Ibn Arabi (1165-1240)

Birth in Murcia and childhood in Seville

Muhammad ibn 'Alî ibn al-'Arabî was born on July 28, 1165 (17 Ramadan 560 of the Hijra) in Murcia, capital of a small taifa of Muslim Spain then ruled by Prince Ibn Mardanîsh, nicknamed "the Wolf King" by Christian chroniclers.^[11] His family, of Arabo-Berber stock, belonged to the court's entourage: his father, 'Alî ibn Muhammad, was in the service of Ibn Mardanîsh — William C. Chittick writes that he was "apparently employed" there, without deciding between an administrative and a military function.^[12] In 1172, when Ibn Arabi was seven, the Almohads conquered Murcia and put an end to the taifa; the family then resettled in Seville, then one of the most brilliant cultural capitals of the Muslim West.^[13]

It was in this Andalusia of the last third of the 12th century — a world in which Muslim, Jewish and Christian communities lived side by side, not without tension, and where Greek philosophical thought rediscovered by the Arabs simultaneously fertilized theology, law, medicine and mysticism — that Ibn Arabi received his formation. He studied the Islamic sciences with numerous masters in Andalusia and North Africa^[14] — biographical tradition counts some sixty — and above all under the influence of the Maghrebi Sufi master Abû Madyan (d. 1198), tutelary figure of Western Sufism whose spiritual influence on him — although the two never met in person — was decisive.^[15]

The founding vision and the meeting with Averroes

As a teenager, Ibn Arabi went through an intense mystical experience — a state of annihilation in God (fanâ') — which overturned his trajectory and directed him toward the Sufi path rather than the administrative or legal career his birth had destined him for.^[16] His father, a friend of the great philosopher and judge Ibn Rushd (Averroes, d. 1198), reported this experience to him; intrigued, the philosopher asked to meet the adolescent. The interview, which Ibn Arabi himself recounts many years later in his autobiographical writings, took place in Cordoba around 1180.^[17]

The account, which became famous, stages an elliptical exchange. Averroes greets the young man with a simple "Yes"; Ibn Arabi answers "Yes," which delights the philosopher, convinced of an immediate meeting of minds — before his young interlocutor adds "No," plunging Averroes into perplexity.^[18] The philosopher then asks him directly: what did the mystical illumination reveal to him, and does it coincide with what speculative thought attains?

"Yes and no. Between the Yea and the Nay the spirits take their flight beyond matter, and the necks detach themselves from their bodies" — Ibn Arabi, reply reported to Averroes, quoted in his own autobiographical account^[19]

The scene, highly stylized, expresses Ibn Arabi's central conviction: direct mystical knowledge (dhawq, spiritual "taste") surpasses discursive reason without absolutely contradicting it — it encompasses and transcends it.^[20] In the historiography of Sufism, the anecdote marks the symbolic meeting of two paths of classical Islam: the rationalist Peripatetic philosophy of Averroes and the intuitive mystical path of which Ibn Arabi would become the greatest theoretician.

Fatima bint al-Muthanna and the masters of Seville

Among the spiritual masters of his Sevillian youth, Ibn Arabi gives an exceptional place to a woman: Fatima bint al-Muthanna of Cordoba, an extremely aged Sufi — over ninety when he met her — living in total destitution, whom he served as a disciple for nearly two years, longer than with any other master of that period.^[21] In his writings, Ibn Arabi reports that she declared to him:

"I am your spiritual mother and the light of your earthly mother" — Fatima bint al-Muthanna, words reported by Ibn Arabi in the Rûh al-Quds^[22]

This formula, in which spiritual filiation replaces biological filiation, illustrates a conviction Ibn Arabi would defend all his life: spiritual rank depends neither on sex, nor on social rank, nor on book learning.^[23] He also mentions two other women Sufis of that Sevillian period, Shams Umm al-Fuqarâ' ("Shams, mother of the poor") and a disciple named Nûna Fâtima bint Ibn al-Muthannâ — sources sometimes distinguish them poorly, a sign of the fragility of biographical transmission for these women figures who were nonetheless decisive in his formation.^[24]

