Philosopher
Ibn Arabi
1165–1240
Also known as Ibn al-Arabi, Ibn ʿArabī, al-Shaykh al-Akbar
Andalusian thinker, called the Greatest Master, who taught that there is no true existence but God, and gave imagination a central place in knowledge and in the cosmos.
Imagination is the widest known thing.
Ibn Arabi was born in Murcia in 1165. After a visionary conversion in his early teens, he was taken to meet Averroes, and later recalled explaining to the philosopher the limits of rational thought. He studied with many teachers in al-Andalus and North Africa, left for Mecca in 1201, travelled through Iraq and Anatolia, and settled in Damascus in 1223, where he taught and wrote until his death in 1240.
His works cover the whole range of the Islamic sciences, and later tradition called him “the Greatest Master”. Within a hundred years of his death his teachings had reached every part of the Islamic world, largely through his stepson Sadr al-Din Qunawi, and fed into the philosophy of Mulla Sadra. The Hanbalite polemicist Ibn Taymiyya attacked him, starting a long controversy over the “Oneness of Being”. He has often been classed as a Sufi, though he did not call himself one, and he has been described as the greatest of all Muslim philosophers, if philosophy is understood in its broad modern sense.
Key ideas
- Realisation (tahqiq)
- Real knowledge cannot come from imitating others; it must be realised within oneself. Everything has its truth and its right (haqq), and the human task is to know each thing’s truth and act rightly towards it.
- No existence but God
- God, the Real, is the only true existence, boundless and undefinable, and He discloses Himself in all things; in themselves, all other things are unreal. Later writers called this the “Oneness of Being”, a phrase Ibn Arabi himself never used.
- The two eyes of the heart
- Reason can only delimit, define and analyse, and so grasps God’s transcendence. Disciplined imagination sees His presence in all things. The heart needs both eyes, seeing God as incomparable with one and as similar with the other.
- The cosmos as an isthmus (barzakh)
- The created world is a barzakh, an isthmus that both divides and joins, standing between the light of Existence and the darkness of nonexistence, like the line between sunlight and shade.
- The Perfect Man
- The human being who fully realises his potential is the Perfect Man, God’s representative and the spirit of the cosmos. Standing in the “station of no station”, he embraces every standpoint without being confined by any of them.
- Tradition
- Arabic and Islamic
- Region
- Al-Andalus and Damascus
- Period
- Later Islamic
Influences
Influenced by
Ibn Arabi1165–1240
Influenced
Influenced by
Ibn Arabi1165–1240
Influenced
Where these links come from
- Ibn Arabi drew on Avicenna. Source: William Chittick, Ibn ‘Arabī, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Ibn Taymiyya argued against Ibn Arabi. Source: Jon Hoover, Ibn Taymiyya, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Mulla Sadra drew on Ibn Arabi. Source: Sajjad Rizvi, Mulla Sadra, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Key works
- The Meccan Openings (al-Futuhat al-makkiyya)
- The Ringstones of the Wisdoms (Fusus al-hikam)
- The Interpreter of Desires (Tarjuman al-ashwaq)
- Read free at Wikisource (translated by Reynold Alleyne Nicholson, as The Tarjumán al-Ashwáq: A Collection of Mystical Odes)
Sources
- William Chittick, Ibn ‘Arabī, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Sajjad Rizvi, Mulla Sadra, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy