ ‘alim).
20. in kuntum muqinin, the last word being a derivative of the same root YQN from
which is derived the word yaqin. Yaqin means a firm conviction in its final form.
21. ahl al-kashfwa-al- wujud . The word wujud here does not mean ‘existence’, but a
particular stage in myscal experience which follows that of wajd. In wajd, the mystic is
in the spiritual state of ‘self-annihilation’ ( fana ), a state in which he has lost his
individual consciousness of the self, while in wujud he is in the state of ‘subsistence’
(baqa’) in the Absolute. Only in this latter state does the mystic ‘finds’ ( wajada ) God
in the true sense, cf. Affifi, Fuy., Com., p. 310.
22. p. 260.
23. in kuntum ta qilun ', the last word comes from the root from which is derived the
word ‘aql ‘reason’.
24. The verb aqala meaning ‘to understand by reason or intellect’ etymologically
means to bind the folded legs of a camel to his thighs (in order to prevent him from
moving freely’.
25. Fuj., p. 260/208-209.
26. Fuy., p. 22/54-55.
27. i.e., the only possible way in which we can see the Absolute is through the
things , yet, on the other hand, since what we actually and directly see are the
‘things’, they intervene between our sight and the Absolute. Thus indirectly we see
the Absolute, but directly we see only the things which prevent our direct vision of the
Absolute.
38
Sufism and Taoism
28. We feel at every moment that we are in need of our Creator for our existence.
This very feeling produces in us the consciousness of separation or distinction
between us and the Absolute.
29. Fus ., p. 188/148-149.
30. Cf. Qashani, p. 189.
31. Fus., p. 33/61-62.
32. p. 33.
33. Fu$., p. 33/62.
Ill The Self-knowledge of Man
It has been made clear by the preceding that the Absolute perse is
unknowable and that it remains a dark mystery even in the mystical
experience of ‘unveiling’ ( kashf ) and ‘immediate tasting’ ( dhawq ).
Under normal conditions the Absolute is knowable solely in its
forms of self-manifestation. The same thing may be expressed
somewhat differently by saying that man is allowed to know the
Absolute only when the latter descends to the stage of ‘God’. In
what follows the structure of this cognition will be analyzed. The
m central question will be: How and where does the absolutely
I unknowable appear as ‘God’?
i Answering this question Ibn ‘ Arabi emphatically asserts that the
only right way of knowing the Absolute is for us to know ourselves.
And he bases this view on the very famous Tradition which runs:
‘He who knows himself knows his Lord ’. 1 What is suggested is, for
Ibn ‘Arabi, that we should abandon the futile effort to know the
| Absolute per se in its absolute non-manifestation, that we must go
f back into the depth of ourselves, and perceive the Absolute as it
■ manifests itself in particular forms.
I In Ibn ‘ Arabi’s world-view, everything, not only ourselves but all
l the things that surround us, are so many forms of the Divine
self-manifestation. And in that capacity, there is objectively no
essential difference between them. Subjectively, however, there is a
remarkable difference. All the exterior things surrounding us are
I for us ‘things’ which we look at only from outside. We cannot
penetrate into their interior and experience from inside the Divine
life pulsating within them . Only into the interior of ourselves are we
able to penetrate by our self-consciousness and experience from
inside the Divine activity of self-manifestation which is going on
there. It is in this sense that to ‘know ourselves’ can be the first step
toward our ‘knowing the Lord’ . Only he who had become conscious
of himself as a form of the Divine self-manifestation is in a position
to go further and delve deep into the very secret of the Divine life as
it pulsates in every part of the universe.
However, not all self-knowledge of man leads to the utmost limit
40
Sufism and Taoism
of knowledge of the Absolute. Ibn ‘Arab! in this respect roughly
divides into two types the way of knowing the Absolute through
man’s self-knowledge. The first is ‘knowledge of the Absolute
(obtainable) in so far as (“thou” art) “thou” ’ (ma‘rifah bi-hi min
hayth anta ), while the second is ‘knowledge of the Absolute
(obtainable) through “thee” in so far as (“thou” art) “He , and not
in so far as (“thou” art) “thou” ’ (ma‘rifah bi-hi min hayth huwa la
min hayth anta). n ,
The first type is the way of reasoning by which one inters uoa
from ‘thee’, i.e., the creature. More concretely it consists in one s
becoming first conscious of the properties peculiar to the creatural
nature of ‘thou’ , and then attaining to knowledge of the Absolute by
the reasoning process'of casting away all these imperfections from
the image of the Absolute and attributing to it all the opposite
properties. One sees, for example, ontological possibility in oneself,
and attributes to the Absolute ontological necessity which is its
opposite; one sees in oneself ‘poverty’ ( iftiqar ), i.e., the basic need
in which one stands of things other than oneself, and attributes to
the Absolute its opposite, that is, ‘richness’ (, ghina ) or absolute
self-sufficiency; one sees in oneself incessant ‘change’, and attri-
butes to the Absolute eternal constancy, etc. This type of know-
ledge, Ibn ‘Arab! says, is characteristic of philosophers and
theologians, and represents but an extremely low level of the know-
ledge of God, though, to be sure, it is a kind of ‘knowing one s Lord
by knowing oneself’ . . . , D .
The second type, too, is knowledge of ‘Him’ through thee . But
in this case the emphasis is not on ‘thee’ but definitely on Him . it
consists in one’s knowing the Absolute - albeit in a particularize
form - by knowing the ‘self’ as a form of the direct self-
manifestation of the Absolute. It is the cognitive process by which
one comes to know God by becoming conscious of oneself as God
manifesting Himself in that particular form. Let us analyze this
process in accordance with Ibn ‘Arabi’s own description. Three
basic stages are distinguished here.
The first is the stage at which man becomes conscious of the Abso-
lute as his God.
If from the Divine Essence were abstracted all the relations (i.e., the
Names and Attributes), it would not be a God (ilah). But what
actualizes these (possible) relations (which are recognizable in the
Essence) are ourselves. In this sense it is we who, with our own inner
dependence upon the Absolute as God, turn it into a ‘God .bo the
Absolute cannot be known until we ourselves become known. To this
refer the words of the Prophet: ‘He who knows himself knows his
Lord’ . This is a saying of one who of all men knows best about God.
The Self-knowledge of Man
41
What is meant by this passage is as follows. The nature of the
Absolute perse being as it is, the Absolute would remain for ever an
unknown and unknowable Something if there were no possibility of
its manifesting itself in infinitely variegated forms. What are gener-
ally known as ‘Names’ and ‘Attributes’ are nothing but theological
expressions for this infinite variety of the possible forms of self-
manifestation of the Absolute. The Names and Attributes are, in
oth^r words, a classification of the unlimited number of relations in
which the Absolute stands to the world.
These relations, as long as they stay in the Absolute itself, remain
in potential they are not in actu. Only when they are realized as
concrete forms in us, creatures, do they become ‘actual’. The
Names, however, do not become realized immediately in individual
material things, but first within the Divine Consciousness itself in
the form of permanent archetypes. Viewed from the reverse side, it
would mean that it is our individual essences (i.e., archetypes) that
actualize the Absolute. And the Absolute actualized in this way is
God. So ‘we (i.e., our permanent archetypes), turn the Absolute
into God’ by becoming the primal objects or loci of the Divine
self-manifestation. This is the philosophical meaning of the dictum:
‘Unless we know ourselves, God never becomes known.’
Some of the sages - Abu Hamid 4 is one of them - claim that God can
be known without any reference to the world. But this is a mistake.
Surely, the eternal and everlasting Essence can (conceptually) be
known (without reference to the world), but the same Essence can
never be known as God unless the object to which it is God (i.e., the
world) is known, for the latter is the indicator of the former . 5
The commentary of al-Qashani makes this point quite explicit. He
says : 6
What is meant by Ibn ‘Arabi is that the essence in so far as it is
qualified by the attribute of ‘divinity’ ( uluhiyah ) cannot be known
except when there is the object to which it appears as God . . . Surely,
our Reason can know (by inference) from the very idea of Being itself
the existence of the Necessary Being which is an Essence eternal and
everlasting, for God in His essence is absolutely self-sufficient. But
not so when it is considered as the subject of the Names. In the latter
case the object to which He is God is the only indicator of His being
God.
The knowledge that the whole created world is no other than a
self-manifestation of the Absolute belongs to the second stage,
which is described by Ibn ‘Arabi in the following terms : 7
After the first stage comes the second in which the experience of
‘unveiling’ makes you realize that it is the Absolute itself (and not the
42
Sufism and Taoism
world) that is the indicator of itself and of its being God (to the
world). (You realize also at this stage) that the world is nothing but a
self-manifestation of the Absolute in the forms of the permanent
archetypes of the things of the world. The existence of the archetypes
would be impossible if it were not for the (constant) self-
manifestation of the Absolute, while the Absolute, on its part, goes
on assuming various forms in accordance with the realities of the
archetypes and their states.
This comes after (the first stage at which) we know that the Absolute
is God.
Already at the first stage the Absolute was no longer Something
unknown and unknowable, but it was ‘our God . Yet, there was an
essential breach between the Absolute as God and the world as the
object to which it appeared as God. The only real tie between the
two was the consciousness that we, the world, are not self-subsistent
but essentially dependent upon God and that we, as correlatives of
the Absolute qua God, are indicators of the Names and Attributes
and are thereby indirectly indicators of the Absolute.
At the second stage, such an essential breach between God and
the world disappears. We are now aware of ourselves as self-
manifestations of the Absolute itself. And looking back from this
point we find that what was (as the first stage) thought to be an
indicator-indicated relation between God and the object to which
the Absolute appeared as God is nothing but an indicator-indicated
relation between the Absolute in its self-manifesting aspect and the
Absolute in its hidden aspect. Here I give a more philosophical
formulation of this situation by al-Qashani. 8
When by Divine guidance Reason is led to the conclusion that there
must exist the Necessary Being existing by itself away from all others,
it may, if aided by good chance, attain the intuition that it is nothing
but this real Necessary Being that is manifesting itself in the form of
the essence of the world itself. Then it realizes that the very first
appearance of this Necessary Being is its self-manifestation in the
One Substance or the One Entity 9 in which are prefigured all the
forms of the permanent archetypes in the Divine Consciousness, and
that they (i.e., the archetypes) have no existence independently of
the Necessary Being , 10 but have an eternal, everlasting existence in
the latter. And to these archetypes are attributed all the Attributes of
the Necessary Being as so many Names of the latter, or rather as so
many particularizing determinations of it. Thus only through the
archetypes do the Names become (actually) distinguishable and
through their appearance does Divinity (i.e., the Necessary Being s
being God) make its appearance. And all this occurs in the forms of
the world. The Absolute in this way is the Outward (appearing
explicitly) in the form of the world and the Inward (appearing invis-
The Self-knowledge of Man
43
ibly) in the forms of the individual essences of the world. But it is
always the same Entity making its appearance (in diverse forms). The
Absolute here behaves as its own indicator. Thus after having known
| (at the first stage) that the Absolute is our God, we now know (at the
| second stage) that it diversifies into many kinds and takes on various
I I forms according to the realities of the archetypes and their various
I states, for, after all, all these things are nothing else than the Absolute
I itself (in its diverse forms.)
In this interesting passage al-Qashani uses the phrase ‘the first
appearance’ (al-zuhur al-awwal), i.e., the first self-manifestation of
the Absolute, and says that it means the Absolute being manifested
in the ‘ One Substance’ . This, in fact, refers to a very important point
in Ibn ‘Arabi’s metaphysics, namely, the basic distinction between
two kinds of self-manifestation ( tajalliyyan ): (1) self-manifestation
in the invisible (tajalli ghayb ) and (2) self-manifestation in the
l visible (tajalli shahadah). 11
| The first of these two is the self-manifestation of the Essence
within itself. Here the Absolute reveals itself to itself. It is, in other
}
words, the first appearance of the self-consciousness of the Abso-
| lute. And the content of this consciousness is constituted by the
I permanent archetypes of things before they are actualized in the
outward world, the eternal forms of things as they exist in the Divine
Consciousness. As we shall see later in detail, Ibn ‘ArabI calls this
type of the self-manifestation of the Absolute ‘the most holy ema-
nation’ ( al-fayd al-aqdas ), the term ‘emanation’ {fayd) being for
Ibn ‘ArabI always synonymous with ‘self-manifestation’ ( tajalli ). 14
This is a (direct) self-manifestation of the Essence ( tajalli dhatiy ) of
which invisibility is the reality. And through this self-manifestation
I the ‘He-ness’ is actualized . 13 One is justified in attributing ‘He-ness’
to it on the ground that (in the Qoran) the Absolute designates itself
by the pronoun ‘He’. The Absolute (at this stage) is eternally and
everlastingly ‘He’ for itself . 14
: It is to be remarked that the word ‘He’ is, as Ibn ‘ArabI observes, a
; pronoun of ‘absence’. This naturally implies that, although there
| has already been self-manifestation, the subject of this act still
remains ‘absent’, i.e., invisible to others. It also implies that, since it
is ‘He’, the third person, the Absolute here has already split itself
; into two and has established the second ‘itself’ as something other
than the first ‘itself’. However, all this is occurring only within the
Consciousness of the Absolute itself. It is, at this stage, ‘He’ only to
' itself; it is not ‘He’ to anybody or anything else. The Consciousness
of the Absolute is still the world of the invisible ( ‘alam al-ghayb ).
The second type of self-manifestation, the tajalli shahadah, is
44
Sufism and Taoism
45
different from this. It refers to the phenomenon of the permanent
archetypes which form the content of the Divine Consciousness
coming out of the stage of potentiality into the outward world of
‘reality’. It means the actualization of the archetypes in concrete
forms. In distinction from the first type, this second type of self-
manifestation is called by Ibn ‘Arab! ‘the holy emanation’ (al-fayd
al-muqaddas ). And the world of Being thus realized constitutes the
world of sensible experience (‘alam al-shahadah).
So much for the second stage of man’s ‘knowing his Lord by
knowing himself’ . Now we turn to the third and the last of the three
stages distinguished above.
Let us begin by quoting a short description of the third stage by Ibn
‘Arab! himself . 15
Following these two stages there comes the final ‘unveiling’. There
our own forms will be seen in it (i.e., the Absolute) in such a way that
all of us are disclosed to each other in the Absolute. All of us will
recognize each other and at the same time be distinguished from one
another.
The meaning of this somewhat enigmatic statement may be
rendered perfectly understandable in the following way. To the eye
of a man who has attained this spiritual stage there arises a scene of
extraordinary beauty. He sees all the existent things as they appear
in the mirror of the Absolute and as they appear one in the other.
All these things interflow and interpenetrate in such a way that they
become transparent to one another while keeping at the same time
each its own individuality. This is the experience of ‘unveiling’
(kashf).
We may remark in this connection that al-Qashani divides the
‘unveiling’ into two stages . 16
The first ‘unveiling’ occurs in the state of ‘self-annihilation’ ( fana ’) in
the Absolute. In this state, the man who sees and the object seen are
nothing other than the Absolute alone. This is called unification’
{jam). The second ‘unveiling’ is ‘subsistence’ ( baqa ) after ‘self-
annihilation’. In this spiritual state, the forms of the created world
make their appearance; they make their appearance one to the other
in the Absolute itself. Thus the Reality here plays the role of a mirror
for the creatures. And the One Being diversifies itself into many
through the innumerable forms of the things. The reality (of the
mirror) is the Absolute and the forms (appearing in it) are creatures.
The creatures in this experience know one another and yet each is
distinguished from others.
Al-QashanI goes on to say that of those whose eyes have been
opened by the second- 4 unveiling’, some attain the state of perfec-
The Self-knowledge of Man
tion’ ( kamal ). These are men ‘who are not veiled by the sight of the
creatures from the Absolute and who recognize the creaturely
Many in the very bosom of the real Unity of the Absolute’. These
are the ‘people of perfection’ (ahl al- kamal) whose eyes are not
veiled by the Divine Majesty (i.e., the aspect of the phenomenal
Many) from the Divine Beauty (i.e., the aspect of the metaphysical
One), nor by the Divine Beauty from the Divine Majesty. The last
point is mentioned with particular emphasis in view of the fact that,
according to al-Qashani’s interpretation, the first ‘unveiling’ con-
sists exclusively in an experience of Beauty ( jamal ), while the
second is mainly an experience of Majesty ( jalal ), so that in either
case there is a certain danger of mystics emphasizing exclusively
either the one or the other.
The first ‘unveiling’ brings out Beauty alone. The subject who
experiences it does not witness except Beauty . . . Thus he is nat-
urally veiled by Beauty and cannot see Majesty.
But among those who experience the second ‘unveiling’ there are
some who are veiled by Majesty and cannot see Beauty. They tend to
imagine and represent the (state of affairs) on this level in terms of
the creatures as distinguished from the Absolute, and thus they are
veiled by the sight of the creatures from seeing the Absolute.
The same situation is described in a different way by Ibn ‘Arabi
himself by a terse expression as follows : 17
Some of us (i.e., the ‘people of perfection’) are aware that this
(supreme) knowledge about us 18 (i.e., about the phenomenal Many)
occurs in no other than the Absolute. But some of us (i.e., mystics
who are not so perfect) are unaware of the (true nature of this)
Presence (i.e., the ontological level which is disclosed in the baqa-
experience) in which this knowledge about us (i.e., the phenomenal
Many) occurs to us . 19 I take refuge in God from being one of the
ignorant!
By way of conclusion let us summarize at this point the interpreta-
tion given by Ibn ‘Arabi to the Tradition: ‘He who knows himself
knows his Lord’.
He begins by emphasizing that the self-knowledge of man is the
absolutely necessary premise for his knowing his Lord, that man’s
knowledge of the Lord can only result from his knowledge of
himself.
What is important here is that the word ‘Lord’ ( rabb ) in Ibn
‘ Arabi’ s terminology means the Absolute as it manifests itself
through some definite Name. It does not refer to the Essence which
surpasses all determinations and transcends all relations. Thus the
dictum: ‘He who knows himself knows his Lord’ does not in any way
suggest that the self-knowledge of man will allow man to know the
46
Sufism and Taoism
Absolute in its pure Essence. Whatever one may do, and however
deep one’s experience of ‘unveiling’ may be, one is forced to stop at
the stage of the ‘Lord’. Herein lies the limitation set to human
cognition. . .
In the opposite direction, however, the same human cognition is
able to cover an amazingly wide field in its endeavor to know the
Absolute. For, after all, the self-revealing Absolute is, at the last
and ultimate stage of its activity, nothing but the world in which we
live And ‘every part of the world’ is a pointer to its own ontologica
ground, which is its Lord .’ 20 Moreover, man is the most perfect of all
the parts of the world. If this most perfect part of the world comes to
know itself through self-knowledge or self-consciousness, it wi
naturally be able to know the Absolute to the utmost limit of
possibility, in so far as the latter manifests itself in the world . 21
There still seems to remain a vital question: Is man really capable of
knowing himself with such profundity? This, however, is a relative
question. If one takes the phrase ‘know himself’ in the most rigor-
ous sense, the answer will be in the negative, but if one takes it in a
loose sense, one should answer in the affirmative. As Ibn ‘Arabi
says, ‘You are right if you say Yes, and you are right if you say No.
Notes
1. Man ‘arafa nafsa-hu ‘arafa rabba-hu.
2. i.e., all the attributes peculiar to the created things as ‘possible’ and ‘contingent
existents.
3. Fus-, p. 73/81.
4. al-Ghazall.
5. Fu$., p. 74/81.
6. p. 74.
7. Fus-, p. 74/81—82.
8. p. 74.
9 This does not mean the absolute One at the level of primordial Unity which has
already been explained above. The ‘One’ referred to here is the One containing in a
unified form all the Names before they become actually differentiated. It is, in brief,
the unity of Divine Consciousness in which exist all the archetypes of the things of the
world in the form of the objects of Divine Knowledge.
The Self-knowledge of Man
47
10. Since the archetypes are no other than the very content of the Divine Con-
sciousness as prefigurations of the things of the world, they cannot exist outside the
Divine Consciousness.
11. Fus., pp. 145-146/120-121.
12. That is to say, the term ‘emanation’ should not be taken in the usual neo-
Platonic sense.
13. Asa result of the ‘most holy emanation’ the Absolute establishes itself as ‘He’.
And as the Divine ‘He’ is established, the permanent archetypes of all things are also
established as the invisible content of the ‘He’ -consciousness of God.
14. Fus., p. 146/120.
15. Fus., p. 74/82.
16. pp. 74-75.
17. Fus., P- 74/82.
18. The ‘(supreme) knowledge about us’ refers back to what has been mentioned
above; namely, the extraordinary scene of all the existent things penetrating each
other while each keeping its unique individuality.
19. This means that the phenomenal Many, being as it is Divine Majesty, is no less
an aspect of the Absolute than the metaphysical One appearing as Divine Beauty.
The knowledge of the phenomal Many through baqa’ is no less a knowledge of the
Absolute than the knowledge of the metaphysical One through fana’.
20. Fus., p- 267/215.
21. Cf. Affifi, Fus., Com., p. 325.
Metaphysical Unification and Phenomenal Dispersion
49
IV Metaphysical Unification and
Phenomenal Dispersion
What the preceding chapters have made clear may briefly be sum-
marized by saying (1) that the Absolute has two aspects opposed to
each other: the hidden and the self- revealing aspect; (2) that the
Absolute in the former sense remains for ever a Mystery and
Darkness whose secret cannot be unveiled even by the highest
degree of fo*s/t/-experience; (3) that the Absolute comes fully into
the sphere of ordinary human cognition only in its self-revealing
aspect in the form of ‘God’ and ‘Lord’; and (4) that between these
two is situated a particular region in which things ‘may rightly be
said to exist and not to exist’, i.e., the world of the permanent
archetypes, which is totally inaccessible to the mind of an ordinary
man but perfectly accessible to the ecstatic mind of a mystic. This
summary gives the most basic structure of Ibn ‘Arabi’s world-view
from the ontological standpoint.
Since the hidden aspect of the Absolute can neither be known nor
described, the whole of the rest of the book will naturally be
concerned with the self-revealing aspect and the intermediate re
gion. But before we proceed to explore these two domains which are
more or less accessible to human understanding, we must consider
the radical opposition between the hidden and the self-revealing
aspect of the Absolute from a new perspective. The analysis will
disclose an important phase of Ibn ‘Arabi’s thought.
From this new perspective Ibn ‘Arab! calls the hidden and the
self-revealing aspect tanzih and tazhbih, respectively. These are two
key-terms taken from the terminology of the traditional Islamic
theology. Both terms played an exceedingly important role m
theology from the earliest times of its historical formulation. Tanzih
(from the verb nazzaha meaning literally ‘to keep something away
from anything contaminating, anything impure ) is used in theology
in the sense of ‘declaring or considering God absolutely free from all
imperfections’. And by ‘imperfections’ is meant in this context all
qualities that resemble those of creatures even in the slightest
degree.
Tanzih in this sense is an assertion of God’s essential and absolute
incomparability with any created thing, His being above all crea-
turely attributes. It is, in short, an assertion of Divine transcen-
dence. And since the Absolute per se, as we have seen, is an
Unknowable which rejects all human effort to approach it and
frustrates all human understanding in any form whatsoever, the
sound reason naturally inclines toward tanzih . It is a natural attitude
of the Reason in the presence of the unknown and unknowable
Absolute.
In contrast to this, tashbih (from the verb shabbaha meaning ‘to
make or consider something similar to some other thing’) means in
theology ‘to liken God to created things’. More concretely, it is a
theological assertion posited by those who, on the basis of the
Qoranic expressions suggesting that ‘God has hands, feet, etc.’,
attribute corporeal and human properties to God. Quite naturally it
tends to turn toward crude anthropomorphism.
In traditional theology, these two positions are, in their radical
forms, diametrically opposed and cannot exist together in harmony.
One is either a ‘transcendentalist’ ( munazzih , i.e., one who exer-
cises tanzih) or an ‘anthropomorphist’ ( mushabbih , i.e., one who
chooses the position of tashbih, and holds that God ‘sees with His
eyes’, for example, and ‘hears with His ears’, ‘speaks with His
tongue’ etc.).
Ibn ‘Arabi understands these terms in quite an original manner,
though of course there still remains a reminiscence of the meanings
they have in theological contexts. Briefly, tanzih in his terminology
indicates the aspect of ‘absoluteness’ ( iflaq ) in the Absolute, while
tashbih refers to its aspect of ‘determination’ (taqayyud). 1 Both are
in this sense compatible with each other and complementary, and
the only right attitude is for us to assert both at the same time and
with equal emphasis.
Of all the prophets who preceded Muhammad in time, Ibn ‘Arabi
mentions Noah as representative of the attitude of tanzih. Quite
significantly, Ibn ‘Arabi entitles the chapter in his Fu$ii$ , in which he
deals with Noah, ‘the transcendentalist wisdom ( hikmah sub-
buhiyyah) as embodied in the prophet Noah’. 2 )
According to the Qoran, Noah in the midst of an age in which
obstinate and unbridled idol-worship was in full sway, denied the
value of the idols, openly exhorted the worship of the One God, and
advocated monotheism. In other words, he emphasized throughout
his life the principle of tanzih. This attitude of Noah, in the view of
Ibn ‘Arabi, was an historical necessity and was therefore quite
justifiable. For in his age, among his people, polytheism was so
rampant that only a relentless exhortation to a pure and extreme
51
50
Sufism and Taoism
Metaphysical Unification and Phenomenal Dispersion
tanzih could have any chance of bringing the people back to the
right form of religious belief.
Apart from these historical considerations, however, tanzih as a
human attitude toward God is definitely one-sided. Any religious
belief based exclusively on tanzih is essentially imperfect and
incomplete. For to ‘purify’ God to such an extent and to reduce Him
to something having nothing at all to do with the creatures is
another way of delimiting Divine Existence which is actually
infinitely vast and infinitely profound. ‘Tanzih' , as Ibn ‘Arab! says , 3
‘in the opinion of the people who know the truth, is nothing less than
delimiting and restricting God’. This sentence is explained by al-
Qashanl as follows : 4
Tanzih is distinguishing the Absolute from all contingent and physi-
cal things, that is, from all material things that do not allow of tanzih.
But everything that is distinguished from some other thing can only
be distinguished from it through an attribute which is incompatible
with the attribute of the latter. Thus such a thing (i.e., anything that is
distinguished from others) must necessarily be determined by an
attribute and delimited by a limitation. All tanzih is in this sense
delimitation.
The gist of what is asserted here is the following. He who ‘purifies’
God purifies Him from all bodily attributes, but by that very act he is
(unconsciously) ‘assimilating’ ( tashbih ) Him with non-material,
spiritual beings. What about, then, if one ‘purifies’ Him from ‘limit-
ing’ ( taqyid ) itself? Even in that case he will be ‘limiting’ Him with
‘non-limitation’ ( i(laq ), while in truth God is ‘purified’ from (i.e.,
transcends) the fetters of both ‘limitation’ and ‘non-limitation’. He is
absolutely absolute; He is not delimited by either of them, nor does
He even exclude either of them.
Ibn ‘ Arabi makes a challenging statement that ‘anybody who exer-
cises and upholds tanzih in its extreme form is either an ignorant
man or one who does not know how to behave properly toward
God’.
As regards the ‘ignorant’, Ibn ‘Arabi gives no concrete example.
Some of the commentators, e.g., Bali Efendi , 5 are of the opinion
that the word refers to the Muslim Philosophers and their blind
followers. These are people, Bali Effendi says, who ‘do not believe
in the Divine Law, and who dare to ‘purify’ God, in accordance with
what is required by their theory, from all the attributes which God
Himself has attributed to Himself’ .
As to ‘those who do not know how to behave properly’, we have
Ibn ‘ Arabi’ s own remark. They are ‘those of the people who believe
in the Divine Law (i.e., Muslims) who “purify” God and do not go
beyond tanzih ’ . They are said to be behaving improperly because
‘they give the lie to God and the apostles without being conscious of
it’. Most probably this refers to the Mu‘tazilite theologians 6 who are
notorious for denying the existence of Attributes in the Essence of
God. They are believers, but they recklessly go to this extreme
driven by the force of their own reasoning, and end by completely
ignoring the aspect of tashbih which is so explicit in the Qoran and
Traditions.
Now to go back to the story of Noah which has been interrupted.
The kind of tanzih symbolized by Noah is an attitude peculiar to,
and characteristic of, Reason. Al-Qashani calls it ‘ tanzih by Reason’
(al- tanzih al-‘aqliy). Reason, by nature, refuses to admit that the
Absolute appears in a sensible form. But by doing so it overlooks a
very important point, namely, that ‘purifying’ the Absolute from all
sensible forms is, as we have seen a few lines back, not only tan-
tamount to delimiting it but is liable to fall into a kind of tashbih
which it detests so violently.
Commenting upon a verse by Ibn ‘Arab! which runs: ‘Every time
(the Absolute) appears to the eye (in a sensible form), Reason
expels (the image) by logical reasoning in applying which it is always
so assiduous’, al-Qashanl makes the following remark : 7
The meaning of the verse is this: Whenever (the Absolute) manifests
itself ( tajalli ) in a sensible form, Reason rejects it by logical reason-
ing, although in truth it (i.e., the sensible phenomenon) is a reality (in
its own way) on the level of the sensible world as well as in itself (i.e.,
not merely qua a sensible phenomenon but in its reality as an authen-
tic form of the self-manifestation of the Absolute). Reason ‘purifies’
it from being a sensible object because otherwise (the Absolute)
would be in a certain definite place and a certain definite direction.