At about twenty, Ibn Arabi married Maryam bint Muhammad, herself engaged in the spiritual path, with whom he shared his first years of marriage in Andalusia.^[25] Between 1193 and 1198, he made several journeys to North Africa — Tunis in 1193-1194, then Fez in 1195 — in contact with other Maghrebi Sufi circles, before leaving Andalusia for the last time in his life in 1198.^[26]

The pilgrimage to Mecca and the vision of the Eternal Youth

Ibn Arabi arrived in Mecca in 1202 to perform the pilgrimage (hajj); he stayed there about three years.^[27] It was there, during a ritual circumambulation of the Kaaba, that he reports one of the most famous visions of his work: the encounter with a mysterious "Eternal Youth" (al-Fatâ), an androgynous and luminous figure whom the text deliberately leaves undetermined — whether an angel, the personified spirit of the Black Stone, or the incarnation of the Holy Spirit — the inaugural episode of the first chapter of the Futûhât al-Makkiyya.^[28]

It was also in Mecca that he frequented the family of a Persian scholar, whose daughter — whom later tradition has haloed with an almost symbolic aura of divine Wisdom — inspired in him the collection of mystical love poems entitled Tarjumân al-Ashwâq ("The Interpreter of Desires"), which he later had to accompany with a commentary to dispel the suspicions of profane sensuality his lyricism had aroused in certain literalist readers.^[29]

From Baghdad to Konya: the Eastern formation years

Between 1204 and 1207, Ibn Arabi travelled through Syria, Palestine, Iraq and Anatolia: he visited Baghdad in 1205 — where he stayed only a few days but met several Sufi masters of the Abbasid capital — then Jerusalem in 1206.^[30] These wandering years brought him into contact with the diversity of the spiritual schools of the Eastern Muslim world, very different from the Andalusi Sufism in which he had been formed.

It was in Anatolia that he met the man who would become his most important disciple, Sadr al-Dîn al-Qûnawî (d. 1274) — Ibn Arabi had married his widowed mother, thus becoming his stepfather.^[31] Qûnawî would be the great systematizer of Akbarian thought — it was he, not Ibn Arabi, who gave precise technical content to notions the master had deliberately left fluid, notably the schema of the five Divine Presences discussed below.^[32]

Settling in Damascus (1223-1240)

In 1223, at fifty-eight, Ibn Arabi settled permanently in Damascus, where he spent the last seventeen years of his life under the protection of local notables, particularly the family of the qadi Ibn al-Zakî, who offered him lodging and a pension.^[33] It was in Damascus that he wrote most of his late work, including the definitive, considerably expanded version of the Futûhât al-Makkiyya.

In 1229, he composed in a few weeks, he says, at the direct command of the Prophet Muhammad himself, who appeared to him in a dream holding out a book — his densest and most studied work: the Fusûs al-Hikam.^[34] He died in Damascus on November 16, 1240 (22 Rabî' II 638 AH), at the age of 75, and was buried in the cemetery of the Banû Zakî family, at the foot of Mount Qâsiyûn, in the al-Sâlihiyya district.^[35]

Al-Futûhât al-Makkiyya, the Meccan Illuminations

Ibn Arabi's masterwork, the al-Futûhât al-Makkiyya ("The Openings" or "Meccan Illuminations"), is a mystical encyclopedia begun in Mecca in 1202, completed in a first redaction in Damascus in 1231, then entirely rewritten and expanded by the master's own hand between 1234 and 1238.^[45] The work comprises 560 chapters and, in modern printed editions, several thousand pages — one of the vastest theologico-mystical sums ever composed by a single author in religious history.^[46]

The title refers to the spiritual "openings" (futûhât) the mystic receives directly from God — the work indeed presents itself as the transcription of knowledge received by direct inspiration (fath) rather than as a treatise of ordered discursive reasoning.^[47] In it he treats, pell-mell, metaphysics, cosmology, law, spiritual psychology, oneirology, accounts of meetings with living or deceased saints, and self-commentaries on his own mystical experience.

Fusûs al-Hikam, the Book of the Bezels of Wisdom

Shorter — about a hundred pages in current Arabic editions — but of extreme doctrinal density, the Fusûs al-Hikam ("The Book of the Bezels" or "Seals of Wisdom") organizes its matter into twenty-seven chapters, each devoted to a biblical or Qur'anic prophet (Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, etc.) seen as the privileged incarnation of a "wisdom" (hikma) and of a particular divine Name.^[48][49] The work, translated into French as early as 1955 by the metaphysician Titus Burckhardt under the title La Sagesse des prophètes, remains Ibn Arabi's most read and most commented text, including by his adversaries: it is essentially on passages of the Fusûs that the accusations of heresy brought against him after his death rely.^[50]

How many books did he really write?

The reference bibliography, established by Osman Yahya (Histoire et classification de l'œuvre d'Ibn ʿArabī, Institut français de Damas, 1964, 2 vols.), lists some 846 titles attributed to Ibn Arabi — but a significant number of them are apocryphal, excerpts from vaster works or duplicates under different titles.^[51] The lists established by Ibn Arabi himself for his disciples (the Fihris and the Ijâza), at the end of his life, contain for their part only about 250 each.^[52] Contemporary critical research on manuscripts, carried out since 2001 by the Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi Society (examination of about 2,800 manuscripts), retains as solidly established only about a hundred works: 84 certain and 11 probable in the balance published in 2012, 86 verified and 11 probable at the 2015 staging point, for a corpus held to be authentic of 106 works at the 2019 balance.^[53] Suffice it to say that the round figures formerly repeated — "850 titles, 700 authentic, 400 preserved" — can no longer be repeated as such. This considerable output — poems, short treatises, Qur'anic commentaries, doctrinal opuscules — partly explains the difficulty of the controversies surrounding him: his defenders have often argued that certain incriminated passages came from apocryphal works falsely attributed to his name, or from copies altered by later unscrupulous scribes.^[54]

'Wahdat al-wujûd': a phrase he never wrote

A capital point for understanding the controversy: Ibn Arabi himself never uses the expression wahdat al-wujûd in his writings.^[55] It was his fiercest adversary, Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), who brought this expression to the fore and popularized it as a term of accusation to designate and condemn his thought — a term he may have taken up from Ibn Sab'în, who uses it on a few occasions without any clear technical meaning; later Sufi literature — beginning with al-Farghânî, commentator of the Akbarian school, the first to give it a precise technical meaning — would then propose various meanings for it.^[56]

What Ibn Arabi actually writes is more nuanced than a simple pantheist identification of God and the world. His central thesis is that there is no truly necessary and self-sufficient being apart from God: every creature is ontologically contingent (mumkin), that is, it possesses by itself neither existence nor the necessity of existing — a thesis that takes up, radicalizing it on the mystical plane, the classical distinction between necessary being and possible being already developed by the philosopher Avicenna.^[57] From this postulate, Ibn Arabi draws a bold consequence: since the world has, by itself, no reality of its own, its only reality comes to it from a permanent borrowing from the divine Being who alone truly "is."

