Ibn Arabi School
from 1200
There is only one being, and every existing thing is that being disclosing itself in a particular way.
- Active
- from 1200
- Where
- Andalusia, Anatolia and Damascus, then everywhere Sufi
- Also
- مدرسة ابن عربي
- Status
- living
- Tradition
- Islamic
The claim
The unity of being — wahdat al-wujud. Nothing exists but God, and the cosmos is the outward face of a reality whose inward face is unknowable. Creatures are not God, and are not other than God.
What it held
Ibn Arabi is called the Greatest Master and wrote perhaps 350 works, one of which runs to thousands of pages. The system is genuinely difficult and its central formula is easy to misstate in either direction.
The claim is not that everything is God, which would collapse the distinction he needs. It is that being is one, and that what we call things are the fixed realities of God's knowledge receiving existence — loci in which the one being discloses itself. Each disclosure is unrepeatable, so no two moments and no two things manifest the same face.
The Perfect Human is the second key idea: a being in whom all the divine names are manifest at once, and through whom the cosmos is complete. It is a cosmological role rather than a moral compliment.
Between the sensory and the intellectual he places the imaginal — a real domain, with its own laws, where meanings take form. That is where dreams and visions occur, and treating it as a genuine level of reality rather than as fancy is one of his most consequential moves.
How it argued
Exposition through Quranic exegesis and reported unveiling, structured by the divine names, and written in a dense symbolic register that requires commentary.
What it was arguing against
Anyone who takes God's transcendence or immanence alone. His formula is that both must be affirmed together, and that affirming only one is the characteristic error.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether wahdat al-wujud amounts to pantheism, which opponents from Ibn Taymiyya onward have charged and which his commentators deny. Whether all religions are equally valid paths, which some passages appear to say.
Common misconceptions
That it is pantheism. Ibn Arabi maintains the distinction between the Real and the cosmos throughout; the position is closer to what Western philosophy would call panentheism, and even that fits imperfectly.
How it began
A young man in Andalusia who reportedly met Averroes as a boy and left him disturbed — the rationalist and the visionary each recognising the other as a serious problem.
What became of it
Living, and the dominant metaphysical framework in much of the Sufi world, while remaining contested by more literalist currents.
Lasting influence
Persian, Ottoman, Indian and Malay Sufism entire. Dante scholarship has argued for a connection. Modern comparative religion draws on him constantly, sometimes carelessly.
Why it still matters
It is the most fully developed non-dualist metaphysics in a monotheistic tradition, and the natural comparison with Advaita Vedanta.
Put another way
One light in a hall of coloured glass, where each pane shows a colour that is not in the light.
Where to start
The Bezels of Wisdom with a commentary. Without one it is very close to impenetrable.
The surprising bit
He is said to have met Averroes as a young man; Averroes asked whether unveiling gave what reason gave, and Ibn Arabi answered yes and no, and reports that the philosopher went pale.
In their own words
He is now as He was then.
My heart has become capable of every form.
Connections
- Opposed by
- Ash’arism
- Parallel to
- Advaita Vedanta
The verdict
The most ambitious metaphysics written in Arabic, and the most argued about ever since.