Ibn ʿArabi

Ibn ʿArabi
	Artistic depiction of Ibn ʿArabi
Tradition	Sufism, Islamic mysticism, Islamic philosophy
Influenced by	Qur’an, Hadith, Al-Ghazali, Al-Hallaj
Lifespan	1165–1240
Notable ideas	Wahdat al-wujūd (Unity of Being); Perfect Man (al-insān al-kāmil); mystical interpretation of the Qur’an
Occupation	Sufi mystic, philosopher, poet, theologian
Influenced	Mulla Sadra, Rumi, Ottoman Sufism, later Islamic mysticism
Wikidata	Q46420

Ibn ʿArabī (1165–1240), full name Muḥyī al-Dīn Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad Ibn ʿArabī, was a highly influential Andalusian-born Muslim mystic and philosopher of the Islamic Golden Age. Known honorifically as al-Shaykh al-Akbar (“the Greatest Master”), he is celebrated for giving Islamic mysticism (Taṣawwuf) its first comprehensive philosophical articulation. Ibn ʿArabī authored an enormous corpus of writings—over 300 works are attributed to him—of which the most famous are Al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya (“The Meccan Revelations”) and Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam (“The Bezels of Wisdom”). His ideas profoundly shaped subsequent Sufi thought and earned him both devout admirers and sharp critics in the centuries that followed.

Early Life and Spiritual Awakening

Ibn ʿArabī was born in Murcia in Muslim Spain (al-Andalus) in 1165, into an Arab family of the prominent Tayyi tribe. As a boy his family moved to Seville, a major center of learning, where he received a classical Islamic education. From an early age, he showed intense spiritual inclination. Around the age of 15 he experienced a dramatic mystical “opening” (fatḥ or kashf) – an ecstatic vision that fundamentally transformed his consciousness. Only after this did the young Ibn ʿArabī formally embark on the Sufi path, undertaking disciplined spiritual training under numerous Sufi masters (by his own account, he studied with about 90 teachers) while also mastering traditional Islamic sciences such as Hadith (prophetic traditions).

One celebrated story from his youth highlights Ibn ʿArabī’s remarkable insight. His father arranged for him to meet the famed philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroës), who was curious about the prodigious mystic boy. During their brief conversation, the teenage Ibn ʿArabī so astonished the elderly Aristotelian philosopher with his spiritually infused perspective that Ibn Rushd was said to be left pale and trembling in amazement. This symbolic encounter – rational philosophy meeting transcendent mystical insight – has been noted by scholars as emblematic of a divergence in worldview: whereas thinkers like Averroës pursued a purely rationalist path, Ibn ʿArabī represented an approach that sought to harmonize reason with direct spiritual experience.

Journeys, Pilgrimage and Major Works

In 1198, Ibn ʿArabī had a visionary dream in his hometown instructing him to “journey east” for the sake of his spiritual mission. He left al-Andalus for good, setting out on a pilgrimage (ḥajj) to Mecca and a tour of the Islamic East. After traveling through North Africa, he reached Mecca in 1201. There, amid the holy city’s inspiration, he began writing his monumental masterpiece Al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya (“The Meccan Openings”). This colossal work (ultimately spanning 560 chapters in later editions) is often described as a personal encyclopaedia of esoteric Islam. In it, Ibn ʿArabī attempts to catalogue and convey the entirety of his mystical knowledge – covering theology, cosmology, psychology, Quranic interpretation, meditation practices, and accounts of his own inner visionary experiences. He regarded Al-Futūḥāt as divinely inspired; by his report, he commenced it in Mecca upon receiving a “command from God” in a vision and only completed the encyclopedic work many years later in Damascus.

Mecca also marked a pivotal human encounter for Ibn ʿArabī. He became acquainted with a gifted young Persian woman, often identified as Niẓām, who embodied for him the eternal divine wisdom in feminine form. Ibn ʿArabī fell spiritually in love with this woman-sage and composed an inspired collection of mystical love poems in her honor titled Tarjumān al-Ashwāq (“The Interpreter of Desires”). Although on the surface these poems spoke of profane love and beauty, Ibn ʿArabī later wrote a commentary to emphasize their symbolic meaning — Niẓām was for him an earthly mirror of the divine Sophia (Wisdom), and the intense love described is allegorical for the soul’s love of God. Despite his explanations, the bold imagery of Tarjumān al-Ashwāq and other frank expressions of mystical union led some conservative jurists to accuse Ibn ʿArabī of “pantheism” or heresy. Indeed, even during his lifetime, certain orthodox scholars were scandalized by his ideas and sought to condemn or ban his works, while many Sufis revered him as a saint and even as the “Renewer of Religion” for his era.