Reason judges (the Absolute) to be above such (determinations).
And yet, the Absolute transcends what (Reason) ‘purifies’ it from, as
it transcends such a ‘purifying’ itself. For to ‘purify’ it in this way is to
assimilate it to spiritual beings and thereby delimit its absoluteness. It
makes the Absolute something determinate.
The truth of the matter is that the Absolute transcends both being in a
direction and not being in a direction, having a position and not
having a position; it transcends also all determinations originating
from the senses, reason, imagination, representation and thinking.
Besides this kind of tanzih symbolized by Noah, which is ‘ tanzih by
Reason’ , Ibn ‘Arab! recognizes another type of tanzih. This latter is
Tanzih of immediate tasting’ (al-tanzih al-dhawqiy), and is symbol-
ized by the above-mentioned prophet Enoch.
The two types of tanzih correspond to two Names: the one is
subbuh which has been mentioned at the beginning of this chapter,
and the other is quddus, the ‘Most Holy ’. 8 Both are tanzih , but the
one symbolized by Noah is ‘purifying’ the Absolute from any partners
52
Sufism and Taoism
and from all attributes implying imperfection, while the sec-
ond, in addition to this kind of tanzih , removes from the Absolute all
properties of the ‘possible’ beings (including even the highest per-
fections attained by ‘possible’ things) and all connections with mat-
eriality as well as any definite quality that may be imaginable and
thinkable about the Absolute . 9
The second type of tanzih represents the furthest limit of ‘subtrac-
tion’ ( tajrid ) which attributes to the Absolute the highest degree of
transcendence. According to Ibn ‘Arabi, the prophet Enoch was
literally an embodiment of such tanzih. Depicting the mythological
figure of Enoch as a symbol of this kind of tanzih, al-Qashani
says : 10
Enoch went to the extreme of ‘subtracting’ himself (i.e., not only did
he ‘subtract’ everything possible and material from the Absolute, but
he ‘subtracted’ all such elements from himself) and ‘spiritualization’
(tarawwuh), so much so that in the end he himself was turned into a
pure spirit. Thus he cast off his body, mixed with the angels, became
united with the spiritual beings of the heavenly spheres, and
ascended to the world of Sanctity. Thereby he completely went
beyond the ordinary course of nature.
In contrast to this, al-Qashani goes on to say, Noah lived on the
earth as a simple ordinary man with ordinary human desires, got
married and had children. But Enoch became himself a pure spirit.
All the desires fell off from him, his nature became spiritualized, the
natural bodily properties were replaced by spiritual properties. The
assiduous spiritual discipline completely changed his nature, and he
was transformed into a pure unmixed Intellect {‘aql mujarrad). And
thus he was raised to a high place in the fourth Heaven.
In less mythological terminology this would seem to imply that the
tanzih of Noah is that exercised by the Reason of an ordinary man
living with all his bodily limitations, while that of Enoch is a tanzih
exercised by the pure Intellect or mystical Awareness existing apart
from bodily conditions.
Intellect, being completely released from the bondage of body,
works, not as the natural human faculty of logical thinking, but as a
kind of mystical intuition. This is why its activity is called ‘ tanzih of
immediate tasting’. In either of the two forms, however, tanzih, in
Ibn ArabFs view, is one-sided and imperfect. Only when combined
with tashbih does it become the right attitude of man toward the
Absolute. The reason for this is, as has often been remarked above,
that the Absolute itself is not only an absolute Transcendent but
also Self-revealer to the world in the world.
The Absolute has an aspect in which it appears in each creature. Thus
it is the Outward making itself manifest in everything intelligible.
53
Metaphysical Unification and Phenomenal Dispersion
while being, at the same time, an Inward concealing itself from every
intelligence except in the mind of those who hold that the world is its
Form and its He-ness as (a concrete manifestation of) the Name ‘the
Outward’."
This passage is reproduced by al-Qashani in a more explicitly articu-
late form as follows : 12
The Absolute appears in every creature in accordance with the
‘preparedness’ (i.e., natural capacity) of that particular creature. It is
in this sense the Outward appearing in everything intelligible in
accordance with the ‘preparedness’ of the individual intelligence.
And that (i.e., the particular ‘preparedness’) is the limit of each
intelligence. . . .
But (the Absolute) is also the Inward, (and in that capacity it is) never
accessible to the intelligence beyond the limit set by the latter’s own
‘preparedness’. If the intelligence attempts to go beyond its natural
limit through thinking, that is, (if it tries to understand) what is
naturally concealed from its understanding, the heart goes off the
track, except in the case of the real sages whose understanding has no
limit. Those are they who understand the matter of God from God,
not by means of thinking. Nothing is ‘inward’ (i.e., concealed) from
their understanding. And they know that the world is the Form or
He-ness of the Absolute, that is, its inward reality, manifesting itself
outwardly under the Name ‘the Outward’. For the Divine Reality
(haqiqah) in its absoluteness can never be ‘ He-ness’ except in view of
a determination (or limitation), be it the determination of ‘absolute-
ness’ itself, as is exemplified by the Qoranic words: ‘He is God, the
One.’
As to the Divine Reality qua Divine Reality, it is completely free
from any determination, though (potentially) it is limited by all the
determinations of the Divine Names.
Not only does the Absolute manifest itself in everything in the world
in accordance with the ‘preparedness’ of each, but it is the ‘spirit’
(ruh) of everything, its ‘inward’ ( bafin ). This is the meaning of the
Name ‘the Inward’ . And in the ontological system of Ibn ‘Arabi, the
Absolute’s constituting the ‘spirit’ or ‘inward’ of anything means
nothing other than that the Absolute manifests itself in the
archetype (or the essence) of that thing. It is a kind of self-
manifestation ( tajalli ) in no less a degree than the outward tajalli.
Thus the Absolute, in this view, manifests itself both internally and
externally.
(The Absolute) is inwardly the ‘spirit’ of whatever appears outwardly
(in the phenomenal world). In this sense, it is the Inward. For the
relation it bears to the phenomenal forms of the world is like that of
the soul (of man) to his body which it governs . 13
The Absolute in this aspect does manifest itself in all things, and the
54
Sufism and Taoism
latter in this sense are but so many ‘determined (or limited)’ forms
of the Absolute. But if we, dazzled by this, exclusively emphasize
‘assimilation’ ( tashbih ), we would commit exactly the same mistake
of being one-sided as we would if we should resort to tanzih only.
‘He who “assimilates” the Absolute delimits and determines the
Absolute in no less a degree than he who “purifies” it, and is
ignorant of the Absolute’. 14 As al-Qashani says: 15
He who ‘assimilates’ the Absolute confines it in a determined form,
and anything that is confined within a fixing limit is in that very
respect a creature. From this we see that the whole of these fixing
limits (i.e., concrete things), though it is nothing other than the
Absolute, is not the Absolute itself. This because the One Reality
that manifests itself in all the individual determinations is something
different from these determinations put together.
Only when one combines tanzih and tashbih in one’s attitude, can
one be regarded as a ‘true knower’ (‘arif) of the Absolute. Ibn
‘Arabi, however, attaches to this statement a condition, namely,
that one must not try to make this combination except in a general,
unspecified way, because it is impossible to do otherwise. Thus
even the ‘true knower’ knows the Absolute only in a general
way, the concrete details of it being totally unknown to him. This
may be easily understood if one reflects upon the way man knows
himself. Even when he does have self-knowledge, he knows himself
only in a general way; he cannot possibly have a comprehensive
knowledge of himself in such a way that it would cover all the details
of himself without leaving anything at all. Likewise no one can
have a truly comprehensive knowledge of all the concrete details of
the world, but it is precisely in all these forms that the self-
manifestation of the Absolute is actualized. Thus tashbih must of
necessity take on a broad general form; it can never occur in a
concretely specified way. 16
As to the fact that the Absolute manifests itself in all, i.e., all that
exists outside us and inside us, Ibn ‘Arab! adduces a Qoranic verse
and adds the following remark: 17
God says (in the Qoran): ‘We will show them Our signs 18 in the
horizon as well as within themselves so that it be made clear to them
that it is Reality’ (XLI, 53). Here the expression ‘signs in the horizon’
refers to all that exists outside yourself, 19 while ‘within themselves’
refers to your inner essence. 20 And the phrase: ‘that it is Reality’
means that it is Reality in that you are its eternal form and it is your
inner spirit. Thus you are to the Absolute as your bodily form is to
yourself.
The upshot of all this is the view mentioned above, namely, that the
only right course for one to follow in this matter is to couple tanzih
9
Metaphysical Unification and Phenomenal Dispersion 55
and tashbih. To have recourse exclusively to tashbih in one’s con-
ception of the Absolute is to fall into polytheism; to assert tanzih to
the exclusion of tashbih is to sever the divine from the whole
created world. The right attitude is to admit that, ‘thou art not He
(i.e., the phenomenal world is different from the Absolute), nay
thou art He, and thou seest Him in concretely existent things
absolutely undetermined and yet determined’ . 21 And once you have
attained this supreme intuitive knowledge, you have a complete
freedom of taking up the position either of ‘unification’ ( jam" , lit,
‘gathering’) or of ‘dispersion’ ( farq , lit. ‘separating’), 22 Concerning
these two terms, yam’, and farq, al-Qashani remarks: 23
Taking up the position of ‘unification’ means that you turn your
attention exclusively to the Absolute without taking into considera-
tion the creatures. This attitude is justified because Being belongs to
the Absolute alone, and any being is the Absolute itself.
(The position of ‘dispersion’ means that) you observe the creatures in
the Absolute in the sense that you observe how the essentially One is
diversified into the Many through its own Names and determinations.
The position of ‘dispersion’ is justified in view of the creaturely
determinations (of the Absolute) and the involvement of the ‘He-
ness’ of the Absolute in the ‘This-ness’ (i.e., concrete determina-
tions) of the created world.
I? The distinction between ‘unification’ and ‘dispersion’, thus
explained by al-Qashani, is an important one touching upon a
cardinal point of Ibn ‘Arabi’s ontology. As we already know, the
distinction is more usually expressed by tanzih and tashbih . We shall
now examine the distinction and relation between the two in more
H detail and from a somewhat different angle.
Ibn ‘Arabi starts from a well-known and oft-quoted Qoranic verse:
Laysa ka-mithli-hi shay’un, wa-huwa al-samiu al-bafir meaning
‘there is nothing like unto Him, and He is All-hearing, All-seeing’
(XLII, 11), which he interprets in an original way. The interpreta-
tion makes it clear from every aspect that tanzih and tashbih should
be combined if we are to take the right attitude toward God.
Let us start by observing that the verse grammatically allows of
two different interpretations, the pivotal point being the second
term ka-mithli-hi, which literally is a complex of three words: ka
‘like’ mithli ‘similar to’, and hi ‘Him’.
The first of these three words, ka ‘like’, can syntactically be
interpreted as either (1) expletive, i.e., having no particular mean-
ing of its own in the combination with mithli which itself connotes
similarity or equality, or (2) non-expletive, i.e., keeping its own
independent meaning even in such a combination.
If we choose (1), the first half of the verse would mean, ‘there is
56
Sufism and Taoism
nothing like Him’ with an additional emphasis on the non-existence
of anything similar to Him. It is, in other words, the most emphatic
declaration of tanzih. And in this case, the second half of the verse:
‘and He is All-hearing, All-seeing’ is to be understood as a state-
ment of tashbih, because ‘hearing’ and ‘seeing’ are pre-eminently
human properties. Thus the whole verse would amount to a combi-
nation of tanzih and tashbih.
If we choose the second alternative, the first half of the verse
would mean the same thing as laysa mithla-mithli-hi shay’ meaning
‘there is nothing like anything similar to Him’. Here something
‘similar to Him’ is first mentally posited, then the existence of
anything ‘similar’ to that (which is similar to Him) is categorically
denied. Since something similar to Him is established at the outset,
it is a declaration of tashbih. And in this case, the second half of the
verse must be interpreted as a declaration of tanzih . This interpreta-
tion is based on the observation that the sentence structure - with
the pronominal subject, huwa ‘He, put at the head of the sentence,
and the following epithets, samV (hearing) and basir (seeing) being
determined by the article, al- (the) - implies that He is the only
sami’ and the only basir in the whole world of Being . 24 Thus, here
again we get a combination of tanzih and tashbih.
The following elliptic expression of Ibn ‘ Arabi will be quite easily
understood if we approach it with the preceding explanation in
mind . 25
God Himself ‘purifies’ (i.e., tanzih) by saying: laysa ka-mithli-hi shay ,
and ‘assimilates’ (i.e., tashbih) by saying: wa-huwa al-samV al-ba$ir.
God ‘assimilates’ or ‘declares Himself to be dual’ by saying: laysa
ka-mithli-hi shay, while he ‘purifies’ or ‘declares Himself to be uni-
que’ by saying: wa-huwa al-samV al-basir.
What is very important to remember in this connection is that, in
Ibn ‘ Arabi’ s conception, tanzih and tashbih are each a kind of
‘delimitation’ ( tahdid ). In both the Qoran and Tradition, he
observes , 26 we often find God describing Himself with ‘delimita-
tion’, whether the expression aims at tanzih or tashbih. Even God
cannot describe himself in words without delimiting Himself. He
describes Himself for example, as, ‘sitting firm on the throne’,
‘descending to the lowest heaven’, ‘being in heaven’, ‘being on the
earth’, ‘being with men wherever they may be’, etc.; none of these
expressions is free from delimiting and determining God. Even
when He says of Himself that ‘there is nothing like unto Him’ in the
sense of tanzih , 11 He is setting a limit to Himself, because that which
is distinguished from everything determined is, by this very act of
distinction, itself determined, i.e., as something totally different
from everything determined. For ‘a complete non-determination is
a kind of determination’.
57
Metaphysical Unification and Phenomenal Dispersion
Thus tanzih is a ‘delimitation’ no less than tashbih. It is evident
that neither of them alone can ever constitute a perfect description
of the Absolute. Strictly speaking, however, even the combination
of the two cannot be perfect in these respects, for delimitations will
remain delimitations in whatever way one combines them. But by
combining these two delimitations which of all the delimitations are
the most fundamental and most comprehensive in regard to the
Absolute, one approaches the latter to the utmost extent that is
humanly possible.