Commentators sum up this ontological ambivalence of the world with a formula often attributed to the master: to say of a thing that it is the world is to speak truly — and to say that it is the eternal Real is to speak truly as well (paraphrase after Chittick's syntheses, not a verified literal quotation).^[58]

This formula of "He / not He" (huwa lâ huwa) — the creature is at once a manifestation of God and the veil that conceals Him — runs through his entire work. Each divine Name (merciful, powerful, just, etc.) is "related" (nisba) to a particular aspect of creation, so that, according to a formula attributed to him, every created thing is, in a sense, a particularized divine Name.^[59]

The Perfect Man and the Muhammadan Reality

At the summit of this cosmological hierarchy stands the Perfect Man (al-insân al-kâmil): the being in whom the totality of divine Names and realities are synthesized, the Logos through which, according to Ibn Arabi, all things are created, and the obligatory intermediate vicegerent (khalîfa) between God and the universe.^[60]

According to the synthesis given by William C. Chittick in The Sufi Path of Knowledge (1989), this cosmic anthropology makes the cosmos the unfolding of what Adam contains in synthesis: man is as it were the spirit of which the cosmos is the body (paraphrase, not a verified literal quotation).^[61]

This archetypal reality finds its most perfect historical incarnation in the Prophet Muhammad, of whom Ibn Arabi develops the theory of the Muhammadan Reality (al-haqîqa al-muhammadiyya), also called the "Reality of realities": the eternal prototype through which God knows Himself before all creation, and whose temporal, historical manifestation is but one actualization among others.^[62] The Perfect Man occupies what the Shaykh calls the "Station of no station" (maqâm lâ maqâm): he embraces all particular spiritual stations without being limited by any of them.^[63]

The five Divine Presences and the creative imagination

Systematized by his disciple Qûnawî from the master's intuitions, the doctrine of the five Divine Presences (al-hadarât al-ilâhiyyat al-khams) organizes reality into five nested levels: the divine Presence properly so called (God's knowledge of the cosmos), the invisible spiritual world, the imaginal world ('âlam al-khayâl), the visible corporeal world, and the Perfect Man who synthesizes the four preceding ones.^[64]

The imaginal world — the third presence, the hinge of the system — is decisive in Akbarian metaphysics: Ibn Arabi places in it mystical visions, angels appearing in human form, and the events of the afterlife (paradise, hell) as they will be experienced by souls. This intermediate level is neither purely spiritual nor purely material: it possesses, in his view, a proper ontological reality, irreducible to the other two — which allows him to avoid a strict dualism of spirit and matter while maintaining a hierarchy of degrees of being.^[65]

A mercy that overflows wrath: the question of hell

A controversial consequence of this system concerns eschatology. According to Abdul Muthalib's study (2022), Ibn Arabi teaches — relying on the principle of the priority of divine Mercy over divine Wrath, a theme grounded in a hadith attributed to the Prophet ("My mercy prevails over My wrath") — that the punishment of hell, for the damned who remain there eternally in the literal Qur'anic sense, nonetheless eventually turns, with time, into a soothed habituation, if not a form of relative well-being: the manifestation of the divine Name "All-Merciful" (al-Rahmân) would there replace that of the Name "Avenger" (al-Muntaqim). The Futûhât as well as the Fusûs affirm this, according to Islamologists, who refer — according to the references given by Muthalib, not checked against the originals in this redaction — to the following Arabic passages (Dâr al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya edition, Beirut, 1999: vol. 7, p. 70; vol. 3, pp. 455 and 474; vol. 7, pp. 402 and 474) and to Qâshânî's classical commentary on the Fusûs.^[66] In this reading, he would not frontally deny the eternity of hell affirmed by the Qur'an, but would shift its meaning: perpetual suffering would cease to be experienced as suffering, without the infernal sojourn itself ceasing.^[67]

This thesis — which remained minoritarian and debated even within Sufism itself, to the point that its defender ʿAbd al-Wahhâb al-Shaʿrânî (d. 1565) denied its authenticity, attributing it to interpolations — is said to have supplied later Muslim thinkers favorable to a form of universal salvation with a doctrinal foundation to refer to — although Ibn Arabi never formulated as explicitly as they did the thesis of a final salvation of all the damned.^[68] One readily recognizes, in this attempt to make mercy overflow into the very heart of punishment, a debate structurally close to the one the Church had to settle against Origenist apocatastasis — the doctrine, condemned at the Second Council of Constantinople (553), which ratified the condemnation of Origenism, of a final universal restoration that would include the salvation of the damned and even of demons.