After several years in Mecca, Ibn ʿArabī continued his travels. He visited Cairo and then Anatolia (Seljuk Turkey), where in Konya he met Ṣadr al-Dīn Qūnawī – the son of one of his close friends and destined to become his foremost disciple. Qūnawī would later systematize Ibn ʿArabī’s teachings and spread them in the eastern Islamic lands. Ibn ʿArabī also spent time in Baghdad and Aleppo, among other cities. By 1223 he finally settled in Damascus, the capital of Syria, which became his permanent home for the last 17 years of his life. In Damascus, his reputation as al-Shaykh al-Akbar had already grown throughout the Islamic world. He devoted these final decades to teaching a circle of disciples, writing additional treatises, and revising his earlier works. It was in Damascus around 1229 that he composed his other major opus, Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam (“The Bezels of Wisdom”). Unlike the sprawling Futūḥāt, Fuṣūṣ is a concise book – just 27 chapters – but it distills the essence of Ibn ʿArabī’s metaphysical teachings in their most mature form. In each chapter of Fuṣūṣ, he uses the spiritual legacy of a different prophet (Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, etc.) to illustrate a facet of divine wisdom. Later Sufis regarded Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam as a crown jewel of Sufi theory, and it became the subject of dozens of commentaries in subsequent centuries.

(Optional figure: A present-day photograph of the Mosque and tomb of Ibn ʿArabī in Damascus, originally built in 1516 under Sultan Selim I, could illustrate the reverence later generations had for him.)

Teachings and Key Concepts

Integrating the Islamic Sciences: Ibn ʿArabī’s writings are remarkable for their intellectual breadth and cohesion. He did not consider himself just a “Sufi” in the narrow sense – in fact, he engaged deeply with Qur’an commentary, Hadith, Islamic law (fiqh), theology (kalām), and philosophy, weaving all these disciplines into a unified spiritual worldview. In contrast to many earlier mystics who wrote only aphorisms or poetry, Ibn ʿArabī produced extensive prose works that systematically explored mystical theology and cosmology. He has been credited with giving theoretical Sufism a rigorous intellectual framework. His writing style often blurs genres: legal and philosophical discussions segue into mystical meditations and visionary narratives. Throughout his works, he maintains a “highest level of discourse” – complex, multilayered, and often symbolic – which assumes a deep knowledge of the Islamic tradition. Later generations honored him with the title “Greatest Master” in part because of this encyclopedic command of religious knowledge and the masterful way he “unpacked the multi-layered significance” of scriptures and spiritual truths.

Epistemology – Harmonizing Reason and Mystical Insight: A hallmark of Ibn ʿArabī’s approach is his insistence on balancing intellect (ʿaql) with inner spiritual unveiling (kashf or mystical intuition) as complementary modes of knowing. He criticized both the rationalist theologians who relied exclusively on dry logic and the extreme ascetic mystics who rejected scholarly learning. Instead, Ibn ʿArabī argued that true understanding of God requires “seeing with two eyes”: the eye of reason and the eye of imagination. Reason, he says, perceives God’s absolute transcendence (tanzīh) – recognizing that God, as the Infinite Reality, is beyond all creation and “absent” from the world in essence. Mystical insight, on the other hand, perceives God’s immanence and similarity (tashbīh) – recognizing the divine presence shining through all things. If one claims God is only transcendent or only immanent, one has a one-eyed view, missing half the truth. By integrating rational knowledge with spiritual vision, Ibn ʿArabī proposes a fully “realized” (taḥqīq) knowledge of God that does justice to the complexity of reality. This methodology – sometimes called the “school of realization” – seeks to harmonize revelation, reason, and mystical experience into a single coherent perspective.

“Oneness of Being” (Waḥdat al-Wujūd): Perhaps the most famous doctrine associated with Ibn ʿArabī is the idea that all existence is fundamentally one. Though waḥdat al-wujūd (Arabic for “unity of being”) was a term coined by later followers, Ibn ʿArabī’s writings ubiquitously convey this concept. In his metaphysics, God is the only true reality or Being (wujūd); everything else in the cosmos exists only through Him, as reflections or manifestations of His being. Ibn ʿArabī emphasizes that created things have no independent existence – they are ontologically “nonexistent” in themselves, subsisting only by the divine light they borrow (just as the earth shines only by reflected sunlight). He famously wrote that creatures “have never even smelled a whiff of real existence,” meaning that what we perceive as their existence is merely God’s existence appearing in various forms. Yet, Ibn ʿArabī also asserts the complementary truth: from God’s perspective of self-revelation, all those forms are none other than Him. In a paradoxical formula, he describes the world as “He/not He” (Huwa lā Huwa) – everything is God (since nothing can exist outside the One Being), and at the same time everything is not God (since the distinct forms are not the Absolute in Himself). This dialectical vision of unity-in-multiplicity allowed Ibn ʿArabī to reconcile Islamic monotheism (tawḥīd) with the apparent diversity of creation. Importantly, he did not equate God with the material world in a crude pantheistic sense; rather, he taught that the world is like a mirror continually reflecting facets of God’s names and attributes, without exhausting God’s essence. Thus, the cosmos is a theophany – an ever-renewing disclosure of God – and if for one instant God’s sustaining presence should cease, all creation would vanish into nothingness (ibnarabisociety.org). Ibn ʿArabī’s “oneness of being” doctrine was controversial to literalist theologians, but it deeply influenced later Sufi philosophy, becoming a cornerstone of what is now called the Akbarian school.

The Perfect Human (al-Insān al-Kāmil): Another central concept in Ibn ʿArabī’s thought is that of the Perfect Human or Universal Man. He uses this term to describe the person who has fully realized the divine image within, achieving the pinnacle of spiritual potential. Ibn ʿArabī finds the prototype of the Perfect Human in Adam, about whom the Qur’an says God “taught him all the Names” (Qur’an 2:31). Those Names, in Islamic understanding, represent God’s attributes (Life, Knowledge, Power, Love, Justice, etc.). Thus, being taught all the divine Names means Adam (and by extension humanity) was gifted with the capacity to reflect every attribute of God. In Ibn ʿArabī’s view, each human carries an innate microcosm of the divine qualities. The Perfect Human is one who actualizes all these attributes to the fullest degree, becoming a polished mirror of God’s own perfection. Such a person is not merged with God’s essence, but so completely manifests the divine attributes that he/she is the ideal vicegerent of God in creation. All prophets and great saints, in Ibn ʿArabī’s schema, were examples of the Perfect Human – each exemplifying a unique configuration of the divine Names. For example, Moses might manifest God’s justice, Joseph God’s beauty, Solomon God’s wisdom, and so on, yet Muhammad as the final Prophet is believed to encompass all attributes in a supreme synthesis. In fact, Ibn ʿArabī controversially claimed to be himself the “Seal of Muhammadan Sainthood” – essentially the last great saint who inherits the comprehensive spiritual mold of the Prophet Muhammad. While this claim raised eyebrows, it was meant in a spiritual sense: that after Ibn ʿArabī, saints would only inherit partial aspects of Muhammad’s spiritual legacy, since the full range had been realized and “sealed” in Ibn ʿArabī’s own person.

Legacy and Influence

Ibn ʿArabī died in Damascus in 1240, and his tomb in the Ṣāliḥiyya neighborhood of the city soon became a site of veneration. In later centuries, his gravesite was enshrined within a mosque complex; notably, when the Ottoman Turks conquered Damascus in 1516, Sultan Selim I ordered a mausoleum and mosque built to honor the Shaykh al-Akbar. This patronage reflected the high esteem Ibn ʿArabī had gained – by the 16th century, the Ottomans were actively promoting Sufi spirituality, and Ibn ʿArabī’s teachings were considered a pinnacle of Sufi intellectual tradition (commons.wikimedia.org). (The Ibn ʿArabī mosque in Damascus, restored in the 20th century, still stands today as a pilgrimage spot for devotees (commons.wikimedia.org).)