Of these two basic attitudes of man toward the Absolute, Noah, as
remarked above, represents tanzih. In order to fight idolatry which
was the prevalent tendency of the age, he exclusively emphasized
tanzih. Naturally this did nothing but arouse discontent and anger
among the idol- worshippers, and his appeal fell only upon unheed-
ing ears. ‘If, however, Noah had combined the two attitudes in
dealing with his people, they would have listened to his words’ . 28 On
this point al-Qashani makes the following observation:
In view of the fact that his people were indulging in an excessive
tashbih, paying attention only to the diversity of the Names and being
veiled by the Many from the One, Noah stressed tanzih exclusively.
If, instead of brandishing to them the stringent unification and
unmitigated tanzih, he had affirmed also the diversity of the Names
and invited them to accept the Many that are One and the Multiplic-
ity that is Unity, clothed the Unity with the form of Multiplicity, and
combined between the attitude of tashbih and that of tanzih as did
(our prophet) Muhammad, they would readily have responded to
him in so far as their outward familiarity with idolatry was agreeable
to tashbih and in so far as their inner nature was agreeable to tanzih.
As is clearly suggested by this passage, the idols that were worship-
ped by the people of Noah were, in Ibn ‘ Arabi’ s conception, prop-
erly ‘the diversity of the Names’; that is, so many concrete forms
assumed by the Divine Names. The idols in this sense are sacred in
themselves. The sin of idolatry committed by the people of Noah
consisted merely in the fact that they were not aware of the idols
being concrete forms of the self-manifestation of the One, and that
they worshipped them as independent divinities.
The kind of absolute tanzih which was advocated by Noah is called
by Ibn ‘Arabi furqan, a Qoranic term, to which he ascribes an
original meaning , 29 and which is to play the role of a key-term in his
system.
The word furqan, in Ibn ‘ArabFs interpretation derives from the
root FRQ meaning ‘separating’. One might expect him to use it to
designate the aspect of ‘dispersion’ ( farq ) referred to a few para-
58
Sufism and Taoism
graphs back, which is also derived from exactly the same root.
Actually, however, he means by furqan the contrary of ‘dispersion’.
‘Separating’ here means ‘separating’ in a radical manner the aspect
of Unity from that of the diversified self-manifestation of the Abso-
lute. Furqan thus means an absolute and radical tanzih , an intrans-
igent attitude of tanzih which does not allow even of a touch of
tashbih .
Noah exhorted his people to a radical tanzih, but they did not
listen to him. Thereupon Noah, according to the Qoran, laid a bitter
complaint before God against these faithless people saying, ‘I have
called upon my people day and night, but my admonition has done
nothing but increase their aversion’ (LXXI, 5-6).
This verse, on the face of it, depicts Noah complaining of the
stubborn faithlessness of his people and seriously accusing them of
this sinful attitude. However much he exhorts them to pure mono-
theism, he says, they only turn a deaf ear to his words. Such is the
normal understanding of the verse.
Ibn ‘ Arabi, however, gives it an extremely original interpretation,
so original, indeed, that it will surely shock or even scandalize
common sense. The following passage shows how he understands
this verse. 30
What Noah means to say is that his people turned a deaf ear to him
because they knew what would necessarily follow if they were to
respond favorably to his exhortation. (Superficially Noah’s words
might look like a bitter accusation) but the true ‘knowers of God’ are
well aware that Noah here is simply giving high praise to his people in
a language of accusation. As they (i.e. the true ‘knowers’ of God)
understand, the people of Noah did not listen to him because his
exhortation was ultimately an exhortation to furqan.
More simply stated, this would amount to saying that (1) Noah
reproaches his people outwardly but (2) in truth he is merely
praising them. And their attitude is worthy of high praise because
they know (by instinct) that that to which Noah was calling them
was no other than a pure and radical tanzih, and that such a tanzih
was not the right attitude of man toward God. Tanzih in its radical
form and at its extreme limit would inevitably lead man to the
Absolute per se, which is an absolutely Unknowable. How could
man worship something which is absolutely unknown and unknow-
able?
If Noah had been more practical and really wished to guide his
people to the right form of religious faith, he should have combined
tanzih and tashbih . A harmonious combination of tanzih and tashbih
is called by Ibn ‘Arab! qur’an . 31 The qur’an is the only right attitude
of man toward God.
Metaphysical Unification and Phenomenal Dispersion 59
The right (religious) way is qur’an not furqan. And (it is but natural)
that he who stands in the position of qur’an should never listen to (an
exhortation to) furqan, even though the latter itself is contained in
the former. Qur’an implies furqan, but furqan does not imply
qur’an . 32
Thus we see that the relation of Noah with his people, as Ibn ‘Arabi
understands it, has a complex inner structure. On the one hand,
Noah, as we have just observed, outwardly reproaches his people
for their faithlessness, but inwardly he praises them because of the
right attitude they have taken on this crucial question. On the other
hand, the people, on their part, know, if not consciously, that pure
monotheism in its true and deep sense is not to reduce God to one of
his aspects such as is implied by the kind of tanzih advocated by
Noah, but to worship the One God in all the concrete forms of the
world as so many manifestations of God. Outwardly, however, they
give the impression of committing an outrageous mistake by refus-
ing to accept Noah’s admonition and exhorting each other to stick to
the traditional form of idol- worship.
Ibn Arabi terms this relation between Noah and his people
‘(reciprocal) makr , a word meaning ‘stratagem’, ‘artifice’ or ‘cun-
ning deceit’. This is based on a Qoranic verse: ‘And they tried to
deceive by a big artifice’ (LXXI, 22). This situation is explained by
Affifi in a very lucid way. He writes: 33
When Noah called upon his people to worship God by way of tanzih
he did try to deceive them. More generally speaking, whoever calls
upon others to worship God in such a way, does nothing other than
trying to exercise makr upon them to deceive them. This is a makr
because those who are admonished, whatever their religion and
whatever the object they worship, are in reality worshipping nothing
other than God. (Even an idolater) is worshipping the Absolute in
some of its forms of self-manifestation in the external world.
To call upon the idolaters who are actually worshipping God in this
form and tell them not to worship the idols but worship God alone, is
liable to produce a false impression as if the idolaters were worship-
ping (in the idols) something other than God, while in truth there is
no ‘other’ thing than God in the whole world.
The people of Noah, on their part, exercised makr when they, to fight
against Noah s admonition, called upon one another saying, ‘ Do not
abandon your gods! This is also a clear case of makr, because if they
had abandoned the worship of their idols, their worship of God
would have diminished by that amount. And this because the idols
are nothing other than so many self-manifestations of God
Affifi in this connection rightly calls attention to the fact that, for Ibn
‘Arabi, the Qoranic verse: ‘And thy Lord hath decreed that you
should worship none other than Him’ (XVII, 23) does not mean, as
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Sufism and Taoism
it does normally, ‘that you should not worship anything other than
God’, but rather ‘that whatever you worship, you are thereby not
(actually) worshipping anything other than God ’. 34
In explaining why Noah’s call to the worship of God is to be
understood as a makr, Ibn ‘Arabi uses the terms the ‘beginning’
(bidayah) and the ‘end’ (, ghayah ). 35 That is to say, he distinguishes
between the ‘beginning’ stage and the ‘end’ stage in idol-worship,
and asserts that these two stages are in this case exactly one and the
same thing. The ‘beginning’ is the stage at which the people of Noah
were indulging in idol-worship, and at which they were reproached
by Noah for faithlessness. They were strongly urged by him to leave
this stage and go over to the other end, i.e., the ‘end’ stage where
they would be worshipping God as they should. However, already
at the ‘beginning’ stage Noah’s people were worshipping none other
than God albeit only through their idols. So, properly speaking,
there was no meaning at all in Noah’s exhorting them to leave the
first stage and go over to the last stage. Indeed, it was even more
positively an act of makr on the part of Noah that he distinguished
between the ‘beginning’ and the ‘end’ when there was nothing at all
to be distinguished.
As al-Qashani puts it, ‘how can a man be advised to go to God
when he is already with God?’ To tell the idolaters to stop worship-
ping God and to worship God alone amounts exactly to the same
thing as telling those who are actually worshipping God to abandon
the worship of God and to resort to the worship of God! It is absurd,
or rather it is worse than absurd, because such an admonition is
liable to make people blind to the self-revealing aspect of the
Absolute.
The secret of idol-worship which we have just seen may be
understood in more theoretical terms as a problem of the compati-
bility of the One and the Many in regard to the Absolute. There is
no contradiction in the Absolute being the One and the Many at the
same time. Al-Qashani offers a good explanation of this fact, com-
paring it to the essential unity of a human being . 36
(Since there is nothing existent in the real sense of the word except
the Absolute itself, a true ‘knower of God’) does not see in the form
of the Many anything other than God’s face, for he knows that it is He
that manifests Himself in all these forms. Thus (whatever he may
worship) he worships only God.
This may be understood in the following way. The divergent forms of
the Many within the One are either spiritual, i.e., non-sensible, such
as angels, or outwardly visible and sensible such as the heavens and
earth and all the material things that exist between the two. The
former are comparable to the spiritual faculties in the bodily frame of
a man, while the latter are comparable to his bodily members. The
Metaphysical Unification and Phenomenal Dispersion
61
existence of multiplicity in man in no way prevents him from having a
unity. (Likewise, the existence of the Many in God does not deprive
Him of His essential Unity.)
The conclusion to be reached from all this is that there is nothing
wrong with idolatry, for whatever one worships one is worshipping
through it God Himself. Are all idol-worshippers, then, right in
indulging in idolatry? That is another question. Idolatry, though in
itself it has nothing blamable, is exposed to grave danger. Idolatry is
right in so far as the worshipper is aware that the object of his
worship is a manifested form of God and that, therefore, by wor-
shipping the idol he is worshipping God. Once, however, he forgets
this fundamental fact, he is liable to be deceived by his own imagina-
tion and ascribe real divinity to the idol (a piece of wood or a stone,
for example) and begin to worship it as a god existing independently
of, and side by side with, God. If he reaches this point, his attitude is
a pure tashbih which completely excludes tanzih.
Thus in Ibn ‘Arabi’s view, there are two basic attitudes toward
idolatry that are opposed to each other: the one is an attitude
peculiar to the ‘higher’ (a‘la) people, while the other is characteris-
tic of the ‘lower’ ( adna ). He says : 37
The ‘knower’ knows who (really) is the object of his worship; he
knows also the particular form in which the object of his worship
appears (to him). He is aware that the ‘dispersion’ and ‘multiplicity’
Y . are comparable to the corporeal members in the sensible form (of
man’s body) and the non-corporeal faculties in the spiritual form (of
man), so that in every object of worship what is worshipped is no
f. other than God Himself.
In contrast to this, the ‘lower’ people are those who imagine a divine
nature in every object of their worship. If it were not for this (wrong)
Y, imagination, nobody would worship stones and other similar things.
This is why (God) said to men of this kind, ‘Name them (i.e., desig-
nate each object of your worship by its name)!’ (XIII, 23). If they
*!’ were really to name these objects they would have called them a
stone, a tree, or a star, (because their idols were in fact stones, trees
and stars). But if they had been asked, 1 Whom are you worshipping?’,
“ they would have replied, ‘a god!’ They would never have said, ‘God’
or even ‘the god’. 38
Y; The ‘higher’ people, on the contrary, are not victims of this kind of
deceitful imagination. (In the presence of each idol) they tell them-
W selves, ‘This is a concrete form of theophany, and, as such, it deserves
a veneration’. Thus they do not confine (theophany) to this single
instance (i.e., they look upon everything as a particular form of
theophany).
If we are to judge the attitude of Noah’s people who refused to
respond to his advice, we must say that it was right in one respect
and it was wrong in another. They were right in that they upheld
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Sufism and Taoism
(though unconsciously) the truly divine nature of the outward forms
of theophany. This they did by resolutely refusing to throw away
their idols. But they were wrong in that they, deceived by their own
imagination, regarded each idol as an independently existing god,
and thus opposed in their minds ‘small goods ’ 39 to God as the ‘great
God’.
According to Ibn ‘Arabi, the ideal combination of tanzih and
tashbih was achieved only in Islam. The real qur’an came into being
for the first time in history in the belief of Muhammad and his
community. On this point Ibn ‘Arabi says : 40
The principle of qur’an was upheld in its purity only by Muhammad
and his community ‘which was the best of all communities that had
ever appeared among mankind’. 41 (Only he and his community real-
ized the two aspects of) the verse: laysa ka-mithli-hi shay ‘There is
nothing like unto Him’, for (their position) gathered everything into
a unity. 42
As we have seen above, the Qoran relates that Noah called upon his
people ‘by night and day’. Over against this, Muhammad, Ibn
‘Arabi says, ‘called upon his people, not “by night and day” but “by
night in the day and by day in the night” \ 43
Evidently, ‘day’ symbolizes tashbih and ‘night’ tanzih, because
the daylight brings out the distinctive features of the individual
things while the nocturnal darkness conceals these distinctions. The
position of Muhammad, in this interpretation, would seem to sug-
gest a complete fusion of tashbih and tanzih.
Was Noah, then, completely wrong in his attitude? Ibn ‘Arab!
answers to this question in both the affirmative and the negative.
Certainly, Noah preached outwardly tanzih alone. Such a pure
tanzih, if taken on the level of Reason, is, as we have already seen,
liable to lead ultimately to assimilating the Absolute with pure
spirits. And tanzih in this sense is a ‘ tanzih by Reason’, and is
something to be rejected. With Noah himself, however, tanzih was
not of this nature. Far from being a result of logical thinking, it was a
tanzih based on a deep prophetic experience 44 Only, the people of
Noah failed to notice that; for them the tanzih advocated by Noah
was nothing but a tanzih to be reached by the ordinary process of
reasoning.
Real tanzih is something quite different from this kind of logical
tanzih . And according to Ibn ‘ Arabi, the right kind of tanzih was first
advocated consciously by Islam. It does not consist in recognizing
the absolute Unknowable alone with a total rejection and denial of
the phenomenal world of things. The real tanzih is established on
the basis of the experience by which man becomes conscious of the
unification of all the Divine Attributes, each Attribute being actual-
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Metaphysical Unification and Phenomenal Dispersion
ized in a concrete thing or event in the world. In more plain terms,
the real tanzih consists in man’s peeping through the things and
events of this world into the grand figure of the One God beyond
them. It is ‘purifying’ {tanzih), no doubt, because it stands on the
consciousness of the essential ‘oneness’ of God, but it is not a purely
logical or intellectual ‘purifying’. It is a tanzih which comprises in
itself tashbih.
In Ibn ‘Arabi’s view, the tanzih practised by Muhammad was
inviting men not to the absolute Absolute which bears no relation at
all to the world, but to Allah the Merciful, that is, the Absolute as
the ultimate ground of the world, the creative source of all Being. It
is worthy of notice also that of all the Divine Names the ‘Merciful’
(al-Rahman) has been specially chosen in this context. The name
‘Merciful’ is for Ibn ‘Arabi the most comprehensive Name which
comprises and unifies all the Divine Names. In this capacity the
‘Merciful’ is synonymous with Allah. Al-Qashani is quite explicit on
this point . 45
It is remarkable that the ‘Merciful’ is a Name which comprises all the
Divine Names, so that the whole world is comprised therein, there
being no difference between this Name and the Name Allah. This is
evidenced by the Qoranic verse: ‘Say: Call upon (Him by the Name)
Allah or call upon (Him by the Name) Merciful. By whichever Name
you call upon Him (it will be the same) for all the most beautiful
Names are His’ (XVII, 110).
Now each group of people in the world stands under the Lordship of
one of His Names. And he who stands under the Lordship of a
particular Name is a servant of that Name. Thus the apostle of God
(Muhammad) called mankind from this state of divergence of the
Names unto the unifying plane of the Name Merciful or the Name
Allah.
To this Bali Efendi 46 adds the remark that, unlike in the case of
Noah, there is no relation of reciprocal ‘deceit’ ( makr ) between
Muhammad and his people, for there is no motive, neither on the
part of Muhammad nor on the part of the community, for having
recourse to makr. Muhammad, he goes on to say, certainly invited
men to the worship of the One God , 47 but he did not thereby call
men to the Absolute in its aspect of He-ness. In other words, he did
not unconditionally reject the idols which men had been worship-
ping; he simply taught men to worship the idols (or, indeed, any
other thing in the world) in the right way, that is, to worship them as
so many self-manifestations of God. In the Islamic tanzih there is
included the right form of tashbih.
If a man wants to know the Absolute by the power of his Reason
alone, he is inevitably led to the kind of tanzih which has no place for
64
Metaphysical Unification and Phenomenal Dispersion
65
Sufism and Taoism
tashbih. If, on the contrary, he exercises his Imagination (i.e., the
faculty of thinking through concrete imagery) alone, he falls into
pure tashbih. Both tanzih and tashbih of this sort are by themselves
imperfect and positively harmful. Only when man sees by the
experience of ‘unveiling’ the true reality of the matter, can tanzih
and tashbih assume a form of perfection.
If Reason functions by itself quite independently of anything else so
that it acquires knowledge by its own cognitive power, the knowledge
it obtains of God will surely be of the nature of tanzih, not tashbih.
But if God furnishes Reason with a (true) knowledge of the Divine
self-manifestation (pertaining to the tashbih aspect of the Absolute),
its knowledge of God attains perfection, and it will exercise tanzih
where it should, and exercise tashbih where it should. Reason in such
a state will witness the Absolute itself pervading all cognizable forms,
natural and elemental. And there will remain no form but that
Reason identifies its essence with the Absolute itself.
Such is the perfect and complete knowledge (of God) that has been
brought by the revealed religions. And the faculty of Imagination
exercises its own judgment (upon every thing) in the light of this
knowledge (i.e., Imagination collaborates with Reason by modifying
the tanzih-\ iew of Reason with its own tashbih-view).™
The gist of what Ibn ‘Arab! says in this passage may be summarized
as follows. Under normal conditions, tanzih is the product of
Reason, and tashbih is the product of Imagination ( wahm ). But
when the experience of ‘unveiling’ produces in the mind a perfect
knowledge, Reason and Imagination are brought into complete
harmony, and tanzih and tashbih become united in the perfect
knowledge of God. Of Reason and Imagination in such a state,
however, it is invariably the latter that holds regal sway {sultan).
Concerning the proper activity of Reason in this process and the
controlling function exercised by Imagination over Reason in such a
way that a perfect combination of tanzih and tashbih may be
obtained, Bali Efendi makes the following illuminating remark : 49
In just the same place where Reason passes the judgment of tanzih,
Imagination passes the judgment of tashbih. Imagination does this
because it witnesses how the Absolute pervades and permeates all
the forms, whether mental or physical. Imagination in this state
observes the Absolute in the (completely purified) form peculiar to
tanzih as established in Reason, and it realizes that to affirm tanzih
(exclusively, as is done by Reason) is nothing but delimiting the
Absolute, and that the delimitation of the Absolute is nothing but (a
kind of) tashbih (i.e., the completely purified Absolute is also a
particular ‘form’ assumed by the Absolute). But Reason is not aware
that the tanzih which it is exercising is precisely one of those forms
which it thinks must be rejected from the Absolute by tanzih.
These words of Bali Efendi makes the following argument of Ibn
‘Arab! easy to understand : 50
It is due to this situation that Imagination 51 has a greater sway in man
than Reason for man, even when his Reason has reached the utmost
limit of development, is not free from the control exercised over him
by Imagination and cannot do without relying upon representation
regarding what he has grasped by Reason.
Thus Imagination is the supreme authority ( sultan ) in the most
perfect form (of Being), namely, man. And this has been confirmed
by all the revealed religions, which have exercised tanzih and tashbih
at the same time; they have exercised tashbih by Imagination where
(Reason has established) tanzih, and exercised tanzih by Reason
where (Imagination has established) tashbih. Everything has in this
way, been brought into a close organic whole, wherefanziTz cannot be
separated from tashbih nor tashbih from tanzih . It is this situation that
is referred to in the Qoranic verse: ‘There is nothing like unto Him,
and He is All-hearing All-seeing’, in which God Himself describes
Him with tanzih and tashbih . . .
Then there is another verse in which He says, ‘exalted is thy Lord, the
Lord of majestic power standing far above that with which they
describe Him (XXXVII, 180). This is said because men tend to
describe Him with what is given by their Reason. So He ‘purifies’
Himself here from their very tanzih, because they are doing nothing
but delimit Him by their tanzih. All this is due to the fact that Reason
is by nature deficient in understanding this kind of thing.
Notes
1. Cf. Affifi, Fuy., Com., p. 33.
2. The epithet subbuhiyyah is a derivative of subbuh or sabbuh which is one of the
Divine Names meaning roughly ‘One who is glorified’ ‘the All-Glorious’. The verb
sabbaha {Allah) means to ‘glorify’ God by crying out Subhana Allah! (‘Far above
stands God beyond all imperfections and impurities!’)
3. Fus., p. 45/68.
4. p. 45.
5. Fu$., Com., p. 47. (The commentary of Bali Efendi is given in the same Cairo
edition of the Fuyizj which we are using in the present work.)
6. Cf. Affifi, Fuj., Com., p. 12.
7. p. 88.
8. Ibn ‘ Arab! calls the wisdom embodied by Noah ‘ wisdom of a subbuh nature’ , and
calls the wisdom symbolized by Enoch ‘wisdom of a quddus nature’ ( hikmah qud-
duslyah), Fus., p. 6 /75.
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Sufism and Taoism
9. Cf. Qashani, p. 60.
10. ibid.
11. Fus., p. 46/68.
12. pp. 46-47.
13. Fus., P- 47/68. Ibn'Arabi takes this occasion to point out that the Absolute does
not allow of definition not only in its absoluteness but also in its self-revealing aspect.
The impossibility of defining the Absolute perse has already been fully explained in
Chapter II. But even in its aspect of self-manifestation, the Absolute cannot be
defined because, as we have just seen, the Absolute in this aspect is everything,
external or internal, and if we are to define it, the definition must be formulated in
such a way that it covers all the definitions of all the things in the world. But since the
things are infinite in number, such a definition is never to be attained.
14. Fus., p. 47/69.
15. p. 47.
16. Fus., P- 47/69.
17. Fus -, p- 48/69.
18. ‘Our signs’, that is, ‘Our Attributes’ - al-Qashani.
19. ‘in so far as their determinations ( ta‘ayyunat , i.e., properties conceived as
‘determinations’ of the Absolute) are different from your determination’ - al-
Qashani. This means that, although essentially it is not necessary to distinguish the
things of the outer world and yourself, there is a certain respect in which ‘all that exist
outside of yourself’, i.e., the modes of determination peculiar to the things of the
outer world, are different from the mode of determination which is peculiar to
‘yourself’, i.e., the inner world.
20. ‘i.e., what is manifested in yourself by His Attributes. If it were not for this
manifestation, you would not exist in the world’. - al-Qashani.
21. Fus -, P- 49/70.
22. Fus., p. 98-99/93.
23. p. 99.
24. that is to say, whenever anybody sees or hears something, it is not the man who
really sees or hears, but God Himself who sees or hears in the form of that man.
25. Fus., P- 49/70.
26. Fus., P- 131/111.
27. taking ka as expletive.
28. Fus., P- 50/70.
Metaphysical Unification and Phenomenal Dispersion
67
29. The word furqan, whatever its etymology, denotes in the Qoran the Qoran itself.
For Ibn ‘Arab!, its meaning is totally different from this.
30. Fus., p. 51/70.
31. Qur’an as a technical term of Ibn ‘Arabi’s philosophy is not the name of the
Sacred Book Qur’an (or Qoran). He derives this word from the root QR’ meaning ‘to
gather together’ .
32. Fus ., p. 51/70.
33. Fus., Com., p. 39.
34. ibid. Cf. also Fus., p. 55/72.
35. Fus., p. 54/71-72.
36. p. 55. The problem of the One and the Many will form the specific topic of
Chapter VII.
37. Fus„ p. 55/72.
38. This implies that for these people each idol is ‘a god’, i.e., an independent
divinity; they are not aware that in the forms of the idols they are ultimately
worshipping the One God.
39. Cf. Qashani, p. 55.
40. Fus., p. 51/71.
41. Reference to III, 110 of the Qoran.
42. i.e., it affirmed ‘separating’ ( farq ) in ‘gathering’ ( jam ‘), and affirmed ‘gathering’
in ‘separating’, asserting thereby that the One is Many from a relative point of view
and that the Many are One in their reality - al-Qashani, p. 51.
43. Fus., p. 52/71.
44. Fus., P- 53/71.
45. p. 54.
46. ibid., footnote.
47. Outwardly this might be considered a pure tanzih.
48. Fus., P- 228/181.
49. p. 229, footnote.
50. Fus., P- 229/181-182.
51. The word Imagination ( wahm ) must be taken in this context in the sense of the
mental faculty of thinking through concrete imagery based on representation
{tasawwur).
Metaphysical Perplexity
69
V Metaphysical Perplexity
As the preceding chapter will have made clear, in Ibn ‘Arabi’s
conception, the only right attitude of man toward God is a harmoni-
ous unity composed of tanzih and tashbih , which is realizable solely
on the basis of the mystical intuition of ‘unveiling’.
If man follows the direction of Imagination which is not yet
illumined by the experience of ‘unveiling’, he is sure to fall into the
wrong type of idolatry in which each individual idol is worshipped as
a really independent and self-sufficient god. Such a god is nothing
but a groundless image produced in the mind of man. And the result
is a crude type of tashbih which can never rise to the level of tanzih.
If, on the other hand, man tries to approach God by following the
direction of Reason unaided by Imagination, man will inevitably
rush toward an exclusive tanzih, and lose sight of the Divine life
pulsating in all the phenomena of the world including himself.
The right attitude which combines in itself tanzih and tashbih is, in
short, to see the One in the Many and the Many in the One, or rather
to see the Many as One and the One as Many. The realization of this
kind of coincidentia oppositorum is called by Ibn ‘Arab! ‘perplexity’
(hay rah). As such, this is a metaphysical perplexity because here
man is impeded by the very nature of what he sees in the world from
definitely deciding as to whether Being is One or Many.
Ibn ‘Arabi explains the conception of ‘perplexity’ by an original
interpretation of a Qoranic verse. The verse in question is: ‘And
they (i.e., the idols) have caused many people to go astray’ (LXXI,
24). This is interpreted by Ibn ‘Arabi to mean that the existence of
many idols has put men into perplexity at the strange sight of the
absolute One being actually diversified into Many through its own
activity. 1
The idols in this context represent the multiplicity of forms that
are observable in the world. And, as al-Qashani remarks, anybody
who looks at them ‘with the eye of unification (tawhidf , i.e., with
the preconception of tanzih, is sure to become embarrassed and
perplexed at the sight of the One being diversified according to the
relations it bears to its loci of self-manifestation.
The Qoranic verse just quoted ends with another sentence: ‘and
(o God) increase Thou not the people of injustice (zalimin) except
in going astray’, and the whole verse is put in the mouth of Noah.
This second sentence, too, is interpreted by Ibn ‘Arabi in quite an
original way. The interpretation is, in fact, more than original, for it
squeezes out of the verse a conception of zalim which is exactly the
opposite of what is meant by the Qoran. He begins by saying that
the word zalim or ‘a man of injustice’ here is equivalent to a phrase
which occurs repeatedly in the Qoran , zalim li-nafsi-hi, meaning ‘he
who does injustice or wrong to himself’. Now according to the
actual usage of the Qoran, ‘he who wrongs himself’ designates a
stubborn unbeliever who disobeys God’s commands and by sticking
obstinately to polytheism, drives himself on to perdition. But, as
interpreted by Ibn ‘Arab! zalim li-nafsi-hi refers to a man who ‘does
wrong to himself’ by refusing himself all the pleasures of the present
world and devotes himself to seeking ‘self-annihilation’ ( fana ’) in
God. 2
This interpretation is based on another Qoranic verse, namely
XXXV, 32, which reads: ‘Some of them are doing injustice to
themselves and some of them are moderate, while some others vie
one with another in doing good works with the permission of God’ .
And quite opposite to the usual ranking, Ibn ‘Arabi considers ‘those
who do injustice to themselves’ the highest and best of all the three
classes of men. They are, he says, ‘the best of all people, the
specially chosen of God’. 3
Al-Qashani quotes, in this connection, a Tradition from al-
Tirmidhi’s $ahih which reads: ‘These men are all in one and the
same grade; all of them will be in the Garden’. He says that this
Tradition refers to the three classes of men mentioned in the verse
just quoted. These three classes are, as the Tradition explicitly
states, in the same grade in the sense that they all are destined to go
to the Garden, but al-Qashani thinks that this does not prevent
them from forming a hierarchy, the highest being ‘those who do
injustice to themselves’, the middle the ‘moderate’, and the lowest
‘those who vie with one another in the performance of good works’ .
The theoretical explanation he gives of this hierarchy, however,
does not seem to be convincing at all. It would seem to be better for
us to take, as Affifi does, ‘the man who does injustice to himself’ as
meaning a mystic who has had the experience of ‘unveiling’ in
self-annihilation, and ‘the moderate man’ as meaning ‘a man who
keeps to the middle course’. Then most naturally, ‘those who vie
one another’ would mean those who are still in the earlier stage of
the mystical training.
However this may be, what is important for Ibn ‘Arabi is the
conception that the ‘man who does injustice to himself’ occupies the
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Sufism and Taoism
highest rank precisely by being in metaphysical perplexity. As is
easy to see, this has a weighty bearing on the interpretation of the
latter half of the Qoranic verse, in which Noah implores God to
increase more and more the ‘going astray’ of the ‘people of injustice .