The Seal of Muhammadan sainthood, a contested claim

Ibn Arabi considered himself, or was understood by his disciples as considering himself, the "Seal of Muhammadan sainthood" (khâtam al-walâya al-muhammadiyya) — that is, the ultimate and most perfect heir of the sainthood proper to the spiritual lineage of the Prophet Muhammad, a rank he develops in a treatise specifically devoted to this question.^[69] This claim, kept discreet during his lifetime and entrusted only to close disciples, draws on the well-established Qur'anic doctrine according to which Muhammad is the "Seal of the prophets" — the last of them, after whom no new prophecy is expected — but it transposes this closure to the distinct domain of mystical sainthood.^[70]

This claim never achieved consensus, including among Sufis: several centuries later, the partisans of the Maghrebi Sufi master Ahmad al-Tijânî (d. 1815) would claim this same title of Seal for their own founder — a claim academic research documents as carried by the Tijani order itself, its founder declaring that he received his visions directly from the Prophet^[71] —, Tijani sources affirming that the Prophet himself had revealed it to him in person^[72]: a sign, according to those same sources, that the question of the last and most perfect spiritual heir of Muhammad remains a point of friction between rival great Sufi orders.

Ibn Taymiyya: 'a greater danger than the Mongols'

The Hanbali jurist Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), a reference figure of Sunni rigorism, was Ibn Arabi's most systematic and most influential adversary. He reproaches him for assimilating, through the doctrine he baptizes wahdat al-wujûd, the substance of God to that of nature — which he explicitly qualifies as a form of shirk (associationism) and kufr (unbelief).^[73] According to historian Jamileh Kadivar's analysis, Ibn Taymiyya pronounced an unambiguous takfîr (declaration of exclusion from Islam) against Ibn Arabi and his disciples, judging the spiritual harm they caused to believers' souls even graver than the material harm inflicted by the Mongol invasions then ravaging the Muslim world — a summary of his position by historiography, not a literal quotation from Ibn Taymiyya.^[74] Other specialists stress that Ibn Taymiyya targets first and foremost the doctrine — the kufr of the monist thesis — and that the exact scope of his declarations regarding the very person of Ibn Arabi is debated in historiography.^[75]

Other major legal authorities take up these criticisms: the famous jurist and theologian al-'Izz ibn 'Abd al-Salâm (d. 1262) is said to have called him a "master of evil" and reproached him for professing the eternity of the world and for not explicitly condemning fornication — accusations whose reporting sources diverge as to their exact authenticity.^[76] The historian Ibn Khaldûn (d. 1406), in his famous Muqaddima, also devotes critical pages to the metaphysical monism of the Akbarian school.^[77]

The posthumous trial: book burnings and fatwas of excommunication

The controversy intensified after Ibn Arabi's death, notably from the 15th century onward. The Egyptian preacher Burhân al-Dîn al-Biqâ'î (d. 1480) wrote a treatise with an unambiguous title, Tanbîh al-Ghabî ilâ Takfîr Ibn 'Arabî ("Warning to the ignorant concerning the apostasy of Ibn 'Arabî"), which lists numerous quotations from the Fusûs al-Hikam deemed openly blasphemous — notably passages in which Ibn Arabi seems to justify, in his chapter devoted to Noah, the refusal of that prophet's contemporary idol-worshippers, read by al-Biqâ'î as an implicit apology for idolatry.^[78] Copies of his works were, at various times and in various regions of the Muslim world, publicly burned on the orders of hostile jurists.^[79]