In the immediate aftermath of Ibn ʿArabī’s passing, his ideas spread rapidly across the Islamic heartlands. His step-son and chief disciple, Ṣadr al-Dīn Qūnawī of Konya, played a crucial role in disseminating and interpreting Ibn ʿArabī’s works. Qūnawī and his students (like Muʾayyad al-Dīn Jandī and Fakhr al-Dīn ʿIrāqī) wrote some of the first commentaries on Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam and helped systematize the complex doctrines for others. Over the 13th–15th centuries, Ibn ʿArabī’s metaphysical ideas gave rise to a full-fledged school of thought often termed the “Akbarian school” (after his title al-Akbar). In Persian-speaking lands, luminaries such as ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Jīlī (author of al-Insān al-Kāmil) and the poet-scholar Jāmī further developed and popularized Ibn ʿArabī’s concepts. By around 1500, study of Ibn ʿArabī had become almost standard in many Sufi orders and intellectual circles of the Ottoman, Persian, and Mughal realms.

Despite occasional backlashes from orthodox quarters, Ibn ʿArabī’s influence proved enduring. Conservative critics – from medieval jurists like Ibn Taymiyyah to modern Salafis – have at times condemned Ibn ʿArabī’s works as heretical or pantheistic. Some regions even saw temporary bans on reading his books. Yet such objections did little to stem the reverence afforded to him by those who tasted the depth of his insights. In Sufi tradition he has been revered as a supreme spiritual Pole (al-Qutb) and the “Greatest Master” guiding seekers long after his death. Generations of Sufi commentators used Ibn ʿArabī’s framework to interpret other mystics; for example, the famous Persian poet Rūmī – a near contemporary – was later often read through an Akbarian lens, with scholars noting strong conceptual resonances between Rūmī’s poetry and Ibn ʿArabī’s teachings. Beyond the Muslim world, some have drawn parallels between Ibn ʿArabī’s philosophy and ideas in Neoplatonism, Christian mysticism (e.g. Meister Eckhart), and Eastern traditions. His notion of the imaginal world (the intermediate realm of spiritual forms) and the one reality of existence have even intrigued comparative philosophers and scientists in the modern era.

Serious academic study of Ibn ʿArabī in the West began only in the mid-20th century. Pioneering scholars like Henry Corbin (1958) and Toshihiko Izutsu (1966) introduced his thought to Western audiences, revealing Ibn ʿArabī as a sophisticated thinker rather than merely a “mystic” lost in ecstasy. Since then, interest in Ibn ʿArabī has grown steadily. Institutes and societies (such as the Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabi Society, founded 1977) have been established to translate and discuss his works. By the 21st century, conferences around the world have been convened to reassess Ibn ʿArabī’s legacy in the context of interfaith dialogue, philosophy, and even science. In 2015, on the 850th anniversary of Ibn ʿArabī’s birth, international symposia were held (from Murcia to Mecca to New York) under titles like “A Living Legacy: Ibn ʿArabi in Today’s World,” celebrating the continuing relevance of his ideas (en.casaarabe.es). To this day, Ibn ʿArabī remains a towering figure in Islamic thought – a bridge between the legalistic and the mystical, the rational and the intuitive, the human and the divine. His writings invite readers into a spacious worldview where “there is no god but God” is not just a creed but an existential reality in which all beings and all knowledge find their unity.

Sources:

Encyclopædia Britannica. “Ibn al-ʿArabī | Muslim Mystic, Sufi Philosopher.” Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ibn-al-Arabi
Encyclopædia Iranica. “Ebn al-ʿArabī, Moḥyī-al-Dīn” (biographical entry by W. Chittick). https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/ebn-al-arabi
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. “Ibn ʿArabī.” (Fall 2022 Edition, ed. E. Zalta). https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ibn-arabi
Archnet – Shrine of Ibn al-ʿArabi (Damascus). (Description of Selim I’s 1516 construction). https://www.archnet.org/sites/1837
Casa Árabe (Spain). “Casa Árabe helps celebrate the 850th anniversary of Ibn Arabi’s birth.” (Jan 2015 announcement). https://en.casaarabe.es/eventos-arabes/show/casa-arabe-con-el-850-aniversario-del-nacimiento-de-ibn-arabi