Noah, according to this understanding, implores God to increase
even more the metaphysical ‘perplexity’ of the highest class of men,
while the standard, i.e., common-sense, interpretation of the verse
sees Noah calling down Divine curses upon the worst class of men,
the stubborn idol-worshippers.
In exactly the same spirit, Ibn ‘Arab! finds a very picturesque
description of this ‘perplexity’ in a Qoranic verse (II, 20) which
depicts how God trifles with wicked people who are trying in vain to
beguile and delude Him and those who sincerely believe in Him. A
dead darkness settles down upon these people. From time to time
roars frightful thunder, and a flash of lightning ‘almost snatches
away their sight’. And ‘as often as they are illuminated they walk in
the light, but when it darkens again they stand still’ .
This verse in Ibn ‘Arabl’s interpretation, yields a new meaning
which is totally different from what we ordinarily understand.
Although he merely quotes the verse without any comment, what
he wants to convey thereby is evident from the very fact that he
adduces it in support of his theory of ‘perplexity’ . On behalf of his
Master, al-Qashani makes it explicit in the following way: 4
This verse describes the ‘perplexity’ of these people. Thus, when the
light of the Unity ( ahadiyah ) is manifested they ‘walk’, that is, they
move ahead with the very movement of God, while when it darkens
against them as God becomes hidden behind the veil and the Multi-
plicity appears instead (of Unity) obstructing their view, they just
stand still in ‘perplexity’.
This ‘perplexity’ necessarily assumes the form of a circular move-
ment. ‘The man in “perplexity” draws a circle’, as Ibn ‘ Arab! says. 5
This is necessarily so, because the ‘walking’ of such a man reflects
the very circle of the Divine self- manifestation. The Absolute itself
draws a circle in the sense that it starts from the primordial state of
Unity, ‘descends’ to the plane of concrete beings and diversifies
itself in myriads of things and events, and finally ‘ascends’ back into
the original non-differentiation. The man in ‘perplexity’ draws the
same circle, for he ‘walks with God, from God, to God, his onward
movement being identical with the movement of God Himself’. 6
This circular movement, Ibn ‘ Arab! observes, turns round a pivot
(qu(b) or center ( markaz ), which is God. And since the man is
merely going round and round the center, his distance from God
remains exactly the same whether he happens to be in the state of
Unity or in that of Multiplicity. Whether, in other words, he is
Metaphysical Perplexity
71
looking at the Absolute in its primordial Unity or as it is diversified
in an infinite number of concrete things, he stands at the same
distance from the Absolute per se.
On the contrary, a man who, his vision being veiled, is unable to
see the truth, is a ‘man who walks along a straight road’. He
imagines God to be far away from him, and looks for God afar off.
He is deceived by his own imagination and strives in vain to reach
his imagined God. In the case of such a man, there is a definite
distinction between the ‘from’ {min, i.e., the starting-point) and the
‘to’ ( ila , i.e., the ultimate goal), and there is naturally an infinite
distance between the two points. The starting-point is himself
imagined to be far away from himself, and the distance between is
an imaginary distance which he thinks separates him from God.
Such a man, in spite of his desire to approach Him, goes even farther
from God as he walks along the straight road stretching infinitely
ahead.
The thought itself, thus formulated and expressed with the image
of a man walking in a circle and another going ahead along a straight
line, is indeed of remarkable profundity. As an interpretation of the
above-cited Qoranic verse, however, it certainly does not do justice
to the meaning given directly by the actual context. The extraordi-
nary freedom in the interpretation of the Qoran comes out even
more conspicuously when Ibn ‘Arab! applies his exegesis to other
verses which he quotes as a conclusive evidence for his thesis. 7 The
first is LXXI, 25, which immediately follows the one relating to the
‘people who do injustice to themselves’. It reads: ‘Because of their
mistakes ( khafi’at ) they (i.e., the people of injustice), were
drowned, and then put into fire. And they found nobody to help
them in place of God’.
The word khafi’at meaning ‘mistakes’ or ‘sins’ comes from the
root KH-T which means ‘to err’ ‘to commit a mistake’. It is a
commonly used word with a definite meaning. Ibn ‘ Arabi, however,
completely disregards this etymology, and derives it from the root
KH-TT meaning ‘to draw lines’ ‘to mark out’. The phrase min
khan.’ ati-him ‘from their mistakes’ is thus made to mean something
like: ‘because of that which has been marked out for them as their
personal possessions’. And this, for Ibn ‘Arab!, means nothing
other than ‘their own individual determinations {ta ( ayyundt)' , that
is, ‘the ego of each person’.
‘Because of their egos’ , i.e., since they had their own egos already
established, they had to be ‘drowned’ once in the ocean before they
could be raised into the spiritual state of ‘self-annihilation’ ( fana ’).
This ocean in which they were drowned, he says, symbolizes
‘knowledge of God’, and that is no other than the ‘perplexity’. And
al-Qashani: 8
72
Sufism and Taoism
(This ‘ocean' -‘perplexity’) is the Unity pervading all and manifesting
itself in multiple forms. It is ‘perplexing’ because of the Unity appear-
ing in a determined form in every single thing and yet remaining
non-determined in the whole. (It is ‘perplexing’) because of its
(simultaneous) non-limitation and limitation.
As regards the sentence in the verse: ‘then (they) were put into fire’ ,
Ibn ‘Arabi remarks simply that this holocaust occurred in the very
water, that is, while they were in the ocean. The meaning is again
explicated by al-Qashani: 9
This ‘fire’ is the fire of love (‘ ishq ) for the light of the splendor of His
Face, which consumes all the determined forms and individual
essences in thd very midst of the ocean of ‘knowledge of God’ and
true Life. And this true Life is of such a nature that everything comes
to life with it and yet is destroyed by it at the same time. There can be
no perplexity greater than the ‘perplexity’ caused by the sight of
‘drowning’ and ‘burning’ with Life and Knowledge, that is, simul-
taneous self-annihilation and self-subsistence.
Thus ‘they found nobody to help them in place of God’, because
when God manifested Himself to these sages in His Essence, they
were all burned down, and there remained for them nothing else
than God who was the sole ‘helper’ for them, i.e., the sole vivifier of
them. God alone was there to ‘help’ them, and ‘they were destroyed
(i.e., annihilated) in Him for ever’. Their annihilation in God was
the very vivification of them in Him. And this is the meaning of
‘self-subsistence’ ( baqa ), of which fana\ ‘self-annihilation’, is but
the reverse side.
If God, instead of destroying them in the ocean, had rescued them
from drowning and brought them back to the shore of Nature (i.e.,
brought them back to the world of limitations and determinations)
they would not have attained to such a high grade (i.e., they would
have lived in the natural world of ‘reality’ and would have remained
veiled from God by their very individualities).
Ibn ‘Arab! adds that all this is true from a certain point of view, 10
‘although, to be more strict (there is no ‘drowning’, no ‘burning’,
and no ‘helping’ because) everything belongs (from beginning to
end) to God, and is with God; or rather, everything is God.
In a Qoranic verse following the one which has just been discussed,
Noah goes on to say to God: ‘Verily, if Thou shouldst leave them as
they are, they would surely lead Thy slaves astray and would beget
none but sinful disbelievers’.
The words: ‘they would surely lead Thy slaves astray’ mean,
according to Ibn ‘Arabi, 11 ‘they would put Thy slaves into perplexity
and lead them out of the state of being slaves and bring them to their
Metaphysical Perplexity 73
inner reality which is now hidden from their eyes, namely, the state
of being the Lord. (If this happens,) then those who think them-
selves to be slaves will regard themselves as Lords’ . The ‘perplexity’
here spoken of is considered by al-Qashani not the true metaphysi-
cal perplexity but a ‘Satanic perplexity’ (hay rah shay(aniyah). But
this is evidently an overstatement. Ibn ‘Arabi is still speaking of the
same kind of metaphysical ‘perplexity’ as before. The point he
makes here is that, if one permits those who know the Mystery of
Being to lead and teach the people, the latter will in the end realize
the paradoxical fact that they are not only slaves, as they have
thought themselves to be, but at the same time Lords.
The interpretation which Ibn ‘Arab! puts on the ending part of
the verse: ‘and would beget none but sinful disbelievers’, is even
more shocking to common sense than the preceding one. We must
remember, however, that this interpretation is something quite
natural and obvious to Ibn ‘ Arabi’ s mind.
The Arabic word which I have translated as ‘sinful’ is fajir , a
well-established Qoranic term which is derived from the root FJR
meaning ‘to commit unlawful, i.e., sinful, acts’ . Ibn ‘Arabi derives it
from another FJR meaning ‘to open and give an outlet for water’.
And in this paticular context it is taken in the sense of ‘making
manifest’ ( izh 'ar ). Thus the word fajir, instead of meaning ‘a man
who commits sinful acts’, means ‘a man who manifests or unveils
what is veiled’ . In a terminology which is more typical of Ibn ‘Arabi,
a fajir is a man who manifests the Absolute in the sense that he is a
locus of the Absolute’s self-manifestation.
As for the second term translated here as ‘disbeliever’ , the Arabic
is kaffar, an emphatic form of kafir meaning ‘one who is ungrateful
to, i.e., disbelieves in, God’. But, as we have observed before, Ibn
‘Arabi takes this word in its etymological sense; namely, that of
‘covering up’. So kaffar in this context is not an ‘ingrate’ or ‘disbe-
liever’, but a man who ‘covers up’ or hides the Absolute behind the
veil of his own concrete, determined form.
Moreover, it is important to remember, the fajir and kafir are not
two different persons but one and the same person. So that the
meaning of this part of the verse amounts to: ‘these people would do
nothing but unveil what is veiled and veil what is manifest at the
same time’. As a result, those who see this extraordinary view
naturally fall into ‘perplexity’.
But precisely the act of falling into this kind of ‘perplexity’ is the
very first step to attaining ultimately the real ‘knowledge’. And the
‘perplexity’ here in question has a metaphysical basis. We shall
consider in what follows this point in more theoretical terms,
remaining faithful to Ibn ‘ Arabi’ s own description.
* * *
74 Sufism and Taoism
What we must emphasize before everything else is that, in Ibn
‘Arabi’s world-view, the whole world is the locus of theophany or
the self-manifestation of the Absolute, and that, consequently, all
the things and events of the world are self-determinations of the
Absolute. Therefore, the world of Being cannot be grasped in its
true form except as a synthesis of contraditions. Only by a simul-
taneous affirmation of contradictories can we understand the real
nature of the world. And the ‘perplexity’ is nothing other than the
impression produced on our minds by the observation of the simul-
taneous existence of contradictories.
Ibn ‘ArabI describes in detail some of the basic forms of the
ontological contradiction. And the explanation he gives of the
coincidentia oppositorum is of great value and importance in that it
clarifies several cardinal points of his world-view. Here we shall
consider two most fundamental forms of contradiction.
The first 12 is the contradictory nature of the things of the world as
manifested in the relation between the ‘inward’ (bafin) and the
‘outward’ ( zahir ). When one wants to define ‘man’, for example,
one must combine the ‘inward’ and the ‘outward’ of man in his
definition. The commonly accepted definition - ‘man is a rational
animal - is the result of the combination, for ‘animal’ represents the
‘outward’ of man, while ‘rational’ represents his ‘inward’, the
former being body and the latter the spirit governing the body. Take
away from a man his spirit, and he will no longer be a ‘man’ ; he will
merely be a figure resembling a man, something like a stone or a
piece of wood. Such a figure does not deserve the name ‘ man’ except
in a metaphorical sense.
Just as man is man only in so far as there is spirit within the body,
so also the ‘world’ is ‘world’ only in so far as there is the Reality or
Absolute within the exterior form of the world.
It is utterly impossible that the various forms of the world (i.e., the
things in the empirical world) should subsist apart from the Absolute.
Thus the basic attribute of divinity ( uluhiyah ) must necessarily per-
tain to the world in the real sense of the word, not metaphorically,
just as it (i.e., the complex of spirit, the ‘inward’, and body, the
‘outward’) constitutes the definition of man, so long as we understand
by ‘man’ a real, living man.
Furthermore, not only is the ‘inward’ of the world the Reality itself
but its ‘outward’ also is the Reality, because the ‘outward’ of the
world is, as we have seen, essentially the forms of theophany. In this
sense, both the ‘inward’ and ‘outward’ of the world must be defined
in terms of divinity.
Having established this point, Ibn ‘Arab! goes on to describe the
strange nature of the praising ( thana ’) of the ‘inward’ by the ‘out-
Metaphysical Perplexity 7 5
ward’ . ‘Just as’ , he says, ‘the outward form of man constantly praises
with its own tongue the spirit within, so the various forms of the
world praise, by a special disposal of God, the inward spirit of the
world’. How does the bodily form of man ‘praise with its own
tongue’ the spirit within? This is explained by al-Qashani in the
following way: 13
The bodily form of man praises the spirit, i.e., the soul, by means of its
movements and by manifestation of its peculiar properties and per-
fections. (The reason why this is ‘praise’ is as follows.) The bodily
members of man are in themselves but (lifeless) objects which, were
it not for the spirit, would neither move nor perceive anything;
besides, the bodily members as such have no virtue at all such as
generosity, liberal giving, magnanimity, the sense of shame, courage,
truthfulness, honesty, etc. And since ‘to praise’ means nothing other
than mentioning the good points (of somebody or something), the
bodily members (praise the spirit) by expressing (through actions)
the virtues of the spirit.
Exactly in the same way, the various forms of the world ‘praise’ the
inner spirit of the universe (i.e., the Reality residing within the
universe) through their own properties, perfections, indeed, through
everything that comes out of them. Thus the world is praising its own
‘inward’ by its ‘outward’.
We, however, usually do not notice this fact, because we do not have
a comprehensive knowledge of all the forms of the world. The
language of this universal ‘praise’ remains incomprehensible to us
‘just as a Turk cannot understand the language of a Hindi!’. 14 The
contradictory nature of this phenomenon lies in the fact that if the
‘outward’ of the world praises its ‘inward’, properly speaking both
the ‘outward’ and ‘inward’ are absolutely nothing other than the
Absolute itself. Hence we reach the conclusion that the one who
praises and the one who is praised are in this case ultimately the
same.
The phenomenon just described, of the Absolute praising itself in
two forms opposed to each other, is merely a concrete case illustrat-
ing the more profound and more general fact that the Absolute,
from the point of view of man, cannot be grasped except in the form
of coincidentia oppositorum. Ibn ‘ArabI quotes in support of his
view a famous saying of Abu Said al-Kharraz, a great mystic of
Bagdad of the ninth century: ‘God cannot be known except as a
synthesis of opposites’. 15
Al-Kharraz, who was himself one of the many faces of the Absolute
and one of its many tongues, said that God cannot be known except
by attributing opposites to Him simultaneously. Thus the Absolute is
the First and the Last, the Outward and the Inward. It is nothing
76
Metaphysical Perplexity
77
Sufism and Taoism
other than what comes out outwardly (in concealing itself inwardly),
whereas in the very moment of coming out outwardly it is what
conceals itself inwardly.