The defenders: al-Suyûtî, al-Sha'rânî, al-Fayrûzabâdî

Faced with these attacks, a scholarly tradition just as respectable takes the side of the Shaykh al-Akbar. The great Egyptian polygraph Jalâl al-Dîn al-Suyûtî (d. 1505) answers al-Biqâ'î directly with a treatise of almost symmetrical title, Tanbîh al-Ghabî bi-Tabri'at Ibn 'Arabî ("Warning to the ignorant concerning the innocence of Ibn 'Arabî"), in which he ranks Ibn Arabi among the authentic saints of God (awliyâ') and recalls that scholars, past and present, are divided about him — some holding him for a saint, as did in their time Ibn 'Atâ' Allâh al-Sakandarî and al-Yâfi'î, others, particularly a large share of the jurists, for a heretic.^[80] The Maghrebi jurist 'Alî ibn Maymûn al-Maghribî (d. 1511) for his part publishes a defense fatwa, Tanbîh al-Ghabî fî Tanzîh Ibn 'Arabî ("Warning to the ignorant concerning the exoneration of Ibn 'Arabî").^[81]

Two other great figures also take his defense: the lexicographer al-Fayrûzabâdî (d. 1415), author of the famous dictionary al-Qâmûs al-Muhît, and the Egyptian Sufi 'Abd al-Wahhâb al-Sha'rânî (d. 1565), for whom the most shocking statements attributed to Ibn Arabi come from interpolations and falsifications introduced by "anonymous apostates" into later manuscripts, and therefore do not reflect the master's authentic thought.^[82]

Reading the table: the controversy over Ibn Arabi sets, from the 13th century to the present day, two equally established Muslim scholarly traditions against each other, one holding him for an authentic saint, the other for a dangerous heretic.^[83]

A forgotten tomb, then restored by an Ottoman sultan (1516)

This legal hostility had concrete consequences on the very memory of the man: his tomb in Damascus fell into lasting neglect — secondary literature reports its dilapidation at the end of the Middle Ages^[84] — and the situation changed radically only in 1516: the Ottoman sultan Selim I, who had just taken Damascus from the Mamluks, had the tomb restored and had a mosque and a Sufi convent complex (takiyya) built there, in the al-Sâlihiyya district — the ArchNet notice of the mausoleum dates this foundation to 1516 — a highly political gesture by which the Sunni Ottomans sought to win the favor of Damascene Sufi circles at the very moment they were annexing Syria.^[85] A later tradition recounts that Selim is said to have seen Ibn Arabi in a dream announcing his victory to him; this hagiographical account does not appear in the ArchNet notice, which attests only the 1516 foundation: it is given here for what it is, a tradition, not an established fact.

Miguel Asín Palacios, the priest who followed Ibn Arabi to Dante

One of the most rigorous and most influential Christian readers of Ibn Arabi was a Spanish Catholic priest, Miguel Asín Palacios (1871-1944), a specialist in Arabic and Islam.^[86] In his major work El Islam cristianizado ("Christianized Islam," 1931), Asín Palacios devotes an in-depth study to Ibn Arabi's Sufism, tracing its roots to the earlier Andalusi mystical school of Ibn Masarra (d. 931).^[87]

It was another work, however, published as early as 1919, that secured Asín Palacios a lasting reputation far beyond Islamic studies: La Escatología musulmana en la Divina Comedia ("Muslim Eschatology in the Divine Comedy"), in which he argues, on the basis of many precise textual parallels, that Islamic sources concerning the Prophet's night journey and celestial ascension (mi'râj), as well as certain writings of Ibn Arabi himself, may have influenced, directly or indirectly, the architecture of the Hell, Purgatory and Paradise of Dante Alighieri.^[88] The thesis, controversial in its time, remains debated among Dante scholars, but it had the merit of opening a serious scholarly dialogue between Islamic studies and Christian medieval studies, conducted precisely by a Catholic priest concerned with understanding Ibn Arabi's thought loyally before judging it.^[89]

Louis Massignon: the suspicion of a monism without transcendence

The great French Catholic Islamologist Louis Massignon (1883-1962), the most influential Western specialist of Muslim mysticism in the 20th century, takes a markedly more reserved, if not severe, view of Ibn Arabi.^[90] Attached to the figure of the Baghdadi mystic al-Hallâj (d. 922), a Sufi martyr whom he holds for the incarnation of a "testimonial" and transcendent mysticism — a mysticism which, even in the most intimate union, preserves the infinite distance between the human witness and the transcendent God he attests — Massignon explicitly opposes Ibn Arabi's path, in which he perceives a Neoplatonic resurgence altering, in his view, the ascetic and transcendent purity of primitive Sufism.^[91]

According to Islamologist Florence Ollivry's analysis, Massignon was particularly wary of the existential monism and the aesthetic, immanent conception of mystical union developed by Ibn Arabi, reproaching him for setting aside any genuinely transcendent intervention of divinity in the mystical experience itself.^[92] This critical judgment from a Catholic scholar otherwise profoundly admiring of Muslim mysticism in general — and notoriously engaged, personally, in a course of spiritual fraternity with Islam — gives all the more weight to his reservation: it does not proceed from hostility in principle toward Sufism, but from a precise theological discrimination between two forms of mysticism, one deemed compatible with divine transcendence, the other suspected of dissolving it.^[93]

Ibn Arabi and Meister Eckhart: the same vertigo, two magisteria

The most enlightening comparison for a Catholic reader remains doubtless the one comparative-mysticism specialists have long drawn between Ibn Arabi and the Rhenish Dominican Meister Eckhart (d. 1328) — his exact contemporary of the next generation, who died the same year as Ibn Taymiyya. Although no direct influence between the two men is attested, their formulations of the soul's radical union with God present striking similarities, to the point that several comparative studies are devoted to them.^[94]

Yet Eckhart too was condemned: Pope John XXII, by the bull In agro dominico of March 27, 1329, censured twenty-eight propositions drawn from his teaching — the first fifteen and the last two as formally heretical (seventeen in all), and the other eleven, formally reproved as well but under the lesser qualification of ill-sounding, rash and suspect of heresy (male sonantes, temerarios et suspectos de haeresi), the bull specifying that with many explanations they could receive a Catholic meaning.^[95] The Eckhart case shows that a mystical language of transcending every created limit, pushed to its extreme consequences, can indeed spill over into formulations the Catholic Magisterium itself has judged incompatible with the faith — not from hostility to mysticism as such, but because certain formulations, taken literally, erase the distinction between the created soul and the uncreated God it seeks to attain.^[96]

This precedent internal to the Church matters: it shows that Catholic reservation toward Ibn Arabi's monism is not a double standard applied only to non-Christian mystics. The same theological criterion — preserving the real distinction between Creator and creature, even in the most intense mystical union — led the Church to censure propositions of one of its own religious, a Dominican renowned for his personal holiness and never himself condemned as an individual.^[97]

What the Catholic Church cannot accept

One must acknowledge, before any criticism, the intellectual depth and coherence of Ibn Arabi's system: his metaphysics answers an authentic and universally shared religious intuition — the feeling that every creature, left to itself, is nothing, and that its entire consistency comes to it from elsewhere. Catholic theology fully shares this intuition: it lies at the very heart of the doctrine of creation, according to which nothing that exists subsists by itself, but everything continuously receives being from God, who alone "Is" in the full sense.^[98]

Where Ibn Arabi's metaphysics and the Catholic doctrine of creation diverge radically is on the exact nature of this dependence. For the Catholic faith, God creates the world out of nothing (ex nihilo) and freely: the creature remains, in its very being, really distinct from the divine substance — dependent on God for existing, but neither identical with Him nor a necessary component or manifestation of His Being.^[99] It is precisely this real distinction that the First Vatican Council intends to defend in its dogmatic constitution Dei Filius (April 24, 1870):

