Figures

Ibn Arabi

IB-un AH-rah-bee
The greatest master of Sufism, Ibn Arabi (1165-1240), whose doctrine of the unity of being made him Islam's most quoted and most argued mystic.
Documented

The Shaykh al-Akbar

Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi, born Murcia, died Damascus: author of the Futuhat al-Makkiyya and the Fusus al-Hikam, teacher of wahdat al-wujud, the unity of being, the doctrine that existence is one and God is its only true reality. His school shaped Sufism, Persian poetry, and Ottoman theology; his defenders and prosecutors both fill libraries.

Assessment: Documented: the works, the school, and the eight-century argument.
Stories

The pantheism charge

The permanent accusation: unity of being as pantheism in turban, God dissolved into everything, everything excused as God. His defenders answer that the doctrine distinguishes the Real from creation absolutely; the charge and the answer are both still being printed.

Assessment: Stories: the pantheism reading is a simplification; the simplification has real institutional power.
Interesting claims

The barzakh concept

His subtlest tool: the barzakh, the isthmus between, imagination (khayal) as the intermediate world where spirit takes body and body takes spirit. Ibn Arabi built a physics of the in-between, and every later theory of the imaginal, including Jung's, walks his bridge, credited or not.

Assessment: Interesting: Corbin's scholarship made the bridge visible; the Jungian crossing is debated genealogy.
Sources and further reading
  1. Ibn Arabi, Fusus al-Hikam and Futuhat al-Makkiyya
  2. Henry Corbin, Alone with the Alone (1958)
  3. William Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge (1989)
Worth asking

Can a doctrine be both a tradition's crown and its permanent accusation?

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GR8YFILES · competing origin stories, labeled by the strength of their evidence · readers 14+