There is no one who sees the Absolute except the Absolute itself, and
yet there is no one to whom the Absolute remains hidden. It is the
Outward (i.e., self-manifesting) to itself, and yet it is the Inward (i.e.,
self-concealing) to itself. The absolute is the one who is called by the
name of Abu SaTd al-Kharraz and by other names of other contin-
gent beings.
The Inward belies the Outward when the latter says ‘I’, and the
Outward belies the Inward when the latter says T. And this applies
to every other pair of opposites. (In every case) the one who says
something is one, and yet he is the very same one who hears. This is
based on the phrase said by the prophet (Muhammad): ‘and what
their own souls tell them’, indicating clearly that the soul is the
speaker and the hearer of what it says at the same time, the knower of
what itself has said. In all this (phenomenon), the essence itself is one
though it takes on different aspects. Nobody can ignore this, because
everybody is aware of this in himself in so far as he is a form of the
Absolute.
Al-Qashani reminds us concerning this fundamental thesis of his
Master that everything, in regard to its ontological source and
ground, is the Absolute, and that all the things of the world are but
different forms assumed by the same essence. The fact that the
phenomenal world is so variegated is simply due to the diversity of
the Divine Names, i.e., the basic or archetypal forms of the Divine
self-manifestation .
Nothing exists except the Absolute. Only it takes on divergent forms
and different aspects according to whether the Names appear out-
wardly or lie hidden inwardly as well as in accordance with the
relative preponderance of the properties of Necessity ( wujuh ) over
those of Possibility ( imkan ) or conversely: the preponderance of
spirituality, for instance, in some and the preponderance of material-
ity in others . 16
As regards Ibn ‘ArabFs words: ‘The Inward belies the Outward
when the latter says “I”, etc.’, al-Qashanl gives the following
explication:
Each one of the Divine Names affirms its own meaning, but what it
affirms is immediately negated by an opposite Name which affirms its
own. Thus each single part of the world affirms its own I-ness by the
very act of manifesting its property, but the opposite of that part
immediately denies what the former has affirmed and brings to
naught its self-assertion by manifesting in its turn a property which is
the opposite of the one manifested by the first.
Each of the two, in this way, declares what it has in its own nature,
and the other responds (negatively) to it. But (in essence) the one
which declares and the one which responds are one and the same
thing. As an illustration of this, Ibn ‘ Arabi refers to a (famous) saying
of the prophet (Muhammad) describing how God pardons the sins
committed by the people of this community, namely , ‘both what their
bodily members have done and what their souls have told them (to
do) even if they do not actually do it.’ This is right because it often
happens that the soul tells a man to do something (evil) and he
intends to do it, but is detained from it by another motive. In such a
case, the man himself is the hearer of what his own soul tells him, and
he becomes conscious of the conflicting properties at work in himself
when he hesitates to do the act.
The man at such a moment is the speaker and the hearer at the same
time, the commander and the forbidder at the same time. Morover,
he is the knower of all this. And (he manifests and gathers in himself
all these contradictory properties), notwithstanding his inner essence
being one and the same, by dint of the diversity of his faculties and
governing principles of his actions such as reason, imagination, repul-
sion, desire etc. Such a man is an image of the Absolute (which is
essentially one) in its divergent aspects and the properties coming
from the Names.
Close to the relation between the ‘inward’ and ‘outward’ is the
contradictory relation between the One and the Many. The two
kinds of contradictory relations are, at bottom, one and the same
thing. For the dictum that the Absolute (or the world) is One and
yet Many, Many and yet One, arises precisely from the fact that the
infinitely various and divergent things of the world are but so many
phenomenal forms of one unique Being which is the Absolute. The
(apparent) difference is due to our taking a slightly different view-
point in each case.
Regarding the second relation which we will now consider, Ibn
‘Arab! offers two explanations, one mathematical and the other
ontological. We begin with the ‘mathematical’ aspect of the
problem.
The structure of the metaphysical fact that the One appears in the
multiplicity of things, and the things that are many are ultimately
reducible to the One or the Absolute, is identical with the structure
of the reciprocal relation between the mathematical ‘one’, which is
the very source of all numbers, and the numbers.
The numbers are produced in a serial form by the (repetition of)
‘one’. Thus the ‘one’ brings into existence the numbers, while the
numbers divide the ‘one’, (the only essential difference between
them being that) a ‘number’ subsists as a number by virtue of some-
thing which is counted . 17
Ontologically, as we have seen, the diversification of the unique
Essence by concrete delimitations and various degrees is the cause
78
Sufism and Taoism
of things and events being observable related to one another in an
infinitely complicated manner. The basic structure of this
phenomenon, however, is quite simple. It is, Ibn ‘Arab! says, the
same as the proceeding of the infinite series of numbers out of ‘one’ .
In his view, the mathematical ‘one’ is the ultimate source of all
numbers, and the numbers are nothing but various forms in which
‘one’ manifests itself.
‘One’ itself is not a number; it is the source or ground of all
numbers. Every number is a phenomenal form of ‘one’ brought into
being by the repetition of the latter (just as all the things in the world
are products of the one Essence ‘repeating itself’, mutakarrir, in
various forms of self-determination). 18 The important point is that a
number thus constituted by repetition of ‘one’, is not a mere con-
glomeration of the units, but an independent reality (haqiqah). For
example, the number ‘two’ is explained by al-Qashani in the follow-
ing way: 19
When ‘one’ manifests itself ( tajalla ) 20 in a different form it is called
‘two’. But ‘two’ is nothing other than ‘one’ and ‘one’ put together,
while ‘one’ itself is not a number. It is to be remarked that the
structure of this putting together (of two ‘one’s) is one, and the
product of this putting together, which is called ‘two’, is also one
number. So that the essential form here is one, the matter is one, and
the two ‘one’s put together is also one, i.e., ‘one’ manifesting itself in
a form of the Many. Thus ‘one’ produces the number (‘two’) by
manifesting itself in two different forms. The same is true of ‘three’,
for example, which is ‘one’ and ‘one’ and ‘one’, and the nature and
structure of its one-ness is exactly the same as in the case of ‘two’.
Thus, all the numbers are each a particular form in which ‘one’
manifests itself according to its peculiar determination and the rank
it occupies in the numerical series.
It is very important to note that the numbers brought into being in
this way are all intelligibles ( haqaiq ma‘qulah, lit. ‘realities grasped
by Reason’), and have no existence in the external world; they exist
only in our mind. They exist in the external world merely in so far as
they are recognizable in the objects that are countable. This must be
what is meant by Ibn ‘Arab! when he says (in the above-quote
passage) that a ‘number’ is actualized only by something which is
counted. And this situation corresponds exactly to the ontological
structure of the world of Being.
‘Something which is counted’ ( ma‘dud ), in al-Qashani’s interpre-
tation, refers to the One Reality which manifests itself and
diversifies itself in the Many. But this is clearly a misinterpretation.
The ma‘dud in this context must denote a concrete object which
exists in the external world and which manifests the transcendental
‘one’ in a concrete form. In terms of the correspondence between
Metaphysical Perplexity 79
the mathematical and the ontological order of being, ‘one’ corres-
ponds to the One Reality, i.e., the Absolute, and the numbers that
are intelligibles correspond to permanent archetypes, and finally
the ‘countable things’ correspond to the things of the empirical
world. Bali Efendi brings out this system of correspondences with
an admirable lucidity: 21
You must notice that ‘one’ corresponds symbolically to the one inner
essence (‘ ayn ) which is the reality itself of the Absolute, while the
numbers correspond to the multiplicity of the Names arising from the
self-manifestation of that reality (i.e., of the Absolute) in various
forms in accordance with the requirement of its own aspects and
relations. (The multiplicity of the Names here spoken of) is the
multiplicity of the permanent archetypes in the Knowledge (i.e.,
within the Divine Consciousness). Finally, the ‘things counted’ cor-
respond to the concrete things of this world, that is, creaturely forms
of theophany, without which neither the properties of the Names nor
the states of the permanent archetypes can become manifest (in the
external world in a concrete way).
Only when we understand the word ‘things counted’ in this sense,
are we in a position to see correctly what is meant by the following
words of Ibn ‘Arabi: 22
The ‘thing counted’ partakes of both non-existence and existence, for
one and the same thing can be non-existent on the level of the senses
while being existent on the level of the intellect . 23 So there must be
both the ‘number’ and the ‘thing counted’.
But there must be, in addition, also ‘one’ which causes all this and is
caused by it . 24 (And the relation between ‘one’ and the numbers is to
be conceived as follows.) Every degree in the numerical series (i.e.,
every number) is in itself one reality. (Thus each number is a self-
subsistent unity and) not a mere conglomeration, and yet, on the
other hand, there certainly is a respect in which it must be regarded as
‘one’s put together. Thus ‘two’ is one reality (though it is a ‘gathering’
of ‘one’ and ‘one’), ‘three’ is also one reality (though it is a ‘gathering’
of ‘one’ and ‘one’ and ‘one’), and so on, however far we go up the
numerical series. Since each number is in this way one (i.e., an
independent reality), the essence of each number cannot be the same
as the essences of other numbers. And yet, the fact of ‘gathering’ (of
‘one’s) is common to all of them (i.e., as a genus, as it were, which
comprises all the species). Thus we admit the (existence of) various
degrees (i.e., different numbers, each being unique as an indepen-
dent number) in terms of the very essence of each one of them,
recognizing at the same time that they are all one . 25 Thus we inevi-
tably affirm the very thing which we think is to be negated in itself . 26
He who has understood what I have established regarding the nature
of the numbers, namely, that the negation of them is at the same time
the affirmation of them, must have thereby understood how the
Absolute in tanzih is at the same time the creatures in tashbih.
80 Sufism and Taoism
although there is a distinction between the Creator and the creatures.
The truth of the matter is that we see here the Creator who is the
creatures and the creatures who are the Creator. Moreover, all this
arises from one unique Essence; nay, there is nothing but one unique
Essence, and it is at the same time many essences.
In the eye of a man who has understood by experience the ontologi-
cal depth of this paradox the world appears in an extraordinary form
which an ordinary mind can never believe to be true. Such an
experience consists in penetrating into the ‘real situation’ ( amr )
beyond the veils of normal perception and thought. In illustration,
Ibn ‘Arab! gives two concrete examples from the Qoran. 27 The first
is the event of Abraham going to sacrifice his own son Isaac, and the
second is the marriage of Adam with Eve.
(Isaac said to his father Abraham): ‘My father, do what you have
been commanded to do!’ (XXXVII, 102). The child (Isaac) is essen-
tially the same as his father. So the father saw (when he saw himself in
his vision sacrificing his son) nothing other than himself sacrificing
himself. ‘And We ransomed him (i.e., Isaac) with a big sacrifice’
(XXXVII, 107). At that moment, the very thing which (earlier) had
appeared in the form of a human being (i.e., Isaac) appeared in the
form of a ram. And the very thing which was ‘father’ appeared in the
form of ‘son’, or more exactly in the capacity of ‘son’.
(As for Adam and Eve, it is said in the Qoran): ‘And (your Lord)
created from it (i.e., the first soul which is Adam) its mate’ (IV, 1).
This shows that Adam married no other than himself. Thus from him
issued both his wife and his child. The reality is one but assumes many
forms.
Of this passage, al-Qashani gives an important philosophical expla-
nation. 28 It is to be remarked in particular that, regarding the
self-determination of the Absolute, he distinguishes between the
‘universal self-determination’ ( al-ta‘ayyun al-kulliy ), i.e., self-
determination on the level of species, and the particular or
‘individual self-determination’ ( al-ta‘ayyun al-juz’iy). These two
self-determinations correspond to the ontological plane of the
archetypes and that of the concrete things.
‘The reality is one but assumes many forms’ means that what is in
reality the one unique Essence multiplies itself into many essences
through the multiplicity of self-determinations.
These self-determinations are of two kinds: one is ‘universal’ by
which the Reality in the state of Unity becomes ‘man’, for example,
and the other is ‘individual’ by which ‘man’ becomes Abraham. Thus,
in this case, (the one unique Essence) becomes ‘man’ through the
universal self-determination: and then, through an individual self-
determination, it becomes Abraham, and through another (indi-
vidual self-determination) becomes Ishmael. 29
Metaphysical Perplexity 81
In the light of this, (Abraham, not as an individual named Abraham,
but on the level of) ‘man’ before individuation, did not sacrifice
anything other than himself by executing the ‘big sacrifice’ (i.e., by
sacrificing the ram in place of his son). For (the ram he sacrificed) was
hjmself in reality (i.e., if we consider it on the level of the Absolute
before any self-determination). (It appeared in the form of the ram
because) the Absolute determined itself by a different universal
self-determination 30 (into ‘ram’) and then by an individual self-
determination (into the particular ram which Abraham sacrificed.)
Thus the same one Reality which had appeared in the form of a man
appeared in the form of a ram by going through two different self-
determinations, once on the level of species, then on the level of
individuals.
Since ‘ man’ remains preserved both in father and child on the level of
the specific unity, (Ibn ‘Arabi) avoids affirming the difference of
essence in father and child and affirms only the difference of ‘capa-
city’ ( hukm ) saying ‘or more exactly, in the capacity of son’. This he
does because there is no difference at all between the two in essence,
that is, in so far as they are ‘man’; the difference arises only in regard
to their ‘being father’ and ‘being son’ respectively.
The same is true of Adam and Eve. Both of them and their children
are one with respect to their ‘being man’.
Thus the Absolute is one in itself, but it is multiple because of its
various self-determinations, specific and individual. These self-
determinations do not contradict the real Unity. In conclusion we
say: (The Absolute) is One in the form of Many.
It is remarkable that here al-Qashani presents the contradictory
relation between the One and the Many in terms of the Aristotelian
conception of genus-species-individual. There is no denying that
the world-view of Ibn ‘Arab! has in fact a conspicuously philosophi-
cal aspect which admits of this kind of interpretation. However, the
problem of the One and the Many is for Ibn ‘Arab! primarily a
matter of experience. No philosophical explanation can do justice
to his thought unless it is backed by a personal experience of the
Unity of Being ( wahdah al-wujud). The proposition: ‘Adam mar-
ried himself’, for example, will never cease to be perplexing and
perturbing to our Reason until it is transformed into a matter of
experience.
Philosophical interpretation is after all an afterthought applied to
the naked content of mystical intuition. The naked content itself
cannot be conveyed by philosophical language. Nor is there any
linguistic means by which to convey immediately the content of
mystical intuition. If, in spite of this basic fact, one forces oneself to
express and describe it, one has to have recourse to a metaphorical
or analogical language. And in fact, Ibn ‘Arabi introduces for this
purpose a number of comparisons. Here I give two comparisons
which particularly illumine the relation of the One and the Many.
82 Sufism and Taoism
The first is the organic unity of the body and the diversity of the
bodily members. 31
These forms (i.e., the infinite forms of the phenomenal world) are
comparable to the bodily members of Zayd. A man, Zayd, is admit-
tedly one personal reality, but his hand is neither his foot nor his head
nor his eye nor his eyebrow. So he is Many which are One. He is
Many in the forms and One in his person.
In the same way, ‘man 1 is essentially One no doubt, and yet it is also
clear that ‘Umar is not the same as Zayd, nor Khalid, nor Ja‘far. In
spite of the essential one-ness of ‘man’, the individual exemplars of it
are infinitely many. Thus man is One in essence, while he is Many
both in regard to the forms (i.e., the bodily members of a particular
man) and in regard to the individual exemplars.
The second is a comparison of the luxuriant growth of grass after a
rainfall. It is based on the Qoran, XXII, 5, which reads: ‘Thou seest
the earth devoid of life. But when We send down upon it water, it
thrills, swells up, and puts forth all magnificent pairs of vegetation’.
He says: 32
Water 13 , is the source of life and movement for the earth, as is indicated
by the expression: ‘it thrills’. ‘It swells up’ refers to the fact that the
earth becomes pregnant through the activity of water. And ‘it puts
forth all magnificent pairs of vegetation’ , that is, the earth gives birth
only to things that resemble it, namely, ‘natural’ things like the
earth . 34 And the earth obtains in this way the property of ‘double-
ness’ by what is born out of it . 35
Likewise, the Absolute in its Being obtains the property of multiplic-
ity and a variety of particular names by the world which appears from
it. The world, because of its ontological nature, requires that the
Divine Names be actualized. And as a result, the Divine Names
become duplicated by the world (which has arisen in this way), and
the unity of the Many (i.e., the essential unity of the Divine Names)
comes to stand opposed to the world . 36 Thus (in the comparison of
the earth and vegetation, the earth) is a unique substance which is
one essence like (the Aristotelian) ‘matter’ (hayula). And this unique
substance which is one in essence is many in its forms which appear in
it and which it contains within itself.
The same is true of the Absolute with all the forms of its self-
manifestation that appear from it. So the Absolute plays the role of
the locus in which the forms of the world are manifested, but even
then it maintains intact the intelligible unity. See how wonderful is
this Divine teaching, the secret of which God discloses to some only
of His servants as He likes.
The general ontological thesis that the Many of the phenomenal
world are all particular forms of the absolute One in its self-
manifestation is of extreme importance in Ibn ‘Arabi’s world-view
not only because of the central and basic position it occupies in his
Metaphysical Perplexity 83
thought but also because of the far-reaching influence it exercises
on a number of problems in more particular fields. As an interesting
example of the application of this idea to a special problem, I shall
here discuss the view entertained by Ibn ‘Arabi concerning the
historical religions and beliefs that have arisen among mankind.
The starting-point is furnished by the factual observation that
various peoples in the world have always worshipped and are wor-
shipping various gods. If, however, all the things and events in the
world are but so many self-manifestations of the Absolute, the
different gods also must necessarily be considered various special
forms in which the Absolute manifests itself.
All gods are ultimately one and the same God, but each nation or
each community believes in, and worships, Him in a special form.
Ibn ‘Arab! names it ‘God as created in various religious beliefs’.
And pushing this argument to its extreme, he holds that each man
has his own god, and worships his own god, and naturally denies the
gods of other people. God whom each man thus worships as his god
is the Lord ( rabb ) of that particular man.
In truth, everybody worships the same one God through different
forms. Whatever a man worships, he is worshipping indirectly God
Himself. This is the true meaning of polytheism or idolatry. And in
this sense, idol-worship is, as we have seen above, nothing blam-
able.
In order to bring home this point, Ibn ‘Arab! refers to an article of
belief which every Muslim is supposed to acknowledge; namely,
that God on the day of Resurrection will appear in the presence of
the believers in diverse forms. 37
You must know for sure, if you are a real believer, that God will
appear on the day of Resurrection (in various forms successively):
first in a certain form in which He will be recognized, next in a
different form in which He will be denied, then He will transform
Himself into another form in which He will be again recognized.
Throughout this whole process, He will remain He; in whatever form
He appears it is He and no one else. Yet, on the other hand, it is also
certain that this particular form is not the same as that particular
form.
Thus, the situation may be described as the one unique Essence
playing the role of a mirror. A man looks into it, and if he sees there
the particular image of God peculiar to his religion he recognizes it
and accepts it without question. If, however, he happens to see an
image of God peculiar to some other religion than his, he denies it.
This is comparable to the case in which a man sees in a mirror his own
image, then the image of some one else. In either case, the mirror is
one substance while the images reflected upon it are many in the eye
of the man who looks at it. He cannot see in the mirror one unique
image comprising the whole . 38
84 Sufism and Taoism
Thus the truth itself is quite simple: in whatever form God appears
in the mirror, it is always a particular phenomenal form of God, and
in this sense every image (i.e., every object worshipped as a god) is
ultimately no other than God Himself. This simple fact, however, is
beyond the reach of Reason. Reason is utterly powerless in a matter
of this nature, and the reasoning which is the activity of Reason is
unable to grasp the real meaning of this phenomenon. 39 The only
one who is able to do so is the real‘knower’ (‘arif). Ibn ‘ Arabi calls
such a true ‘knower’ who, in this particular case, penetrates into the
mystery of the paradoxical relation between the One and the Many,
a ‘worshipper of the Instant’ (‘ abid al-waqt), 40 meaning thereby a
man who worships every self-manifestation of God at every
moment as a particular form of the One.
Those who know the truth of the matter show a seemingly negative
attitude toward the various forms which ordinary people worship as
gods. (But this attitude of denial is merely a make-believe. In reality
they do not deny such a form of worship for themselves) for the high
degree of spiritual knowledge makes them behave according to the
dictates of the Instant. In this sense they are ‘worshippers of the
Instant .’ 41
In the consciousness of such men of high spirituality, each Instant is
a glorious ‘time’ of theophany. The Absolute manifests itself at
every moment with this or that of its Attributes. The Absolute,
viewed from this angle, never ceases to make a new self-
manifestation, and goes on changing its form from moment to
moment. 42 And the true ‘knowers’, on their part, go on responding
with flexibility to this ever changing process of Divine self-
manifestation. Of course, in so doing they are not worshipping the
changing forms themselves that come out outwardly on the surface;
they are worshipping through the ever changing forms the One that
remains eternally unchanging and unchangeable.
These men know, further, that not only themselves but even the
idol- worshippers are also (unconsciously) worshipping God beyond
the idols. This they know because they discern in the idol-
worshippers the majestic power of Divine self-manifestation ( sultan
al-tajalli ) working actively quite independently of the conscious
minds of the worshippers. 43
If, in spite of this knowledge, the ‘knowers’ hold outwardly an
attitude of denial toward idolatry, it is because they want to follow
the footsteps of the prophet Muhammad. The prophet forbad
idol-worship because he knew that the understanding of the mass of
people being shallow and superficial, they would surely begin to
worship the ‘forms’ without going beyond them. He urged them,
instead, to worship One God alone whom the people could know
Metaphysical Perplexity 85
only in a broad general way but never witness (in any concrete
form). The attitude of the ‘knowers’ toward idol- worship is pious
imitation of this attitude of Muhammad.
Let us go back to the point from which we started. We opened this
chapter with a discussion of the problem of ‘perplexity’ ( hayrah ).
We are now in a better position to understand the true nature of the
‘perplexity’ and to see to what extent the ontological structure of
Being is really ‘perplexing’ . A brief consideration of the problem at
this stage will make a suitable conclusion to the present chapter.
An infinity of things which are clearly different from each other
and some of which stand in marked opposition to one another are,
with all the divergencies, one and the same thing. The moment man
becomes aware of this fact, it cannot but throw his mind into
bewildering confusion. This ‘perplexity’ is quite a natural state for
those who have opened their eyes to the metaphysical depth of
Being.
But on reflection it will be realized that the human mind falls into
this ‘perplexity’ because it has not yet penetrated deeply below the
level of superficial understanding. In the mind of a sage who has
experienced the Unity of Being in its real depth there can no longer
be any place for any ‘perplexity’ . Here follows what Ibn ‘Arab! says
on this point. 44
The ‘perplexity’ arises because the mind of man becomes polarized
(i.e., toward two contradictory directions, one toward the One and
the other toward the Many). But he who knows (by the experience of
‘unveiling’) what I have just explained is no longer in ‘perplexity’, no
matter how many divergent things he may come to know. For (he
knows that) the divergence is simply due to the nature of the locus,
and that the locus in each case is the eternal archetype itself of the
thing. The Absolute goes on assuming different forms in accordance
with different eternal archetypes, i.e., different loci of self-
manifestation, and the determinate aspects which man perceives of it
go on changing correspondingly. In fact, the Absolute accepts every
one of these aspects that are attributed to it. Nothing, however, is
attributed to it except that in which it manifests itself (i.e., the
particular forms of its self-manifestation). And there is nothing at all
(in the whole world of Being) except this . 45
On the basis of this observation al-Qashani gives a final judgment
concerning the metaphysical ‘perplexity’. It is, he says, merely a
phenomenon observable in the earliest stage of spiritual
development. 46
The ‘perplexity’ is a state which occurs only in the beginning when
there still lingers the activity of Reason and the veil of thinking still
86
Sufism and Taoism
remains. But when the ‘unveiling’ is completed and the immediate
intuitive cognition becomes purified, the ‘perplexity’ is removed with
a sudden increase of knowledge coming from the direct witnessing of
the One manifesting itself in diverse forms of the archetypes in
accordance with the essential requirement of the Name ‘All-knowing’ (‘alim).* 1
Notes
1. Fu$., p. 55/72.
2. Cf. Affifi, Fu$., Com., p. 40; Fuj., p. 56/72-73.
3. Reference to Qoran, XXXVIII, 47.
4. p. 56.
5. Fuj., p. 56/73.
6. Qashani, p. 56.
7. Fuj., p. 57/73.
8. p. 57.
9. ibid.
10. i.e., from the point of view of the Names, in whose plane alone there come into
existence all these differences in degrees.
11. Fus-, p. 58/74.
12. Fuj., p. 48/69.
13. p. 48.
14. Qashani, ibid.
15. Fuj., p. 64/77.
16. p. 64.
17. Fus„ p. 64/77.
18. The words in parentheses belong to al-Qashani, p. 65.
19. ibid.
20. It is to be remarked that the multiplication of the mathematical ‘one’ is described
in terms of ‘self-manifestation’ ( tajalh ) just in the same way as the Absolute is
described as ‘manifesting itself’ in the Many.
Metaphysical Perplexity
21. p. 65, footnote.
22. Fu$„ p. 65/77-78.
87
23. i.e., one and the same thing qua ‘number’ is non-existent on the level of the
senses, existing only on the level of intellect, but it is, qua ‘a thing counted’, existent
on the level of the senses. In other words, it is the ‘thing counted’ that makes a
number exist in a concrete, sensible form. The same applies to the relation between
an archetype and a thing which actualizes it in a sensible form.
24. i.e., besides the ‘number’ and the ‘thing counted’, there must necessarily be also
‘one’ which is the ultimate source of all numbers and things counted. But ‘one’ which
thus causes and establishes the numbers is also caused and established by the latter in
concrete forms.
25. That is to say: we admit the one-ness (i.e., uniqueness) of each number, while
recognizing at the same time the one-ness (i.e., sameness) of all numbers.
26. You affirm of every number that which you negate of it when you consider it in
itself. This may be explained in more concrete terms in the following way. You admit
the inherence of ‘one’ in every number; ‘one’ is the common element of all the
numbers and is, in this respect, a sort of genus. But, on the other hand, you know that
‘one’ is not inherent in every number in its original form but only in a particularized
form in each case; ‘one’ may be considered a sort of species as distinguished from
genus. Thus ‘one’ , although it does exist in every number, is no longer the ‘one’ perse
in its absoluteness. And this precisely corresponds to the ontological situation in
which the Absolute is manifested in everything, but not as the absolute Absolute.
27. Fu$., p. 67/78.
28. p. 67.
29. the Absolute
/\
(universal self-determination)
/ \ .
, A
( individual
V self-determination ,
. / \
this ram that ram
, N
/ individual \
\ self-determination /
f \
Abraham Ishmael
30. i.e., by a specific self-determination different from the self-determination by
which the Absolute became ‘man’.
31. Fu$„ pp. 231-232/183-184.
32. Fus., p. 253/200.
33. ‘Water’ for Ibn ‘Arabi is a symbol of cosmic Life.
34. The idea is that the earth produces only ‘earth-like’ things, i.e., its own ‘dupli-
cates’ , the symbolic meaning of which is that the things of the world are ultimately of
the same nature as the Absolute which is their ontological ground.
88 Sufism and Taoism
35. i.e., the luxuriant vegetation which grows forth from the earth, being of the same
nature as the latter, ‘doubles’ so to speak the earth.
36. This is a difficult passage, and there is a remarkable divergence between the
Cairo edition and that of Affifi. The Affifi text reads: fa-thabata bi-hi wa-khaliqi-hi
ahadlyah al-kathrah ‘thus the unity of the Many becomes established by the world
and its Creator’. The Cairo edition, which I follow here, reads: fa-thunniyat bi-hi
wa-yukhalifu-hu ahadiyah al-kathrah.
37. Fuy., p. 232/184.
38. i.e., what he actually sees in the mirror is always the particular image of a
particular object which happens to be there in front of the mirror; he can never see a
universal image comprising all the particular images in unity.
39. Fuj., p. 233/185.
40. The word waqt ‘Time’ in this context means, as al-Qashani remarks, the present
moment, or each successive moment as it is actualized (p. 247).
41. Fu. j., p. 247/196.
42. a view comparable with the atomistic metaphysics of Islamic theology.
43. Fus., p. 247/196.
44. Fu$., p. 68/78.
45. All the divergent aspects ( ahk 'am ) that are recognizable in the world of Being are
so many actualizations of the eternal archetypes. And the eternal archetypes, in their
turn, are nothing but so many self-manifestations of the Absolute. In this sense
everything is ultimately the Absolute. And there is no place for ‘perplexity’.
46. p. 68.
47. The archetypes are, as we shall see later in more detail, the eternal essential
forms of the things of the world as they exist in the Divine Consciousness. They are
born in accordance with the requirement of the Attribute of Omniscience.