"If anyone says that the substance or essence of God and that of all things are one and the same thing, let him be anathema." — First Vatican Council, dogmatic constitution Dei Filius, ch. 1, canon 1, April 24, 1870^[100]

The following canon condemns, in the same movement, anyone who would teach that finite things have emanated from the divine substance, or that the divine essence, by manifestation and evolution of itself, becomes all things.^[101]

Akbarian monism — even in its most prudent formulation, the one that carefully distinguishes necessary Being from contingent being — tends, by its internal logic, to reduce this distance to a difference of degree rather than a difference of nature: the creature becomes a "locus of manifestation" necessary to God, almost an extension of His self-unfolding, rather than a being truly other, freely willed, distinct from Him forever. This is exactly the type of formulation Ibn Taymiyya denounced within Islam itself, and which the Church, in Eckhart's case, likewise judged untenable when a Christian mystical language approached it.

Yet this system seduces, and one must understand why: it offers a powerful metaphysical consolation — that of a proximity to God so intimate that no separation seems conceivable anymore — and a real intellectual elegance, that of a unified system in which everything is explained by a single principle. But this philosophical seduction does not make the system true. The Catholic faith prefers a rougher intimacy, and ultimately a more genuinely personal one: that of a God who loves a creature truly other than Himself, capable in return of a freely given love — which supposes precisely that this creature is not, even metaphysically, a mere modality of God Himself.^[102]

Diffusion through the Sufi orders and Safavid Persia

Despite — or because of — the controversy surrounding him, Ibn Arabi's thought spread rapidly after his death through the great Sufi brotherhoods, translated and commented in Persian, then in Turkish and Urdu.^[103] His cosmological doctrine became a dominant intellectual framework across vast regions of the Muslim world, from Ottoman Anatolia to Mughal India via Safavid Persia, where it profoundly influenced the so-called school of Isfahan in the 17th century.^[104] His stepson and disciple Sadr al-Dîn al-Qûnawî played a decisive role in this diffusion by giving the master's teaching a systematic form, transmissible within a school setting, which Ibn Arabi's own more fluid and poetic intuitions had not always worn.^[105]

The Western rediscovery in the 20th century

In the West, the scholarly study of Ibn Arabi developed mainly in the 20th century, carried notably by researchers such as the aforementioned Asín Palacios, then by the French orientalist Henry Corbin (d. 1978), who popularized his thought through the prism of the philosophy of the creative imagination, and by academics such as Michel Chodkiewicz and Claude Addas in France, or William C. Chittick in the United States, whose translations and studies today form the basis of international academic research on the subject.^[106] The founding, in 1977, of the Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi Society testifies to the persistent vitality of this research.

This Western rediscovery also nourished, from the 1920s-1930s onward, esotericist currents known as "traditionalist" or "perennialist," which sometimes read Ibn Arabi through a modern interpretive grid — that of a transcendent unity of all religions — which several contemporary specialists of the author now judge anachronistic and foreign to his own framework of thought, firmly rooted in Sunni Islam and the Qur'anic revelation as he understood it.^[107]

A debate still alive in contemporary Islam

Eight centuries after his death, the controversy over Ibn Arabi remains lively within Islam itself. Certain contemporary reformist currents, close in their doctrinal rigorism to Ibn Taymiyya's sensibility, continue to hold him for a dangerous heretic whose reading should be discouraged; other Sufi traditions, particularly in the Turkish, Syrian, Indo-Pakistani or North African worlds, continue on the contrary to venerate him as the greatest of saints after the Prophet's companions.^[108] This fracture, far from being a mere scholars' debate, still structures today a significant share of the tensions between Sufism and rigorist currents within worldwide Sunni Islam.

• On the founder of Islam and the historical problem of the sources concerning him: Muhammad (c. 570-632)
• On the Catholic Church's official position toward Islam: What does the Church say about Islam?
• On the Catholic distinction between Creator and creature and the magisterial condemnation of pantheism: First Vatican Council (1869–1870), constitution Dei Filius